POINT OF VIEW
The Art of Friendship
March 18, 2011 - David Taylor
"Originally and properly within I am still alone by myself: in my freedom in relation to the whole cosmos; with my poetry and truth; with the question of my needs and desires and loves and hates; with my known and sometimes unknown likes and dislikes; with my capacities and propensities; as my own doctor, as the sovereign architect, director, general and dictator of the whole, of my own earth and heaven, my cosmos, God and fellow-men; as the incomparable inventor and sustainer of myself; in first and final solitude."
—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2, 231, describing here a "Nietzschean" perspective on human relationship
In 2010 Forbes magazine placed Lady Gaga at #7 on their annual list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women—just two spots behind Hilary Clinton and thirty-four spots ahead of Queen Elizabeth II.
The World of Donquixotry
I have just gotten off the phone with an artist. I can't think of a better incitement for this essay than the anecdote that he relayed. He returned yesterday from a gathering with other artists in the Northwest. He described the atmosphere that marked their gathering as the plaintive bleating of lonely, wounded sheep.
I confess to being baffled by the strange obsession with loneliness that marks much of the art world. On the one hand, artists are known for perpetuating a kind of cult of loneliness, while on the other they rue the lonely life that many of them, due to the confused circumstances of art in modern society, find themselves forced to live—even in their own homes, even in New York City.
Lady Gaga, who, as I type this sentence, has amassed a mind-boggling 28,946,681 "friends" on Facebook, offers this curriculum vitae for her artistic calling:
"We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be or rather to become, in the future. When you are lonely, I will be lonely too. And this is the fame."
Two things strike me about her statement. One, it represents the kind of donquixotry of ideas, vaguely thrilling but ultimately damaging, that I readily hear rolling out of the mouths of artists. And two, her statement reminds me of a similar epithet that Nietzsche used to describe himself: "I am no man; I am dynamite." The Swiss theologian Karl Barth noted that Nietzsche's life could be aptly summarized in the phrase "azure isolation."
Nietzsche was the man, according to Barth, who wanted to be "admired and honoured and loved," yet who also wished to live "six thousand feet above time and man." This concurrent need and repulsion for other people, this relational schizophrenia, this sense of being "special" yet also feeling intensely, insecurely ordinary describes to my mind a great number of contemporary artists. In personal conversation, I hear artists confessing their struggle with loneliness, and it grieves me. I feel often helpless. But it stirs me to ask how the church can respond.
In her splendid book, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices, Jennifer Herdt offers the church the kind of help we sorely need. In it she explores (among other things) ideas about social formation. How should individuals conceive their relationship to the community? What does it mean to act in a way that is "properly and uniquely" our own, to use Charles Taylor's language, while also happily recognizing our indebtedness to others? What does it mean for an artist to have "good friends"? Why does it matter? And what are we protected against if we follow Herdt's advice? I would like to connect some of her ideas about friendship to the life of an artist.
But before Herdt, let me take a quick detour to Andy Crouch.
The Virtue of Good Friendship
In his book Culture Making, Crouch proposes the idea that all of us have three kinds of relationships in our lives: a 3, a 12, and a 120. At most, Crouch writes, I will have three close friends, folks with whom I share a tightly knit, vulnerable, loyal, and cherished relationship. I'll have 12 reasonably kindred friends. And I'll have around 120 acquaintances who comprise a loose association of like-minded people.
With whatever magical powers of observation he possesses, Andy gets it right. I do in fact have a 3, a 12 and a 120! I would like to propose that artists need three good friends in order to truly flourish in their calling. But sadly, most barely have one—which, as I have witnessed up close, is cause for considerable distress. Compelled by compassion, we must keep praying for artists to find good friends. Compelled by truth, we must keep seeking to think rightly about friendship.
As Herdt explains (and here I am adopting her general observations on human behaviour to the lives of artists), an artist's calling will find its proper orientation "in the presence of others and in response to others." In the company of good friends, an artist discovers the resources both to want to cultivate virtue—to be humble, generous, diligent or courageous, for example—as well as to persist in the practices which sustain these virtues. Good friends help us to resist the hydra of vices—sloth and jealousy and so on—that betray us against our best intentions.
In the company of good friends an artist discovers—though not without struggle—that the service of another's good is also, with the Spirit's help, a common good. Oscar Wilde remarks, "Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success."
In the company of good friends, an artist discovers the need for, as well as the joy of debt to, other "exemplars." These are men and women who embody the kind of life an artist aspires to attain. That might be Herbert or Bach. That might be O'Connor. That might be Fujimura. On the one hand, then, an artist needs to see how other believer artists have embodied their imitation of Christ. On the other, an artist can welcome their influence in her life as a means of Christ's grace.
From a Christian perspective, an artist needs regular reminders that she is not self-determined. She is constituted instead by the often rag-tag group of people, whether smart or simple, cool or uncool, that God has lovingly surrounded her with. Herdt wonderfully expresses this dynamic:
"We may become aware of how our capacity to critique our own partial malformations and the malformations of our own formative exemplars has itself been made possible through our encounter with yet other exemplars. So the ardor of Christians to imitate Christ by emulating the heroic martyr was corrected by the ardor to emulate the ascetic Desert Father, and corrected in turn by the ardor to emulate the mendicant preacher, the foreign missionary, the civil rights worker, and so on."
A Few Dangers
What does the presence of good friends in an artist's life protect against? I can suggest three dangers. The first danger, appearing often enough in the art world, involves the temptation to use people but to pretend to treat them as friends (a temptation Augustine anticipated long ago). My filmmaker friend Jeffrey Travis told me a story once. He remarked that he went to an "industry party" in Hollywood, and it was the weirdest party he'd ever been to. People would approach him and ask him who he was. If they thought they had something to gain by knowing him, they would stay. Otherwise they moved on. No "pardon me." No "nice to meet you." Their departures were crassly blunt.
A second danger is the need for artists to assert self-sufficiency. Rousseau once quipped that "a truly happy being is a solitary being." It's a deeply confused opinion, but also one that persists in the world of art, where artists continually struggle against the twin need to be original ("my own") and to connect. ("with you").
A third danger involves the desire of artists to play out a bohemian persona. The bohemian persona is always "true to himself," one part "authentic," one part "autonomous." Or as Rousseau once put it: "If I am not better, at least I am different." In the art world, this danger manifests itself often enough as an attitude of anti-responsibility to society, where an artist asserts the "right" to be responsible mainly if not exclusively to himself. "I'm not a baby-sitter. I'm a performer," glam-rock musician Adam Lambert once pronounced. And it's a sentiment that many of us as believer artists find appealing, for better and for worse. Yet however useful we may find people around us, we still as ever feel the sting of loneliness.
Soul Friends
The Greek playwright Euripedes long ago remarked that "one loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives." A few centuries later, St. John Cassian (360-435 AD) called the indissoluble bond between "soul friends" as "what is broken by no chances, what no interval of time or space can sever or destroy, and what even death itself cannot part." To rephrase Augustine, God has made us for this kind of friend, and our hearts are restless until we find one. Artists, despite their push-pull feelings about people, yearn for deep friendship and while three would be ideal, many pray for just one good friend.
I spent my entire twenties living with a loneliness that I was afraid publicly to admit. It was partly my own fault. I suffered the embarrassingly pathological need to find elite, Inkling-like friendships and I would settle for nothing else. Since my search involved the quest for the impossibly ideal friend, I ended up with no close friends and a hardened, fearful heart. It took the gracious but fiercely determined love of two guys to expose my broken thinking and to re-introduce me to the fabulous world of male friendship.
When I come across the kinds of statements that Lady Gaga makes about art and loneliness, my first instinct is to dismiss them as irritatingly silly, because, well, they are, in a manner. Yet something about her views on the vocation of art-making appears to be resonating with many artists, both pop and high. So I keep listening. I don't think they're particularly helpful, but they do stir me to keep praying for artists, that they would find good friends, even one such friend. Surely Christ ceaselessly prays this prayer on our behalf, and I cannot imagine that we as the church would want to pray less.
Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Against Heresies: Why do they hate Aslan so? Polly Toynbee on the r...
Why do they hate Aslan so? Polly Toynbee on the repugnancy of the atonement
The columnist Polly Toynbee wrote an article in The Guardian on 5th December 2005 with the rather acerbic title “Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion.”
I will spare you the full extent of her invective against the Christian imagery found in C.S. Lewis' children's stories. But among her numerous thorny remarks the following stood out:
Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to?
Perhaps the most obvious thing to say by way of explanation about her choice of adjective, is that it is indicative of a heart wedded to the wisdom of this passing age. It is as straightforward a statement of aversion and distaste at the very notion of a substitutionary atonement as one could wish to find. And yet, to those who hold to the presuppositions laid out by Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:8, it hardly comes as much of a surprise.
It stands in marked contrast to the expression of the regenerate heart that sees in the cross both the wisdom and power of God. Of all the great confessions of faith perhaps it is the Belgic Confession (Q. 26) that best verbalizes the sentiments of the regenerate mind:
If, then, we should seek for another mediator who would be favorably inclined toward us, whom could we find who loved us more than He who laid down His life for us, even while we were His enemies? And if we seek for one who has power and majesty, who is there that has so much of both as He who sits at the right hand of God and to whom hath been given all authority in heaven and on earth?
And what should we make of her question? Of course we did not ask Christ to die for us. None of us wanted him to.
This is a point underlined, as it were in thick marker pen, time and again on the pages of the Bible. From Isaiah's description of Christ as despised and rejected by men (Isaiah 53:3) all the way to Paul's retrospective description of Christian believers as being ungodly and enemies toward God (Romans 5:6, 10).
In the book of Judges there is the pattern of apostasy, oppression from enemies, and cries to God for relief from this misery. In his grace God raises up judges who save the people of God from the hands of their oppressors. Judges 13 seemingly opens with this same pattern. Israel has turned from God to their evil ways, and God has handed them over to the Philistines. But the pattern ends there. Just when we expect to hear a cry to God for relief and rescue there is nothing but silence.
When the Angel of the Lord announces the birth of Samson, who will begin to save Israel from the Philistines, it is therefore clear that this is an act of sheer grace on God's part. God sent them a Savior, even though they did not ask him to. The span of time between the book of Judges and that column in The Guardian may have spread over several millenia, but chronology cannot cover up the similarities that exist.
The very glory of the atonement is that Christ died for his enemies. We were not seeking after a Saviour from heaven, but running and hiding from the God who is really there. As Paul reminded the Colossians, it was for those who were hostile in their minds toward God that Christ hung on the cross. It was by that death that he made peace and effected reconciliation with God (Colossians 1:19-22).
Like Polly Toynbee, I never asked him to do this. That he did it at all is all to the praise of his glorious grace.
The columnist Polly Toynbee wrote an article in The Guardian on 5th December 2005 with the rather acerbic title “Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion.”
I will spare you the full extent of her invective against the Christian imagery found in C.S. Lewis' children's stories. But among her numerous thorny remarks the following stood out:
Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to?
Perhaps the most obvious thing to say by way of explanation about her choice of adjective, is that it is indicative of a heart wedded to the wisdom of this passing age. It is as straightforward a statement of aversion and distaste at the very notion of a substitutionary atonement as one could wish to find. And yet, to those who hold to the presuppositions laid out by Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:8, it hardly comes as much of a surprise.
It stands in marked contrast to the expression of the regenerate heart that sees in the cross both the wisdom and power of God. Of all the great confessions of faith perhaps it is the Belgic Confession (Q. 26) that best verbalizes the sentiments of the regenerate mind:
If, then, we should seek for another mediator who would be favorably inclined toward us, whom could we find who loved us more than He who laid down His life for us, even while we were His enemies? And if we seek for one who has power and majesty, who is there that has so much of both as He who sits at the right hand of God and to whom hath been given all authority in heaven and on earth?
And what should we make of her question? Of course we did not ask Christ to die for us. None of us wanted him to.
This is a point underlined, as it were in thick marker pen, time and again on the pages of the Bible. From Isaiah's description of Christ as despised and rejected by men (Isaiah 53:3) all the way to Paul's retrospective description of Christian believers as being ungodly and enemies toward God (Romans 5:6, 10).
In the book of Judges there is the pattern of apostasy, oppression from enemies, and cries to God for relief from this misery. In his grace God raises up judges who save the people of God from the hands of their oppressors. Judges 13 seemingly opens with this same pattern. Israel has turned from God to their evil ways, and God has handed them over to the Philistines. But the pattern ends there. Just when we expect to hear a cry to God for relief and rescue there is nothing but silence.
When the Angel of the Lord announces the birth of Samson, who will begin to save Israel from the Philistines, it is therefore clear that this is an act of sheer grace on God's part. God sent them a Savior, even though they did not ask him to. The span of time between the book of Judges and that column in The Guardian may have spread over several millenia, but chronology cannot cover up the similarities that exist.
The very glory of the atonement is that Christ died for his enemies. We were not seeking after a Saviour from heaven, but running and hiding from the God who is really there. As Paul reminded the Colossians, it was for those who were hostile in their minds toward God that Christ hung on the cross. It was by that death that he made peace and effected reconciliation with God (Colossians 1:19-22).
Like Polly Toynbee, I never asked him to do this. That he did it at all is all to the praise of his glorious grace.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Babette's Feast in Our Digital Age
December 10, 2010
The Trinity Forum-Update
Hospitality in a Digital Age
This weekend is reportedly the high-water mark for the holiday party season. Many friends are juggling multiple soirees in the course of an evening, in the attempt to see and connect with friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. Most of these same revelers (including yours truly) hold accounts with and spend time on social networking sites—so it’s worth reflecting on why we still make such efforts to gather together, to prepare homes and meals and music rather than just posting a quick and cheerful holiday greeting on our social network profiles.
Our newest Trinity Forum Reading, Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen, may actually speak even more profoundly in our digital age than when it first appeared in 1950. Martine and Philippa, the elderly and ascetic protagonists of the tale, live a form of precursor to our disembodied online life. They have “renounced the pleasures of this world” and physically withdrawn from much of the life of their village to better focus on what they believe to be “the true reality” of the New Jerusalem.
Consider now the half-billion people who use Facebook. The site reports that its average user has 130 “friends” and can “interact” with over 900 million “objects”—pages, groups, and events—generating more than 30 billion pieces of content each month. Those of us who use the site encounter an unending stream of information about people from every stage of our lives.
But while online communities can impart a great deal of information about us, they cannot provide the space for us to be known. A person is far more than a persona; an individual cannot be known only through words and images. It is little wonder that many people find that even several hundred online “friends” do not ease their profound sense of isolation. This is one reason many services are now working hard to connect themselves with real “places,” even by attaching GPS coordinates to people’s postings.
But even as our tools become more sophisticated, we will still find that our virtual communities can only flourish when they help us form and deepen real-world relationships, when they take seriously our embodied human nature. This is why hospitality of the most tangible kind is foremost among the practices worth cultivating in a digital age. In our story, it is only when Martine and Philippa open their home to the refugee Babette that they make possible her further act of hospitality that opens them to grace and connection, and helps to transform their small community.
Like most meaningful things in life, hospitality comes with a cost, requiring the sacrifice of money, time, and attention. Inviting people into our homes is of a different order than inviting their friendship online. The practice of hospitality can be inconvenient and disruptive, just as Babette’s extensive preparations detailed in our story upset the routine of the household, as we shift our focus from our own needs to those of our guests. How can we best welcome them? What food and drink would they like? Who would they enjoy meeting?
When someone is at our table, there is no convenient link to click to terminate a conversation or a friendship. We must be open to this person, their presence, and their conversation. Practiced properly, hospitality forces us to recognize the other as someone to be known, loved, welcomed, celebrated, and served—and so as someone who can begin to know us in turn.
Sincerely,
Cherie Harder
President
The Trinity Forum-Update
Hospitality in a Digital Age
This weekend is reportedly the high-water mark for the holiday party season. Many friends are juggling multiple soirees in the course of an evening, in the attempt to see and connect with friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. Most of these same revelers (including yours truly) hold accounts with and spend time on social networking sites—so it’s worth reflecting on why we still make such efforts to gather together, to prepare homes and meals and music rather than just posting a quick and cheerful holiday greeting on our social network profiles.
Our newest Trinity Forum Reading, Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen, may actually speak even more profoundly in our digital age than when it first appeared in 1950. Martine and Philippa, the elderly and ascetic protagonists of the tale, live a form of precursor to our disembodied online life. They have “renounced the pleasures of this world” and physically withdrawn from much of the life of their village to better focus on what they believe to be “the true reality” of the New Jerusalem.
Consider now the half-billion people who use Facebook. The site reports that its average user has 130 “friends” and can “interact” with over 900 million “objects”—pages, groups, and events—generating more than 30 billion pieces of content each month. Those of us who use the site encounter an unending stream of information about people from every stage of our lives.
But while online communities can impart a great deal of information about us, they cannot provide the space for us to be known. A person is far more than a persona; an individual cannot be known only through words and images. It is little wonder that many people find that even several hundred online “friends” do not ease their profound sense of isolation. This is one reason many services are now working hard to connect themselves with real “places,” even by attaching GPS coordinates to people’s postings.
But even as our tools become more sophisticated, we will still find that our virtual communities can only flourish when they help us form and deepen real-world relationships, when they take seriously our embodied human nature. This is why hospitality of the most tangible kind is foremost among the practices worth cultivating in a digital age. In our story, it is only when Martine and Philippa open their home to the refugee Babette that they make possible her further act of hospitality that opens them to grace and connection, and helps to transform their small community.
Like most meaningful things in life, hospitality comes with a cost, requiring the sacrifice of money, time, and attention. Inviting people into our homes is of a different order than inviting their friendship online. The practice of hospitality can be inconvenient and disruptive, just as Babette’s extensive preparations detailed in our story upset the routine of the household, as we shift our focus from our own needs to those of our guests. How can we best welcome them? What food and drink would they like? Who would they enjoy meeting?
When someone is at our table, there is no convenient link to click to terminate a conversation or a friendship. We must be open to this person, their presence, and their conversation. Practiced properly, hospitality forces us to recognize the other as someone to be known, loved, welcomed, celebrated, and served—and so as someone who can begin to know us in turn.
Sincerely,
Cherie Harder
President
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Cardus - We Are the Public
Cardus - We Are the Public
POINT OF VIEW
We Are the Public
December 3, 2010 - Ray Pennings
It's time to reclaim the word "public."
I don't mean to sound like a nerdy grammatical purist, as if etymological arguments are a trumping corrective to everyday conversation. In this case, discussing the development of the Greek polis might be illuminating, but current examples provide enough fodder to make my case.
My concern is quite straightforward. Notions of inclusiveness and common good that were once understood as part of the term "public" have been lost. In its common usage today, the word has morphed to mean state-funded or endorsed and devoid of any religious claim—a positive antidote to the badness of things "private."
But words are important as the conveyors of meaning, and so losing this word impairs our ability to flourish in this pluralistic environment.
Let me clarify my concerns with a few specific examples. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) is on a campaign, investigating universities that require faculty to sign a statement of faith. That fact alone (goes the charge) is a denial of academic freedom.
A few weeks ago, I was invited to participate in a panel on this subject, and while preparing my remarks I realized how easy it was to lose the argument by conceding to the other side the word "public." My first draft included the term "public universities," which I meant as a shorthand for universities that were funded by the state. Although this language was convenient and would have accurately communicated to my audience the universities to which I referred, it would force me to use a word other than "public" for the non-public funded universities.
But public funding had nothing to do with the question we were debating. We were discussing whether the explicit commitment to certain presuppositions or first principles in academic work was fatal to academic freedom. Was scholarship that took place in one type of academy, in which these presuppositions were explicit, of a different nature than the scholarship that took place in a different kind of institution, where the scholars might hold the same convictions but were not asked to make them explicit? I wanted to make the case that scholars in both settings were carrying out a public vocation—namely, that of the academy. The academy is called to add to the body of knowledge on which our society relies and to share it with the next generation. We do not support scholarship so that academics have the space to study and reflect on the questions their curiosities create. Rather, we support scholarship to enable them to make a contribution to the public so that we can all share and benefit from their insights.
Although this is a challenge to those who hold convictions like those of CAUT (and I use this example simply to illustrate—similar things are happening in various social spheres), I suspect it is equally a challenge to those who work in faith-based universities. Sometimes it is easier to retreat from the broader academy and focus more narrowly on the students and context of your own university, as if your responsibilities were purely local (or, to use the terminology preferred by some, private.)
But to give in to this language is to concede that religion is really a private matter, and this concession has consequences for both who can participate and how they participate in society. Even the Supreme Court of Canada noted in a 2002 decision that an understanding of secularism which implied religion had no place in the public square was misguided. Secularism, properly understood, is a pluralist principle. It does not divide society into two groups: one holding a privileged non-theistic framework that gets to dominate the public square, and another with theistic beliefs who can participate only if they keep quiet about their deeply-held convictions. The public includes both theistic and non-theistic believers.
That challenges what has become conventional thinking on the part of many: the idea that only non-theistic belief can be objective. Recently, I was before a foundation-granting committee with a proposed project that involved engagement with a multi-faith group of stakeholders. My questioner was puzzled how an organization like Cardus, which has clear statements regarding its Christian convictions on its website, might be qualified to lead such a process. "We don't do religion," he reminded me, convinced, I am sure, that he had the public interest at heart. It seemed to puzzle him that a person with faith commitments could properly engage a broader community.
I tried to answer his query by pointing out that it was precisely because of my faith commitments that I could respect the beliefs of others and support democratic pluralism. But what was lost in this, and so many other conversations like it, is the implicit view of the "public" that the question presupposes. If people of faith are disqualified from engaging and leading a multi-faith dialogue because their personal faith biases them, then the only ones left to do it are those who do not have theistic faith. But non-theistic faith also has its presuppositions. We are left with a truncated view of the public square.
In using these examples, I do not mean to suggest naively that there are not valid concerns and historic abuses that have provided impetus to this changing notion of what is public. There are settings in which academic freedom is stifled in the name of religion (and those who remember Copernicus will know this is not a problem of recent invention). There are studies—although, these days, this seems more prevalent among non-theists than theistic believers—in which professional standards are compromised and supposedly public square processes are used to proselytize, rather than engage in dialogue.
But let's not allow certain abuses of the term "public" to change the meaning of the word. A civil plural society cannot survive if we marginalize the public contribution of faith. This is a challenge to those who would engage in campaigns to marginalize faith. It is also a challenge to many people of faith who are content to retreat from the public square and reduce their religion to a "God and me" arrangement that is no one else's business. Faith is personal, but it is never private. Our core beliefs shape who we are, how we live, and what we pursue. They define who we consider to be our neighbour and what it is that we owe them.
There are many dimensions to this complex issue but if the conversation is to continue, we need words that communicate what we mean. Reclaiming the appropriate use of the word "public" is important in that process. After all, we are the public.
Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.
POINT OF VIEW
We Are the Public
December 3, 2010 - Ray Pennings
It's time to reclaim the word "public."
I don't mean to sound like a nerdy grammatical purist, as if etymological arguments are a trumping corrective to everyday conversation. In this case, discussing the development of the Greek polis might be illuminating, but current examples provide enough fodder to make my case.
My concern is quite straightforward. Notions of inclusiveness and common good that were once understood as part of the term "public" have been lost. In its common usage today, the word has morphed to mean state-funded or endorsed and devoid of any religious claim—a positive antidote to the badness of things "private."
But words are important as the conveyors of meaning, and so losing this word impairs our ability to flourish in this pluralistic environment.
Let me clarify my concerns with a few specific examples. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) is on a campaign, investigating universities that require faculty to sign a statement of faith. That fact alone (goes the charge) is a denial of academic freedom.
A few weeks ago, I was invited to participate in a panel on this subject, and while preparing my remarks I realized how easy it was to lose the argument by conceding to the other side the word "public." My first draft included the term "public universities," which I meant as a shorthand for universities that were funded by the state. Although this language was convenient and would have accurately communicated to my audience the universities to which I referred, it would force me to use a word other than "public" for the non-public funded universities.
But public funding had nothing to do with the question we were debating. We were discussing whether the explicit commitment to certain presuppositions or first principles in academic work was fatal to academic freedom. Was scholarship that took place in one type of academy, in which these presuppositions were explicit, of a different nature than the scholarship that took place in a different kind of institution, where the scholars might hold the same convictions but were not asked to make them explicit? I wanted to make the case that scholars in both settings were carrying out a public vocation—namely, that of the academy. The academy is called to add to the body of knowledge on which our society relies and to share it with the next generation. We do not support scholarship so that academics have the space to study and reflect on the questions their curiosities create. Rather, we support scholarship to enable them to make a contribution to the public so that we can all share and benefit from their insights.
Although this is a challenge to those who hold convictions like those of CAUT (and I use this example simply to illustrate—similar things are happening in various social spheres), I suspect it is equally a challenge to those who work in faith-based universities. Sometimes it is easier to retreat from the broader academy and focus more narrowly on the students and context of your own university, as if your responsibilities were purely local (or, to use the terminology preferred by some, private.)
But to give in to this language is to concede that religion is really a private matter, and this concession has consequences for both who can participate and how they participate in society. Even the Supreme Court of Canada noted in a 2002 decision that an understanding of secularism which implied religion had no place in the public square was misguided. Secularism, properly understood, is a pluralist principle. It does not divide society into two groups: one holding a privileged non-theistic framework that gets to dominate the public square, and another with theistic beliefs who can participate only if they keep quiet about their deeply-held convictions. The public includes both theistic and non-theistic believers.
That challenges what has become conventional thinking on the part of many: the idea that only non-theistic belief can be objective. Recently, I was before a foundation-granting committee with a proposed project that involved engagement with a multi-faith group of stakeholders. My questioner was puzzled how an organization like Cardus, which has clear statements regarding its Christian convictions on its website, might be qualified to lead such a process. "We don't do religion," he reminded me, convinced, I am sure, that he had the public interest at heart. It seemed to puzzle him that a person with faith commitments could properly engage a broader community.
I tried to answer his query by pointing out that it was precisely because of my faith commitments that I could respect the beliefs of others and support democratic pluralism. But what was lost in this, and so many other conversations like it, is the implicit view of the "public" that the question presupposes. If people of faith are disqualified from engaging and leading a multi-faith dialogue because their personal faith biases them, then the only ones left to do it are those who do not have theistic faith. But non-theistic faith also has its presuppositions. We are left with a truncated view of the public square.
In using these examples, I do not mean to suggest naively that there are not valid concerns and historic abuses that have provided impetus to this changing notion of what is public. There are settings in which academic freedom is stifled in the name of religion (and those who remember Copernicus will know this is not a problem of recent invention). There are studies—although, these days, this seems more prevalent among non-theists than theistic believers—in which professional standards are compromised and supposedly public square processes are used to proselytize, rather than engage in dialogue.
But let's not allow certain abuses of the term "public" to change the meaning of the word. A civil plural society cannot survive if we marginalize the public contribution of faith. This is a challenge to those who would engage in campaigns to marginalize faith. It is also a challenge to many people of faith who are content to retreat from the public square and reduce their religion to a "God and me" arrangement that is no one else's business. Faith is personal, but it is never private. Our core beliefs shape who we are, how we live, and what we pursue. They define who we consider to be our neighbour and what it is that we owe them.
There are many dimensions to this complex issue but if the conversation is to continue, we need words that communicate what we mean. Reclaiming the appropriate use of the word "public" is important in that process. After all, we are the public.
Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Friday, November 26, 2010
On Artists and Community...
POINT OF VIEW
The Tricky Thing Is
November 26, 2010 - Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
In 2008, two things troubled me in culture: the death of author David Foster Wallace and a YouTube clip showing youth group kids singing, "You spin me right round, Jesus, right round," and whirling their socks in the air. The worship leader had told them they were on holy ground and needed to remove their shoes and wave their socks.
If I'd seen the YouTube clip at a different time, I might have laughed or felt a moment's dismay and moved on. It was bizarre to see what the quest for relevance can inspire, and it was outrageous to consider Moses' trembling at the burning bush turned into socks wheeling through strobe lighting. But since I felt freshly hurt by the death of an author I loved, the youth group silliness actually felt painful. It felt painful because Wallace's death had made me realize the extent to which I identified with the literary community, and this YouTube clip made me squirm to identify with the church. "Forget it," I wanted to say, "I'm with the cool people."
In college, when I identified that the arts were, unquestionably, part of what made me tick, I thought the most difficult part of being a writer and artist would be discerning acceptable content. Growing up, I had sorted art and entertainment something like this:
* "Edifying"
* "Corrupting"
* "Okay if you fast-forward a scene/mute a song/skip a few pages."
Discernment about content is important. As Cormac McCarthy's protagonist tells his son in The Road, "Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever." The trickiest thing, though, was going to be that finding community in the arts can be a cause of great hope or great brokenness.
We are made for community—for many communities. Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson saw life as a process of realizing how large one's community really is. The infant thinks life is just him and Mom. The toddler learns to embrace family and friends. The young reader picks up Anne of Green Gables and finds imaginary kindred. The adult risks intimacy. The elderly ponder the world as their community and hope they have made it better for the next generation. We are created not just for one community, but for the expanse of human community.
Art is an essential part of that. Saying that audiences love artists may conjure scenes from Trekkies or images of teeny boppers swooning over Justin Bieber. Yet, in a real, non-creepy, non-adolescent way, there is respect, admiration, and appreciation between artist and audience—and what is that, except love?
It's accurate, then, to say readers loved fiction writer and essayist David Foster Wallace, though most didn't know him and most didn't even know the fact or the extent of the depression he suffered. His suicide, at age 46, devastated the literary community. Reading Wallace's work, one sees a brilliant mind (he won a MacArthur "genius grant") having tremendous fun on the page. One also gets the sense that he was mining postmodern experience and evaluating those aspects that made life by turns delightful and absurd. He connected with a broad community that still grieves for him, and for good reason.
What concerns me is not that art can become a community, but that it is easy for any community to go haywire. Families can become ingrown and be threatened by outsiders. Friends can seek each other's approval to a co-dependent degree. Churches can demand to fill members' every social need.
The arts, too, can become insular. Simon and Garfunkel sing, satirically, "I have no need of friendship. Friendship causes pain. It's laughter and it's loving I disdain . . . I have my books and my poetry to protect me." The listener chuckles, picturing, maybe, a clove-smoking reader holed up in his shelf-lined apartment. The song portrays one harmful use of the arts—a way of avoiding face-to-face friendships and the pain of other communities.
Living in multiple, overlapping communities gets complicated. Where our community is, there, to an extent, our loyalty and love are, and there our identity is. What we love is messy, complicated, and often our loves compete.
C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces illustrates this well. Early in the book, the king of Glome sacrifices his daughter Psyche by abandoning her in the land of the gods. Instead of dying, Psyche marries Cupid. Psyche's sister Orual is unaware of this marriage and travels to find Psyche and bring her home. When the sisters meet, Orual demands and wheedles and whines that Psyche must return. Psyche meets this with gravity and calm. "Orual—think. How can I go back? This is my home. I am a wife." Psyche's love for her sister is not lessened one jot by being married to Cupid, yet her love for him means she cannot meet Orual's demand.
Union with Christ changes everything. There will be demands from other communities that Christians cannot meet. The arts bestow an aura of "cool," of wisdom, and of knowingness on those who drop the right names. It's easy to bask in the hipness of contemporary literature. Craving this identity-validating hipness can turn the arts into Community Number One, and instead of making and enjoying art as worship to God, we can make this an object of worship, an end in itself.
The arts can be a radiant part of a flourishing identity that Christ is remaking. Nonetheless, true flourishing cannot happen if the arts become the community around which everything else orders itself. And so, I can't say "I'm with the cool people" or, borrowing from Simon and Garfunkel, "I have no need of Christians, Christians cause me pain." (Or embarrassment.)
The pressure to say this is crushing. Christian visual artist Makoto Fujimura participated in a conference in which presenters wrote open letters to North American churches, and in his, he incisively identified the uneasy relationship between churches and artists: "We are often in the margins of your communities, being the misfits that we are." Artists sit on the outskirts, perceiving. They are fantastic at deconstruction. Writers can't read a book without deconstructing how the writing works, so it's hard for them not to look at how church is put together. To artists (and to many other postmodern folk), the way church looks is as much a message as the sermon. It can be difficult for the perceptive misfit to embrace the church as home. Certainly many have decided—most recently and famously novelist Anne Rice—that finding community there is impossible. As with Rice, they say, "I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider."
It's essential for the Christian artist to know, setting out, that the artistic community will tug strongly. This false promise will ring out again and again: "If I immerse myself in the arts, I will be made new; I will be a more whole person, with respected insight into culture and truth." The Christian artist must stare down this desire and know it is Christ who makes all things new, whole, right, and bountiful.
The Christian who wants to nurture Christian artists could help greatly by addressing questions of identity and community. The person who wants to encourage Christian artists could show hospitality, making artists at home in the church, and helping them, more and more, to make Christ their home. We need each other's help. All Christians will have other communities, but we have no other true home, and what one defines as home changes everything.
Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.
The Tricky Thing Is
November 26, 2010 - Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
In 2008, two things troubled me in culture: the death of author David Foster Wallace and a YouTube clip showing youth group kids singing, "You spin me right round, Jesus, right round," and whirling their socks in the air. The worship leader had told them they were on holy ground and needed to remove their shoes and wave their socks.
If I'd seen the YouTube clip at a different time, I might have laughed or felt a moment's dismay and moved on. It was bizarre to see what the quest for relevance can inspire, and it was outrageous to consider Moses' trembling at the burning bush turned into socks wheeling through strobe lighting. But since I felt freshly hurt by the death of an author I loved, the youth group silliness actually felt painful. It felt painful because Wallace's death had made me realize the extent to which I identified with the literary community, and this YouTube clip made me squirm to identify with the church. "Forget it," I wanted to say, "I'm with the cool people."
In college, when I identified that the arts were, unquestionably, part of what made me tick, I thought the most difficult part of being a writer and artist would be discerning acceptable content. Growing up, I had sorted art and entertainment something like this:
* "Edifying"
* "Corrupting"
* "Okay if you fast-forward a scene/mute a song/skip a few pages."
Discernment about content is important. As Cormac McCarthy's protagonist tells his son in The Road, "Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever." The trickiest thing, though, was going to be that finding community in the arts can be a cause of great hope or great brokenness.
We are made for community—for many communities. Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson saw life as a process of realizing how large one's community really is. The infant thinks life is just him and Mom. The toddler learns to embrace family and friends. The young reader picks up Anne of Green Gables and finds imaginary kindred. The adult risks intimacy. The elderly ponder the world as their community and hope they have made it better for the next generation. We are created not just for one community, but for the expanse of human community.
Art is an essential part of that. Saying that audiences love artists may conjure scenes from Trekkies or images of teeny boppers swooning over Justin Bieber. Yet, in a real, non-creepy, non-adolescent way, there is respect, admiration, and appreciation between artist and audience—and what is that, except love?
It's accurate, then, to say readers loved fiction writer and essayist David Foster Wallace, though most didn't know him and most didn't even know the fact or the extent of the depression he suffered. His suicide, at age 46, devastated the literary community. Reading Wallace's work, one sees a brilliant mind (he won a MacArthur "genius grant") having tremendous fun on the page. One also gets the sense that he was mining postmodern experience and evaluating those aspects that made life by turns delightful and absurd. He connected with a broad community that still grieves for him, and for good reason.
What concerns me is not that art can become a community, but that it is easy for any community to go haywire. Families can become ingrown and be threatened by outsiders. Friends can seek each other's approval to a co-dependent degree. Churches can demand to fill members' every social need.
The arts, too, can become insular. Simon and Garfunkel sing, satirically, "I have no need of friendship. Friendship causes pain. It's laughter and it's loving I disdain . . . I have my books and my poetry to protect me." The listener chuckles, picturing, maybe, a clove-smoking reader holed up in his shelf-lined apartment. The song portrays one harmful use of the arts—a way of avoiding face-to-face friendships and the pain of other communities.
Living in multiple, overlapping communities gets complicated. Where our community is, there, to an extent, our loyalty and love are, and there our identity is. What we love is messy, complicated, and often our loves compete.
C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces illustrates this well. Early in the book, the king of Glome sacrifices his daughter Psyche by abandoning her in the land of the gods. Instead of dying, Psyche marries Cupid. Psyche's sister Orual is unaware of this marriage and travels to find Psyche and bring her home. When the sisters meet, Orual demands and wheedles and whines that Psyche must return. Psyche meets this with gravity and calm. "Orual—think. How can I go back? This is my home. I am a wife." Psyche's love for her sister is not lessened one jot by being married to Cupid, yet her love for him means she cannot meet Orual's demand.
Union with Christ changes everything. There will be demands from other communities that Christians cannot meet. The arts bestow an aura of "cool," of wisdom, and of knowingness on those who drop the right names. It's easy to bask in the hipness of contemporary literature. Craving this identity-validating hipness can turn the arts into Community Number One, and instead of making and enjoying art as worship to God, we can make this an object of worship, an end in itself.
The arts can be a radiant part of a flourishing identity that Christ is remaking. Nonetheless, true flourishing cannot happen if the arts become the community around which everything else orders itself. And so, I can't say "I'm with the cool people" or, borrowing from Simon and Garfunkel, "I have no need of Christians, Christians cause me pain." (Or embarrassment.)
The pressure to say this is crushing. Christian visual artist Makoto Fujimura participated in a conference in which presenters wrote open letters to North American churches, and in his, he incisively identified the uneasy relationship between churches and artists: "We are often in the margins of your communities, being the misfits that we are." Artists sit on the outskirts, perceiving. They are fantastic at deconstruction. Writers can't read a book without deconstructing how the writing works, so it's hard for them not to look at how church is put together. To artists (and to many other postmodern folk), the way church looks is as much a message as the sermon. It can be difficult for the perceptive misfit to embrace the church as home. Certainly many have decided—most recently and famously novelist Anne Rice—that finding community there is impossible. As with Rice, they say, "I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider."
It's essential for the Christian artist to know, setting out, that the artistic community will tug strongly. This false promise will ring out again and again: "If I immerse myself in the arts, I will be made new; I will be a more whole person, with respected insight into culture and truth." The Christian artist must stare down this desire and know it is Christ who makes all things new, whole, right, and bountiful.
The Christian who wants to nurture Christian artists could help greatly by addressing questions of identity and community. The person who wants to encourage Christian artists could show hospitality, making artists at home in the church, and helping them, more and more, to make Christ their home. We need each other's help. All Christians will have other communities, but we have no other true home, and what one defines as home changes everything.
Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.
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