the parish

Arkansas is Oklahoma with More Trees

Drove the whole ten hours instead of stopping over in Memphis or Jackson. Had to settle for a Days Inn on West End Ave. at 2:00 a.m. The hot, entomological hairdresser wife found a roach as soon as we got to our admittedly substandard room. That freaked her out. The roach was dead, an event that usually occurs when hotels spray Malathion or other insecticides. Alas, that didn't satisfy her, so the quest for bed bugs began at 2:10 a.m. She watched a porgram on 48 Hours about bed bugs, and now we can't sleep in a hotel without turning back the covers, beating the shit out of the mattress, and putting all our luggage on furniture so it won't ever touch the floor. Thanks, Stone Phillips. We'll be moving to the Scarritt-Bennett Retreat Center later today, so hopefully the presence of the Holy Spirit will have kept the bugs at bay.

On the drive here we got to see parts of Arkansas the wife hasn't seen before, including a sign somewhere east of Little Rock that encouraged us to "use the rod on your child, save their lives." We also saw a sign advertising Toad Suck Park. There are as many churches in Arkansas as there are in Oklahoma, it seems, but the doozy of all churches was just outside Memphis. A brick monstrosity joined by a hallway to a mini-me duplicate that was still larger than most churches. Tried to find a link to the thing, but no luck yet. I've never heard of a "First Pentecostal Church." Maybe it's UPC, but I can't imagine a UPC church this large, or gaudy.

We stopped off for dinner and drinks at the Holiday Inn in Forrest City, Ark. Trust me, it wasn't our first choice, but it was the only bar in town. The bartender kindly waived the $5.00 membership fee (damn dry counties) and I drank delicious $4 merlot which name I didn't bother to ask.

The only highlight was crossing the Tennessee River at about 12:30 a.m. and seeing the full moon lighting up the river islands, turning the water a beautiful, shimmery indigo, and seeing the fog nestled into the low areas like clouds among the valleys. It was one of the most breathtaking things I've ever seen. The hottie was sleeping and missed it. Maybe some zen moments are best because they are experienced in solitude. Peace.

Blogging from Nashville

We're off to Nashville for five days to join a group of friends and strangers from around the country to have a God talk. Not sure what my role is supposed to be yet, as I'm not sure most of the people I'm meeting with have any idea where I am vis-a-vis Christian agnosticism. Should be an interesting conversation though. I'm looking forward to evenings on Music Row with the hot, music-loving hairdress wife as much as anything.

Black Snake Moan and Transformation

The team that created the wonderfully brilliant Hustle & Flow produced, wrote, and directed Black Snake Moan. Craig Brewer, the white writer, has a remarkable ability to create and empathize with complex, believable, and nuanced black characters. John Singleton (Remember when he was the wunderkind with Boyz in the Hood?) allows writer/director Brewer to sketch racial stereotypes knowing that those stereotypes will catch us in our own prejudices and draw us into the story with our expectations in tact. Those expectations will eventually be exploited to tell one of the best parables I have seen since, well, Hustle & Flow.

Brewer's Memphis childhood contributed to his understanding of the culture and music of Southern black culture. His sensitivity to black characters is made obvious in Black Snake Moan when Samuel Jackson's charater Lazarus (wink, wink) discovers the beaten, partially clad body of Rae, played by Christina Ricci, outside his house. A heavy-handed director or writer would have taken pains to point out that a black man in the South would be facing a dilemma with an apparently-raped, white woman outside his house. Brewer leaves it to the viewer and to Samuel Jackson's understated performance (in this scene) to communicate the plight of black men in the South. Lazarus doesn't vocalize his concern until much later in the movie. If you haven't figured it out by then, you're just not paying attention, or you're oblivious to Southern America's controlling racial narrative.

Black Snake Moan isn't about race, though, nor was Hustle & Flow. Both movies are about the transformation of humans into moral creatures. The strength of Brewer's writing is his ability to juxtapose black and white characters without ever drawing attention to their racial profiles and without losing their racial distinctives, allowing both races to blend into a common humanity who suffer the same weaknesses and temptations. In this case, Lazarus is working through a Cain and Abel story with his brother who has taken Lazarus's wife Rose "into his bed." Rae is a victim of childhood sexual abuse and her resulting nymphomania threatens to destroy her life. Lazarus chains Rae to his radiator in order to drive the demons out of her, both as a means to save a daughter his wife aborted and to vicariously save his own marriage.

Brewer is not subtle. The metaphors are writ plain: chain as bondage, sexual addiction as fallenness, adultery as a false sense of autonomy, etc. His effectiveness is not based upon subtlety though; the story works because the characters exhibit weaknesses and virtues that are common to all of us. As with Hustle & Flow, salvation is realized in "the other" and transformation happens as we overcome our humanness by sharing our weakness with someone who is the yin to our yang. For Brewer, salvation is temporal and personal, and that won't sit well with fundangelical types, but it seems to work better than other, ethereal notions of salvation. At least in this case, the savior is flesh and blood, and we can know our salvation as a tranformative friendship with someone who gives a shit at the moment of our greatest need.

Taking Suggestions

As a service for the poor bastard who found my blog by googling "worship songs for 4th of July," I offer a few suggestions and am asking for your input as well.

Toby Keith, American Soldier
Lee Greenwood, God Bless the U.S.A.
Darryl Worley, Have You Forgotten

Why are all of them country? Here we go:

American Idiot, Green Day
Bright Eyes, Four Winds
Bright Eyes, When the President Talks to God
Dead Kennedys, Stars and Stripes of Corruption
The Clash, I'm so Bored with the U.S.A.
Black Flag, American Waste

I guess the question here is why are so many anti-American songs by old punk bands? Even Green Day, who made a resurrection album with American Idiot, is an older punk band. Where are the mainstream voices? Oberst, though talented, is hardly mainstream. Let me know what I'm missing. I'd love for churches to have some options this holiday season.

the parish goes Big Apple

New York Magazine's film critic Bilge Ebiri linked to my Evan Almighty post. It's an interesting article, especially some of the linked stories. However, I must take issue with being called a "Christian blog." Eek. I hope that's not true. It's certain some of the regulars around here doubt my faith. Nevertheless, I appreciate the link and the chance to dance in the Big Apple: "I am a star. I'm a star, I'm a star, I'm a star. I am a big, bright, shining star. That's right." Five points for identifying the quote. Googling is cheating!

messianic, times two

Scott Jones linked this on his blog yesterday. I missed this episode of the Daily Show. For those of you not from Oklahoma, Inhofe is a regular embarrassment to moderates and liberals living here, and Gary England has made a career of histrionics. The old folks around here swear by him, but the other local stations long ago surpassed him in technology and reporting. He's a bit of a local celebrity still though, as weather in Oklahoma since the F5 tornados roared through a few years ago has become a selling point for local news, to the point that I almost fell down and worshipped God when the ABC affiliate did not interrupt the NBA finals for the first time I can remember. Anyway, enjoy...

Somebody Save Me (With Apologies to Cinderella and Andre Dubus)-Revised

I just watched "We Don't Live Here Anymore." It's one of three films (so far) based on stories by Andre Dubus. He's also the inspiration for "House of Sand and Fog" and "In the Bedroom." ***This is just wrong. Lee told me that House of Sand and Fog was written by Dubus III. Genetic brilliance, perhaps?*** In this case the stories are the eponymous title and "Adultery." If you're familiar with the three films, you'll know that no one could accuse Dubus of being a Pollyanna, yet his stories speak powerfully to our contemporary context inasmuch as they are about the domestication of our worst instincts and the quest for salvation in sex, alcohol, relationships, marriage, retribution, violence, and suburbia.

I won't go into a great deal of detail about any of the films; you need to see all three. Dubus captures the hopelessness that shapes our lives in a country where we have too much money and too much time to delve into the depths of our "self." In Dubus's world the self has been domesticated by conventions like marriage, parenting, and vocation. There are powerful, primal instincts that lay below the surface of our mundane, domestic lives waiting for the right combination of circumstances to call them forth in violence and destruction and the eventual salvation of the self, but always at the cost of complacency or contentment. We are not allowed to believe that we are better than we are, nor does he allow that salvation will come in any other form than submission to the idea of commonality and the commonness of the mundane. We are, after all, human, with all the passions and weaknesses that state implies, and we depend on those conventions to shape our awareness and our lives.

I was sympathetic to Mark Ruffalo's character in "We Don't Live Here Anymore." He allows himself the luxury of confusion as to how he ends up in an adulterous relationship with his best friend's wife (Naomi Watts). His messiah complex leads him to try to save Watts from her callous, philandering husband (Peter Krause). Adultery is never salvific though, and Ruffalo can only destroy himself and his wife (Laura Dern) in his attempt to save Watts. I'll let you watch the film to see the resolution.

I've been trying to save myself all my life: Jesus, alcohol, sex, adultery, drugs, cigarettes, cynicism...all of them have been part of a campaign to realize salvation in my own life. I've believed the story of my own fallenness and marveled at my ability to fuck up nearly everything while holding on to evangelical and fundamentalist notions of sin and salvation. They all try to perfect the human condition, but they do so by promising something that can't be realized--holiness--or something that is ridiculous--imputed righteousness. Dubus plays the role of prophet in revealing the impossibility of holiness and the ethical telos of imputed righteousness (libertinism or self-righteousness) while granting permission for all of us to be simply human. Salvation is recognizing our humanity, finding those who love us in spite of it, and loving others whatever the cost.

Semiotics and Salvation, Part One

Brent asked me a while back if i thought religion (Christianity specifically) was a semiotic system. A good question that I intend to start answering. My reading of semiotics is very limited, though I have some exposure to Peirce and Bakhtin. I find Peirce's system, though more complex, more useful than Saussure's dyadic system. For those of you new to this discussion, think of it like this: Saussure says communication, meaning, language, etc., is a system of signs and the the thing signified. In a very real sense for Christians then, Jesus would be the sign that signifies God, but at a much more basic level the word black summons an idea in our head of a color (we might even have a swatch of color). The concept of black is the signified and the swatch or picture in our head is the signifier, as is the word black. Saussure's system is too simplisitic, I think, and is improved by Peirce's addition of an intermediary stage called the interpretant. As concisely as possible, the interpretant is the sense we make of the sign; it is neither the signifier nor the signified, but it attempts to understand or interpret the signified in light of the signifier.

The importance of semiotics for Christianity should be obvious at this point. If Jesus is the signifier and God the signified, then the muddled area will be the interpretant. So, to partially answer Brent's question, yes, I think religion is a semiotic system, but I also think all communication is semiotic. We can't live without signs, symbols, images, ideas, concepts, etc. Culture is at least a set of shared signs, symbols, images, ideals, concepts, and vocabulary. Ontologically those semiotic elements have no substance independent of the meaning we assign. God might well exist, but the best we have is a concept that successive generations and different faith reify with meaning from within their own cultural context. This is the point where fundangelicals and materialists (there really is very little difference, folks) will tell me that things have existence independent of the meaning we assign them. I completely agree. I believe I exist whether or not you believe it or assign me any meaning. I tend to believe god exists independent of our assignation of meaning. However, to state that something has ontological substance apart from verification or direct contact seems to miss the difficulty of navigating the interpretant. For those who knew Jesus, he was still an enigma. Assuming he is the sign that points to God, we still don't know what the sign means.

Doctrine becomes important at this point because it seeks to assign meaning to the sign to help get at the signified. One need only point to denominationalism, the multiplicity of religious beliefs, and the various concepts of God to show that the interpretant is unclear. My friend Scott Jones summed it up well: to ask if Jesus is God is a meaningless question; God is a concept and therefore in need of interpretation or assignation of meaning; the thing to say is that if God looks like anything, she looks like Jesus. That is a statement full of meaning, because the signifier is taken to be an accurate representation of the thing signified, and since we can't know the signified, the most we can hope for is to make sense of the signifier, and that is the problem of the interpretant. Take a breath. More another time.

George W. Bush and the SBC

El Presidente George W. Bush addressed the annual Southern Baptist Convention today via satellite. He addressed several of his political goals and his agenda for the next couple years. He began by thanking Baptists for their "Christian witness" and for their "defense of Christian liberty." Speaking of liberty, he then moved quickly to thank them for "supporting our brave men and women in uniform and their families." He was thankful for the prayers of Baptists for the people who "defend our people and extend the hope of freedom to people across the globe." His next move was a little odd, but played well with his audience. He thanked them for their support of "fair-minded and impartial judges" who are so important to our democracy.

Brief aside: Has he seen the news? He knows about the Justice Department firings. And what does impartial even mean? No one is impartial, certainly not judges who are appointed by political heads of state.

He then thanked Baptists for being "committed to a culture of life...my administration shares that goal." (Unless you are an innocent civilian in Iraq.) He patted himself on the back for refusing "to support programs that promote or provide abortions. I will veto any bill Congress gives me that violates the sanctity of human life." Thanks for their commitment to adoption and teen abstinence. Speaking of which, he plugged a program that is bringing True Love Waits to Uganda. It will soon be expanded to six more countries in Africa. On a positive note, he talked about doubling the 15 billion dollars in AIDS relief for Africa. "I believe it lifts our soul and helps our spirit when we help the suffering."

Then he used the "g" word. "The world has a responsibility to end genocide (in Darfur) and hold accountable those responsible." He plugged his new U.N. sanctions, which apparently stop rape and murder. Amazing. "The Southern Baptist Convention and the United States will not turn away...because what matters overseas matters here."

He then commended the SBC for sharing the prosperity and abundance "God has blessed our nation with" and for "living out the call to spread the gospel and proclaim the kingdom of God. God bless the Southern Baptist Convention and God bless America."

Two questions, initially: why is the President of the United States addressing a gathering of messengers from a Protestant denomination? (I know they have about five million voters who roll over like a discount whore for the guy, but I mean why in the theological sense.) Who thinks it's a good idea to invite the President to address a gathering of church people? What purpose does it serve other than to affirm the self-importance of the Baptists themselves? He offers no spiritual insight, no practical insight, no wisdom or direction for the denomination, and certainly no spiritual leadership. So, why invite him to speak? SBC, your politics are showing...

Second question: would the President be so kind as to parse the phrase "spread the gospel and proclaim the kingdom of God"? Is it really the role of the President to affirm a sectarian notion of the "the gospel" or to encourage the proclamation of a nebulous idea like the kingdom of God? What does he mean by "kingdom of God?"

More highlights of the shindig coming later, including commentary on Richard Land's statement that if someone is at war with us, we better be at war with them (WWJD, indeed), and a motion from the floor to have a color guard and American flag at all Southern Baptist annual conventions. Civil religion, it seems, is alive and well.

Stephen King and the Demise of Esquire

I've been subscribing to Esquire for years. The writing is usually excellent, especially so when Tom Junod and Chuck Klosterman end up in the same issue. Yes, I know there are exploitative photos in and on the magazine, and I admit that there are valid prurient reasons for getting the magazine: the long, slow reveal of Scarlett Johansson being one of them, not to mention Angelina Jolie's frequent appearances. Sorry, I'm a guy. I married a hot, hairdresser too. Did you expect me to be an Amanda Plummer or Madeleine Albright kinda guy? No, I don't care about, nor can I afford, the clothes. If you have enough money to spend $1,500 on a sport coat, you ought not be reading Esquire; maybe the Wilson Quarterly, but nothing so basely covetous as Esquire. Anyway...

I started reading Stephen King when I was a kid. Young kid. Can't remember when I read The Shining or The Stand, but I was young, and they scared the shit out of me. (Not as much as the Kubrick edition of The Shining, mind you.) Please understand, as with all things horror-related, the originals are actually scary in their immediate context. Ask anyone who was a teen when Nightmare on Elm Street first came out. If he's honest, he'll admit he slept with the light on at least one night. I had a girlfriend over that night; it was the only thing that kept me from turning the damn light on. Pride is apparently occasionally stronger than fear. King probably hit his apex at Pet Sematary. It was bleak, dark, unredemptive, and without hope. It was what horror is supposed to be: irrational and unrelenting, much like the current crop of Japanes films that explore the inexplicable aspect of horror.

I knew King had lost it when I read It. There was a good set-up, a good idea, an interesting story, and a fucking intergalactic spider was the pay-off. An intergalactic, evil spider? Some clown! (Think E.B. White and you'll get it.) It was all down-hill from there. There have been some good movies based on his short stories, most notably The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, but those benefited from great directing and acting more than King's writing.

When I received the July '07 Esquire with a 21,000-word Stephen King story published in its entirety in the magazine, I was intrigued...briefly. An editorial box on page 14 explained that Esquire was returning to its roots, publishing long fiction and long creative non-fiction. The blurb even mentioned Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1958) and Norman Mailer's serialized novel An American Dream (1964) as evidence that the magazine had a history of publishing long fiction and was justified in doing so for our somewhat less-focused world. Did you catch what happened there? Esquire, a magazine I've long loved, just used two of the great names of American writing to justify including a novella from Stephen King. Yes, folks, publishing "The Gingerbread Girl" is just like publishing a piece by Capote or Mailer. Hell, Mr. Granger, why not throw in Roth and Welty and Faulkner? That would be just like a Stephen King novella about a girl who likes to run (don't let the depth of the metaphor confuse you here—run, run as fast as you can...) and who uses her wits, recently conditioned body, and will to outsmart and overcome a crazed, wealthy, serial killer/sexual predator who apparently has no reason to do what he does except for wealth-induced ennui. Just exactly like it.

It's typical King stuff, of late. Canned characters, canned story, drawn out sequences that fail to heighten tension, and a conclusion that is entirely too convenient. It's King not being able to live up to his set-up—the same problem he's had since Pet Sematary. I read the whole thing. Alas, if I'd known what the protagonist knew (in her own words), "If I'd known, we could have ended this right away," I might have had time for WWE or reruns of Who's the Boss or something else that's just like The Godfather. I'd also still have my respect for Esquire, and King's story would be in an upcoming collection of bad short stories, where it belongs.

Russian Lit: An Appeal for Clarification

Just worked through (and I mean just that) Gogol's short stories. I found them tedious, confusing, and nearly unreadable. I confess up front that I find Tolstoy less confusing and more readable but still not enjoyable. You probably should know that Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment changed my life when I was in county jail waiting to go to the big house. (That's been nearly 20 years ago.) Having worked as a Russian linguist in my late teens and early twenties, and having learned the language from ex-patriate Russian Jews who got out of the country when it was still the Soviet Union, I have a fondness for Russian culture and people. But I'll be damned if the literature doesn't perplex, frustrate, and bore me. As a young twenty-something I managed to work through one volume of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, but lacked the will to read beyond that. That's my background with Russian authors.

Sometimes I read something and I understand why we're still reading it decades or centuries later: Hemingway (John, I was not using Hemingway as a pejorative re: McCarthy.), Steinbeck, Hawthorne, O'Connor, Dostoevsky, Camus, Shakespeare, Twain, Austen, Stowe, etc. I just can't figure out why we're still reading Gogol. The stories are full of fantastic (in the technical sense) elements, sketchy characters, implausible dialogue, and culturally specific details that are impossible to translate. Perhaps if you're looking for insight into Russian life in Gogol's context you might want to read it, but if you're looking for a good read, I don't know why you'd pick it up. I do understand reading as a discipline as well as reading to broaden perspective and awareness, but this seemed like a punishment.

Perhaps I have too much trust in literature experts who tell me this is worth reading. But I do tend to trust the judgment of people who know more about a subject than I do. If people who ought to know say it's worth reading, I feel like I'm not getting it if I don't get anything from it. It's the same reason I started listening to Radiohead--too many people I know who know more about music than I said they were genius. And now I appreciate it. But this is my umpteenth aborted attempt with Russian lit. Is there a lobe of the brain that controls that? Maybe I need more green, leafy vegetables or lecithin or maybe I need to eat borshct. Help...

The Hot, Hairdresser Wife Sheds Anonymity

The hottie has a new blog. She'll be posting photos, thoughts, smart-ass comments, and hopefully, very little information about me. Go by and say hello.

Pulitzer Goes to The Road

The 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction went to Cormac McCarthy for his post-apocalyptic meditation on despair, The Road. I read the book a few months ago on a friend's recommendation, the lovely and talented Kristen McCarty. I found the book an easy read (unlike other McCarthy novels), even intriguing at times, but I failed to be amazed by McCarthy's sparse writing and skeletal characterization. I might even have told KMart that if it weren't Cormac McCarthy's work, the book wouldn't get a whole lot of attention. Shows what I know.

The book features a father and son team making their way across an American landscape that has been destroyed by something. The world is devastated by some sort of cataclysm, the nature of which McCarthy never reveals. We know that there is no place for the two to go, as there is nothing left of the world as it used to be. The father is pushing south with his very young son for no particular reason, except that motion is perhaps better than stasis, especially when the world is now inhabited by pedophilic cannibals. The father is obviously ill with TB or lung cancer, and he suffers the consequences of ignoring his wife's advice to kill himself and the boy; she committed suicide before the story begins. No spoilers here; suffice it to say McCarthy inserts a deus ex machina to resolve the story.

I've struggled to find some allegorical or metaphorical lens through which to view The Road, but I confess to being without an idea of what he's doing. Yes, I get the sense of despair and love that wars in the father, the yin and yang of parenting, if you will, and I get the whole post-apocalyptic metaphors about destruction, waste, loss, and the difficulty of doing ethics after the known world ends (make of that what you will; it can be personal or communal, I suppose). Still, McCarthy's book seems to resurrect fears from the Reagan era. It's difficult not to think about "The Day After" or other 80's schlock that served as psychological projections of our fears of nuclear holocaust. It seemed that in his attempt to tell a timeless parable, McCarthy ended up writing such a generic story that I simply did not care about any of the characters or the story.

The field for the Pulitzer was small this year; only Alice McDermott's After This and Richard Powers's The Echo Maker were considered in addition to The Road. I don't like McDermott's work, and I've never read The Echo Maker, nor any of the other eight novels Powers has written. Perhaps I should rectify that. This is not to say that McCarthy won against a weak field (although it was a small one), but I do suspect that he's getting a "lifetime achievement award" of sorts. This was not his best work, and his failure to locate The Road in any identifiable political, psychological or ethical context makes the work less timeless, not more. Still, it's a damn good read and a very good conversation piece, but if you're used to McCarthy channeling Steinbeck with his endless descriptions and characterizations, be prepared for McCarthy channeling Hemingway in this one.

Why Talk About This Stuff?

Someone asked me today why I continue to talk about Christianity, Christianity Today, church, etc., if I no longer have a vested interest in those topics. Good question, actually, and one I've wondered about. I guess I have three answers: 1. I teach religion; 2. I cover religion in my writing; 3. A ridiculous percentage of people identify themselves as Christian, which makes their beliefs and practices a point of great concern to people like me.

I think the rub right now for people who know me and who don't understand how I ended up outside is what I do with Jesus. Let me be clear, I don't know what to do with Jesus or Jesus talk. I don't dislike it; in fact, I actually approve of people's attempts to live their lives within an ethical framework that makes sense of Jesus' social ethics. However, I don't know anyone who "knows" Jesus, and as such any talk about "personal relationship" or "knowing Jesus" strikes me as absurd.

I've had experiences I can't categorize as simply psychological or drug-induced or physiological--call them manifestations of something transcendent. At no point in those experiences did I hear the voice of God, meet Jesus, hear a voice affirming that it was Jesus or experience something that tied the phenomena to the identity of Jesus. In short, you could call them "god experiences" if you like, or encounters with the holy (thanks, Herr Otto), but you couldn't say that they verified the identity or ongoing existence or immediate presence or activity of Jesus. I don't know anyone I trust that admits to that either. Benny Hinn claims he had an encounter with Jesus, but he smacks handicapped people around, so you can't really trust him.

There are some who say they have had an encounter with Jesus, but there are plenty of other folk who have had similar experiences with Vishnu or an angel or an ancestor or the devil or any of many other gods/spirits. Most people believe what they've been brought up to believe; faith takes the form of a community of reference that gives us vocabulary, symbols, and signs to attach meaning to events or beliefs. Even if you encounter something transcendent, you're likely to experience it in ways that your mind has already been shaped to experience it. Meet God? Grow up Christian? Then God would naturally take the form of Jesus.

All this to say that I don't eschew God talk; I just don't know how to categorize most of it, and I don't know anyone that knows Jesus.