One approach to the question of theological education online can begin with Google’s mission statement: “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” This is not simply the ambition to amass a vast information stockpile in the spirit of the library of Alexandria any more than it is the continuation of the Enlightenment “dare to know.” Rather, insofar as “the world’s information” is presented as an organizational problem, Google’s universality is located in its ability to provide useful access. Google begins in a skeptical critique of information, and locates the solution in the search engine. What I will explore in this paper is the relation of Google's understanding of universal access to the return of the scroll in the far right bar of our computer screens. Implicit to this account is the recognition, noted by Roger Chartier in his Forms and Meanings, that the only real parallel to today’s digital “revolution in the media and forms that transmit the written word... [is] the substitution of the codex for the volumen - of the book composed of quires for the book in the form of a roll” (p. 18). In other words, one way to understand the return of the scroll today is to look back to the rise of the codex roughly 1700 years ago. Here’s where a theological interest arises because Christians chose the codex over the scroll in a countercultural way a few hundred years earlier than the Greco-Roman culture it grew within. Although scholars have struggled to explain just why early Christianity so staunchly chose to go against the bibliographic grain in this regard, one reason rises to the fore: the universal nature of the Christian message itself. What we find is that Christianity is intimately tied to the process of binding codices, and, in this sense, the printing press only further radicalized this impulse. It’s in this light that we can gain an intriguing theological insight into information technology in the West, and the way it’s changing in today’s digital medium. Although useful universal access is at our fingertips, it arrives in an unbound way.

You may wonder whether this is just another bit of bah-humbuggery here. Don't get me wrong, I have on occasion secretly longed to shimmy into a tightly tailored Santa suit in order to steal the consumer core from Christmas. Isn't this the moral of Dr. Seuss's the Grinch? Only by stripping away the stuff of Christmas can we ever be merry. In many ways this is the quiet justification of all Scroogish tails which we tell at this time of year. But I don't think this is really what my "believe in the magic" Christmas cards are saying. 

Isn't the best way to say Merry Christmas today to take the sappy consumer infatuation with some ephemeral state of bliss to its absurd limits? Isn't it precisely as we accept the total stupidity of Christmas as it mistakenly arrives on our doorsteps each year that it might mean something completely else? Maybe in the joke there is freedom to laugh precisely in the command to believe. On the one hand we accept that the stuff of Christmas makes belief impossible. On the other, that only in the acceptance of the impossibility of belief (implied by the command) do we come close to what Christmas might be about. Or as Luther puts it, “If they should poke their heads into heaven… they would find no one but Christ laid in the crib… and so would fall down again and break their necks.” Of course, this also leaves open the atheist possibility that it is all just a bit of magic, in which case the theologian and atheist alike can laugh at the joke, whichever way they choose to take it. 

Yes, I'm a fan of Mad Men, and I thought I'd explain a bit why as the third season winds to a close. 

First, it's no fluke that this show has picked up a slew of awards over the past few years. It is one of the premier examples of the new golden age of television which was inaugurated by shows like the Sopranos, Six Feet Under and more recently Damages and Lost. What the writers and producers understand about these shows is that although the plot and subject matter are important, it is the characters that drive the story. Lost had a quasi sci-fi gimmick, but, as J.J. Abrams made clear in a recent TED presentation, it is the characters that make the story. Mad Men studies people during the 1960s, a time that is now historically distant enough to be as interesting as it is controversial. How did people live in those days is no longer a matter of the memory and politics of our parents, so much as a series of forgotten truths about the history of the western world. The brilliance of the show is to investigate this history at a very human level.

Second, the title, Mad Men, encapsulates one of the key features of the era it studies. This is, in brief, a study of the last hurrah for modern masculinity. The opening credits depict a man falling through skyscrapers which reflect the facade of female forms.  This is a bygone age when men ruled New York like a troupe of idiotic boys, and Mad Men offers a careful analysis of how and why feminism won the day. Of course, there are still powerful men in New York, but the statistics now conclusively paint a different picture of the gender configuration of today's postmodern Gotham. To cite just one from a recent article in the New York Times: "women of all educational levels from 21 to 30 living in New York City and working full time made 117 percent of men’s wages."

Although most people today consider it a matter of pride that women have become so successful in western society today, there remains a kind of nostalgia, I think, for a world full of well dressed men in suits and fedora hats who welcomed you to their offices with an elegant glass of scotch. This nostalgia somewhat explains the recent Mad Men inspired fashions and resurgence of 1960s era cocktail parties. We celebrate feminine freedoms, and yet we miss some of the pretence of that old fashioned polity.

It is in this light that I have a theory as to why Don Draper is the hero of the show. For those who haven't seen it, Don is a genius creative director at an advertising agency. What's interesting is that Don is just as much of a misogynist man's man as any of the other men in the show. And yet, he is somehow the one who tells us the truth about the era he lives within. He is something akin to a magician who is able to immediately recognize how a product should be depicted to a public audience. One of the most poignent examples of which was when Kodak came to Don's agency to have them market a slide projector. In one of the most beautiful sales pitches of the show, Don described it as a carousel.

Technology is a glittering lure. But there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in house at a fur company with this old pro copyrighter, a Greek named Teddy… Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a space ship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel. It’s called the carousel. Let’s us travel the way a child travels. Round and round back home again to a place where we know we are loved. (Available on Youtube)

Don's description of technology as a glittering lure is straight off the pages of Marshall McLuhan, one of the saintly prophets of the digital age. But the reason why this scene is so powerful for its audience is becuase it describes the precise appeal of the show for us today. We watch because it offers us that chance to look at the past with more than a desire to recover memories. Rather, we watch to find solace for an ache in our social consciousness that wonders where it all went wrong. Mad men engages its audience on this emotive human level, and we watch like children hoping to be returned to a time when the pretence of politeness was more precious, when our lives weren't bubble-wrapped with health and safety laws to protect us from the boogey-man lurking around every corner.

The reason Don Draper is the hero of Mad Men is not because he is any less hypocritical or more truthful than the other characters in the show. For instance, the reason why Don thinks Roger (one of the other mad men) is a fool is not because he divorced his wife and re-married his mistress, but because he thinks that this will somehow be a more authentic life than his previous one. What Don's character tells us time and again in the show is that, just like the advertisements he creates, life's truth is mediated through facades. Don, whose very identity is a facade, knows just how important it is to respect them. And here the subtitle of the show, "Where the truth lies," should be mentioned. The puns in the names matter here. Don Draper is the literal cover/drapery for his real name Dick Whitman, the phallic white man.

Whereas everyone else in the show lives with an identity crisis which drives them to try to make their lives really real, Don clings all the more robustly to the facade of his particular life. He fights for the beautiful house, wife and two kids not because this is who he really is, but because this facade is as true as it gets. It's not that perception is reality as we might expect from an ad man. Rather, that precisely because Don has a deep seated respect for the elusiveness of reality, the facade is all the more precious to him. Somehow, fifty years on, with the pain in our nostalgic hearts, we seem to agree.

What is the nature of Barth's development over the 1920s? Barth himself understood this period as his "apprenticeship," and cites his 1931 book on Anselm as a significant juncture in moving beyond this stage in his thinking. Barth's emphasis upon both change and continuity lies at the heart of the discrepancy between two prominent interpreters of his theology, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Bruce McCormack. On the surface it appears as though their disagreement centers around Barth's employment of dialectic and analogy in his theology. However, our thesis is that this focus conceals the ontological strategies Barth's multifarious uses of analogy and dialectic always implied. Although McCormack is right to suggest that Balthasar's depiction of a shift from dialectic to analogy is inadequate, in the end McCormack's account of Barth's development over the 1920s conceals as much as it reveals. The following essay attempts to demonstrate the kinds of insights which can be made of the past accounts of Barth's development which focused on the transition from dialectic to analogy. Far from relegating these accounts to the sidelines, McCormack's work helps us see all the more clearly just what was at stake in figures like Balthasar's work. By looking past McCormack and Balthasar's respective periodizations of Barth's development, a clearer focus upon Barth's theological ontology can begin to take place.

The God under discussion in theology is something akin to a Great White Shark. They die in captivity. None have lived beyond a few days once caught. So too with the theos of theology. If we presume to have caught God in clever explanation we find that this is in fact not God at all. Nietszche understood this in his claim that God had died while under the captivity of the theologians and philosophers (the death of God first arising in Hegel's thinking in this regard). As Heidegger saw, this was a prophetic call to consider a God without philosophical categories such as being. Hence, one approach to theology today is post-ontological, ala Jean-Luc Marion.

Probably one of the best artistic representations of post-ontological theology today is Damien Hirst's "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living." There is a wonderful summary of the sociological implications of this piece that I will discuss in a moment. At this point however, I want to take the liberty to theologically interpret Hirst's concern for the impossible possibility. It is impossible to contain a Great White Shark. So too, it is impossible to contain God in theology. It is precisely insofar as the death of the shark confronts us with the impossibility of its captivity that it reveals a profound truth. The negative statement of impossibility, in fact, becomes a positive statement of what is really true. It stands as a profound reminder of the knowledge of what we don't know. Hirst's shark could thus be interpreted as a contemporary representation of the negative theology which attempts to inscribe the God without being.

The question which arises at this point is whether the post-ontological theologians may still be saying too much when they suggest that God does not exist as such. In other words, do we not give up the theological game and the very incarnational nature of the word theology itself when we presume to speak of a God without being? Is there a need to take Heidegger's cross more seriously than he himself did, and consider the cruciform death of God all the more closely.

The reasons for this re-emphasis of the logos in theology can be felt as we pay closer attention to the contemporary interpretations of Hirst's art as the representation of the vampire culture of capitalism. Hirst has put Warhol to shame. Hirst continues to break record profit barriers even amidst the financial crisis, and is one of the most market savvy examples of bourgeois bohemia in existence today. In Marx's reading this sets his art in utter contradiction to the qualitative value it might have, moral, theological, or otherwise. Rather, it, like all other commodities, takes on a life of its own with a value dictated by the fetish it can conjure in the market. Hirst's shark is a kind of zombie, a vampire which sucks as much commodity value it can out of the system.

Why is this interpretation so important here? Because it is precisely in our theology today that a response to such zombie commodification is needed. We simply say too much when we distance God from our categories of existence in such sanctimonious protectionism of the theos of theology. Hirst's shark is in fact an idol of the deity in the vampire culture of capitalism which blinds us by its multimillion dollar magnificence. It is no more able to reference deity than a cathedral can be much more than a tourist attraction in western society today. Rather, a much more risky, if not radical approach to theology is demanded precisely in order to preserve the full force of interactions between the theos and the logos of theology. There is need for a cross in Christian theology that has not been sanitized like Dali's Christ of St. John of the Cross, a death of God which hovers above in the clouds, no unlike one which could be suspended in gelatinized formaldehyde. Rather, we must face a cross which is firmly planted in the ground, its timbers stained with blood. It is not that we can be sure to see God there, as Luther was right to say. But it is there that we must look nonetheless.

Randomly searching YouTube as you do and found this interesting little clip of Derrida commenting on the nature of his work and it's relation to Heidegger's. 

The Dodos, Beware of the Maniacs

Sufjan Stevens, Seven SwansDave Matthews, Christmas Song

It may seem odd to listen to a Christmas song in July, but iTunes genius suggestions triggered Dave Matthews in my subconscious and a Christmas memory came flooding back. This past holiday season I was one of those desperate significant others standing outside the dressing room in a glazed eye trance that gave me the appearance of a mannequin. True story, I once had a couple kids come up and poke me to see if I was real a few seasons ago. Then, this Christmas Song came on and thoughts of suicide subsided for a moment. It's interesting listening to it again. Despite Matthew's ecumenical caveat in the YouTube clip below, this is a deeply Protestant depiction of Mary and Joseph's relationship and a memorial Eucharist devoid of real presence. Having said that, Matthews acoustic rendition of Jesus's story sums it up about as open heartedly as can be: love.

Here's a few lyrics that stand out:

A surprise on the way, any day, any day
One heathy little giggling dribbling baby boy
The wise men came, three made their way
To shower him with love
While he lay in the hay
Shower him with love love love
Love love love
Love love was all around

Not very much of his childhood was known
Kept his mother Mary worried
Always out on his own
He met another Mary who for a reasonable fee,
less than reputable was known to be.

His heart full of love love love
Love love love
Love love was all around

Father up above, why in all this hatred do you fill
Me up with love, love, love
Love love love
Love love was all around
Father up above, why in all this anger do you fill
Me up with love, fill me love love love
Love love love

In the Christian case, the very point of renunciation requires that the ordinary flourishing forgone be confirmed as valid. Unless living the full span were a good, Christ's giving of himself to death couldn't have the meaning it does. In this it is utterly different from Socrates' death, which the latter portrays as leaving this condition for a better one. Here we see the unbridgeable gulf between Christianity and Greek philosophy. God wills ordinary human flourishing, and a great part of what is reported in the Gospels consists in Christ making this possible for the people whose affliction he heals. The call to renounce doesn't negate the value of flourishing; it is rather a call to centre everything on God, even if it be at the cost of forgoing this unsubstitutable good; and the fruit of this forgoing is that it become on one level the source of flourishing to others, and on another level, a collaboration with the restoration of a fuller flourishing by God. It is a mode of healing wounds and "repairing the world" (Pg. 17 from the Introduction).

It's interesting because it raises the suspicion of many secular people that what Christians mean by a good life, or human flourishing, is not what they mean. Here, Taylor puts his finger on one of the chief points of contention amidst the multicultural religious plurality so prized in western societies. Consider the endless loop of Baywatch and KFC chicken wings that has ensued in the secular Utopia at the end of history. Despite the brilliant satirical evidence cartooned in the Simpsons, most people are aware of the fact that God is not pandering the Colonel about his secret recipe on a shared cloud in heaven somewhere.

Whatever the differences between secular and Christian perspectives on the good life (and they are nearly impossible to pin down given the diversity of positions within both groupings) Taylor very helpfully sidelines the tendency of secularists to simply sideline Christianity as anti-materialist. As he rightly points out, the meaning of Jesus's death loses its significance if it is simply a renunciation of this world in a Socratic sense. Rather, the paradoxical meaning of Christian flourishing comes to light as we accept the coinherence between Christ's death and his love for the world. There is much to disagree on as we practically go about our lives as a society together (buying bananas is simply one of them), but something we must all inevitably face is that the the basic resources we need to survive (water, food, land, etc.) are not endless and that it is precisely insofar as we are willing to renounce our excesses that a good life for all may become a real possibility. The stakes are high, but this is precisely why a number of Christian philosophers and theologians are so insistent upon fostering a public sphere which allows for authentic disagreement to take place, as was discussed on a recent Australian radio program on political theology. 

Firstly, this story reminded me of the broader social political matrix for works such as Gustavo Gutierrez's A Theology of Liberation. Secondly, even though the Vatican eventually stood against this attempt to syncretize the thought of Karl Marx with Jesus Christ, the story nonetheless gives voice to the ever present socio-economic radicalism in history of the Roman Catholic Church. Lastly, however, this historical excursion provided the context for the rest of my scan through the headlines and most read articles of today's paper where I subsequently came across the NY Times coverage of Benedict XVI's recent encyclical, "Charity in Truth," which was his first on economic and social matters.

The first article I will mention was Ross Douthat's "The Audacity of the Pope," which makes the claim that truly radical political and social thought that breaks from the typical ideological factions in the US today is not to be found in the Obama administration which continues to pander neo-liberalism in new "internet-era font," but rather in the thought of the Pope whose audacious ideas defy conformity to either left or right. Although Douthat stops short of advocating the Pope's encyclical as a kind of third way party manifesto, he nonetheless asks:

Why should being pro-environment preclude being pro-life? Why can’t Republicans worry about economic inequality, and Democrats consider devolving more power to localities and states? Does opposing the Iraq war mean that you have to endorse an anything-goes approach to bioethics? Does supporting free trade require supporting the death penalty?

The second article I will mention is "Catholicism as Antidote to Turbo-Capitalism," by Carter Dougherty. Here he explores the German bestseller by a more recent Marx who cheekily penned his own Das Capital.

Unlike the 19th-century Marx, who thought organized religion was a trick played on the impoverished in order to control them, Archbishop [Reinhard] Marx and other Catholics yearn for reform, not class warfare. In that, they are following a long and fundamental line of church teaching. What is different now is that some of them see this economic crisis as a moment when the church’s economic thinking just may attract serious attention.

As an institution, the Catholic Church has tried to stand somewhere between the socio-economic left and right for most of the twentieth century. John Paul II's upbringing in Poland honed his instincts against the injustices of communist regimes. But he was equally dismayed as the fall of communism led to an equally Godless form of turbo-capitalism. Although the Church was largely intolerant of the more radical left and right wing factions within the church, then as now, they nonetheless recognized that their engagement in the physical world was directly related to people's willingness to turn to them regarding spiritual things.

What is most surprising in the coverage of Catholic socio-economic teaching today, however, is that in the fall-out of both capitalist and communist systems the institutional centrist reform ethos of the Catholic Church is itself now interpreted as a kind of radicalism. I do not at this point want to comment in detail upon the specific ideas being proposed here. No doubt there would be no clear consensus from the right or left on how to work them out in practice. But there is a broader phenomena at work where the Catholic presentation of the socio-economic radicality of Jesus is seen to outstrip Marx. Whereas once it was the social failures of the church to care for the poor which inspired the secularist prophets' readership, now it is the failure of capitalism and communism which inspire the Church's.

This is not to say that the Roman Catholics are advocating another grand utopia. “'There is no way back into an old world,' Archbishop Marx said in a recent interview, before the encyclical was issued. “'We have to affirm this world, but critically.'” But is it possible that somehow, through audacity of the Pope no less, Jesus is again being heard as a political radical? I suppose the best way to answer that question is to begin where Benedict does: "Charity in truth, to which Jesus Christ bore witness by his earthly life and especially by his death and resurrection, is the principal driving force behind the authentic development of every person and of all humanity." 

I have to say I am always intrigued when theologians are given a public forum to speak today, and this is a fantastic example of the phenomenon. In particular, there is a point towards the end of the interview where Jones discusses the current moment in history as a possible new reformation. I have cited it at length below because she depicts this reformation as a "crisis of metaphysics." People, she says, "want something real that is an alternative," or, as Cornel West summed it up, "It's the funk. It's the funk. It's the funk of life...That's what black life is about. But, in the end, that's what human life is about. How funky is your faith." Here's Jones's closing remarks:

What I see in my students is powerful. It is a sense that, in the crumbling of all of this, what is being unleashed is an intense sense of the embodied character of faith. Call it Pentecostal. You can see it in my students now. What does it mean to call them Pentecostal? It's not the traditional things we think of. But these are students who are coming off the set of "American Idol." Or they've been on a war ship outside of Iraq.

Or they've been stocking shelves in Texas. And they're coming to Union committed to social justice. And open to the power of the spirit in physical ways that give them this kind of zealousness that, for a large swath of time, the liberal left lost. They're doing this as a whole new generation for whom tactility, thinking about the way the body lives in the world. It's actually exciting to me. Because I think, in their own lives, we're seeing the contestation of the power of the market to configure desire. Because they don't want those market desires in the same way my generation did. They're critical of them. They're coming up with new forms of music. And they're very committed to a sense of passion in it. To use a very scholarly term, I think we need to use it more often, I think it's a crisis of metaphysics. These students are asking, and their liberal professors, questions about, you know, "Do you really believe that God exists?"

Now, the liberal church is sort of, you know, wanting to say, "Well, it might be a myth. It might be a symbol. We can say this about it. We can back away." These students are saying, "I'm not going to get out there on the front line, and I'm not going to reconfigure my interior world to desire different things..." If this isn't real, they want something real that is an alternative.

Fenton, Roger. Valley of The Shadow of Death. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow…
— T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”