Inkling Lessons Learned (or: Generation Found)

Posted on July 28, 2016 by awtraughber

tolkien lewisWhile I haven’t listened to the interview to be found at the article’s end, I did enjoy the recent Forbes piece on “The Inklings at War” by Jerry Bower.  In the article, Bowyer traces the philosophical implications of the first World War, particularly in light of contemporary culture, from Joseph Loconte’s A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.

As I surveyed the landscape of our leadership class here in America, I found myself tempted to despair. And then I spent several hours in the company of two World War I officers: C. S. Lewis and his future friend J.R.R. Tolkien, and I actually found myself refreshed. They were part of a generation which endured far worse than we have, and yet Lewis and Tolkien came out… I won’t say ‘unscathed’, but I will say scathed in a way which left them with empathy and wisdom along with their permanent scars. No, they never fully healed. Like Frodo, and Percival, The Fisher King, and like the Patriarch Jacob they carried their wounds for the rest of their lives. But they bought something with their wounds. Wisdom came from suffering.

Through historical and philosophical context, Bower concludes:

The lost generation dragged high culture down into nihilism and low culture into decadence, but the Found Generation founded a counter-counter-culture. The novels of Tolkien, and not those of Gertrude Stein, or T.S. Eliot, or even Ernest Hemingway are read widely by the general public (and not under compulsion of class syllabus). The Lord of the Rings was voted most beloved novel of the century by the British public. Lewis has a wide subculture to his name, and there’s serious talk about a C.S. Lewis College at Oxford. That’s because the middle and working classes cannot live on a diet of nothingness, they need meat, and in Lewis and Tolkien, they have been served red beef and strong beer.

Food for thought for us, for sure.

You can read the rest of the article (and the linked interview with Loconte) here.

(image from thewrap.com)

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Island Travel

Posted on July 27, 2016 by awtraughber

A few summers ago, while traveling through New Zealand, I had the opportunity to tour the Weta Workshop and Cave.  I saw lots of cool things from movies like The Lord of the Rings, District 9, and the Narnia movies.  One of the projects we saw but couldn’t get a straight answer on was a large replica of a King Kong head.  I’m thinking it was part of what led to this trailer for a new Kong-based movie coming out next year.

The trailer looks pretty good: great visuals and a story that’s just different enough to do something a little different with the franchise.  Kong: Skull Island drops in March.

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In Praise of Handwavium

Posted on July 26, 2016 by awtraughber

Star-Wars-still-use-the-force-luke-e1415132076759The folks over at The Ringer recently posted a fun little piece on JJ Abrams and some perceived cross-pollination between the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises.  And while I can’t help but think that the author of the post is forcing things a bit, I see where he’s coming from.  The simple fact is that in the 21st century, one big movie feels like every big movie, whether Abrams has been involved or not.

Even still, it’s always interesting to see people articulate what was a given for my adolescent understanding of space opera distinctions: Star Wars and Star Trek existed on opposite ends of a cosmic spectrum, and you couldn’t really love both simultaneously.  And while that distinction has softened for me a bit (with particular thanks to Abrams), I still love to see the contrast between each franchise’s worldview.  Consider:

Star Trek is rooted in just enough scientific theory to suspend disbelief, while Star Wars is basically mythology. Where mind control in Star Trek might be the result of, say, a neural neutralizer, Star Wars uses handwavium and weird declarative statements. Khan’s 100-inch vertical was explained away with genetic engineering that freed him from human physical limitations. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn easily leaped between platforms inside of a poorly designed Nabooian power generator complex (where the hell were the railings?) and moved stuff with their minds thanks to tiny little sentient beings in their bloodstreams.

Star Wars deals more with the dichotomy of good and evil using a slightly less cynical kind of two-party system (the Empire and the Republic), while Star Trek uses deep-space exploration to wrestle with timeworn human questions, both abstract and empirical.

I really enjoyed Star Trek Beyond.  It’s a great, fun movie.  At its best, Star Trek engages the mind.  Star Wars, though?  From the music to the moments, it gets the heart . . . except when the Force is explained away by something as unnecessary as midichlorians.

(image from sequart.org)

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Some Way to Recovery

Posted on July 26, 2016 by awtraughber

thumb_IMG_0274_1024Yuval Levin spends the first chunk of The Fractured Republic noting trends and making connections in American life over the 20th and 21st centuries.  In the last chunk of the book, Levin attempts to articulate some way forward from our decentralized-yet-concentrated culture.  A good part of that involves a discussion of subsidiarity (which involves giving decision-making power on levels that are literally closer to home).  In the chapter “Subculture Wars,” Levin discusses how church and religious communities (or any group outside of the mainstream) can navigate things, particularly in the areas of fight or flight.

A few cultural critics have been pointing in the first, darker, direction for decades.  Especially notable among them has been the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.  At the end of his groundbreaking 1981 book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, MacIntyre drew some parallels between the contemporary West and the Roman world as it declined into the dark ages.  “A cultural turning point in that earlier history,” he wrote, “occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify with the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium.”  Instead, the sought to build around themselves the kinds of human communities they believed essential to the survival of their way of life, and used those to escape a collapsing civilization.

And if you’re going to bring up MacIntyre, you’re going to bring up Benedict.

Something of the same spirit is necessary for traditionalists to confront the challenges of our time, he argued.  “This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers,” MacIntyre warned.  “They have already been governing for quite some time.  And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.  We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.”

Rod Dreher over at The American Conservative has been talking about Benedict for a few years now (and I’ve mentioned his thinking a few times here).  Levin seems to get a good sense about Dreher’s argument (most recently articulate here).  “The Benedict Option” has often been maligned as escapist, when really it’s an opportunity invented to reconnoiter and strengthen what little culture particular communities might have left.  From Levin:

A resurgence of orthodoxy in our time will not involve a recovery of the old mainline churches or a reclaiming of the mainstream, but an evolution of the paraphernalia of persuasion and conversion of our traditional religions and moral communities.  Those seeking to reach Americans with an unfamiliar moral message must find them where they are, and increasingly, that means traditionalists must make their case not by planting themselves at the center of society, but by dispersing themselves to the peripheries as small outposts.

I don’t think many conservative Christians in America see this yet (partly because such a “reality” has been a way Christians have articulate their place in the world for centuries).  And it may never come to the point that Dreher (or Levin) ultimately argue.  But it is a word of wisdom to those who would listen.

(image from the remains of a monastic community in York)

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And Then: Sherlock Season Four

Posted on July 24, 2016 by awtraughber

So this teaser for Sherlock series four dropped today.

And to think we’re just over five months away from this . . .

I must say, I’m surprised we haven’t seen or heard anything from the next series of Doctor Who, which has a Christmas special dropping before the start of Capaldi’s final season.

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Rainfall in Sweden

Posted on July 22, 2016 by awtraughber

Andrew Peterson has been traveling through Europe and singing as he goes.  Here’s a clip of him singing “The Rain Keeps Falling Down” live at the Gullbranna Festival in Sweden.  It includes some great background vocals from his daughter and from the audience (much like his show earlier this year in Kailua).

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Free Dave Eggers!

Posted on July 21, 2016 by awtraughber

Heroes of the FrontierHeroes of the Frontier, the newest novel by Dave Eggers, drops next Tuesday at a bookstore near you.  Eggers has been putting out some interesting, timely stuff over the last few years (from Hurricane Katrina to technology to contemporary disillusionment), so I’m curious to see how he handles a story of a mother and her two children living in the wilds of Alaska.

You can read an excerpt from the novel here thanks to the folks at Outside Online.  I’ve only skimmed the passage myself, as I’d kind of like to read things in the broader context, as they happened.  I did read a couple of paragraphs talking about the effects of “non-calendared living” on Paul and Ana, the two children in the story.  Makes you wonder how Eggers might subvert things before the novel’s end.  An excerpt from the excerpt:

In those long days at the Peterssen Mine, Paul and Ana made bows from bent sticks and rubber bands. They created and destroyed dams in the river, they piled rocks to make walls and rock castles. They read by candlelight. Josie taught Paul how to start a fire in the hearth. They napped some afternoons, and other afternoons they explored the buildings of the old mine, the midday sun coming through the porous roofs in white bolts, dozens of tiny spotlights illuminating dust and rust and tools not held for a hundred years.

There were a hundred uncomplicated hours in every day and they didn’t see a soul for weeks. Was it weeks? They no longer had a grasp of the calendar. During the day all was quiet but for the occasional scream of a bird, like a lunatic neighbor; at night, the air was alive with frogs and crickets and coyotes. Paul and Ana slept deeply and Josie hovered over them, like a cold night cloud over rows of hills warmed all day in the sun.

They were growing in beautiful ways, becoming independent, and forgetting all material concerns, were awake to the light and the land, caring more about the movement of the river than any buyable object or piece of school gossip. She was proud of them, of their purifying souls, the way they asked nothing of her now, they slept through the night, and relished the performing of chores, liked to wash their clothes—and they were immeasurably better now than they were in Ohio. They were stronger, smarter, more moral, ethical, logical, considerate, and brave. And this was, Josie realized, what she wanted most of all from her children: she wanted them to be brave. She knew they would be kind. Paul was born that way and he would make sure Ana was kind, but to be brave! Ana was inherently courageous, but Paul was learning this. He was no longer afraid of the dark, would plunge into any woods with or without a light. One day, on her way back from the woods, she caught the two of them on the hillside near the cabin, both barefoot, gently shushing through the shallow leaves with their bows, watching something invisible to her. She turned, scanned the forest, and finally saw it, a ten-point buck, walking through the birches, his back straight and proud. Her children were mirroring it on the other side of the hill, unheard by the deer. They had turned into something else entirely.

(image from amazon.com)

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A Kind of Comfortably Numb

Posted on July 21, 2016 by awtraughber

Tomorrowland was one of the more maligned and ignored “blockbusters” from the summer of 2015, which is ironic when considering the movie’s attempt at being a “canary in the coal mine concerning contemporary society.  The idea behind telling stories about the end of the world, the movie’s antagonist asserts, was to get people to do something to avert disaster.  Instead, they turned it into video games and movies, basically making themselves numb to what was actually going on around them.  Instead of being calls to action, such things normalized the worse-off reality.

There’s something of that in Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic.  He doesn’t go far as to “cry wolf” on total disaster because, after all, humans are an inventive lot.

But human beings are resilient and adaptable, we adjust to difficulties and grow accustomed to problems.  Projections that suggest we won’t are rarely plausible. . . This may sound like good news, but it isn’t.  It suggests that no action-forcing cataclysm will compel us to turn things around . . . Prophesying total meltdown is not the way to draw people’s attention to this failure to flourish.  The problem we face is not the risk of cataclysm, but the acceptance of widespread despair and disorder in the lives of millions of our fellow citizens.  We risk getting used to living in a society that denies a great many of its most vulnerable people the opportunity to thrive.

We do a great job regularly adapting to whatever the “new normal” is, it seems.  Yuval is concerned that such a disposition will work against us.  He also believes that we are so used to doomsday scenarios from both ends of the political spectrum that we assume it’s all crying wolf.  For Levin, the best message to give others comes from a common, lived experience.  “Show us people who are living life well,” he seems to suggest.  And he’s right.  I feel that way often in education, where doomsday and magic potion options abound.  Our tendency is to jump to the next easy fix, regardless of whether or not anyone has actually tried it.  So work it out first, work through the kinks, and then show us the implications and possibilities for the better solution.

Here’s the scene from Tomorrowland where Hugh Laurie’s character explains the reasoning behind his actions.  It’s actually a decent movie.  Probably a little too much build-up.  I think that it might regain some critical ground in the long run.  Guess we’ll have to wait to find out.

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The Ethic of the Age

Posted on July 20, 2016 by awtraughber

IndividualityIt’s been interesting for me to bear witness to even the small changes in thinking that have happened with high school students over the last thirteen years.  Every spring, I get to spend a quarter with seniors talking about issues like genetic engineering, abortion, and euthanasia at the intersection of ethical systems and logical fallacies, particularly as it relates to the role of the self in the decision-making process.  At its best, I love the conversation and the possibilities of understanding things of great implication for society.  At its worst, I am totally bewildered at the realization that I don’t necessarily share the same presuppositions as some of my students about some pretty significant issues.  Perhaps Yuval Levin has something to say about that in The Fractured Republic?

The ethic of our age has been aptly called expressive individualism.  That term suggests not only a desire to pursue one’s own path but also a yearning for fulfillment through the definition and articulation of one’s own identity. . .

The solipsism of our age of individualism is uniquely dangerous to the institutions of moral formation.  Because much of the good they do is a function of their ability to shape and structure our desires rather than serve them, to form our habits rather than reflect them, and to direct our longings rather than simply satisfy them, these institutions stand in particular tension with the ethic of our time.

Expressive individualism.  A great and sobering phrase.  At its best, it is articulated as a kind of libertarianism, which I get.  But it’s not easy to talk ethics and issues when a hard libertarianism (or a hard moral subjectivism) steps up to the microphone.

Levin brings up a great point concerning “the solipsism of our age,” which is the question of when does someone actually become him or herself and how do “institutions of moral formation” interact with people in that mindset.  From a particularly evangelical perspective, how does the intervention of and regeneration by the Holy Spirit come into play when the particularities of personhood trump the possibility of an outside “force” who wants to make us other than what we are (because who we are is broken at the core) ?

What’s also interesting is how expressive individualism has seeped into religious language.  I have to confess some complicity here.  “Be all that God made you to be” can be one way of inadvertently buying into “the ethic of our age.”  Even the greatly lauded “it’s not a religion, it’s a relationship” ideology can end in expressive individualism.  I imagine a good bit of this can be traced back to some aspects of the Protestant Reformation.

(image from advancedlifeskills.com)

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The Beginning from the End

Posted on July 19, 2016 by awtraughber

plant-new-life-largeFrom Bonhoeffer’s introduction to Creation and Fall/Temptation, his study of the early chapters of the book of Genesis:

The Church of Christ bears witness to the end of all things.  It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.  “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old.  Behold, I am doing a new thing” (Isaiah 43.18-19).  The new is the real end of the old; Christ is the new.  Christ is the end of the old.  he is not a continuation of the old; he is not its aiming point, nor is he a consummation upon the line of the old; he is the end and therefore the new.

Within the old world the Church speaks of the new world.  And because the Church is more certain of the new world than of anything else, it recognizes the old world only in the light of the new.  The old world cannot take pleasure in the Church because the Church speaks of its end as thought it had already happened– as though the world had already been judged.  The old world does not like being regarded as dead.  The church has never been surprised at this, nor is it surprised by the fact that again and again men come to it who think the thoughts of the old world– and who is there entirely free of them?  But the Church is naturally in tumult when these children of the world that has passed away lay claim to the Church, to the new, for themselves.  They want the new and only know the old.  And thus they deny Christ the Lord.  Yet the Church, which knows the end, knows also of the beginning . . .

The Church doe all this because it is grounded upon the testimony of Holy Scripture.  The Church of Holy Scripture– and there is no other “Church”– lives from the end.  Therefore it reads all Holy Scripture as the book of the end, of the new, of Christ.  What does Holy Scripture, upon which the Church of Christ is grounded, have to say of the of the creation and the beginning except that only from Christ can we know what the beginning is?  The Bible is nothing but the book upon which the Church stands.  This is its essential nature, or it is nothing.  Therefore the Scriptures need to be read and proclaimed wholly from the viewpoint of the end.  Thus the creation story should be read in church in the first place inly from Christ, and not until then as leading to Christ.  We can read towards Christ only if we know that Christ is the beginning, the new and the end of our world.

I used part of this in a sermon that I preached yesterday this past Sunday morning about Paul’s “rule” that a life of “new creation” is what truly matters.  I like Bonhoeffer’s approach here, though I have not always approached Hebrew Scriptures in the way he advises here.  I do think it interesting that he thinks of the Church as being “more certain of the new world than of anything else, it recognizes the old world only in the light of the new.”  It’s a hopeful statement, and not one that I immediately think of as true in these days.  How great it would be, though, if he was correct on that point?

(image from digital-photo-secrets.com)

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