Reading the Signs of the Times
The Second Vatican Council tract, Gaudium et Spes, among the more significant documents to emerge from the Council, was organized around the proposal that At all times the Church carries the responsibility of reading the signs of the time and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel, if it is to carry out its task. This trope, reading the signs of the time, is an allusion to Matthew 16.3, in which Jesus criticizes religious leaders who can interpret the skies for tomorrow's weather, but...
Theologians and the Study of Culture
Christian theologians are notorious for either preemptively dismissing theory that is making the rounds outside their discipline, or rushing headlong to embrace it. The work of cultural studies has caught the attention of many of us, and, true to form, some view it as yet more evidence for the decline of godly civilization, while others, at the opposite end, herald it as the key to understanding all past failures of godly civilization.1 What has caught the interest of its heralds, in...
Accessorized identities
Near the beginning of FightClub, Jack is seen sitting on the toilet in his stylish condo, studying a magazine and rotating it as if to examine a racy centerfold. The magazine, it turns out, is an Ikea catalogue, and he is on his cell phone placing an order for an Erika Pekkari dust ruffle. Like so many others, he voices over, I had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct. If I saw something clever like a little coffee table in the shape of a yin-yang, I'd have to have it I'd flip through...
Laurence Coss A Corner of the Veil 1996
Laurence Coss is a journalist in France and past president of the European Community Commission. Her expertise is primarily in the area of political science. The tantalizing surprise in her novel is that an unknown physics professor has written a six-page proof for the existence of God that is not only unassailably true, but it also demonstrates that the cruelty of the world and the goodness of God aren't contradictory anymore. Human errors, follies, atrocities, finally make sense.47 As we...
Confession in religion2
Paul Ricoeur has argued that the notion of human beings standing guilty before some transcendent tribunal for evil deeds they have committed is one that had to gestate over many centuries, and go through several stages of development, before it entered the minds of our ancestors.37 In its earliest stages, evil was viewed as some impurity in the environment that needed to be avoided because it defiled those who came into contact with it. Like an infection that was contracted through the body's...
Social protest
Reaching back to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and through the folk music scene of the early 1960s with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, a lineage of pop-protest balladeers folk musicians with electric guitars can be traced, including Marvin Gaye, John Lennon, Billy Bragg, The Pretenders, The Police, Suzanne Vega, REM, U2, and Joe Strummer. The pop-protest song bears one of the most direct debts of rock music to the black churches through the civil rights movement. Its roots are in the music sung on...
Franco Ferrucci The Life of God as Told by Himself 1996
Franco Ferrucci is a literary critic from Italy whose previous published work has focused on Dante. The Life of God as Told by Himself is offered as autobiography, told throughout from God's first-person point of view. From the outset, the story follows a biblical sequence that is blended with evolutionary spans of time. But given that the genesis of the cosmos is told here with an eye to God's own consciousness of these events, some imaginative liberties are taken. In Ferrucci's account, God...
Commodity Fetishism
H. Richard Niebuhr contended that we find ourselves pulled almost irresistibly toward polytheism, and that epicureanism Ferucci and existentialism Morrow are mere pauses between traditional monotheisms and the polytheism of modernity. Polytheism, as he defined it, is a religion of many small and mostly unintegrated concerns, inspiring adherents to chase haphazardly after many shiny gods - purported sources of meaning and power - to provide life with direction and consolation. The marketing of...
Popular Cultures Congenital Defects Tertullians de Spectaculus
Tertullian was a church father from Carthage, a Roman city on the north coast of Africa, who lived from 160-225 ce. Born a pagan, he studied law in Rome, converted to Christianity in his thirties and had a long career as a theologian and apologist for the Christian faith. He stands out for the moral rigor he expected of Christians, and for his vigorous defenses of the minority Christian community against charges of atheism, cannibalism, and treachery toward the state that circulated in the...
James Morrow The Towing Jehovah Saga34
The next work of fiction to be examined is actually a trilogy written by James Morrow, a science fiction writer from Pennsylvania, about a chain of events that begins with the splashdown of the Corpus Dei in the early 1990s. In 1992, to be precise, a giant male corpse, two miles long, was discovered floating face-up in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. The Vatican and a handful of other individuals were notified of this by dying angels, who confirmed that it was indeed God. The...
Covenants and Jeremiads
When the descendants of Jacob fled Egypt and followed Moses into the desert, they waited at the foot of Mt Sinai until God made a covenant with them. The covenant acknowledged that this God had delivered them from slavery and was preparing to make them into a great nation, and it assured them that the same God would remain faithful to them and to their descendants. In turn, the covenant stipulated civil and religious obligations that they now had to accept in order to be worthy of God's...
Images of God
In 1946, Nikos Kazantzakis wrote Zorba the Greek, a novel about a laborer named Zorba, who exuded a colossal zeal for life, and his boss, a well-educated, wealthy mine-owner who hired Zorba as a foreman at one of his mines. The two became friends. Late in their friendship, Zorba became ill and, knowing that he was dying, turned to his boss for some comforting words. I want you to tell me, Zorba said, where we have come from and where we are going to. During all these years you've been burning...
Liminality
Arnold van Gennep was a Dutch anthropologist who wrote an important study in the early twentieth century on patterns he had detected across cultures in the rituals that marked life transitions. He began his book, The Rites of Passage, describing what he took to be the more obvious phenomenon of territorial passage, noting the way human beings in archaic societies divide land into a patchwork of domains with boundaries that they mark with sacred stones, trees, or rivers. Passage across these...
The Frankfurt School
The earliest concerted effort to theorize popular culture is to be found in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, which was founded in Germany in 1923 by neo-Marxist sociologists who pioneered the field of critical theory. Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm were among its celebrated roster of intellectuals. Expelled from Germany by the Nazis, all of them migrated to the US in the early 1930's and temporarily relocated the...
Tillich and the Frankfurt School
There is an interesting and enduring connection between Paul Tillich and the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. From 1929 to 1933 Tillich taught at the University of Frankfurt. As a professor of philosophy at Frankfurt, Tillich oversaw Theodor Adorno's dissertation on Kierkegaard's aesthetics, and later helped him secure a teaching position at the university. It was with Tillich's support as dean that Max Horkheimer was appointed in 1929 to a new chair in social philosophy at Frankfurt,...
Antinomianism and Anarchy
In 1975, Robert Bellah, after reflecting on the cultural experimentation of the 1960s' counterculture, made the comment, A period of great social change always produces a certain amount of antinomianism and anarchism.11 Antinomianism is a rich term in Christian theology, referring to Gnostic sects in the early centuries of the church, some of them loosely Christian, who believed that spirit and matter were so opposed to each other that what one did with one's body was of no consequence to the...