Tag: Christianity

Week 4: 2024 June 17-23

Good week overall! It already feels like the summer is going too quickly. Only one more week before I’m back in the office prepping for the school year.

Note: The above title does not indicate which week of the year we’re in. I’m just trying to keep track of how many weeks this year I’ve managed to write a weekly review.

Grad School

This is the summer of exams. I will take my doctoral exams in October this year. I spent much of my time in the spring semester developing a long (~70 texts) reading list. I’ve got a good routine going right now: I wake up around 5am to read and study for 1.5 to 2 hours–it all depends on when the kids wake up. It’s a habit I’ve carried over from the previous semester. Unfortunately, even two hours a day doesn’t seem like enough. Right now, I’m struggling to work my way through Ovid’s Metamorphoses…but for good reason!

I’m also trying to use this blog as a way of reflecting on my reading for the exams. Having a public space to formally write down my observations will only help to solidify my thoughts and ideas around the reading list. It also keeps me in some form of writing practice. The thing that will stop me from being consistent is the tension I always feel between reading and writing. Time spent writing is time I can’t spend reading. And since my available time for academic study is severely limited, every minute feels precious. However, I realize that this is a bit of a false dichotomy. If I don’t reflect on my reading, I won’t get much out of it. Hopefully I can find a balance within the next couple months.

Books

Metamorphoses, Ovid: I still haven’t finished re-reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I’m just Book 13. Despite how much I want to quickly move on to the next set of readings on my exam lists, I can’t help but linger over the rich and complex narrative structure Ovid has created.

Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan: This book will stay with me for the foreseeable future. I still haven’t finished reading it yet, which means I still haven’t fully digested the arguments and observations McLuhan is making about technology and the way it affects human society and psychology. It has been one of those books that I immediately wanted to write and talk about after reading the first page. He’s one of those writers who states an idea so clearly it lights up the mind with a host of other realizations. I’m also still blown away by the fact that McLuhan wrote this book in 1964. The first sentence alone would’ve made me think he had written it as late the the 1990s. There is no mention of the “internet,” but he saw it coming.

Movies & TV

American Fiction: I really enjoyed this film. It was, in some ways, a cathartic experience watching the main character navigate the politics of literary elites. The screen writers and director did not pull any punches. But the thing that really fascinated me was the stack of books on the desk of Monk Elllison’s agent. There is an enormous pile of A Barfield Reader very prominently placed on the desk. Why?! What is going on there? I need answers. A brief Googling search was unhelpful. My guess is that I need to read the novel that the film was based on. Until then, I’ll be haunted by the possible implications.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, s1e1: I read the book a few years ago, and I’m very happy to get back into the world of English magic. So far so good! Both Strange (Bertie Cavell) and Norrell (Eddie Marsan) have been well-cast.

Sports

It’s a soccer summer! I’ll be following the Europe Cup and the Copa America. I really don’t know what to expect from the USMNT, and England has been very disappointing so far.

My favorite YouTube channel for post-game reviews is FourFourTwo. Adam Clery’s videos are always insightful–see his latest review of England’s very sad performance against Denmark. As someone who doesn’t know very much about football/soccer, I’ve been learning a lot from Adam about strategy and play formation on the pitch.

Also, just started watching this documentary on Liverpool, and this first interview with Liverpool’s new head coach, Arne Slot.

The Blog

I mentioned this in the Grad School section, but I’m working on blogging my way through some of my reading for exam prep. Right now, I’m thinking a lot about Ovid’s Metamorphoses:

I’m also posting some quotations and short reflections on my read through of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media:

Post-Literacy

I’ve now read two pieces on the idea of “post-literacy” which require some digestion.

First, I should clarify what I mean by “post-literate.” This is a term that has its roots in Marshall McLuhan’s book Gutenburg Galaxy. To say that we are living in a “Post-literate age” does not mean that people have suddenly lost the ability to read, nor does it suggest that modern society has reverted to a pre-literate age (e.g., an age governed by oral tradition). Rather, it’s a term reckons with the fact that our technological and social moment has largely replaced the reading of the written word with images, radio/audio, tweet-size text, scrolling, etc.

Recent data, not to mention my own and fellow teachers’ set of anecdotal evidence, appears to support this new reality. No one is reading.

…that is, no one is reading the way people in a Western society were reading between (say) the centuries 1500-1950s-ish. The reason is fairly straight forward: the printed word is no longer the primary media by which people learn or engage in the public square.

We live in an age which has undergone and is undergoing a seismic shift in literacy comparable to the age in which Gutenberg invented the printing press. In the same way that the printing press made cheap books available to the average person in the 16th century, the smartphone has been made available to almost everyone in the 21st century. Everyone, from panhandlers to elementary-aged students, have access to a device that prioritizes images and audio over the written word.

This brings me to the first article by Michael Cuenco. Cuenco outlines Marshall McLuhan’s philosophy of media and the effects it has on society through history. One of the main takeaways from Cuenco’s essay (…and there are many takeaways) is the idea that revolutions in technological modes of literacy have a direct influence on social and individual psychology.

A literacy within a “pre-literate society” was defined by oral modes of storytelling and the carrying of messages. Within a McLuhanian framework, “oral man” exhibits an epistemic literacy in which time and space are cyclical/simultaneous, knowledge and wisdom are integrative and associative. This mode of being contrasts sharply with “literate man” for whom the written word represents an epistemic literacy that is linear, sequential, and analytic.

Human civilization in the West has already moved from an oral to a literate stage thanks, in part, to the development of writing systems. One only needs to read Plato’s Phaedrus to recognize that even the ancients recognized and worried about the potential psychological impact of “writing.” In its early days, the fledgling writing system had a relatively small effect on society at large. Acquiring books, manuscripts, parchment, etc. was expensive and hard to come by. Much of the population remained illiterate. All of this changed, however, with the invention of the printing press. Books were cheaper and more easily accessible, therefore more people learned to read. Society as a whole made the leap from being predominately oral to literate. The consequences of this shift worked itself out over centuries, but it’s no accident (McLuhan and Cuenco would argue) that the transition eventually led to the “Age of Reason” and “Enlightenment.” The written word, particularly in the form of a bound volume, is an image of the rationality itself–linear, progressive, and imbued with telos. As an image, the book eschews the simultaneity time, and the associative and integrative epistemology of myth.

According to Cuenco, McLuhan’s argument is that the technological developments of the mid-twentieth century–specifically with the advent of television–mark another moment in human history where the emergence of a new technology will accelerate a transition from one age to another. We are on the brink of passing into a “post-literate age” which take on many of the characteristics of the “oral age” while retaining elements of the “literate age.” Much of McLuhan’s work is centered on trying to understand how and why this transition will take place. He warns that the transition is not a guarantee of future success. We are headed either for a new mode of consciousness that has learned to balance the oral with the literate, or we are headed for a “post-literate perdition.”

In a recent essay for Christianity Today, Brad East takes McLuhan’s arguments and applies them to recent upheavals and hand-wringing in Christian culture. Here are a few highlights:

First, we are in the midst of a seismic technological shift that has already shaken the ground beneath Christians’ feet. We should not continue pretending that the old world is still with us. This includes the nature of ordinary believers’ relationship to the Bible.

Perhaps we need to reimagine what “biblical literacy” can mean: not necessarily the reading and rereading of one’s personal Bible, but a mind, imagination, and vocabulary shot through with the stories and characters and events of Holy Scripture.”

These suggestions are tentative, as I said. I’m open to others, as all of us should be. But alternative visions are what we need. Christians have not always been readers, and it seems that for the foreseeable future, a majority of Christians will not be readers anymore. Discerning a durable form of faithfulness for this new and uncertain time is one of the pressing challenges of our day.

Insofar as the Protestant reformation was made possible, in part, by the printing press, and its theological battles took place within the height of the literate age, Brad’s observations make perfect sense. Having grown up in the evangelical world of the 90s and early 2000s, I have felt the shift. Reading my Bible everyday was a requirement, and I had many friends who did the same. This was how you developed a personal relationship with Jesus.

And yet, within a McLuhan framework, it’s worth noting that the idea that reading a book was essential for my spiritual development is a holdover from the literate age. And it’s a little bit of an odd fundamental of faith when compared to the rest of church history. Many saints and martyrs were functionally illiterate. McLuhan’s observation doesn’t invalidate the practice of reading the Bible everyday, but it does contextualize the overt social pressure to do so.

As East points out, this fundamental of protestant Christianity has not escaped the changing literacy landscape. Very few people–especially in the younger generation–are reading their Bibles anymore. At least, they are not reading them the way that I was taught to read the Bible when I was growing up. There are real negative effects of this change, many of which East points out.

But I agree with East: we must make our peace with this new post-literate reality, and start to ask difficult questions about what we should accommodate and what we should reject if we are to continue to encourage people in discipleship and spiritual growth.

As an educator, I want to also shift my focus to classical education: how should we approach reading, writing, math, and science instruction in an age where very few students read? Should we double-down on forcing students to read physical copies of long books? If so, how many? What is the good we hope to preserve by setting a rigorous curriculum that requires reading? Is reading itself an inherent good?

If nothing else, we have to ask questions that will help us navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of bull-headed conservatism (“If it was good enough for grandpa, then its good enough for me!”) and uncritical progressivism.

the imprudence of having children

From Leah Libresco’s latest Other Feminisms:

One thought is it’s great because the scriptures tell us that we “bring nothing to the table” but our own need in our relationship with God. Nothing but our own sins—a cost to him. A newborn is an approximation of that—a human who is utterly unable to give us anything but need. (and those needs often trouble us greatly.) Yet often we are happy to do something for them.

Haley chimed in:

Vikki offered a response to my question “What do you make of the claim that the unearned love a baby receives is our bulwark against despair?”

Cultural and economic issues aside, that’s why (on average) Christians have more children. We can make wise choices about family, but in the end we aren’t after the most seamless, streamlined, most controlled life there is. We don’t despair of life. It’s worth inviting children into, because they are signs of hope and the goodness of the life we’ve been gifted.

I think Haley is right here. Christians have room to be imprudent by worldly measures, because we believe that we aren’t limited to only our own resources and efforts. I’ve heard a number of stories of mendicant orders who said “Yes” to a need of their community without the financial means to support it, and then received an unsolicited donation for exactly the amount needed.

Understandably, parents don’t take the same risks, because they’re not just putting themselves on the line. But being a parent requires a certain level of comfort with risk (I write, eyeing my daughter’s learning tower warily).

C.S. Lewis: Passing the Baton

From Brad East:

There are subjects that Lewis did not address or articulate as well as he did others; these remain for others to elaborate or expand upon. He is not, it seems to me, especially trustworthy on politics. His ecclesiology is thin. Though he can be quite good on sex and gender, at other times he is bad, and occasionally he is plain weird. In his time he was on the threshold—knowingly—of a truly post-Christian society. It was already present in the people, but the trappings remained in law, education, and culture. No longer. What does it mean to take up the baton from him? That is, to evangelize a re-paganized West at once post-Christian and anti-Christian yet also somehow formally and thus morally and spiritually Christian (without knowing or acknowledging it)?

That, so far as I can tell, is the question to ask. Not least because it’s the question he’d be asking. I don’t have hope that there will be another like him anytime soon. But God has done stranger things. At any rate, we can give God thanks for doing the altogether strange thing of converting Lewis to Christ. Lord knows Lewis is on the short list of reasons why I am a believer. How many others can say the same?

This seems exactly right to me, and one of the reasons I’m so invested in classical education. I don’t think the genius of Lewis can be understood–though it might be felt–without having read widely in pagan mythology and literature.

But I’m also grateful for his articulation of the places where I think Lewis falls short in his philosophcial and apologetic writings. My own relationship with Lewis has taken the shape of a U: I found his apologetics in my teens and began to read him as an ideal Christian apologist, then when my own education began to (fractionally) catch up with Lewis’s own educational background, I started to feel much less enthusiastic. As Brad notes, some of Lewis’s views are just weird.

But I’m now at a point where I find him invaluable. Especially as a model of how a robust grounding in classical literature and philosophy can enrich a person’s spiritual life.

More importantly, if we hope to see the baton of Lewis’s intellectual legacy passed on, then I–as a parent and teacher–will need to ensure that I’ve set laid the groundwork ahead of time. I won’t become Lewis–it’s too late for me. But my son and daughters might.

A Sunday of Orthodoxy

Hieromonk Gabriel on the meaning of this Sunday of Orthodoxy:

This fallen world instills in us the idea that truth is the field of scholars, whereas the Church teaches us that truth is the field of the saints. It was at the very hour of His crucifixion (toward which we are now journeying) that Christ declared to the uncomprehending Pilate: “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth” (John 18:37). And until we ourselves have come to the hour of our own crucifixion, standing condemned before the judgment seat of the uncomprehending world, we will never be able to bear witness to the truth by our own experiential knowledge of Him Who is the Truth, of Him Who was crucified. Until that hour, we know the truth only by hearsay.