Cultural criticism is a kind of reading. As we try to understand our times, discern where the Spirit is afoot, and identify what powers and principalities hold us captive, we are interpreting culture. It’s like our cultural context is an open book, but like any book, the meaning has to be mined. We need to learn to read well.But as Alan Jacobs argued in A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, we need to be careful not to confuse criticism with suspicion. Reading well means reading charitably. Yet reading charitably does not mean reading uncritically. Charitable cultural criticism is its own sort of dance.
[gallery] 50watts:
Yury Annenkov, illustration for 1945 French Dostoyevsky edition. Previously: 50 Watts post of Annenkov’s illus. for Blok.
Another contentious area for Hill is religion. Much of his verse dramatises a passionate wrestling with faith. Is he a Christian poet? “Well, it’s a tag, isn’t it?” says Hill. “They tag you with a convenient epithet.” He pauses. “I’m reasonably au fait with the Christian documentation. I’m quite able to use theological terms.” He turns to the Rev Alice Goodman: “Can I say that I dislike the Church of England in so many ways without harming you?” he asks. The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has written appreciatively on the following lines from Canaan: “I say it is not faithless / to stand without faith, keeping open / vigil at the site.” One reason why Williams and other members of the clergy love Hill, Goodman claims, is “because he expresses the things about the Church and about the faith that they felt but could not in their position articulate”. Yet she reminds him he has written sensitively on Vaughan’s and Donne’s work. “Yes,” he replies, “because it’s excellent and fascinating. Not because I suddenly feel that Vaughan is a brother in the faith or that reading Donne converted me to a love of Christ.”Goodman points out that he kneels at the Church altar on Sundays. Her husband, she says, is “communicant but resentful”.
“When did I say that?” says Hill.
“You didn’t, I just said it now.”
“It sounds like me.”
“I’ve been married to you for some years,” she says drily.
For thirteen years MGM had the great Tex Avery; after 1940 they also had Hanna and Barbera putting Tom and Jerry through their formulaic wars. Those differ from the Coyote-Road Runner quest in that whereas Wile E. and his quarry exist in different psychic universes — the one obsessed, the other blithe — the Tom-and-Jerry formula calls simply for a cat who’d eat a mouse if only he could manage to catch it; but the mouse, being smaller, hence smarter, can always outmaneuver him. The Road Runner never outmaneuvers the Coyote. He’s never even distressed by him. what outdoes the Coyote is the interactiveness of a single coherent universe, where fanaticism is guaranteed to defeat itself.
It was markedly different from the sermon delivered by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on the eve of the previous conclave, in 2005, when he rallied the cardinals by pitting the virtuous Church against the world’s “dictatorship of relativism.” That sermon, encapsulating Ratzinger’s vision of the Church’s moral superiority, was widely perceived as having sealed his election. Now a cardinal was speaking very differently. “One must humble himself before God and men, and try to eradicate the evil at all costs,” Grech said.
James Carroll: A Radical Pope’s First Year : The New Yorker.
Is that what Cardinal Ratzinger preached? Well, you can read the sermon for yourself. Speaking to his fellow cardinals, Ratzinger said, “We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.” He said to them, “We must develop this adult faith; we must guide the flock of Christ to this faith. And it is this faith — only faith — that creates unity and is fulfilled in love.” He said to them, “The fruit that endures is therefore all that we have sown in human souls: love, knowledge, a gesture capable of touching hearts, words that open the soul to joy in the Lord. So let us go and pray to the Lord to help us bear fruit that endures.”
For a “virtuous church” it, along with its leaders, seemed to require a great deal of prayer in order for it to become what it should be. Only someone, like Carroll, with a desperate determination to see Francis as Benedict’s opposite in every way would be able to reach so willfully perverse a reading of Benedict’s sermon. That the Church’s leadership is failing its people is a point on which Benedict and Francis are in perfect agreement.
GLADWELL: So suppose we channel our inner Nate Silver and come up with a universal celebrity misbehavior metric. We grade each public incident on three dimensions, each measured on a scale of one to 10. First, the stature of the celebrity. Second, the degree of impairment at the time of the accident. And third, the severity of the transgression. Your grade is the sum of those three scores.SIMMONS: Hold on, hold on — we need to name this thing. And as much as I want to force-feed O.J. into the acronym, I love your “universal celebrity misbehavior” metric because “UCM” is such a strong acronym. I could see Bill James re-releasing Popular Crime just to reassess every famous murder with UCM.
GLADWELL: Why has it taken so long for the Moneyball revolution to come to Hollywood? I don’t get it. Because the UCM finally makes it possible for us to make rational judgments about scandals. So, take Tiger Woods’s run-in with his wife’s 9-iron. As a celebrity, Tiger is a 10. His impairment, a sex addiction, maybe painkillers, and probably alcohol, is also a 10. And I’m going to go out on a limb and say that cheating on your Swedish model wife with so many hookers that she may have believed it was in her best interest to smash the back window of your SUV with a golf club is, at the very least, a nine. That’s 29 out of 30. Future generations will now be able to look back on that night and understand that it was the Apollo moon landing of the modern tabloid era. In fact, as much as I like UCM, maybe we should refer to this score as someone’s “Woods Number” in honor of the contemporary champion.
To put that 29 in perspective, I think that in the normal course of affairs, it’s really, really hard for anyone to score above a 20, for the simple reason that as your celebrity score rises your ability and willingness to max out on the transgression and impairment scales fall. I have no doubt, for example, that, say, Lindsay Lohan or Axl Rose are routinely putting up sevens and eights on transgression and impairment. But they just don’t have the stature they used to.
He brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, damped and benummed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.
[gallery] unapologetic-book:
Advent calendar 14: cushion for the restoration of the Old Tower, Dover Castle, embroidered by prisoners serving life sentences. As well as taking commissions for churches and historical sites, the charity Fine Cell Work also sells bags, cushion covers and quilts direct to the public.
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John Ruskin, The Casa d’Oro, Venice, 1845.Pencil and watercolour with bodycolour, 33 x 47.6 cm
Source: Robert Hewison, Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, 2000.
