In case you haven’t been notified yet, let me be the first to break the news. Ranch style houses are cool! I mean officially cool, complete with their own trend being analyzed by news stories, two different hip magazines documenting their coolness, and great big books filled with pictures of them.

It’s safe to say this trend is aggressively retro, even revisionist. It only works because the conventional wisdom of the past few decades is so clearly that ranch-style houses are ubiquitous, undesireable, and nothing special. As soon as our culture reaches a consensus of taste, you can count on the polymorphously perverse to get out there and subvert that dominant paradigm.

So let the backlash begin: (more…)

The new issue (Summer 06) of Cultural Encounters: A Journal for the Theology of Culture is now available. If you haven’t seen this journal, check it out: it’s new, so ask your school library to pick it up. Editor Paul Louis Metzger and his team bring together articles that carry on “a biblically informed, Christ-centered trinitarian engagement of contemporary culture.” As a contributing editor, I’ll be writing articles and book reviews for it from time to time.

The current issue publishes my article “Don Giovanni: The Absolute Man and the Patience of God,” which is a theological interpretation of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Here are the first couple of pages, which set up the problem posed by the opera:

Something strange, and theologically significant, happens when you listen to Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The peculiar phenomenon I have in mind has been reported by ordinary music lovers as well as by some of the most insightful critics ever to ponder the work of Mozart. What happens is this: Don Giovanni performs despicable acts of exploitation, seduction, and violence right before our eyes, and we enjoy every minute of it. It is not that we, the audience, are tricked into approving of the actions. They remain loathsome in themselves, and we are never invited to think of the Don as anything but a rogue. Nor is it that we merely anticipate with relish the final judgment which we know awaits the Don, with its reassertion of moral equilibrium: “This is the end which befalls evildoers, and in this life, scoundrels always receive their just deserts.” Either of these possibilities might explain how we could be pleased by watching the actions of a villain, but neither of them is quite as singular as what occurs in Don Giovanni. The pleasure delivered by this opera is something else, something unique and central to this work so frequently hailed as “the perfect opera.”
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All of us here at Middlebrow are spending the next couple of weeks working with Emmaus Forum, a summer program for Christian high school students. For this group, I temporarily remove my theologian hat and put on an artistic beret, introducing students to the world of the visual arts, lecturing on art appreciation, and leading a field trip to the Getty Center.

I think that if you learn to look at visual art, you develop receptive and interpretive skills that will serve you well in reading books, relating to people, and hearing from God. What matters is clearing your mind of preconceptions and receiving a message from outside. I try to teach the visual arts as a practice ground for exercising the powers of perception. Here at Emmaus Forum’s website is a video clip in which I draw the connection between seeing and understanding.

And here is a transcript of my remarks, in case you prefer reading to watching web video.

Why is the cat so happy? Whence his pleasing grin? This un-knock-down-able cat is composed of un-duplicate-able forms which only a five year old could assemble with such confidence and verve. No two legs alike! No two ears alike! A hint of symmetry about the ears and mouth, but no true symmetry! And a big empty belly for vittles. You’d be happy too.

(Note: The management apologizes for the lack of knight themes in this week’s drawing. Expect a return of medievalism soon.)

Just how did John Calvin become the epitome of evil in the minds of so many?

I suppose the full story is too long to tell, but here is one interesting chapter. American history textbooks for nearly two centuries portrayed him as evil. Historian Thomas Davis got this idea and then did all the patient work of digging through the textbooks to see how they handled Calvin. He wrote up his findings in “Images of Intolerance: John Calvin in Nineteenth-Century History Textbooks ,” in the journal Church History, Vol. 65, 1996.

Textbook Calvin, it turns out, is a bad man. We textbook readers only know two things about him: He burned a heretic at the stake, and he was a fanatic about his pet doctrine, predestination. Textbook Calvin’s very name functions as a “rhetorical negative,” which is to say, a kind of cuss word.
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On July 10 in 1509, John Calvin was born. Why not celebrate with a birthday party?

I am always astonished at the amount of anti-Calvin sentiment abroad in the world. I myself am a Wesleyan theologian, so there are a few key areas –maybe about 5– where I come into disagreement with Calvin. But that doesn’t keep me from putting Calvin on my short list of greatest theologians in the history of the church, up there with Athanasius, Augustine, and Aquinas (the A team). And when it comes to authorship, Calvin emerges from that elite pack as undisputed master, for two reasons: he’s the only one who wrote a book which is capable of discipling its reader and teaching the craft of theology. Reading Calvin’s Institutes is like becoming an apprentice to one of the world’s greatest theological craftsmen. The Confessions and the Summa Theologiae won’t do that for you (though they do a lot of other things well). Secondly, Calvin wrote a great quantity of biblical commentary which actually manage to take you deeper into the meaning of the passage he’s commenting on (a rare gift among accomplished theologians).

But people hate John Calvin; especially people who don’t know anything about him. Because popular bigotry against Calvin is so pervasive and deep-seated, I’d like to step aside and leave the task of defending him to a better essayist, Marilynne Robinson. Robinson is now justly famous for her 2004 novel Gilead, which won the Pulitzer. But back in 1998, she published a set of essays called The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought . One of the essays, entitled (oddly enough) “Marguerite de Navarre,” is her attempt to plead Calvin’s case against modern detractors.
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What’s a book about textual criticism, textual criticism of all things, doing on the NY Times bestseller list?

Don’t get me wrong, I find textual criticism fascinating, but that’s because it’s already far too late to save me from bookwormhood. I’m also gripped by the history of concordances, and have been known to read etymological dictionaries for kicks. I’m not embarrassed about that, but I don’t expect a lot of people to join me in my passion. And I don’t expect to find text crit books in the airport bookstore between Tom Clancy and Stephen King. Granted, the vocabulary of text crit consists of some of the coolest-sounding scholarly words you’ll ever hear: The Complutensian polyglot, Codex Cantabrigiensis, haplography, etc. And pioneers in the field include Indian Jones types with names like Constantin von Tischendorf. Who wouldn’t love that? Still, it’s hardly the stuff of bestsellers.

But along comes Bart D. Ehrman, with his new book Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. This book sells like ipods (faster than hotcakes, you know) and gets Prof. Ehrman on CNN, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, NPR’s Fresh Air, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show –okay, that last one is pretty odd. Text criticism (“Complutensian polyglot!” – not a good punchline) on The Daily Show (see it here). What’s going on?

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Transcription from the artist’s impromptu remarks about his own work:

They are enemies because they have different armor. Actually, look: that plate metal guy doesn’t have anything on his shield, and that mail armor guy has a lion rampant on his shield. That’s how they’re enemies.

Plate metal knight: “Hey knight, would you like to punch your head?”

(aside: “What if evil babies laughed like, heh heh heh heh heh…”)

Mail armor knight: “Hey, want to take your armor off? I won’t attack you…”

Plate metal knight: “… um… uh…. Hey, want to punch your head?”

Mail armor knight: “No, I don’t want to punch my head. Would you like to punch your head?”

Plate metal knight: “Hey, no.”

I can’t account for why this passage made me laugh so hard that my eyes teared up. It’s just funny. It’s from an early chapter in Robert Southey’s (1774-1843) sprawling and unclassifiable book The Doctor. The narrator, trying to fall asleep, tries one trick after another:

I put my arms out of bed. I turned the pillow for the sake of applying a cold surface to my cheek. I stretched my feet into the cold corner. I listened to the river, and to the ticking of my watch. I thought of all sleepy sounds and all soporific things: the flow of water, the humming of bees, the motion of a boat, the waving of a field of corn, the nodding of a mandarine’s head on the chimney-piece, a horse in a mill, the opera, Mr. Humdrum’s conversation, Mr. Proser’s poems, Mr. Laxative’s speeches, Mr. Lengthy’s sermons. I tried the device of my own childhood, and fancied that the bed revolved with me round and round. … At last Morpheus reminded me of Dr. Torpedo’s divinity lectures, where the voice, the manner, the matter, even the very atmosphere, and the streamy candle-light were all alike somnific; –where he who by strong effort lifted up his head, and forced open the reluctant eyes, never failed to see all around him fast asleep. Lettuces, cowslip-wine, poppy-syrup, mandragora, hop-pillows, spiders-web pills, and the whole tribe of narcotics, up to bang and the black drop, would have failed: but this was irresistible; and thus twenty years after date I found benefit from having attended the course.

Dr. Torpedo’s Divinity Lectures! Dr. Torpedo’s Divinity Lectures! Dr. Torpedo’s Divinity Lectures! I can’t quit saying it.

“Sudden Heaven” describes an experience of glory, glory in the course of normal life. A moment of sudden heaven is not marked by any outward circumstances (it’s not sparked by graduation or a touchdown or falling in love), but is an unexpected, unexplainable epiphany in the middle of the commonplace. You’re just going on with life, and for no apparent reason an eternal power “picks you up and rings you like a bell,” to use Annie Dillard’s phrase. Nothing changes, but sudden heaven blazes. In the elegant phrase “sudden heaven,” it’s the word “sudden” that captures the inbreaking, while “heaven” captures the otherworldliness, the eschatological, the end and consummation of the world making itself known.

I can’t be sure who coined the term, but I’ve found it used by four poets: Ruth Pitter, C. S. Lewis, Walter de la Mare, and Terry Scott Taylor. These poets are connected to each other by various threads of influence, so the phrase “sudden heaven” has been passed around inside of this little school. Ruth Pitter seems to be the furthest upstream, so I tend to credit her as the source for the others. They ring the changes on Pitter’s poem. Here’s the plot as far as I can follow it.
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