This week there’s been one song in particular that has been a blessing to me as I cleaned my classroom and planned for next semester and walked through downtown Honolulu. This is Mission House’s “Good God.” It hits the right balance of pretty much everything.
Last day of June, as crazy as that sounds. In just a few hours we start the second half of 2020. Lots of fears (and jokes, for some) about what the next few months might bring. We are in uncharted territory, I fear. I spent the morning in the classroom getting rid of things that should have been cleaned out ten years ago. Afternoons are weird for me: not quite back into a routine then, which is why I end up staying up later than anticipated. I did finish Wright’s pandemic book. And I’m slowly getting through Radner’s “figural reading of the Christian Scriptures” book, which is a good challenge for me as it is completely out of my comfort zone. Alas, I spent no time in the third book for my pastoral ministries class. The week is a bit more of a work week than I had originally anticipated, but there are lots of moving parts and the school year starts sooner than we think.
My accidental Great Rewatch of Agents of SHIELD continues. It does much better (1) years later and (2) in quick chunks. Season two is when the show pivots into Inhumans territory. It was always a bit weird (especially when compared to the comics), but at least the show owns it well. And it becomes a necessary building block for later stories and seasons. Today I caught an episode with a quick Hawaii scene. No real time spent on the island, mind you. But it’s a nice scene played with a straight face by Coulson. Here’s the clip:
It’s nice watching a show where you’ve forgotten details but know how things end up (in general).
Today I received my copy of N. T. Wright’s God and the Pandemic (many thanks to the folks at Hearts and Minds Books in Pennsylvania for the amazing service). It’s a tiny book, clocking in at just over 70 pages. Wright has had a couple of shorter pieces (likely adaptations) in various sites over the last few months. I’m about halfway through the work. And while Wright introduces some of the tropes he’s known for (to the frustration of some, he likes to touch on Stoicism and Epicureanism), when he gets “going” with the Gospels and Jesus, he’s on fire. And he does it while looking at the broader context of the biblical story in a way that helps you feel the weight of the Gospel narratives’ climactic role in what God has done. One of my favorite passages so far concerning Jesus, the Gospels, and our quest for answers in relation to Jesus being “the final word”:
The New Testament insists that we put Jesus at the centre of the picture and work outwards from there. The minute we find ourselves looking at the world around us and jumping to conclusions about God and what he might be doing, but without looking carefully at Jesus, we are in serious danger of forcing through an ‘interpretation’ which might look attractive– it might seem quite ‘spiritual’ and awe-inspiring– but which actually screens Jesus out of the picture. As the old saying has it, if he is not Lord of all, he is not Lord at all.
. . . Trying to jump from an earthquake, a tsunami, a pandemic or anything else to a conclusion about ‘what God is saying here’ without going through the Gospel story is to make the basic theological mistake of trying to deduce something about God while going behind Jesus’ back.
This morning I finished reading Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society. I mentioned it a few days ago as a book I’d set aside with the advent of Covid but had finally gotten back around to reading. It’s a good read, one part looking back and another part looking ahead. In the previous post I mentioned “the four horsemen” of decadence from the author’s perspective: stagnation, sterility, sclerosis, and repetition. And while Douthat uses these terms to understand our particular moment in history, the four terms could also be used as a diagnostic framework for any institution in a self-reflective mood.
After identifying and discussing his “four horsemen,” Douthat moves to four ways that our current societal decadence could actually become a steady state. The book ends with a selection of ways that decadence might come to an end. And while these two sections are the “looking ahead” section of the book, they are still rooted in trends evident in bits and pieces today. They represent a kind of sober speculation we would be wise to consider even while the possibilities might seem so far away.
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Two other concepts came to mind as I was finishing the book and thinking about my own day-to-day experiences with different facets of life: sustainability and exhaustion. Exhaustion has to do with a real depletion of what has been present and necessary for an endeavor to succeed. Exhaustion is a kind of running out. Sustainability, on the other hand, has to do with having what it takes to keep going. The two are obviously connected. If something isn’t sustainable, it is a resource that gets exhausted. That is particularly true of people, who ought not be treated like resources but too often are. Here at the end of a school year, exhaustion is a very real thing. It’s almost like some things, school calendars included, are mean to be ended, are not (in a way) sustainable. But what does that look like stretched out across space and time, across classrooms and curriculum and the extra-curricular? What does it look like for a church community as it tries to understand what goes into and what comes out of life lived together?
All things to think about, of course. And things with answers that probably vary. We don’t like to think about exhaustion on any level as it’s just another name for burnout. But like Douthat’s “four horsemen,” these two things are also worth our time.
Today has been a day! It started before the crack of dawn with the second Zoom meeting for my summer audit class, Pastoral Ministry in the Modern Novel. Today we discussed what we had learned from Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. I’ve known of the novel’s existence for a long time but had never given it a read. I really enjoyed it . . . it read much faster than Gilead while also being a good bit heavier content-wise. The conversation this morning was good. I’m obviously one of the oldest people in the class. Many of them are involved in regular pastoral ministry, so it’s refreshing to hear young pastors articulate their concerns, fears, and joys.
Beyond that, today was a work day at school for me. I’ve mostly gotten my classroom ready for social distancing in August. I also had some work to do to get ready for opening things up in July with faculty and staff. Called some family and friends. Did some yard work. Spent some time with the neighbors. And now I’m catching up on this week’s Agents of SHIELD (which I’ve been writing about way too much lately).
SHIELD has been jumping up the time stream on a quest to keep things on course, which means they’ve been messing up in bits and pieces along the way. But the show has been having some fun with things, including how they do opening credits and title sequence. This week’s episode was a great nod to the 70s.
And here’s the preview for next week’s episode. Looks like they’ll be in the seventies at least a little while longer.
And that’s enough TV talk for a few days, I hope. This weekend should bring something with a bit more substance . . . or at least a comic strip or two.
The local ABC affiliate decided to preempt this week’s Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, which left me with some time to watch the first big turning point in the series’ seven season run. So after a nice walk down the hill and back, I settled in for “Turn, Turn, Turn,” the episode of SHIELD where the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier totally changed the set-up for the fledgling show. And it wasn’t enough that the system of SHIELD was compromised by HYDRA. It was also the fact that one of Coulson’s own agents was a plant the whole time.
I hadn’t really intended to start a SHIELD re-watch. But it was on my mind after watching a couple of Captain American movies and two seasons of Agent Carter. I’ve seen every episode of the show, but I’d never really thought of it as one to watch a second time through. I remember feeling like the first season was disjointed and sorely lacking in real Marvel Cinematic Universe connections. It holds up surprisingly well, though. Granted, six seasons later we have a sense of how little the show will connect to the MCU, but we also know that it does a good job of creating its own complicated little world. It’s also nice to revisit so many long-standing characters during their earliest year. And even though it took a while for the show to adopt its “three short seasons in one” approach, the first season “binges” nicely with some great twists and turns.
Here’s the scene where Coulson figures it out. Most of the first season was spent trying to make sense of a character known as the Clairvoyant. I’ll have to admit that I had forgotten who it was (just like I had forgotten that Skye almost dies and Coulson has a difficult time trusting Agent May).
The episode afterwards, of course, is where the team starts to pick up the pieces. It’s an odd one: lots of threads are in knots and Coulson leads the remaining team on a wild goose chase. A chase that comes to an end when he throws that badge into the air. Here’s Coulson’s big speech, which sums things up nicely, just before the fatal throw (which brings its own twisty reveal or two).
Earlier this month the folks at Princeton University Press released a book by John Garth detailing the locations that likely inspired different aspects of JRR Tolkien’s imagination and writings. Sometimes it feels like about-Tolkien books are a dime a dozen, so I’ve waited to move on this one until some reviews came in. A recent article on the UnHerd platform by Niall Gooch helped me hit the “purchase” button. Here are a couple of my favorite selections from the essay (no real quotes from the book, just about Tolkien’s life and writing). The first concerns hobbits in light of Tolkien’s posthumously published Roverandom:
In this respect it foreshadows the creation of hobbits, who closely resemble rural Englishmen and women of Tolkien’s early life. They are extremely insular in a good-natured way, fond of ale and soil, and enjoy a peaceful, complacent existence under the barely-necessary authority of sheriffs and mayors. And yet, the Shire is a little enclave of quiet normality in a vast and dangerous world of magic and mystery.
Everywhere the hobbits move in Middle Earth, they are moving through the ruins of an ancient and decayed civilisation, inhabited by all kinds of dark creatures. It is stressed several times in The Lord Of The Rings that the hobbits’ lifestyle is maintained only by the vigilance and sacrifice of others outside their borders. Even the hobbits’ own history hints that their bucolic idyll is brought at a high price and is part of a much wilder and harder world — it tells of attacks by goblins and wolves. As Aragorn says to the landlord of The Prancing Pony in nearby Bree, there are enemies within a day’s march who would chill their blood.
And then on the gap in England’s mythical history:
Tolkien saw a gap in England’s pre-history. There is English folklore. However, this tends to be local and on a rather small scale. There are Hengist and Horsa, the legendary first Anglo-Saxons to lead an expedition to our shores, but nothing with the grandeur and drama of the sagas mentioned above. Tolkien planned to fill in the gaps before Hengist and Horsa with a highly-developed imaginary world that harked back to a time of elves and fairies.
Some early versions of the Middle Earth stories use a framing device of a traveller to an enchanted land, which turns out to be an antique and otherworldly Britain inhabited by the Elves who were the predecessors to the human inhabitants. Indeed, a great deal of the Tolkienian fiction not linked to Middle Earth has a similar setting: a kind of uncanny fantasy England, where people are called Tom and Bob and have village greens and summer fetes, but where dragons are in the offing and towering mountain ranges full of bizarre creatures loom on the horizon. Smith of Wootton Major, Leaf By Niggle and Farmer Giles Of Ham all have this kind of atmosphere.
One of the things I like about The Silmarillion and things like Tolkien’s letters is that you get a sense of the bigger picture. I’m looking forward to that here, too. Plus it looks like it has lots of maps!
Earlier this week I posted a classic Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strip having to do with perspective, particularly what happens Calvin tries to “engage” his dad in some kind of “minor debate.” It’s a visually brilliant strip that points to some bigger truths. Because perspective is difficult. And there are different ways of getting it and different ways of understanding it. And that requires a particular kind of humility.
Earlier this year, Ross Douthat (columnist at the New York Times) released The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. I got a few chapters into it before Covidtide came along. At that point, it seems like I gave up most books in order to follow Twitter and read longer pieces online. One thing my summer online class has done for me is it has forced me back into my books. So I’ve spent the last couple of days finishing the first section of Douthat’s work. He’s a great writer, I think, super-easy to read and often saying hard truths in interesting ways.
The premise of the book is that America has entered a period of decadence, which he defines as “economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.” From there, he introduces what he calls the “four horsemen” that signify this state of being:
It describes a situation in which repetition is more the norm than innovation; in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private enterprises alike; in which intellectual life seems to go in circles; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, underdeliver compared with what people recently expected. And, crucially, the stagnation and decay are often a direct consequence of previous development.
It is important for Douthat to help the reader to see “decadence as something more specific than just any social or moral trend that you dislike.” And then he wants the reader to see that decadence doesn’t necessarily bring things to a swift death and rebirth; instead, decadence can last for a long time.
All to say that I find Douthat’s argument substantive and sobering, particularly in light of the last three months. All of the facets of Our Current Moment have been apocalyptic in the sense that they are showing, really pointing out, how much of Douthat’s basic assertions hold weight. And those four horsemen (stagnation, sterility, sclerosis, and repetition) make an interesting and beneficial framework for understanding specific institutions and ideas as they ground a survey of things in the history of something and not just in a particular moment.
I mention all of this because this is both the stew and the pot for me. It’s both content and content holder. Any handle we can have to understand things more fully, to gain perspective, is a good thing.
Appropriate for today for many reasons, I think.
Things with Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD took an interesting turn this week. It looks like we’re spending roughly two episodes in each time period, and each time period is revealing more of the thread that entwines SHIELD and Hydra. So even though there are no Infinity Stones involved, Coulson’s team is on its own kind of “Endgame” travel through history to some key moments. And, unlike the first story of the season, this story saw the team changing the time stream in a significant way: saving Agent Sousa and bringing him onto the team, at least for a while. Here’s the preview for next week’s episode. It looks to a lot of fun.
Space Enough, and Time 