top tens

Posted on December 29, 2011 by djgrieser

The War over Christmas (Historians’ edition)

Posted on December 27, 2011 by djgrieser

Giles Fraser, late of St. Paul’s Cathedral, had a radio program on the BBC on Christmas Day in which he argued that:

Following his battlefield conversion, Constantine established Christianity as the official religion of Rome, and he decided that Christ’s birth should become a major focus of the Christian year.

The broadcast is available here. But for a better historical perspective, try Andrew McGowan’s piece in Biblical Archaeology Review. It’s much better history, and much better nuanced, making clear that it wasn’t until the mid-4th century that December 25 became the accepted date for Christmas, and pointing out that there was considerable speculation about Jesus’ birth as early as the gospels, and increasing in the second century. He even goes a long way toward debunking the myth that December 25 was deliberately chosen to counteract pagan rites.

All are welcome here!

Posted on December 11, 2011 by djgrieser

I really don’t want to use news about other denominations as marketing for my own church, but living in Madison, it’s hard not to want to take advantage of developments in the Roman Catholic Church. Now, Bishop Morlino has recommended that a hymn entitled “All are Welcome” is not appropriate for use in the Mass. Here’s Doug Erickson’s article on Madison.com. Apparently, Bishop Morlino believes that all are not welcome at the Lord’s table.

I’ve toyed over the years with several marketing strategies for disaffected Catholics: “The Episcopal Church: All of the liturgy, none of the guilt” is one. OK, yes, that was a joke. The national church has had a slogan “The Episcopal Church welcomes you.” Perhaps we need to be even more clear in our message, at least in Madison: “The Episcopal Church: All are welcome here!”

And we mean it, whether you’re Episcopalian, or Roman Catholic, or just seeking!

Milton’s Paradise Lost

Posted on December 6, 2011 by djgrieser

Jessica Martin, in The Guardian, has begun a series examing Paradise Lost. It’s well-timed given the promised release of a movie based on Books V and VI of the great English epic.

Here’s part 1, part 2. Other parts to follow.

Here’s Martin on Milton’s choice of epic as his genre:

And so Milton folds together two stories focused on different heroes, placing them in balance. On one side, and opening the poem, the defeated figure of Satan following a first great fall, his fall from heaven. Corrupted by overweening ambition, morally tormented, subtle and charming, Satan presents like a melange of the best villains of the stage-plays of Milton’s youth; but his strand of the story follows the epic tradition.

To him belongs the journeys, the politics, the battles, a growing insupportable self-knowledge that will, eventually, diminish him to almost nothing. He travels to encounter and corrupt his opposite numbers, the counter-heroes Adam and Eve – united where he is solitary, ignorant where he is knowing, happy where he is miserable. Their meeting will result in the poem’s second and very different fall, raising Adam and Eve separately and for different reasons to tragic stature. Out of its disaster, as out of Troy’s burning, we see them at the beginning of an odyssey. Their final “wandering steps and slow” will walk them out of the poem and into history, an untold journey leading humanity – eventually, eventually – into the embrace of a lost beloved.

I’ve probably blogged about this before, but looking back on my teaching career, one of the great gifts I received was teaching for most of my fifteen years in an interdisciplinary humanities program, and in almost every year, in a term that had us reading at least some of Paradise Lost. I hadn’t read it before beginning to teach and learning from my colleagues at Sewanee and Furman, and growing to love Milton’s language and genius, is one of the great gifts I’ve received.

It’s probably time to read it again. It’s been almost four years.

More lists anyone?

Posted on November 22, 2011 by djgrieser

Last week, I posted about “25 books every Christian should read.” Tony Jones has come up with an alternative that is more “theological,” he says. It also includes some of the authors I thought should be included.

If lists are your thing, you love Slate’s (rather premature) list of cultural items from the twenty-first century “that will stand the test of time.” Uggs? Ugh! Not to be outdone, The Guardian offers its take.

If, like me, you think one needs a little more historical distance before judging something a classic, you might appreciate Jeffrey Brenzel’s criteria for determining what constitutes a classic. One of them is “a classic requires strenuous intellectual engagement.” Well, that excludes uggs, and pretty much everything else on Slate’s list. The video down the page includes Brenzel’s reflections on some of the Christian classics and the development of the Christian tradition through the “speculation and collision” of ideas, beginning with Plato and Aristotle.

Stephen Greenblatt tells us what books he would like to have on his desert island:

25 Books every Christian Should read

Posted on November 16, 2011 by djgrieser

The twenty-sixth is apparently this one.

Here’s the list: Henri Nouwen makes the list, but Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Wesley, MLK, don’t? And nothing at all between the sixth and fourteenth centuries.

The Shame of College Sports: Another icon has feet of clay

Posted on November 9, 2011 by djgrieser

People often ask me if I follow college athletics. I reply that I did, until I began teaching college students. The barriers to achieving any academic success, even for students at NCAA Division III schools, even for participants in “minor” sports like golf are enormous. I never taught at a Division I college football power, but dealing with students who missed the first day of classes because of a volleyball match scheduled at a college across the state, or the first week of classes because of baseball games, outraged me as a professor.

I grew up a fan of the Ohio State Buckeyes–don’t blame me, I grew up in Ohio. I remember only last year how tv announcers and commentators praised the “squeaky clean” image of Jim Tressel. While they were speaking those platitudes, Tressell knew he was playing ineligible players.

Now, we have the Penn State spectacle, which is drawing analogies with the sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church. Paterno and Penn State president Spanier were fired this evening.

Taylor Branch’s The Atlantic article entitled “The Shame of College Sports” should be read by everyone who follows NCAA sports.

The Antichrist is back in the news!

Posted on September 27, 2011 by djgrieser

First, an oped in the New York Times.

For some evangelicals, President Obama is troubling. The specious theories about his place of birth, his internationalist tendencies, his measured support for Israel and his Nobel Peace Prize fit their long-held expectations about the Antichrist. So does his commitment to expanding the reach of government in areas like health care.

As if to prove Sutton’s point, a heckler calls President Obama the antichrist: http://youtu.be/9cP-FTX5tVg

A review of Richard Landes’ new book on secular apocalypticism:

Despite the lack of subtlety in his treatment of Islam, Landes’ arguments are convincing: that by diminishing the milennialist influence, viewing it through a narrow Enlightenment-centric lens, or ignoring it altogether, the “bats” overlook a dangerous historical force; and second, that we need to better understand how such ideas shift from the fringes to the center. Above all, Heaven on Earth convinces the reader that secular movements are often far more religious than we tend to acknowledge.

In the category of: movie stars’ poor judgment

Posted on September 10, 2011 by djgrieser

Mel Gibson is making a movie based on the story of Judah Maccabee, which is the historical background for the Jewish celebration of Chanukah. Given the furor over the portrayal of Jews in The Passion of the Christ and his anti-semitic tirades, what can he be thinking? Let Christopher Hitchens remind us of Gibson’s attitudes.

The Tempest

Posted on September 9, 2011 by djgrieser

We saw a wonderful performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest at American Players Theatre last night. The play’s an old favorite of mine and we used it regularly back when I was teaching in interdisciplinary humanities programs at Sewanee and Furman. It works well in that interdisciplinary context because it touches on so many themes that are important for developments in Early Modern Europe. It also touches on themes I often highlight on this blog, particularly questions of human nature. A review of APT’s production by Terry Teachout is here. He was particularly taken with the musical score by Joshua Schmidt.

I’m intrigued by the different ways I encounter the same work of art over the years. With a play as rich as The Tempest, it’s not surprising that we hear and see new things with each new reading or production. Last night, however, what affected me most was this exchange between Ariel and Prospero (Act V, scene i):

PROSPERO

I did say so,
When first I raised the tempest. Say, my spirit,
How fares the king and’s followers?

ARIEL

Confined together
In the same fashion as you gave in charge,
Just as you left them; all prisoners, sir,
In the line-grove which weather-fends your cell;
They cannot budge till your release. The king,
His brother and yours, abide all three distracted
And the remainder mourning over them,
Brimful of sorrow and dismay; but chiefly
Him that you term’d, sir, ‘The good old lord Gonzalo;’
His tears run down his beard, like winter’s drops
From eaves of reeds. Your charm so strongly works ’em
That if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become tender.

PROSPERO

Dost thou think so, spirit?

ARIEL

Mine would, sir, were I human.

PROSPERO

And mine shall.
Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,
Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason ‘gaitist my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further. Go release them, Ariel:
My charms I’ll break, their senses I’ll restore,
And they shall be themselves.

It touches on vengeance and humanity, especially as Ariel wonders why Prospero cannot be compassionate toward those he has imprisoned when Ariel says that their plight would move him to pity, if he had the feelings of a human.

As we think about 9-11, Shakespeare challenges us to think about how our human nature requires more of us than demands for revenge.

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Preaching Grace on the Square

Scripture, Tradition, Theology, Random Thoughts from Capitol Square in Madison, WI

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