Irish theologian, Kevin Hargaden
This is an extended musing on propitiation and atonement, an argument that heroism is impossible in a culture that is nihilistically self-centred and also a hugely enjoyable silly horror movie about monsters in the woods.
Your Correspondent, Anatomically incapable of a husband bulge
It is an uncommon children’s movie that deals with questions of legacy, the appreciation of artistic genius, the moral abomination that is war, the decency in tinkering with things and most of all the magic of movies but in Hugo we have the film that does all this, ends by honouring the book as the chief of all art forms and should by rights have won the Oscar.
Your Correspondent, It even has better silent movie scenes than The Artist
A popular textbook of introductory economics illustrates abstract equivalence and formal substitutionability. First, ‘opportunity costs’ are explained: they are the costs incurred by someone for forsaking one choice in favour of another. Then a question is posed based on the following example: ‘Mrs Harris spends an hour preparing a meal.’ However, she is also a ‘psychologist in private practice, and can obtain $50 per hour for her services.’ Thus, we must ask: what are the opportunity costs involved in her preparing the family meal? This seems a harmless enough question. The situation is a nice way of explaining that for every action chosen, another opportunity is sacrificed. The facts seem incontestable. No matter what our values might be concerning family, work, religion, politics, etc., when Mrs. Harris makes dinner she forgoes the opportunity of generating $50.
But this description is misleading. While it appears to give us merely the facts, it gives us much more. It invites us to construe our lives, primarily our lives as family members, in terms of the activities of producers and consumers. The family meal loses all incommensurable status with other consumable objects. All such objects are placed before the individual and he or she is asked ‘Which objects will you forego for the sake of the others? How long will you continue to exchange until you have sufficient xs and adequate ys? How many xs will you forego for the sake of how many ys?’ The question assumes a form of rationality, known as ‘marginalism,’ that inevitably reduces all forms of life to ‘utility’ and ‘interest’.
To pose the question this way assumes already the legitimacy of viewing all human action in terms of ‘opportunity costs’. In fact, this putatively harmless example contains a complex metaphysics that assumes all human action and language takes place in a tragic world of scarcity. The ability to ask this question entails acquiescence to that metaphysics. Any action that I take will be inscribed in a world of lack wherein my choice is made possible only by the other options I choose against. Rather than viewing human action as arising out of a plenitude, this metaphysics assumes it is ensconced in scarcity. Death, violence, and antagonism become the source and end of such a metaphysics.
What could not be substituted into the calculation of opportunity costs? Let us suppose that Mrs Harris engages in sexual intercourse with her husband. And let us suppose that he could hire a prostitute at fifty percent of the opportunity costs incurred for the time they spend together. Although our values might be shocked by such a calculation, the economic facts are clear. It costs this couple $25 per hour for sexual intercourse. If he utilized the services of a prostitute and she worked the hour, the economic index of productivity would increase by $75.
These so-called facts are no more settled than the values one putatively chooses. For the principle of formal substitutability treats all human action as if it were a disconnected or isolated event. The fact of the matter is not that Mrs. Harris’ husband saved the family $25 and increased the productivity by $75. The fact is that he committed adultery and thus denied God’s purposes for marriage. This fact has much more concrete or empirical reality than the putative economic facts mentioned. We can point to the concrete historical embodiment of something called ‘adultery’ much more readily than something called ‘opportunity cost’. Yet in a social reality determined primarily by marginalist rationality, the latter is called a ‘fact’ and the former a ‘value’.
– Stephen D. Long, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market, p. 4-5.
Your Correspondent, Everyone but economists call things that grow without ceasing “cancer”
This is our generation’s Driving Miss Daisy.
Your Correspondent, Completely underwhelmed and not just because the dialogue lacked sparkle.
This movie is a surprisingly good fresh take on superhero myths and an excellent parable about the scale of fury contained within a human being who has been abused as a child.
Your Correspondent, He will not instigate revolution
I am a huge fan of the writing style of the Atlantic columnist Caitlin Flanagan and her latest book about the emotional geography of the female adolescent has me thinking alot about what it means to be a pastor and in time, perhaps, a parent.
Here’s a slice, that is typically muse-worthy:
But make no mistake: the mass media in which so many girls are immersed today does not mean them well; it is driven by a set of priorities largely created by men and largely devoted to the exploitation of girls and young women. Even a teenage girl who doesn’t seem particularly interested in the current culture is not safe from it, because the culture is interested in her. It encourages her to think of herself as a creature who lives to please men, to post revealing or undignified photographs of herself online, to develop a persona on Facebook and Twitter that is highly sexual. It wants her to live her private moments in public, to expose every aspect of her interior life for all to see, to dress and behave in ways that will draw the most heated reactions from boys and men. The question parts of girls must ask themselves is to what extent they want to raise them within a counterculture that rejects the commercialization of sexuality, the imperatives toward exhibitionism and crudeness. Creating a counterculture is hard work, but it can be done, and it is my strong belief that the young women who emerge from Girl Land having been protected from the current mainstream values are much stronger and more self-confident than those who have been immersed in it throughout their adolescences.
– Caitlin Flanagan, Girl Land, p. 182.
Your Correspondent, From hell’s heart he stabs at thee.
A novel that sits perfectly as a summer read, or an on-the-bus-commute-companion and was endorsed by the Richard and Judy book-club and yet still won the Pulitzer is a curious proposition. A novel that does all this and has a chapter that is a powerpoint presentation and that ends in a dystopian vision of a technologised society that can only be described as sci-fi is definitely a tantalising prospect.
A Visit From The Goon Squad deserves its acclaim. Whether it is a novel or a short story collection is something more skilled readers can dispute. While the chapter that apes and surpasses Coupland is impressive, the one that does the same in homage to David Foster Wallace is audacious and the slide show is going down in history as epic, the thing I liked most about the book is the consistently insightful and real descriptions of the internal lives of human beings, especially as they are buffeted around by time that refuses to be eternal.
One such section has an art history scholar approaching middle-age ruminate on how he ruined his marriage because he was scared of love.
Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both.
– Jennifer Egan, A Visit From The Good Squad, p. 217.
Your Correspondent, Has already reached his all-final end and is already off on his new-starting future.
A supremely influential text on Christian non-violence that sits behind much of the best theological thinking of our age, this book also seemed eerily relevant reading it as Thessaloniki rioted and America continued its decline.
For example, it is not true in an unqualified sense that the person on top of the social pile is powerful. Such a person is very often the prisoner of the intrigues and “deals” whereby he has reached that position, and of the consensus he is attempting to maintain. Often the bargains he needed to make to get into the office are the very reasons why, once firmly established there, he is not in the position anymore to help those truly in need – for whose sake he first sought to achieve power.
That quote will more than suffice for my take on the great James Fallows article in this month’s Atlantic:
Your Correspondent, Can’t start the day without that fresh from the circus feeling
The End of Sexual Identity is a quite brilliant little book by the anthropologist Jenell Williams Paris that I read at the weekend. Her thesis is that a Biblical perspective on sexuality is one grounded in common humanity, not the easy categorisation of sexual practice or identity that Christians often fall back on.
It is simultaneously an interesting and informative read, pastorally sensitive to the very real concerns of the people who might be reading it and an impassioned call to serious engagement with the humanities. She is an unabashed apologist for anthropology and this is a surprising and refreshing discovery- a female Christian scholar arguing robustly in a way that just might encourage more serious female Christian scholars.
Sharyn Graham Davies, an Australian anthropologist, spent nearly two years living in South Sulawesi, a small region of Indonesia, among the Bugis ethnic group. She immersed herself in the everyday lives of men, women, calalai, calabai and bissu (the five gender categories in their society) with the goal of understanding, in part, how Bugis gender roles relate to people’s sexualities.
…
Instead of separating men and women into discrete categories, imagine a line spanning from man to woman. Calalai (masculine women) are born female but have so much male essence that they live as men in that they travel, dress as men and work in men’s professions; sometimes they are even mistaken for men. Calabai (feminine men) are born male, but their extra female essence leads them to dress and act as women, but in an over-the-top, glamorous, sexy way. They don’t feel they are women trapped in a man’s body; they feel they are calabai, feminine males. Bissu (transgender shamans) are the perfect combination of female and male elements, having come to earth from the spirit world without being divided into male or female. This is reflected in the body; many bissu are intersex, that is, born with ambiguous sexual biology. This is believed to animate their spiritual power, which is used to bless important life events like birth, marriage and death.
Jenell Williams Paris, The End Of Sexual Identity, p. 26.
We’re well past the idea of “praying away the gay” here.
It is an accessible, fascinating and well argued book which serves to broaden out a conversation constantly driven back into stark and silly dichotomies. I heartily recommend it.
Your Correspondent, Not weighed down by redundant torso fabric
The complex emotional life of a horrible person rendered beautifully and interestingly to slightly less than critical acclaim.
Your Correspondent, Fluent in the “Pizza English”