I traveled to Kansas City last winter and wrote a post about it despite spending less than 48 hours in the city. So when I returned there last week, I figured it was worth a brief follow up travel post.
The first thing of note is that in the 6 days I have spent in Kansas City in my life, I have been there for near record highs and near record lows. It was 109 on Wednesday and was well into the negative double digits when I visited in February. That is a 120 degree swing. I left an apple in my car on Wednesday and when I came back it was literally baked. Which was delicious – I love baked apples. I’m just sayin…
But Kansas City really is a surprisingly fun place…with enough stuff for a second (mostly picture) post.
I was teaching a joint sediment workshop with another sediment specialist. His material included a field day at the Blue River.
This was an urban river which was the site of the biggest civil war battle west of the Mississippi (adding archeological issues to the standard economic, statistical, hydrological, hydraulic and ecological complexities). There are severe flooding and channel degradation issues[1] and we did some cool hydro-geotech testing.
I went running at night when it cooled to a mere 96 degrees. Usually I ran along Brush Creek, which has a really nice running trail along it and is surrounded by classic hotels and one of the higher end shopping and cultural districts. There is even a gondola.
But my last day in town, I went running early in the morning
I also made it to a Royals Game. I love going to ballparks. Especially nice ones. And Kaufman field is a really nice one.
One of the reason I enjoy going to sporting events when visiting a city, is that it is one of the few things you can do with 20,000 to 40,000 of the cities inhabitants. It is a social experience of the place. Unfortunately, the Royals are terrible…only they are better than the hapless Orioles who they were playing…so 20,000 Kansas Cityans is a little on the generous side.
But there was a hilarious moment. Before the game teams often play a montage of the team highlights. So before the game they flashed up this graphic on the big screen.[3]
I thought it was hilarious that they would call their highlight reel ‘Major League Moments’ as if that is the best they can hope for. Even better, they left the screen up there for about 3 minutes…and then just took it down. No highlights. Apparently, the Royals were not even able to clear the bar of moments that seem characteristic of the Major Leagues.
Then there was this building.
I heard a rumor that it was the building used for the climactic scene of Ghostbusters. I didn’t bother to verify this, because it seems like the sort of thing that makes a better story in rumor form. But that is pretty cool and highlights the eclectic nature of Kansas City architecture.
This post was written while listening to the Mumford and Sons channel on Pandora
_______________________ [1] It also runs through the zoo, near the ‘Lagoons of Africa’ which led to a number of jokes about it being a unique ‘habitat enhancement’ project…for hippos. [2] At the base of the tower is a mural that I found pretty moving, with soldiers and civilians, some antagonistic, others battered by war, all converging on a strong angelic figure in the center and four verses from the Bible:
“Behold a pale horse and his name that sat on him was death and hell followed with him.” “Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders.” “What does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God.” “Then shall the earth yield her increase and God even our own God shall bless us.”
[3] Apparently it was the biggest screen in the country until the cowboys put their monstrosity in.
I would like to see a Broadway show that tells the story of western intellectual history based totally on Youtube musical numbers. It could start with the Declaration of Independence:
Then it could move on to the great economic debate[1] of the last century.[2]
And then could move on to the history of science with one of the epic rap battles. This one is my favorite (though it contains entirely too much focus on Hawkning’s disability).
“There are one million…million, million, particles in the universe that we can observe Your mom took the ugliest ones and put them together into one nerd.”[3]
_____________ And while I am punting on a blog post with clips, I might as well make it worth your while. This is one of the finest deconstructions of western plausibility structures I have seen in some time:
“If they eat glitter”
And finally, here are two videos our resident film maker[4] made for our campus ministry. The first one is just fun featuring phenomenal steady cam work:
And yes, that is our half-wit bunny that Frank is stroking.
For the second year in a row, a promotional piece he did for us made it into the UC Davis film festival, and, on top of that, a cynical reviewer from the campus newspaper (who panned many of the entries) kind of went on and on about how much he enjoyed this.
This post was written while listening to the Brand New channel on Pandora
_______________________ [1] Note: don’t lose patience with this clip in the first 2 minutes. Once they start throwing down, its transcendent. Also, I’d like to say, that the film makers declare Hayek the winner, but portray Keynes so fairly, that I am not sure that they are even justified calling the match based on their own arguments. [2] Incidentally, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I think the exchange actually demonstrates the difficulty of the choice. I did not understand the stimulus solution and am not sure it was a solution…but can’t refute those who say that we would be catastrophically worse off without it. But I guess that is the point for me. The modern supporters of Hayek (including his rapping self in the video) seem to present their position as an all or nothing alternative...while the Keynesian alternative seems to fit well into an economic ‘toolbox’ where one solution does not fit every problem. The bust/boom cycle is a problem, but I’m not sure that Hayekian models make it better – it seems like they could make it worse. Incidentally, the bottom-up/top-down processes are at the heart of a lot of the debate about ecological processes over the last 5 decades and, surprise, you cannot account for ecological processes without both. [3] These epic rap battles are kind of crass, and the earlier ones are better in content than the later ones (thought the production is better in the later ones). But ‘Nice Peter’s’ other stuff is pretty great too. I recommend his picture songs, especially nom, nom, nom, babies. [4] Matt Pye, a PhD student in plant physiology. [5] I have asked him to consider to bring this genre back to tell the story of Joseph and Potipher’s wife when we teach Genesis this year.
Introductory Note: I love innovation. I think creativity is one of the things that makes us fundamentally human. But there is one thing I do where I do not value innovation: Biblical Interpretation.[1]In general I try to let the testimony of the historic church and other wise exegetes temper my wild speculations about what a Biblical text means. I do not fully trust my faculties and let the spatio-temporal community offer their checks and balances to keep me honest. Which brings me to this post. I have never understood the story of Joseph and his brothers and have found most commentaries less than persuasive. Last week I finally realized some things about the larger Genesis narrative that seem to put it in focus. I think I finally get it. Here is the problem. My interpretation seems novel, which makes me hesitant to preach it. So I would like to vet it to a community. You are this community. Please do not hesitate to weigh in with your take on it in the comments section or to pass it on to friends you think might be helpful. Thanks.
Heroes who are not Heroic: Interpreting Hebrew Narrative
One of the biggest mistakes that people make in interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures is assuming that it is a collection of hero stories that tell us how to live. We look at the lives of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Leah, Rebecca and Joseph and try to mine their stories for insights about how to live good, just and beautiful lives. There is just one problem with that. These are horrible people![2] The exegetical gymnastics that authors and preachers sometimes do to find an ennobling lesson from the darker chapters of their lives are often comical, periodically embarrassing and occasionally dangerous.[3]
Christians believe that these texts have to be interpreted Christological, as the narrative of God’s peculiar use of an unremarkable, nomadic, middle eastern tribe to initiate his plan of cosmic redemption for our species. The point of the stories is that he uses people who are alternately horrible and honorable to do this (and often, particularly in the case of Jacob, they forget to alternate to the latter). I think there are two reasons for this:
1) The Bible is not about people. It is about God. And he uses douchenozzels[4] to demonstrate that his purposes in redemption are not contingent upon our frailties. He will win. He will tell a story that ends with justice, beauty, and glory…and it will not be subverted by the bokeness of his friends or enemies (who are often morally indistinguishable).[5]
2) If God can use someone as paradoxically cowardly and courageous as Abraham, or someone as deceitful and industrious as Jacob, or someone as vengeful and prudent as Joseph, for his cosmic narrative of species redemption…then he can use me for the small, localized tasks of redemption he has asked me to be involved in. I am precisely the kind of person God likes to use. And so are you. Being an agent of redemption really is something ‘just anyone’ can do. You do not need to be anything special.
Which brings me to the confrontation between Judah and Joseph in Genesis 44[6], a text I have read dozens of times, but never seen. Now stories that include both Joseph and Judah are interesting because these two men become the two great provinces of the Hebrew Nation:[7] the Northern and Southern kingdoms. Following the Assyrian exile, ‘Judah’ is often shorthand for ‘the people of Israel.’ But that’s weird, because Judah was an enormous a-hole. So it is interesting how this relationship between these two most important sons of Jacob plays out. There are four stories that include these two brothers that becomes an underlying narrative, itself.
Joseph and Judah: The Story within the Story (in Four Acts)
Act 1: The Sale of Joseph
Joseph was the bratty little son of his Father’s favorite wife.[8] And so his brothers decided to kill him. Except one brother, Judah, decides, “why just kill him, when we could profit from this.” So he talks them into selling the boy into slavery and staging his death.
Act 2: The Sex Scenes
The next story we get about Judah placed awkwardly within the story of Joseph’s rise and fall and rise and fall and rise in Egypt. It is a tawdry little tale of Judah’s mistreatment of his daughter in law that ends in her deceiving him into sleeping with her and then publically outing him to extort him into honorable treatment.[9] The placement of the story of Judah’s sexual brokenness seems curious until it is considered as a contrast with Joseph’s sexual integrity in the following passage. [10]
Act 3: Judah’s self donation
Fast forward decades. Joseph is running Egypt, which, because of his ‘insider information with Yahweh’ is the only land that has food in a regional famine. His brothers come to get food and don’t recognize him. What follows is three chapters of mind games as Joseph toys with his brothers. Commentators do all kinds of exegetical gymnastics to explain Joseph’s behavior[11] but I think the parsimonious solution is that Joseph is being a d-bag. He is an emotional mess seeing his brothers (he has to leave the room to cry not once, but twice[12]) and he reacts with an illogical string of actions that seem motivated by a messy mixture of affection and vengeance…but mostly vengeance. The story comes to the head with Joseph threatening to kidnap Benjamin (his only full brother, and his father’s new favorite)…when Judah stands up to him and offers himself instead. In response to this gesture, Joseph breaks down, reveals himself and is reconciled to his brothers.
Act 4: The Will
Before Jacob dies he prophecies over his twelve sons. Joseph and Judah both get honorable treatment but it is clear that the trajectory of God’s rescue operation, his plan of cosmic redemption, will go through Judah’s family…even though Joseph is generally thought of as the most important son. In fact, when we talk about the patriarchs, it is Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph…but this is wrong, the Davidic line goes through Judah…and TAMAR!! Both Matthew and Luke highlight Perez[13] (one of Tamar’s twins by her father in law, Judah) as part of Jesus’ lineage. But more than that, Matthew even mentions Tamar by name in the genealogy, making her the only woman included in the lineage, though she would seem to be the one he would want to forget. I think Matthew is pointing out how his lineage is messianically legit, but messy…making it existentially legit.
Volf, Vengeance and the Role of Self Donation in Reconciliation
Which brings me to Miroslov Volf and the role of self donation in reconciliation. In Exclusion and Embrace Volf deals with the problem[14] that we generally privilege the oppressed morally over the oppressors.[15] And, while nothing seems more unseemly than to morally implicate the oppressed[16], he argues that one of the great violences that oppression does to the oppressed is to force violence into their hearts. The oppressor not only takes their resources and/or dignity, they create the desire for vengeance in the hearts of their victims. So the greatest wickedness the oppressor does is to create wickedness, a network of sleeper cells of future oppressors. This is why history is replete with accounts of power shifts, where the oppressed easily slips into the role of oppressor. The evil of the oppressor is complete. They have fashioned the oppressed in their own image.
Thus “one of the most insidious aspects of the practice of evil (is that) In addition to inflicting harm, the practice of evil keeps re-creating a world without innocence. Evil generates new evil as evildoers fashion victims in their own ugly image.” (81)
And this is what has happened with Joseph. His brothers’ evil against him has made him into them.[17] But Judah has become someone different in the decades since Act 2. There is actually a note of who he had the potential to become at the end of the tawdry episode with Tamar. When she publically embarrasses him, his response was simply: “She is in the right, not me.”[18]
These men did not invent their own brokenness. Their parents had their own soap opera. And the gist of it is that everyone resented the children of the favorite wife (Joseph and Benjamin).[19] But here is Judah, the very one who sold Joseph into slavery, offering himself into slavery in exchange for Benjamin not in spite of him being Rachel’s son but BECAUSE Benjamin is the only remaining son of his father’s favorite wife. This does not justify Jacob’s favoritism, but it shows that Judah cares more about his father (who would die in sorrow if he lost both of Rachel’s sons) than he does about his father’s mistakes.
Volf argues that the cross is the key to reconciliation. That self donation is the only way to break the cycle of violence. And that is what we see in this story. Judah makes Joseph in his own image by selling him into slavery. But then he unmakes that image by offering himself on behalf of the brother he should hate. And so Joseph[20] and Judah become synonymous with Israel. But it is Judah[21], not Joseph, who becomes the conduit of the covenant. And this seems surprisingly apt. Because we know the climax of the story. It is God’s self donation which redeems and disarms his enemies and makes the way for our reconciliation.
___________________ [1] Alternately, conveying the content of these interpretations into a particular culture is a place where not nearly enough creativity is applied. [2] Mark Driscoll said in his sermon on Gen 4 “The Bible is not a book about good people and bad people…it is a book about bad people and Jesus.” [3] Dawkins has an account in his angry little book “The God Delusion” where an atheist read the Bible for the first time and found it delightfully full of all manner of embarrassing content. This is why Christians generally steer clear of the OT. Our OT hermeneutics tent to just be an optimistic form of this. But both are exercises in missing the point. [4] I find it semantically interesting that the various derivatives of the word “douche” has become an unseemly but acceptable pejorative that replaces taboo words. It kind of operates like ‘frack’ (the BSG version not the ‘hunting for gas by shattering shale version’ which has led to the same pun over and over – which, to be fair, is funny every time). Our linguistic rules of taboo are static but language is not. [5] Genesis often goes out of its way to paint an honorable picture of the Canaanite rulers that the patriarchs interact with. Often the former are more admirable than the latter. [6] Dan and I are preaching Genesis next year. So I have been studying it for about 3 months and will probably devote over half of my personal study to it for the next 8 months. So, this blog is going to get some Genesis. [7] The tribes named after Joseph’s sons compose “the Northern Kingdom” referred to as Ephrium, and the other tribes compose the southern kingdom and are often referred to collectively as Judah. [8] It is often pointed out that the Bible doesn’t forbid polygamy and actually includes multiple examples of it. But the consensus in OT scholarship is that God’s tact on warning us against polygamy is to provide numerous examples of how it goes poorly. There are no Biblical examples of men taking multiple wives where it does not cause them problems. [9] And, of all the brothers, and all their wives, this the baby produced by this lurid little affair becomes the line of the great Davidic monarchy and of the Messiah. More on this later. [10] We have laid out our messages for Genesis, and in 18 passages that we are going to teach, this is the only one where we think the author is actually holding up a character as a moral example to be imitated. [11] And, worse, derive moral principles from it. [12] Actually, he cries 5 times in the larger story. [13] The relation of Tamar’s twins is curious. One of the themes of Genesis (and the Hebrew Scriptures in general) is that God is not held to cultural convention or expectation. Not once, does he select the oldest son to propagate his people, with the possible exception of Perez. But not really, because it is not entirely clear who the first born is between Perez and his brother…which goes beyond flaunting the cultural expectation that the first born has primacy to the point of almost mocking the convention. [14] “From a distance, the world may appear neatly divided into guilty and perpetrators and innocent victims. But the closer we get the more the line between the guilty and the innocent blurs and we see an intractable maze of small and large hatreds, dishonesties, manipulations and brutalizes, each reinforcing the other…Paul strips down the pretense of innocence.” (p 81) [15] Now anyone who reads the Bible knows God favors the oppressed and calls us to do the same. But Volf argues that that is an epistemological favor, and a call to end opression, not a moral or intrinsic prefernce. The key to Christian interactions with power structures is we must act on behalf of the oppressed without loosing the humanity of the oppressor. [16] It smacks of “they had it coming”. [17] And it is not just his treatment of his brothers. It is clear from the story that he uses his God given insight not just to provide relief to Egypt and the surrounding countries, but to extort the working people of those nations and enrich the Pharaoh at their expense. There are two attempts I have seen to defend Joseph’s actions here: 1) he puts the serfdom tax at 20% which is a relatively light burden compared to what he could have required or 2) Goldengay suggests he was just deeply committed to ‘nationalization’ of the agriculture industry to moderate boom-bust cycles (which is hilarious given the animosity US evangelicals have for ‘nationalization’ – and I suggest that this is primarily an attempt at tongue-in-cheek, wink at us by a cheeky brit). But it is this policy that eventually leads to the enslavement of the Hebrews and the necessity of the exodus. So I am inclined to think it was a ‘moral blind spot’ for Joseph, like his vengeance. Now, I can’t believe anyone is still reading this note, but this also illustrates something else I believe. It is difficult to quantify moral or spiritual maturity because it is not univariate. Joseph was sexually virtuous and had business integrity but struggled with unforgiveness and, um, oppression. It doesn’t make him a villain or a hero. It makes him a person. But we tend to overvalue the moral categories we are good at in order to evaluate ourselves as ‘good people’ and undervalue the stuff we suck at. We cannot be plotted neatly on a univariate scale of goodness. We all have moral blind spots. [18] Genesis 38:26 This is reminiscent of the story of Nathan and David. [19] And this is probably more than just petty jelousy. Leah’s story is the tale of a woman mistreated by all the men in her life, who responds with bitterness and her own vengeance, until she finally finds a love that will not fail or mistreat her in Yahweh. So you could see how Leah’s 6 sons would hold a grudge against Rachel’s side of the family. [20] Actually, Eprhium, Joseph’s son. [21] And Tamar!!!!! Which is just great. Judah is selected to be the tribe of promise, but through their patriarch’s messieiest relationship. As I argued at the beginning, it is a story of redemption in spite of…and often even leveraging crass brokenness. As Joseph himself famously said “What you meant for evil, God meant for good.” God’s periodic use of evil to bring about a good good does not condone the evil, but is meant to take the sting out of it until he undoes it for good.
One of the marks of my generation – a mark I share - is a general incapacity for sentimentality. This means that many of the social commitments that used to be enforced by sentimental notions of faith, family, and duty are mysterious to us. So we end up having to re-craft these roles out of motivations that either emerge from idealist notations of the true, good, and beautiful or out of our pragmatic impulses for self preservation. We usually default to the latter and it usually ends up looking something like this[1]:
Pete: You don't ever think about divorce?
Ruxin: I've thought about it. But I would never do it.
Pete: What, you have like a moral stipulation ...
Ruxin: No. If Sophia and I split up, 50 percent of the time I would have to spend 100 percent of my time with my kid. Right now, I'm rocking like 50 percent coverage 30 percent of my time, you cannot beat those numbers. Also - If we got a divorce, she would get half of my money, making me ostensibly poor, yet still paying her to just get pounded by other dudes, which will happen because she is still smoking hot, whereas I look like a Nazi propaganda cartoon.
And even when we are inspiring, we are not very inspiring.[2]
Yet the divorce rate has been steadily dropping since the 1980’s.[3] We are the children of divorce of the friends of children of divorce. We know sentimentality won’t carry us for decades but we know the fallout of breaking a family sucks. There is a great scene in a French film from a couple years ago[4] where a dying hedonist is talking to the woman engaged to his son, a man with a wandering heart of his own:
Daughter in Law: When I met Sebastien, I said: With him it's forever, there'll be no one else.
Dying Man: I hope it lasts, for your sake. Because, you know, love...
Daughter in Law: No, no, no! Not "love." Mom and Dad talked like that. "Love." I love you. I love you too much. I don't love you. You can't build a life on pop-song philosophy. Love Me Tender. Love, Love Me Not. It's ridiculous. My parents divorced when I was 7. For several years Dad continued to come over for Sunday lunch. Half an hour before he left, I'd vanish. I'd be lying on the ground in front of his car so he couldn't leave. My kids won't go through that. So now my nocturnal pleasures are provided by my giant-screen Toshiba at the foot of my bed.
But deep down, we want to believe that there is something beyond pragmatic resignation.[5] While sentimentality seems foolish, we are a generation that longs to be part of something transcendent.[6]
Which brings me to Father’s day, yet another artifact of a generation that found ways to not only build a life on sentimentality but also built an economy on sentimentality. This Father’s day is a little different for me, because two weeks ago we had our third kid.[7] That’s a lot of kids for a couple of pragmatic Xers who thought zero sounded like a pretty good number 15 years ago. But that is kind of the point. Making the move from sentimentality to pragmatism was not enough for me.[8] I had to go beyond pragmatism to purpose and beauty before I could even entertain the idea of children. I needed a picture of reality that intrinsically[9] ennobled parenthood. I needed a theology of children.
I needed to recognize that I was designed to live for someone else and I needed to stare down the fear of failure and accept the challenge of working with God (and, often, against our cultural inertia) to raise agents of justice, kindness, curiosity, beauty and the gospel in a generation that will be lovely and broken in ways we cannot yet imagine. These fundamental commitments have moved parenthood from pragmatic resignation punctuated by moments of happiness to an ennobling passion and one of the great joys[10] of my life.
This post was written while listening to The New Pornographers station[11] on Pandora
_______________________ [1] From the hilarious, but crass FX comedy “The League” which follows four high school friends who stay connected through a fantasy football league. [2] So many great lines: “She told me many stories about the chinchilla in her class room.” “Do you want to know why your father spends so long on the toilet. Because he’s not sure he wants to be a father.” “So I got up off the toilet.” [3] This is just one of the things that infuriates me when boomers b&m about ‘kids these days’ and how Xers are ruining the world. We are not innocent. We have our unique generational sins. But we have redeemed some of the brokenness of those who are reluctantly bequeathing this world to us…and are not, on balance, more broken. [4]The Barbarian Invasions [5] This is why so many of us wait so long to have kids. My brother likes to say that the benefits of marriage are easy to foresee while the disadvantages are difficult to predict…while children are just the opposite: the advantages are impossible to foresee and the disadvantages are obvious. [6] We are just unwilling to pretend. [7] A boy. But it really bugs me when people say ‘you finally got your boy.’ We were not ‘trying for a boy.’ We decided to have a third child. My girls are amazing and I would have loved a third. Or, as it stands, it will be fun to experience raising both. Also, I'll use this as my excuse for a recently quiet blog...though it is really only part of it. [8] We were married 9.5 years before we had kids because (a) we didn’t want them and (b) we didn’t think wanting them was a good enough reason to have them. [9] You will even notice a little of this intrinsic argument that ‘this is what we were designed to do’ in Louis C.K.’s monologue. [10] I have written a couple posts about the unexpected joys of parenthood: here and here [11] I once posted a facebook status that read: “I wish I either lived in a universe where I did not like The New Pornographers or that they had a different name.” It spawned a lively discussion.
This is the Honey Badger…He doesn’t give a s#$%![1]
At 5 million views[2], it is likely that you have already seen this. But what you may or may not have seen is the connection between the climactic confrontations with the King Cobra @2:33…and Easter. Of course that is the sort of essential analysis you have come to expect from this little blog.
The first time I saw this clip, all I could think about was Gen 3:14-15 known as the protoevangelium:
14 So the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,
“Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. 15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
Historically, Christians have seen in this verse, the seeds of the entire story…an epic foreshadowing of the entire narrative. Humans would live at odds with each other and a malevolent cosmic force until a special human child will take it on and bring down this enemy at huge personal cost. [3] “He will crush your head and you will strike his heal.”
That’s right, in this analogy, the Honey Badger is Jesus. The story of Holy Week is that a cosmic champion in mortal personhood [4] plays out this script from the opening pages of the Hebrew Scriptures. He takes down the serpant but is mortally wounded in the process.
The days that passed between the cross and the resurrection are like the moments in the video where our hero, the Honey Badger, is overcome by the snake bite[5]. In those seeming interminable clicks of the YouTube clock, his bravery looks like foolishness.[6] We don’t have the data to do the toxicology in our heads but we know that the King Cobra is mythically deadly. Surely the Honey Badger could not survive that. The first time I watched this clip, I mourned the protagonist in those moments, sure he was dead. But he knows something about being a Honey Badger that we don’t. He is actually far more bad ass than we ever guessed.
And that is the story of Holy Week. Jesus lets the serpent bite him instead of us…because he can take it. He can emerge on the other side of death and wrap up his victory over the decimated serpent.
In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (another, more intentional, illustration of the events of Holy Week), when Aslan emerges from death, he says:
“Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know.[7] Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation.[8] She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack[9] and Death itself would start working backward."
The Honey Badger’s fearlessness (he really doesn’t give a s$#%) is motivated by appropriate confidence that the serpent mortal bite can only inflict a fleeting death…that he will emerge the victor[10] and that the cost is worth the prize. It is a deeply flawed illustration[11], but one that I has captured my imagination this week. I hope that you find this weekend reflective and life giving.
This post was written while listening to The Suburbs by The Archade Fire __________________________ [1] So, there is more colorful language in my latest two posts than in the previous hundred. This should not be considered a trend (though I really want to work a Tim Minchum song into a post I am working on…so there might be a little more to come). [2] And rightly so. This is a perfect YouTube clip because it works on two levels. The narration is hilarious but the Honey Badger really is remarkable. It works on the levels of joy and wonder, two of the fuels of our humanness. [3] Revelation 12 paints the picture of these events as an epic battle between a cosmic champion and a serpentine dragon. I am working on a post about how this chapter is like Lost episode 118. [4] As long as we are making strained comparisons between the gospel accounts and a silly four minute YouTube clip…the comparison is actually uncanny. Jesus spends the first half to 2/3rds of the gospel texts declaring a new mode of humanness and a new reign of Yahweh…demonstrating his authority over the dark forces that plague our existence. Then each of these texts spends a disproportionate amount of time on the climactic confrontation in the final week. This is not unlike the Honey Badger wreaking havoc on lesser serpents and vermin in the first half of the clip and then turns to the climactic death to life battle at the end. [5] This is really the only place where I question the artistic choices of our skilled narrator. He shows his hand too quickly, not allowing the tension of the perceived death of our hero to strike us with full force. [6] Along the lines of Schweitzer’s ‘he threw himself against the cosmic wheel and it crushed him” Christology. [7] Note: The mystery of the Atonement is a rich and multi-faceted idea. In this post I am stressing the Christus Victor aspects of the doctrine (the oldest and most culturally foreign to us), as Lewis did in his story. However, this does not supplant the Anslelmic ‘satisfaction’ aspects of the cross that evangelicals are more familiar with or the ‘moral example’ implications that Liberal (capital L to indicate a precise theological movement not a political leaning) theologians prefer. Any theology of the cross that champions one of these to the neglect of the others is flawed. [8] My brother pointed out that the film changed this word from “a different incantation” to “another interpretation” and quipped: “a meditation on that script change will say everything about our culture and the caution I was trying to voice above” [9] There is a picnic spot in Davis, where I sometimes meet the girls for lunch to watch the trains, that is a big slab of rock split in two…we call it Aslan’s Table. [10] OK, one more strained parallel. In Christian theology, the cross and resurrection initiate the victory but, of course, the world in general and my heart in particular is still full of all manner of darkness. The victory is implemented over time. One author described the resurrection like D-Day. Once we took the French beach heads in WWII, the outcome of the war was determined. But there was still a lot of suffering, and work and war that was still ahead of them. Thus, after the climactic struggle with the King cobra, the Honey Badger turns his energy to a sustained program of snake eradication. [11] I’m not suggesting that we respond to the liturgical prompting “He is Risen” with “Yeah, the Honey Badger doesn’t give a s$%^.” And like all parables, it is only intended to illustrate a central idea – not to correspond to the prototype in every detail.
I have a new favorite show. Sadly, (if predictably) I’m late to the party and it was over before I started. But I am willing to careen into hyperbole and deem “The Wire” the best television drama of all time.
Now, it took me a while to warm up to The Wire. After each of the first three discs (4 episodes each) I gave up on it. But critical acclaim and repeated urgings from people I respect made me give it second, third and fourth chances. But by the end of the first season I was all in.
I eventually came to realize that the very thing that made the series difficult to get into was the thing that made it transcendent. It is a character driven exploration of human nature. In order to tell real, sustentative, narratives about textured, carefully crafted, characters that behave consistently and ‘ring true,’ we had to get to know them. But once we knew them, they were worth knowing. I didn’t anxiously await each disc to see how the writers would resolve some contrive plot cliff hanger[1]…I stayed up late watching ‘one more episode’ because I wanted to see who these people became.
And then there was Baltimore. I have said all I have to say about art that has a sense of place, but the wire is the prototype. Baltimore is as textured and gorgeous, despite and because of its grit[2] and decay as Omar, Freamon, Snoop or Stringer Bell[3].
It is impossible to summarize the series in a post. Do I write about the moments that left me stunned and literally breathless?[4] Do I write about the grief I felt as ‘the game’ claimed character after character with brutal capriciousness and with indiscriminate ferocity? Do I describe the pervasive corruption in the police, politics and press that mirror the wickedness of the street which succeeded in skirting a preachy and false moral equivalency while illustrating the pervasive fallenness of our condition despite our circumstances? Do I pick out the hilarious moments like the British actor who plays Jimmy practicing a bad British accent or every single monologue by Sgt Landsman that registered a 7.5 on the rictor scale of crassness but managed to be not only hysterical, but sublime? No idea. So I thought I’d just post a little commentary on four clips that contain four of my favorite quotes.
Quote #1 - Dan, my preaching partner, and I could not be more different musically. I openly mock him for his love of Sheryl Crowe and he has declared that my indifference for James Taylor is my most glaring personality disorder. But we agree that The Wire is probably the best television show ever…which makes it awkward that we both love a show we cannot recommend in the college ministry we serve.[5] Plus, we both love to illustrate our preaching with our favorite art, and can almost always think of a perfect Wire clip that is totally unusable. But this clip I plan to use.[6]
“You want it to be one way…but it’s the other way.”
There may not be a better summary of Genesis 3.[7]
Quote #2 And while we are talking about Marlo…Marlo is probably the most chilling character in the series. He is devastatingly understated…almost emotionless. Which is what made this scene so powerful:
That there is Marlo’s longest monologue of the show and the clearest insight we get into who he is.
Quote #3 Then there was Omar. Omar was, rightfully, the show’s most beloved character.[9] Picking a best Omar scene is almost impossible. But this one was great[10]:
“I shot the boy mike mike in his hind parts, that all.”
Quote #4 Finally, for all of great narrative and characters, The Wire was most powerful when it cashed in those narratives and characters to make some of the most powerful and precise observations about human nature I have encountered in contemporary small screen art. This is most compelling when the ‘heroes’ talk about ‘the job.’
““The job will not save you Jimmy.”
[11] ‘Righteousness’ can be as destructive as ‘wickedness.’ ‘The job’ can destroy you as sure as ‘the game.’[12] Tim Keller could have written this scene.
And a few more….
This post was written while listening to the Ivoryline Pandora station. ________________________
[1] Seriously, I loved Lost as much as the next guy, but I often felt manipulated.
[2] I am going to skip the whole ‘white guilt’ discussion. There were aspects of the wire that I appreciated because it drew attention to the ‘corner’ culture that my Buffalo kids interacted with. But The Wire isn’t great because of it provides a voyeuristic expose on urban life…the wire is great because it told stories that rung true and connected with my experiences of beauty and brokenness.
[3] Its funny how everyone else can be identified by a single name, but it takes two for “Russell.”
[4] E.g. the simultaneous tenderness and coldness of the Chris/Snoop executions. Or, one of my favorite scenes has two Baltimore drug dealers listening to Prairie Home Companion on their way to NY and one of them starts fiddling with the radio as the station begins to cut out. He thought it was broken. He’d never been far enough away from his corner to realize that radio stations are not static entities.
[5] I have written repeatedly about my frustration with HBO’s gratuitous exploration of ‘boob shots’ in what is otherwise excellent, nuanced, art. Also, I usually have a very high tolerance for words with social taboo, but I found myself thinking in a new and colorful vocabulary after banging through a couple discs of this show. Don’t get me wrong, the dialogue is amazing and the language is perfectly apt and believable, but there is one famous episode where the ‘dialogue’ consists of 38 F-bombs in a row (in about 3 minutes).
[6] I’m going to use the middle scene in the convenient store.
[7] Which I am preaching in the fall.
[8] One of the things I love about it is how it makes sense of a seemingly insignificant detail from a former season (this was always happening). There is a great scene when Marlo is in a power struggle with Bodie and decides to assimilate rather than destroy him. He walks up to Bodie and gets his name wrong a couple times. Bodie, responds “You know my name.” This all reminds me of the theme of Yahweh’s name and the demons asking Jesus his name and visa versa in the first and second testaments. It is the classic example of an illustration that ‘cuts the wrong way’ but there is a really interesting parallel here regarding name and power.
[9] SPOILER ALERT – IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE WHOLE SERIES DO NOT READ THIS FOOTNOTE– Nothing in this show was more controversial than Omar’s death. And, I felt outrage…because he was, in some ways, the show’s moral center. “A man has got to have a code.” But Omar had to die, and die unceremoniously, and pass without fanfare. That was the point. We loved Omar, because we knew him, but in the end, he was just another body. The rules were that ‘the game’ could and would claim everybody and an honorable life did not assure you an honorable death. Oh, and he was my favorite gay character in any art…ever.
[10] Though almost ruined by the overacting of the defense attorney.
[11] I think Freamon is my favorite character.
[12] There is an echo of this with Daniels, who has his S#$% together more than Jimmy, but still worships ‘the job’. ‘The job does not love you,’ in the mouth of his wife could be a straight up Keller Quote.
So, this is my 100th post…so I thought I’d do a Fragments and Links post to celebrate. Every once in a while I like to collect ideas, quotes and links that did not warrant their own post. This is one of those times. I like to start sentences with the phrase “speaking of…” to give the illusion of connection and coherence. But mainly it is just a bunch of things I think are interesting. Skimming is recommended:
Topic 1: Sex and Zombies(but not at the same time[1])
The OK Cupid blog[2] is worth checking out. The author has access to the data from a major dating site and essentially mines it for statistically interesting observations.[3] And some of them are VERY interesting.[4]
But this one was particularly interesting. He chose several questions that you might want to ask on a first date to get at information that is inappropriate to ask, looking for highly correlated information that it is socially acceptable to ask about.
For example, do you want to know if your date would consider sex with you on the first date but don’t have the bad manners to ask? Ask “do you like the taste of beer?” Answers to these questions are amazingly highly correlated.
The analysis gets more bizarre from there. But one question was particularly interesting: “Are you religious?”
Try to guess the correlated question. ...got it?
Here it is: “Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?” I was crestfallen. Seriously? People of faith (and presumably, Christians, as it is an American data set) are marked by their legalism and attention to behaviors that don’t matter? So lame. But wait, the question COUNTER-correlates. People of faith are significantly LESS likely to care about spelling and grammar mistakes. This was refreshing to me and should not be surprising to the frequent readers of this blog.
Speaking of having sex on the first date…my brother has documented some of his thoughts on the economics of modern sexuality and how it has been characterized by the “de-unionization of women.” It is a sober analysis (particularly for the father of two girls), but I have two favorite quotes:
“The functional value of male sex is zero.” “this meant that the R&D cost of switching partners was high”
Speaking of my brother, he has a talk in which he asks the listeners to vote on the following question: Are we are mostly composed of “nature” or “personality”? (i.e. are we more like other humans or more uniquely ourselves)[5]: I think that this needs to be considered in that discussion.
Now I am an unapologetic facebook apologist, but while we are recognizing its flaws, it seems like this needs to be cited.
So as a Buffy fanboy, the current vampire craze leaves me with a “been there done that an order of magnitude better” feeling. But I have recently made a surprising entre into the zombie world. John Green’s opening chapter (which he reads in the below vid) of his zombie apocalypse novella is nothing short of gorgeous:
He released the complete novella “Zombicorns” online with the disclaimer that it is horrible. I disagree.[6] I really liked it. And you can bang it out in an hour.
This work probably resonated with me more than it might have because I have spent a good deal of time thinking about Zombie epidemiology. Two Canadian professors did an epidemiological study of how a zombie epidemic would spread. We learned about epidemiological modeling in one of my ecology classes and, while the prof never mentioned zombies, it was all I could think about.
For future reference, if you ever find yourself giving a dull lecture on epidemiological modeling and how that could interface with Lottka-Voltera predator-prey dynamics and you do not use zombies as your model organism, you can just consider it a breach of pedagogical responsibility.
A couple more things about the vlogbrothers (who are John Green of the zombie novella above and his brother Hank) I just realized why the intro to the old vlogbrother videos is familiar:
This is one of the things I like about these guys. They celebrate non-romantic love and deconstruct the centrality and ubiquity of the romantic connotations of this embattled word. Consider this line from a recent vlog by John.
“Valentine’s day is one of the most potent symbols of our weird obsession with romantic love…if you spend your life singularly obsessed with romantic love you are going to miss out on a lot of what’s fun about being a person.”
****Technical Language Alert**** (This is like a spoiler alert – it allows you to skip to the “end” of the section if it seems unnecessarily obtuse)
One more John Green quote that I really like. "for me fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true." - John Green
I really resonate with his epistemology even though I’m not entirely on board ontologically. John and I see the epistemological problem the same way (and we have a good deal of psychological research to back us up). We do not know most of what we know because we do not actually remember most of what we remember. The brain is a reconstitution software telling stories from relatively few fixed points of actual stored data. But I don't agree that fiction is the only way to deal with this. I think that spiritual disciplines have surprising utility in circumventing this problem. You could make an evolutionary case that this is why they exist…but I prefer the teleological version of this argument: That we were designed to require a regular calibration from a fixed external reality.
****End Technical Language alert****
Speaking of fun Youtube subculture…this is just about the greatest short film I have ever seen.
Topic 2: Weird Science
Speaking of[7] science that is part fun part serious and it is hard to tell how to partition it: I recently encountered the famous Pleistocene Rewilding paper. This is a paper that appeared in Nature (2005) and argued that our ecosystems are degraded because palo-native-Americans hunted the Pleistocene mega-fauna (mastodons and the “American cheetah”) to extinction. Mega-fauna (lions, elephants and cheetah) are also endangered in Africa. So the paper (which was co-authored by over a dozen professors from good programs) argues that we could ‘kill two birds’ with one stone by introducing the megafauna of Africa to the American plains. This is seemingly too bizarre to be true, but there it is in the pages of nature.[8]
Speaking of bizarre science and ‘killing two birds with one stone’…or rather unkilling birds (which also puts me in line with the zombie theme) I have also learned of active attempts to reconstitute lost species(like the passenger pigeon and the auroch[9]) by isolating them genetically from their closes living relatives.
As absurd as these ideas are, one quote at the end of the Rewilding paper really struck me. The authors pose the question: “We ask of those who find the objections compelling, are you content with the negative slant of current conservation philosophy?” I guess this articulates some of my frustration with my initial foray into conservation biology. There is a lot of gloom and a conspicuous lack of innovation. In many ways, it is a ‘conservative’ science. (I mean, there is a guiding principle called "the precautionary principle"). I know that this smacks of engineering arrogance. But I guess that is what makes me an engineer. I got into science to bring it to bear on social and environmental problems. These ideas may be absurd, but my inclination is to evaluate them with a hopeful rather than antagonistic posture…because the current trajectory is entirely hopeless. Which leads me to climate change… …the climate change story is as bad or worse than the biodiversity crisis. I have very little hope that human behavior will change in time to avoid an eventual total collapse of marine ecosystems.[10] Sociology is not going to fix this. In light of this, too little emphasis and too little research funding is going to technology. There is an excellent and accessible paper in Nature that lays out the relative potential of the options currently on the table. I am not a Steven Levitt fan, but he is getting unnecessarily criticized for essentially making the economic argument that we need to start thinking seriously about technological solutions.
Topic 3: Creativity and Music
Several months ago I wrote about the creative process and how most creatives I know or have read about live in constant fear of loosing the ability to tap into whatever it is that makes them creative. Elizabeth Gilbert did a whole TED talk on this that had two really interesting ideas:
1. This is why creatives go mad or turn to addiction or end their lives at a disproportionally high rate. The seemingly fleeting and capricious nature of creativity leaves them powerless.
2. She posits instead a personal version of this force that you can and should talk to…giving responsibility back. This generates a psychological distance between you and the art you participate in and protects you from it. If you work was good or bad, it didn’t reflect on you. “This is how creativity was viewed in the western world for a really long time.” There was a change from having a Genius[11] to being a Genius. “That was a huge error”
Speaking of TED talks I liked, there is also this one.
I feel like the movie Hurt Locker is an artistic expansion of one of the most compelling lines in Audience of One” by Rise Against: “Maybe we've outgrown all the things that we once loved.”
I wrote a bit about Sufjan’s new album and concert a couple months ago. My friend Justin has registered a pretty accurate critique of the new stuff: “It’s like Sufjan got drunk and made an album with Animal Collective, and then they never bothered to edit the raw tracks”
I have watche a little bit of Bones and a little bit of Castle recently and have decided that they are essentially the same show. Take a tall, attractive, professionally exemplary woman who lives by logic and algorithm and put them opposite an intuitive, gregarious Joss Wheddon leading man…boom…you have a show that is not great, but watchable. I think this pretty much sums up why this formula works.
I have been listening to a ton of Brand New lately. Love them. Their track “Jesus Christ” (off The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me) is amazing.
“We’ve all got wood and nails, we’re tongue tied to a hating factory”
Stuff I am working on:
-The Surprising Similarity of Two Uneven Finales: The Final Episodes of Lost and Battlestar Galactica
-“My Name is My Name”: Thoughts on The Wire
-The Two Great Manipulations: Fear and Guilt from the Right and the Left
-Photobox Stratigraphy
-Cities: New Orleans
-A Monte Carlo Statistical Analysis of Hi-Ho Cherry Oh!
-Backloading the Backstory to Maximize Narrative Utility: How Lost Episode 118 is like Revelation Chapter 12
-Theo-Coleoptaphelia: Upon further review, “An inordinate fondness for beetles” is precisely what I would expect
-The Secret World of River Gravel: A Photographic Expose of Riverine Benthic Communities (in 40X Magnification)
-We’ve Been Here Before, and It Wasn’t Good: Climate Change Precedent in the PETM[12]
This post was written while listening to God and the Devil are Raging Inside of Me by Brand New
[4] Including the standard confusion between correlation and causation.
[5] This is a really interesting exersize, because if we are mostly like other humans, a universal worldview is more likely to be useful because we mostly have the same hopes, fears, and weaknesses. However, if we are all unique snowflakes, then it is absurd to think that one prescription of ‘disease’ and ‘remedy’ could hold universally. Of course, modern psychology has demonstrated that much of our drama stems from our failure to recognize that “we are not as special as we think we are.”
[6] Actually, I picked up a couple of his “real books”, and while I like An Abundance of Katherines and Will Grayson they were not nearly was not as good as Zobiecorns.
[7] You have to go back to the Zombie paper to pick up this train of thought.
[8] I have since learned that most of the authors saw it as a ‘thought experiment’ and not a real study.
[9] The ancestor of the cow. I told my friend Mark this story and he replied “that seems like a species no one has missed.”
[10] The tragic thing about these effects is that they will be locked in in the next 150 years and then will play out for the following two thousand. I am pretty skeptical that standard economic and sociological forces are efficacious against a lagged process.
[11] Which was a spirit that essentially chose to posses the artist.
[12] The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum is the only event anything like a historical precedent for the carbon loadings we are putting into the atmosphere. It provides a template for what the long term effects of our impact will be…and it’s not good news.
And this is what has happened with Joseph. His brothers’ evil against him has made him into them.
And even when we are inspiring, we are not very inspiring.
