TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "religion"
Karen Armstrong talks about our “remarkably undeveloped” and “even primitive” understanding of God in the West, and our loss of religion as a “a practical discipline,” or, “not the quest for an abstract truth but a practical way of life.” In other words, religion has become a noun instead of a verb.
If you don’t do religion, you don’t get it. In the modern period, however, we have turned faith into a head-trip. Originally, the English word “belief”, like the Greek pistis and the Latin credo, meant “commitment”. When Jesus asked his followers to have “faith”, he was not asking them to accept him blindly as the Second Person of the Trinity (an idea he would have found puzzling). Instead, he was asking his disciples to give all they had to the poor, live rough and work selflessly for the coming of a kingdom in which rich and poor would sit together at the same table.
“Credo ut intellegam – I commit myself in order that I may understand,” said Saint Anselm (1033-1109). In the late 17th century, the English word “belief” changed its meaning and became the intellectual acceptance of a somewhat dubious proposition. Religious people now think that they have to “believe” a set of incomprehensible doctrines before embarking on a religious way of life. This makes no sense. On the contrary, faith demands a disciplined and practical transcendence of egotism, a “stepping outside” the self which brings intimations of transcendent meaning that makes sense of our flawed and tragic world.
She could just as easily be talking about “art” or “creativity.”
Filed under: religion
On not sucking mid-career and a batch of good Chris Rock interviews
These days I find myself drawn to reading the thoughts of people who are mid-career—not at the end of their careers, and not at the beginning, but in the middle, because I feel like that’s the period where you really have to keep up your stamina, keep chugging, keep working. You’re not necessarily hungry anymore — you might have a nice house, nice wife, couple of kids, a decent fan base, etc. People are over the excitement about your rise, and people aren’t splicing together the kiss-ass retrospective clip reels, either. Your best work may be behind you, may be in front of you, but you just don’t know. (Maybe this is always true.) I do this because, being not at starting line, but a few meters down the track, I’m just looking in awe at these people who keep running the marathon without burning out. (Not sure why my lazy, non-runner ass is using a running metaphor, but hey…)
Chris Rock strikes me as a mid-career guy who has his shit together, and whenever he has an interview published, I try to read it.
Judd Apatow interviewed him for the Vanity Fair comedy issue:
Was it more fun when you first started? If so, what the fuck are we supposed to do now?
Yes, it was more fun. First of all, you had three goals: (1) To get good at comedy. (2) To make money from comedy. And (3) to get laid from comedy. What do we do now? Well, people seem to think we’re good. We have money. We’re married, so the whole working to get laid thing is over. Sad to say, but we work now to maintain our lifestyles, to not suck, and to avoid Celebrity Apprentice.
In his Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, he talked about hanging out with his grandfather preacher:
I used to watch him write his sermons. He writes his sermons pretty much the same way I write my act. He would never write the exact sermon. He’d always write the bullet points, whatever would hit him, and he would write it when he was driving. And I probably come up with half of my standup when I’m driving…His preaching, it’s weird, it’s not a lot different than my style on stage…
When you grow up with a preacher, it’s almost like- it’s like seeing a magician stuff the rabbit in his side jacket. Like, I knew all the tricks… I don’t think he thought of it as tricks, but every job becomes a job, and you figure out shortcuts and you figure out, you know, ways around things…
A good sermon’s always great… these guys, they’re always - they have this task of coming up with a new - with new material every week. I like how a preacher can talk about one thing for an hour and 10 minutes. I keep trying to figure out how I can do that in stand-up. So, how I can, like, OK, how can I just be funny about, you know, jealousy? You know, a preacher will pick a topic and they’ll run with it for the whole sermon, like, and, you know, take you on a ride talking about literally one thing. And I just love that style. So I’m always - I’ve always been trying to figure out how do I do that in stand-up.
In this NYTimes Q&A, he talks about the itch to get back into comedy clubs (“I haven’t done any dirty work in a while”), but the near-impossible task of “workshopping” in the digital era:
When you’re workshopping it, a lot of stuff is bumpy and awkward. Especially when you’re working on the edge, you’re going to offend. A guy like Tosh, he’s at the Laugh Factory. He’s making no money. He’s essentially in the gym. You’re mad at Ray Leonard because he’s not in shape, in the gym? That’s what the gym’s for. The sad thing, with all this taping and stuff, no one’s going to do stand-up. And every big stand-up I talk to says: “How do I work out new material? Where can you go, if I have a half an idea and then it’s on the Internet next week?” Just look at some of my material. You can’t imagine how rough it was and how unfunny and how sexist or racist it might have seemed. “Niggas vs. Black People” probably took me six months to get that thing right. You know how racist that thing was a week in? That’s not to be seen by anybody.
Filed under: Chris Rock
Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion
The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true…
I was fully prepared to hate this book. I’d never read a de Botton book before, but Mark Larson gave it a thumbs up, and not a whole lot makes me seek out a book like a good review from Mark.
The genesis of the book was de Botton’s thought, “there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content,” which isn’t, of course, a new thought at all — Thomas Jefferson cut the parts out of The Bible he didn’t like and kept the rest.
Early Christianity was itself highly adept at appropriating the good ideas of others, aggressively subsuming countless pagan practices which modern atheists now tend to avoid in the mistaken belief that they are indelibly Christian… The premise of this book is that it must be possible to remain a committed atheist and nevertheless find religions sporadically useful, interesting and consoling – and be curious as to the possibilities of importing certain of their ideas and practices into the secular realm.
There are tons of downright goofy ideas in the book, and there were several times where I thought, “Isn’t it just easier to, you know, actual be Catholic?” but what I like is the very simple idea that you don’t have to agree with or believe in something in order to find something valuable and worth stealing in it. Again, go read Mark’s review.
Filed under: my reading year 2012
I know it’s been months since Sendak died, but I just got to listening to this podcast, which in the beginning, when I was walking the dog, made me burst out laughing, but when I got home and sat in my office and listened to the last bit, made me cry.
On signing books for children:
When I’m autographing books, which I don’t like to do much anymore, and children are shoved at me… they have no idea why they’re on the line. They’d much rather be in the bathroom.
…the look of alarm and the tears, and they stare at me like pure hatred. Who is this elderly short man sitting behind a desk who’s going to take their book away? Then on top of that, the parent says, now give him your book, honey. He wants to write something in it. Well, there, they’ve been told: don’t write in a book. Okay. Why then is it all right for a perfect stranger to write in their book? It’s horrible for them. And I become horrible unwittingly. I make children cry.
…There’s only one child who ever had the courage, and his father was urging him forward, urging him forward. I can see the hesitation. I just felt so bad for the kid, and I put my hand on the book to help draw it away from him. And he literally screamed and said: “Don’t crap up my book!”
On faith:
“I am not a religious person, nor do I have any regrets. The war took care of that for me. You know, I was brought up strictly kosher, but I — it made no sense to me. It made no sense to me what was happening. So nothing of it means anything to me. Nothing. Except these few little trivial things that are related to being Jewish. … You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson — she’s probably the top — Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.”
Filed under: Maurice Sendak
President Thomas Jefferson’s edited Bible
Stripping out the Gospel miracles and inconsistencies to demonstrate parts he found interesting, Thomas Jefferson created a book representing his own views:
Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Then, relying on a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper — alongside translations in French, Greek and Latin.Of the practice, he says:
“I have performed the operation for my own use,” he continued, “by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter, which is evidently his and which is as easily distinguished as diamonds in a dunghill.”Renamed by Jefferson “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazereth,” the book was just called the “Jefferson Bible” by friends. From the cut-and-paste physicality to the reframing that revealed in public a new coherence of thought, looks like rather physical and more early evidence of the practice of remixing.
Yes, the Jefferson Bible FTW! And TJ wasn’t the only one who expressed the urge to pick out “diamonds in a dunghill.” Leo Tolstoy made his own The Gospel In Brief, and had this to say:
When, at the age of fifty, I first began to study the Gospels seriously, I found in them the spirit that animates all who are truly alive. But along with the flow of that pure, life-giving water, I perceived much mire and slime mingled with it; and this had prevented me from seeing the true, pure water. i found that, along with the lofty teaching of Jesus, there are teachings bound up which are repugnant and contrary to it. I thus felt myself in the position of a man to whom a sack of garbage is given, who, after long struggle and wearisome labor, discovers among the garbage a number of infinitely previous pearls.”
Stephen Mitchell also took up the task in The Gospel According to Jesus, taking out the magical deeds and leaving only Jesus’ teachings. (The resulting gospel is only 25 pages long.)
I wrote about the Jefferson Bible in Newspaper Blackout.
From his great interview with the Paris Review:
I hate when art becomes a religion. I feel the opposite. When you start putting a higher value on works of art than people, you’re forfeiting your humanity. There’s a tendency to feel the artist has special privileges, and that anything’s okay if it’s in the service of art. I tried to get into that in Interiors. I always feel the artist is much too revered—it’s not fair and it’s cruel. It’s a nice but fortuitous gift—like a nice voice or being left-handed. That you can create is a kind of nice accident. It happens to have high value in society, but it’s not as noble an attribute as courage. I find funny and silly the pompous kind of self-important talk about the artist who takes risks. Artistic risks are like show-business risks—laughable. Like casting against type, wow, what danger! Risks are where your life is on the line. The people who took risks against the Nazis or some of the Russian poets who stood up against the state—those people are courageous and brave, and that’s really an achievement. To be an artist is also an achievement, but you have to keep it in perspective. I’m not trying to undersell art. I think it’s valuable, but I think it’s overly revered. It is a valuable thing, but no more valuable than being a good schoolteacher, or being a good doctor. The problem is that being creative has glamour. People in the business end of film always say, I want to be a producer, but a creative producer. Or a woman I went to school with who said, Oh yes, I married this guy. He’s a plumber but he’s very creative. It’s very important for people to have that credential. Like if he wasn’t creative, he was less.
Emphasis mine. I’ve said it so many times: the world doesn’t necessarily need more artists — what it needs is more decent human beings. It’s like Jeff Bridges’ mother told him: “remember to have fun and don’t take it too seriously.”
(via ayse)
“Hell is real” sign off Interstate 71 in Southern Ohio
Drew from Toothpaste For Dinner:
Lest you believe that all of Ohio is this crazy, it’s not. It’s just the rural parts that are this way. And Cincinnati.
Here, from Floating Sheep, is a map showing where different kinds of Christianity predominate in the United States. If you’re a little unclear on how these different branches of Christianity relate, there’s an overview here, a family-tree style chart here, and tables that compare their beliefs and practices here.
Via Richard Florida
See that little red Methodist band near Southern Ohio? Yep, that’s me.
…the rhythms of the Old and New Testament, the King James version, are just as solidly set in a person of my era who went to church as a moral foundation. I make sentences, I’m sure, from Biblical rhythms. I’ve been called post-Modernist but I doubt it. I think I just write in more fragmented ways and narration. But the base of my sentences, although they are sometimes Baroque, is I think from the Scriptures as far as I can feel it myself.
We read a lot of the Bible. We knew Scriptures by heart, especially Psalms and a great bit of the Book of John, the Sermon on the Mount, and - from Matthew and certain things like that were memorized. And I had them memorized until I was 15-16 years old…
…something like the 23 Psalm. The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow and so on. But this had just a such wonderful basic human poetry in it. And I never was sophisticated enough to consider the Bible as literature until I was - I never even heard the term the Bible as literature until I was way into graduate school. So I - in fact, I’d stopped going to church. But the church is - the Scriptures are very much with me and more and more now I’m reading Mark and John in the Bible. Not all the time but I just love the clarity and the mystery at the same time.
“The clarity and the mystery.” I like that. Whether you leave it behind or not, if The Bible was once a part of your life, it never goes away. I can still recite Bible passages from my youth…
