Andrew McNeely > Recent Status Updates

Adorno on why your favorite sitcom does the laughing for you after a hard day of work:

“Affirmative culture provides an escape from reality, which requires little effort or concentration from workers demoralized and dulled by an alienating work process…Adorno describes techniques…of ‘response mechanisms’ such as canned laughter, which are designed to guarantee the correct response from the audience.”

My, my, this is wild…ly good so far

Even a cantankerous Calvin could get in on all the fun:

“The drinking of a glass of wine was, for [Calvin], associated with the most pleasurable things of life–laughing with friends, sharing a meal with intimates, music and art…The fine things of life pointed to a gracious God” (p. 147).

“Contrary to common associations of the term ‘become,’ the Word is not fundamentally altered in becoming incarnate. It undergoes no basic transformation of character or change of location. The Word does not become a man in the way…a character in a Kafka short story might become a roach…The Word is not going somewhere in becoming incarnate with the intent…of gaining a new set of experiences…” (p. 144)

Tanner charging the nouvelle theologie with sneaking in its own form of natura pura:

“By affirming the idea of a nature-based desire for God, one cannot…avoid in any thoroughgoing way the naturalism associated with a two-tier account of nature and grace–nature as a self-enclosed substructure with grace an added superstructure–because the idea of such a desire is itself implicitly naturalistic” (p. 124).