Monthly Archives: August 2011

More on Michele Bachmann and Religion

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Ryan Lizza’s in-depth examination in The New Yorker.  He talks about evangelical guru Francis Schaeffer, whose book and later video series “How should we then live” chronicled the decline of Christianity from the Renaissance on, and was wildly popular among a certain subset of Evangelicals in the late 70s (I remember trying to read the book at the insistence of a classmate in 79 or 80 and being finding it offensive and occasionally humorous). He also discusses the faculty of the law school at Oral Roberts University. Lizza begins, however, with this statement:

Bachmann belongs to a generation of Christian conservatives whose views have been shaped by institutions, tracts, and leaders not commonly known to secular Americans, or even to most Christians.

My guess is that while particular names or institutions might not be familiar to “most Christians,” these views are widespread, and widely disseminated among the hard-core religious right.
Lizza also discusses the biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Stephen Wilkins, who argues “that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North.” The whole article is well-worth the read.
My previous entries on Bachmann’s religion are here and here.


 

Two articles on grief and mourning

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From Slate, a report on a survey about “what grief is really like.” In this report, a discussion of what grievers wanted from friends and acquaintances:

Asked what would have helped them with their grief, the survey-takers talked again and again about acknowledgement of their grief. They wanted recognition of their loss and its uniqueness; they wanted help with practical matters; they wanted active emotional support. What they didn’t want was to be offered false comfort in the form of empty platitudes. Acknowledgement, love, a receptive ear, help with the cooking, company—these were the basic supports that mourning rituals once provided; even if we’ve never experienced a loss ourselves, we know from literature and history that people require them. Yet as American culture has become divorced from death and dying, we no longer know how to address the most rudimentary aspects of another’s loss—what to say, when to say it, how to say it. Disconcerted by discomfort, friends or colleagues are all too likely to disappear or turn the conversation to small talk in the aftermath of a loss, not knowing what to say. Our survey-takers reported wanting to grieve communally and yearning to find ways to relate to those around them.

Among other things, the article stressed the meaninglessness of platitudes and the importance of rituals.

An earlier article on the theme.

From Salon, Sheila Trask writes about the lengthy grieving process after three deaths in her family.

 

 

The Plight of Christians after the Arab Spring

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Molly Worthen writes about the “persecution complex” of American Evangelicals and their ambivalent response to the persecution of Christians in the wake of the Arab Spring.

Today, we learned that the priest of the Anglican Church in Damascus, Syria, is being forced to leave.

On the other hand, here’s today’s example of the persecution complex at work in the US. A Federal court decided that the prayers beginning Forsyth County, NC county commission meetings were unconstitutional. The outcry has been intense. How 95% of a county (the estimated percentage of its 350,000 residents who are Christian) can claim to be a beleaguered and persecuted religious minority is beyond me.

Christianity and the Arts, continued

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I meant to include links to these two pieces in my earlier post but I forgot about them.

A new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art explores Rembrandt’s “Faces of Jesus.”

“Rembrandt’s concept of Christ changed significantly as his art evolved from one decade to the next,” argues George S. Keyes in his catalog essay, with “Rembrandt’s earlier representations of Jesus [showing him] in dramatically charged events” and later depictions making “Christ… an object of profound meditation.” This evolution can clearly be seen in Rembrandt’s almost endless returning to his favorite story of Jesus on the Road to Emmaus and the Supper at Emmaus. From small drawings focusing on the explosively radiant divinity of Christ at the moment of revelation at Emmaus to paintings such as the Louvre’s 1648 Supper at Emmaus focusing more on the reactions of the disciples than on the more-reserved, resurrected Jesus (whose appearance seems based on the “Philadelphia” head), Rembrandt shifted away from Jesus as the heroic superbeing of antiquity towards a more human, more accessible to believers, and, perhaps, truer face of Christ.

More here. The exhibition will also travel to Detroit. Well worth the trip, I should think. I’m interested in the article’s identification of the Supper at Emmaus as Rembrandt’s favorite subject, especially given the loaded theological significance of the story for seventeenth-century religious conflict. No doubt dissertations have been written on the topic (none of which I plan on reading).

From visual art to music. Peter Phillips’ review of Christopher Page’s The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years. Money quote:

Largely as a result of Guido’s invention, the Latin West had become a place of common worship by the twelfth century, and was given a name: Latinitas. By 1200, clerics envisaged the way they lived and worshipped as being of one tradition with one chant, despite the individual histories of sees such as Milan, with its Ambrosian rites, and the Mozarabic chant in Spain. The Cistercian order was founded by Bernard of Clairvaux to perpetuate the unity of the Roman way of doing things, and staff-notation was from the beginning crucial to their work. During the twelfth century they carried this notation to all corners of the Latin West, deliberately founding houses in remote places.

Of course, the Cistercian order wasn’t founded by Bernard of Clairvaux. Oh, well.

 

Religion and Violence

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Adam Serwer points to a new Gallup poll that explores the relationship between religion and the use of violence among Americans. The key take-away:

Muslims are by far the least likely among all religious groups to justify targeting civilians, whether done by the military or by “an individual person or a small group of persons.” Seventy-eight percent of Muslims say that military attacks on civilians are never justified, while the numbers for Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and atheists hover in the 50s.

Another question asked whether American Muslims repudiated Al-Qaeda: 92% of Muslim Americans claimed no sympathy with the terrorist organization; while only 56% of American Protestants answered the question in the same way.

All the more we ought to worry about Spencer Ackerman’s discovery of a pdf file that seems to have been used as recently as 2009 by the FBI to educate its agents about Islam.

Christianity and the arts

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Several recent essays remind us of the importance of the arts for religious faith and practice.

First, Richard Hays asks, “Why should we care about the arts?” He cites four reasons:

  1. “There is no escaping the arts. They create the imaginative symbolic world in which we live and move; we are constantly surrounded by images, music and stories.”
  2. Worship is nothing else than shaping beliefs and practices into artistic forms and more people (60% of the American population) hear live music in worship than in any other setting.
  3. Participation in artistic performances is useful instruction in faithful discipleship.
  4. Created in the image of a creative God, we are by nature fashioners of images and stories and it is through creativity that we make our selves more fully into God’s image.

I was reminded of the role of the arts in worship this past Sunday while attending services at the church in which I grew up. In many ways, the space is a generic Protestant church–there are no images in the stained glass or on the walls; the ceiling, pews, and front of the church are all plain. What differs from my youth is the presence of instruments in the church–a piano and drum set. But this past Sunday, the hymns were sung in four-part harmony as they were when I was a member. All of them were familiar to me and I was struck by the way in which this unaccompanied, four-part singing had been and perhaps continues to be, an important means for creating and shaping community. As one member shared a story that had to do with singing, I became aware of something else, too: through singing, members also take on particular roles in the community.

A conversation reflecting on the differences between Christian (in this case, specifically Thomas Kincaide) and Modern art poses similar questions. It seems that although most modern artists whose work hangs in great museums are not Christian, or even religious in any conventional sense, but nonetheless, many found that ideas or experiences of the transcendent were central to their work:

Artists who don’t have an orthodox Christian bone in their bodies are making paintings that they’re intending, even in subconscious ways, to function in this very specific, sacred, and you could say a secular-Christian, environment.

One of the conversation partners, Curtis Chang, observed that

When I visited the modern art wing recently, it struck me that there was far more silence and contemplation there than I’ve found at any church service …

Rob Goodman reflects on the differences between bad and good religious art in the course of a discussion of Terence Malick:

But I don’t want to be so hard on Malick’s failed comforter: there’s painfully little any of us can say to grief, or to any of the other human needs that inspire religious feeling. And I think it’s an inability or unwillingness to recognize that fact that is the deeper mistake of bad religious art: it wants to argue us into faith. It won’t rest without a moral, a message, a lesson to take home. But religious persuasion can’t work that way—because religious thought doesn’t work that way.

When we reach for our most fundamental beliefs—whether these are beliefs about a deity, or politics, or family—we aren’t likely to find words there. We’re much more likely to find images, metaphors, memories, half-felt impressions. We’re likely to find, that is, something far more slippery, more vague, more illogical than discursive argument. Words come afterwards—but the fact that they so often rest on a foundation of images goes a long way to explain why the most seemingly persuasive arguments fail so often: why we seek out evidence that confirms our beliefs; why we ignore evidence that does not; why being caught in contradictions often makes us hold on to them even tighter. Arguments rarely touch our central beliefs where they live, and the most perceptive religious thinkers understand this.

I think that’s one of the appeals of beautifully-executed Episcopal liturgy, words that are themselves beautiful, spoken or sung beautifully in a lovely space, all of which connects deeply to images and feelings within ourselves. Oh, it’s not for everyone, of course, but for those who seek beauty in life, may find beauty, and the sacred, in our worship.