Duns Scotus

I like Duns Scotus. I just started reading about him, and while his style (Liebnizian logic meets Aquinas format) leaves something to be desired, and he is distinctly papish, and he may or may not be responsible for beginning the whole modern problem of divinity qua being instead of the other way around (depending on whether you believe certain new interpreters), he believes one very important thing. He disagrees with Thomas Aquinas that theology is primarily theoretical. Duns Scotus believes theology is a "practical science," science used in the classic sense. He believes that theology ought only to deal with those things which affect Christian practice in some way. That, I think, is not only right, but is a necessary corrective for the way things tend to be done in the university.

It corrects some of the hyper-pragmatism in the church as well. There is an awful lot of non-theological practice in the church today. Totally unreflective support for certain political dogma, certain cultural practices/capitulations, certain media as means for the spreading the gospel that have not been submitted to any theological test. Why do I think that's important? Because without faith it is impossible to please God. The knowledge of God and the service of God are inseparable - you cannot have one without the other. This is most certainly the conviction of the Reformation, as articulated in the Scots Confession. I think we should pay heed.

No Longer the Good Guys

This article in the NY Times confirmed some of my concerns about the recent tiff between Fox News and the White House. One should not confuse this with any previous tiffs between Fox News and the rest of the media, much less Fox and MSNBC. No matter what you think about Fox (and I don't think highly of them at all), they are legitimate opposition. There seems to be a strange sense in the Obama Administration that a "legitimate" news network looks and acts a certain way, and that if you do not meet that form, you aren't one. That's not correct. It is never right to silence criticism simply because it is criticism.

Fox is putting lots of pressure on the administration, and catching every un-dotted i and every un-crossed t. The solution is not to delegitimize them as an organization (which, let's face it, is quite impossible if you consider their viewership), much less to exclude them from press events, but simply to run a tighter ship. Why did Van Jones have to resign? What were Acorn's employees thinking, aiding prostitution? Why doesn't Congress listen a little harder to the very very large conservative element in the country? The majority in congress is deceiving - it doesn't represent the actual political demographics of the country. Political ideologues should keep that in mind.

Now, the administration can have whatever opinion it wants about Fox. And if an underling voices his frustration with the network, that's fine. I can almost even see the legitimacy of saying they're not a real news network, if you don't mind the blowback from such a statement. But excluding Chris Wallace's show from a round of Presidential interviews? That's not acceptable. That's censorship - it is Bush-like. The unbelievably smug statement from Dan Pfeiffer, deputy communications director at the White House was, “We simply decided to stop abiding by the fiction, which is aided and abetted by the mainstream press, that Fox is a traditional news organization.” You do not get to decide what is a "traditional news organization," Dan et al, and what on earth is a "traditional" news organization, anyway? And what qualifies it as the only one worth talking to? I was under the impression that most "traditional" news coverage was hopeless rotted out with rank corporate bias anyway, so maybe you should actually be talking to the independent press, if objectivity is what you're going for.

This disturbed me too: "Speaking privately at the White House on Monday with a group of mostly liberal columnists and commentators, including Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert of The New York Times, Mr. Obama himself gave vent to sentiments about the network, according to people briefed on the conversation."

Keith Olbermann? And not Chris Wallace? Chris Wallace makes Keith look like Pravda. Keith's interviews with Obama have not contained a single hard-hitting question. He goes out of his way to allow whatever the President says to stand, even if there's an obvious followup. Maureen Dowd has not been terribly hard on the administration - I sort of wish she would take it to Obama like she did to Clinton. Let's look at an interesting point of fact: the most objective opinionator in the news at the moment is a COMEDIAN. Jon Stewart does not kiss up to Obama. He makes fun of him and the ineffectiveness of democrats just like anyone else. Obama has been happy to go on the Colbert Report, which was great (if not trying), but my point is that there does not seem to be a lot of objectivity to be had. Obama's comments on Fox bother me most not because they are simply repressing opposition, but because it shows an amazing lack of awareness about news networks in general.

Obama appears to be quite effective in managing his press, but not so in actually closing down Guantanamo Bay, managing the economic crisis, or keeping his promise to end the war in Iraq. In fact, he went back into Afghanistan - one of the most disappointing things so far. But that's not number one. The most disappointing thing, which the media has simply failed to notice, is that he has kept all of George Bush's expansion of executive power. That is the greatest threat to our country's future, in the humble opinion of this political science major. Perhaps that's why he needs to silence his opposition. Let's face it - it's a move away from democracy, and it is remarkably short-sighted. Presidents never seem to think beyond their own term until the last minute. Let's just hope he doesn't declare any national states of emergency.

Apple Mice

You should be able to click both buttons at once. Lots of programs need it - especially games. Having no buttons is cool... except when buttons are, in fact, the whole point of the input device. I am reminded of the Onion's pretend Mac laptop with a giant clickwheel instead of a keyboard. It looks so much more intellectual!

But really, my first complaint is my last one: I want to click both buttons. I want to hold one button and click the other one. I want to click a different button without having to raise my other finger, which, if you play the piano, you will know is a common cause of tendonitis. Touch surfaces are awesome - hooray for them - but a mouse is a mouse, not a phone.

...yet.

The Brothers Bloom: Go See It (SPOILERS! WATCH MOVIE FIRST!)

Seriously, though. If you read this post before watching the movie, the movie won't have the same effect on you because I want to talk about the ending. Consider yourself warned.

I must register my objection to the strange objections to The Brothers Bloom. It is purported simply to be a stunt. The Italian Job was a stunt, but I meet all sorts of people who liked it (I could take it or leave it). I loved the Brothers Bloom because when you address the question of where meaning comes from in your life, you begin to speak to me. I loved Adrien Brody's character. I loved how much he was reflected in Rachel Weisz's character. I thought the ambiguity over whether their romance was real was heartbreaking, and the fact that Brody could sort out those emotions and the play-acting enough to let all that seep through really made my day. I also thought there was some fantastic acting and film-making involved.

But the objection usually seems to be that the movie is without content. Maybe if art is without allegory, then sure. It didn't come out and say to your face that Stephen stood for your upbringing, and Bloom is you, and Weisz is what you sure hope you're life is, but can't convince yourself. I suppose if it had been less entertaining, perhaps those things might have come through more clearly. What really really fascinated me about the story (and here's where I go all crazy and postmodern on everybody) is that Stephen's death is exactly analogous to Zizek's reading of the crucifixion. God dies so that you might have life, and the fiction of God in Zizek's psychoanalytical interpretation of Christianity makes himself real precisely in his death. The story we tell ourselves about him comes to life only in that positive absence. It's an ingenious theory, and it's possibly the only even near-legitimate reason-based solution I've ever seen to the crisis of meaning in modernity. There are lots of stupid, uncompelling solutions that miss the point, but that one really hits the nail on the head. The whole movie is contained in the moment when Bloom goes away soaked in what he assumes is fake blood, but which turns out, upon aging, to be real. And what this means is that he - Bloom - wasn't faking it all along. That is real poignancy to me.

Zizek: "The point of the Incarnation is that one cannot become God--not because God dwells in a transcendent Beyond, but because God is dead, so the whole idea of approaching a transcendent God becomes irrelevant; the only identification is the identification with Christ." (The Monstrosity of Christ, 31) "For subjectivity to emerge--not as a mere epiphenomenon of the global substantial ontological order, but as essential to Substance itself--the split, negativity, particularization, self-alienation, must be posited as something that takes place in the very heart of the divine Substance, i.e., the move from Substance to Subject must occur within God himself." (ibid., 59)

I do not believe this is what happens in the crucifixion - but I do think it is the only coherent understanding of it a non-believer can achieve. The conversion experience is not one of infinite absence, but of reconciliation. But that would be a different movie.

A Fact of Life

Fact: Maureen Dowd isn't funny.

You don't have to disagree with her or anything - she's just unfunny. She uses prepubescent techniques. Her signature device appears to be creating imaginary scenes and populating them with her enemies - sort of like Dante's Inferno for dumped high schoolers, except political.

Some examples from a recent column:

“If there’s someone weak,

if you’ve sprung a leak,

if the world looks bleak,

if you hide and seek,

who ya gonna call?

OBAMABUSTERS!”

"You can hear a receptionist chirping: 'Cheney, Cheney & Cheney. Who would you like to target today?'"

*gags, dies*

It's painful to hear somebody with sauce this weak insult Sarah Palin's intelligence in the same piece - it's cheap as dirt. Her editor should have lit that piece on fire. Why do I care? Why did I use this blog entry to say this? Because she writes for the NEW YORK TIMES! I would be embarrassed if this garbage appeared in my alma mater's school paper! I've been reading David Foster Wallace lately. That guy had more insight, humor and subtlety in his footnotes than Maureen Dowd has in her whole column. There's a lot of talent out there - why aren't they writing for periodicals?

Life Hurts

David Bazan isn't a Christian anymore.

I know it's old news. I guess since it's getting more publicity now it's on my mind.

Something that has bothered me more than anything ever is that the smartest people I know are doubters, agnostics, drinkers, self-destroying artists, and almost anything but evangelicals. Most of the evangelicals I know either can't think in a straight line or only think in straight lines. I'm an evangelical Christian, and I hate all the equivocating that goes on around it when I talk about it with others.

Today I was approached by a middle-aged Jehovah's Witness. Looks like evangelicals are not the only people who have this problem.

Still, I want to be a cool, nice, unassuming agnostic more than anything. It's so easy. You simply give up all the stuff that you once believed - which is, let's face it, begging to be given up - and just walk away, right? Just go do the things you think are meaningful.

But that's where it all breaks down. You go do things that you think are meaningful, and then, at least in my case, all meaning melts from the bottom up - like a plastic toy on a stovetop. If life has a purpose, you can't live in search of one - does that make sense to anybody? That's not just me assuming stuff in order to be happy because it has not always made me happy. In fact it frequently makes me crazy. It's just an obvious fact of life that's hard to admit. At least in private.

I'm afraid to listen to David Bazan's new album. I will, but I'm afraid. Why? Because I think he'll make me into an atheist? No, because I'm afraid the reasons he abandoned his faith are the same ones everybody has - it's not intellectually satisfying, or it doesn't seem believable (sort of like Bud Lite isn't actually "drinkable"), or God couldn't possibly be good in a cruel world, or I believe other things more strongly that preclude it... you know the routine. Who doesn't? Bazan noted in an article written by my former roommate for a college publication that evangelicals are afraid of being atheists. That's true. Every evangelical Christian in America has a secret, inner interlocutor that argues with him about why he is a theist, and most actions, conversation, and thought occur along this dialectic. It's totally irrational, but that's how it goes - not irrational because we should all be theists for some supposedly obvious reason, but because it's stupid that we define our faith with that sort of negative method. But we do - neurotically. Evidence? Richard Dawkins is a New York Times best seller in a country that is something like 3% non-religious.

My inner atheist died a sudden death about a year and a half ago. It happened when somebody much much smarter than myself just told me the gospel. That was it. He went away and has barely bothered to call since he left. I suppose I'm a religious fanatic now - one of those unenviable people upon whom others believe in order to believe themselves. Again - a traceable pattern, even by atheists like Zizek, who first alerted me to my own practice of this sort of thing. Not subtle or secret.

I don't know why somebody can struggle with an argument for years, receive no new information, try desperately to think one thing, then fall on the other side of the argument and be satisfied with the result. You have to write off all the past struggling as denial - as valuing to an insane degree something that has turned out, simply upon sudden decision, to be garbage. I know that my faith is implausible. I have done unheard of mental gymnastics to make myself doubt even credibility itself in order to maintain my belief. None of that stuff did much good, as that's not what the Bible is talking about when it refers to faith, and had my good friend not told me the gospel, I would probably still be doing the same thing. I still struggle with feelings of meaninglessness after all that - don't get me wrong. It's not easy to beat your mind into submission with your mind, and it leaves scars. But the fact of the matter is that the Word of God is a phenomenon that you can actually experience, and I don't mean in a pentecostal church with emotional music and lots of shouting. I mean in a cinderblock basement classroom, lit by fluorescent lights, sitting on a desk after a beautiful lecture on Christians dying and enduring torture for their faith under Hitler, one can ask, "Dr. Burnett, why won't my brain make the leap you just told it to? Why is it that Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer could find no wiggle room in their doctrine when threatened with death, but I can't even form a cogent theological sentence that I will even state honestly." He just told me that the distance I was struggling so hard to cross with my mind is the distance Jesus Christ already crossed for me - that this was, in fact, the whole point.

Plausible? That didn't really make any difference - or any sense - at the time. Still doesn't. I'm not trying to tell you, as will many Christians who have latched like barnacles onto the postmodern turn of philosophy, that plausibility doesn't work or is simply relative. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I'm just saying that when God has actually spoken to you, you hear it. My grandfather once said, "People mistake dreams for visions all the time, but nobody ever mistook a vision for a dream." Interesting statement; if you try to apply it as a criterion for visions, you will quickly find that everything you've ever experienced can only qualify as a dream. I had a vision. There is no question. That's why it's a vision. The statement isn't a method. It's just a truth. Incidentally, he had one too.

I don't much care for all the different ways people talk about the Bible. They read all the parts that don't make a whole lot of difference, or apply to them only tangentially, and think themselves very deep for "realizing" this or that doctrinal truth. I recommend 1 John: They wrote what they had seen, touched, witnessed. They (and we) write about it that their (and our) joy may be complete, and that we might witness the same thing. You can accept that at face value, or you can, with truth and sincerity, write 18 volumes on it and die trying to explain it. Or you just won't hear it, and then I truly don't know what to tell you, because if it's me speaking, I've failed already.

Life hurts. I still think that matters. More than ever.

Lockerbie and Dostoevsky

Today the so-called "Lockerbie bomber," the man who was convicted of destroying Pan Am flight 103 which crashed in the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 people, was freed. This has brought about a truly interesting phenomenon - MSNBC and Fox News are saying almost exactly the same thing over and over again as they watch the caravan glide from the prison to the airport. It's a "miscarriage of justice," he's a "man who caused so much pain," we ought to "condemn the Scottish judicial system for being corrupted by diplomatic interests," it's "arbitrary," it's "a shame," we are "gutless" for not condemning it, the victims are victims once again, etc. etc. Scottish law requires that his release be considered on compassionate grounds if he is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Magrahi, the terrorist, had prostate cancer, and was thus released to die in his home country of Libya, where he will be unable to receive the advanced care that might actually prolong his life.

The hard left and the hard right agree, and that should give everyone pause. Nobody on any network currently covering the story can even comprehend the idea that one might have compassion on someone who is dying in spite of his crimes - except, believe it or not, the citizens of Lockerbie. A couple of Scotsmen from Lockerbie were interviewed on CNN, and they admitted that an average citizen has no means of judging whether or not an international businessman committed a terrorist act. They said they believed that compassion was important - something that ought to be practiced. The American news anchors simply couldn't abide such things. They erred on the side of "justice," often eschewing any language of uncertainty and simply stating that a man who killed hundreds was being freed. They also didn't buy that compassion was the motivation, questioning the Scottish judicial system and alleging corruption, as if compassion were impossible!

I find this American response dumbfounding, discouraging, and appalling. Even if the worst case scenario were true - that Megrahi did kill all those people (CNN had a man running through a text list to emphasize how many it was, in case viewer had just joined us and wasn't angry yet), that he was being released on some unrevealed motivation, and that he would receive a hero's welcome at home in Libya, why is it so inconceivable that the West might wish to be seen as compassionate towards those who do us wrong? It amazes me that nobody finds it discomfiting that America with one voice has taken the position of Ivan Karamazov - that no one who commits a crime against humanity ought ever to be forgiven, even by God. Fox News indignation manufacturer Megyn Kelly even declared that the man had been dealt a death sentence "by God or by nature." The trouble with this position is obvious: this sort of act is not inhuman in the slightest bit. It is very human. Human beings are prone to create horrors according to their own addled judgements. How does the old saying go? "To err is human, to forgive is divine."

I have little else to say. We ought to rethink our posture towards justice before we find a low-level demon at home to laugh at us. American media is so voyeuristic at this point that most of the news anchors currently employed make a living by getting our dander up. Keith Olbermann tries to make you feel righteous. Chris Matthews tries to make you feel like a man of common sense against the idiotic masses. Bill O'Reilly tickles your rage at every possible injustice. Sean Hannity raises your fist to shake it at the inhuman liberal Man. Nancy Grace chases ambulances to find out who is responsible so you can click your tongue. We're a nation of pharisees with our eyes lifted to heaven, thanking God that we're not like that tax collector over there. We ought to be ashamed and we ought to be more merciful. We ought to put all the aforementioned men and women out of a job, or at least force them to report facts without their ratings-driving opinions.

We clearly do not live in a Christian nation.