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David Bentley Hart on American Christianity and the American future

The question that should concern us, it seems to me, is whether in years ahead America will produce a society that has any particular right to a future. By this, I mean nothing more elaborate than this: How charitable and just a society will it be, how conscious will it be of those truths that transcend the drearier economies of finite existence, and will it produce much good art? And all of that will be determined, inevitably, by spiritual forces. It is not obvious, however, what those forces will be, or what they can do. It is very much an open and troubling question whether American religiosity has the resources to help sustain a culture as a culture—whether, that is, it can create a meaningful future, or whether it can only prepare for the end times. Is the American religious temperament so apocalyptic as to be incapable of culture in any but the most local and ephemeral sense? Does it know of any city other than Babylon the Great or the New Jerusalem? For all the moral will it engenders in persons and communities, can it cultivate the kind of moral intelligence necessary to live in eternity and in historical time simultaneously, without contradiction? Will its lack of any coherent institutional structure ultimately condemn it to haunting rather than vivifying its culture, or make it too susceptible to exploitation by alien interests, or render it incapable of bearing any sufficiently plausible or even interesting witness to the transcendent...? And so on and so on. There is much to admire in the indigenous American religious sensibility, without question, but also much to deplore, and there is plenteous cause for doubt here.

From America and the Angels of Sacré-Coeur, published in a couple places including the collection, A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays.

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Here’s where stuff will go from now on. It’ll probably cross-post here, too, when I get around to clicking that setting.

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A crow circled and landed on the branch of a nearby willow. It cawed and was answered by other crows I could not see. They would go for her eyes first, and then likely to a spot of thin skin on her back where their beaks could easily pierce her hide and find her flesh.

Thistledown, an essay of mine published on The Curator.

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Prayer for the sick and suffering, Good Friday, 2015

Hear us, Good Lord, as we pray for those who are sick, for those who suffer spiritual, emotional, and mental anguish, for those buckling under the burdens of their lives.

These are people we have heard of. These are people that we know. We ourselves are in the midst of affliction.

You have not promised us simple, carefree lives, nor have you sworn that we should be comfortable all of our days.

But you have given us your Spirit, and have joined us to your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who was perfected in suffering, and whose infirmity and weakness became the salvation of the world.

So if we are joined to his suffering, Good Father, then help us to suffer as he did: willingly for the joy that was set before him.

This joy does not come naturally; despair and illness wear us down. Our faith falters in the weakness of our bodies and minds and circumstances. We ask why you have forsaken us and we no longer expect you to answer.

But joy is a gift and a fruit of your own Spirit, the Spirit who Jesus knew would raise him from the dead.

For those to whom the future looks formless and void, a great fearful blankness, we ask you to give them faith, to trust you for that same joy that the Lord had even in Gethsemane.

Show us your faithfulness. Teach us what joy is, that we would know it when it arrives. Write your words on that great blankness, and compel us to believe you, Good Lord of all comfort, who knows our suffering and has promised not to forsake us or abandon us.

Hear us as we pray for those who are sick and who suffer now.

Gracious God, the comfort of all who sorrow, the strength of all who suffer: Let the cry of those in misery and need come to you Who was despised and forsaken of men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, that they may find your mercy present with them in all their afflictions; and give us, we pray, the strength to serve them for the sake of Him who suffered for us, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Cannon Hill Park, late afternoon in early March, Spokane, WA

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With abortion, the church in America named a grave sin, developed a vocabulary of protest, and articulated a vision of repentance for a nation that consumes and obliterates its weak. Segregationist racism needs the same treatment.

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Sr. Grace Remington, OCSO, “Mary and Eve” (2005)

(via wesleyhill)

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another white guy blogging about racism

I worked for years as a land surveyor in the Pacific Northwest, and so had to read a lot of deeds and real estate covenants and so forth. While the Northwest never had segregated bathrooms or the like, it doesn't take long to run into a CC&R document—covenants, conditions, and restrictions on the use of a parcel of land—stipulating that the property in question never be sold to non-whites. Sometimes the document would simply say non-whites; sometimes it would get real specific (one enumerated every Asian race the document writer could think of); sometimes they employed poetic repetition to get the point across (no Negroes, Blacks, or Niggers). You can find such documents written as recently as the 1950's and even, so I've heard, the 1960's. A history professor I know tells me of reams of similar documents he's seen from the Seattle-Tacoma area.

This kind of racism, institutionalized in real estate documents—in the Pacific Northwest. It was common throughout the northern tiers of the U.S. My father-in-law grew up in Chicago, and first saw segregated bathrooms on a road trip down South with his father. He was appalled and told his father. His father shook his head and said, "At least they have bathrooms down here. That's because everyone's mixed in down here. Up in Chicago, they just keep them separated, and they don't give them anything." This dynamic was at play when men like Robert Moses demolished neighborhoods and communities in New York City (my boyhood home) to make way for expressways that created hellholes like the South Bronx. Keeping blacks out of certain neighborhoods forced them into others in a systemic, deliberate way.

So, of course black-on-black crime constitutes the majority of black murders, rapes, assaults, and robberies. We've worked diligently for decades to shove them together into the same neighborhoods away from the rest of us. When someone in the conservative circles I frequent trots out the black-on-black adages (and dammit, there's been a lot of that lately), it reminds me of when I hear someone go on about Martin Luther King Jr's. theological liberalism: How can we hold that against him when none of the conservative seminaries would admit him because of his skin color?

I think we in our circles use the sad epidemics of black fatherlessness, crime, and social breakdown as comforting bromides when something like Ferguson happens. "The issue isn't white cops shooting black men, it's black-on-black crime." Or "I saw a black guy on Fox News who got an education and decries the rioting. Why can't these other guys get an education?" Or, "The only solution here is the gospel to deal with the individual sins of gang-bangers and deadbeat fathers." 

Statements like these comfort us because they fit neatly into a story where the sin of institutional, systemic racism doesn't exist, and so doesn't have to be confronted. We decry the sins of gang-bangers and deadbeat dads because those don't implicate us. 

I say none of this in support of nebulous charges of white guilt or privilege or whatever the liberals' sin du jour is. Decrying vague, undefined sins—and accusing people of committing them—is, at best, demonic. What I've said here may tread perilously close to that in some people's minds. So let me be clear: Toby Sumpter nails it when he writes that, "...systemic issues... should be the kind of issues that can be named, defined, and repented of. The devil loves vague guilt, vague accusations, vague condemnation because then you can never be sure you’ve actually repented, actually been forgiven, actually been reconciled."

I just don't think we're in any position to bring the gospel to bear without acknowledging that Ferguson is the latest, most prominent expression of a social evil, deeply embedded in this nation, that is an offense to God and his creation. It would therefore be worthwhile for the church to start naming these sins (and I believe them to be name-able), to develop the vocabulary necessary to protest them, and to articulate what repentance looks like.

For just as culturally- and judicially-sanctioned abortion denies the imago dei of murdered children, so, too, do malignant stipulations in a real estate deed deny the imago dei of whole swaths of humanity.

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Wallace Grain & Pea Company, late November, 2014.

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Fred Lyon and Paul Strand.

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austinkleon:

Rembrandt’s drawing of a child learning to walk

David Hockney, on why it’s his favorite drawing:

There’s a drawing by Rembrandt, I think it’s the greatest drawing ever done. It’s in the British Museum and it’s of a family teaching a child to walk, so it’s a universal thing, everybody has experienced this or seen it happen. Everybody. I used to print out Rembrandt drawings big and give them to people and say: “If you find a better drawing send it to me.”

And::

“I used to say to people, ‘I have a reproduction of the best drawing ever made in my pocket’ and I would pull it out and I would convince them, within a minute, that it was the best. It is a Rembrant from the British Museum of a little family teaching a little girl to walk. Everybody at home has a picture like that. The Rembrant, for me, tells me about who you are. I’m looking at the marks and I can feel his arm. That wouldn’t be possible with a photograph – it would be a performance. Rembrant was not intervening in any way, meaning it is the greatest work of art. You don’t see it at first. It is a virtuoso drawing but it doesn’t shout out.”

And:

When I look at these marks, I know a Chinese master of the seventeenth century would recognise instantly that this drawing was the work of a master. Very few people could get near this… The tenderness this drawing shows is not possible with photography.

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There is a genre of writing to which I am particularly devoted, but whose name I do not know. I can only give examples. I think it may have been invented by William Hazlitt, in “The Fight”. Another wonderful instance is Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” — the essay, not the book that…

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Oakesdale skyline.

Oakesdale, Whitman County, WA, November 2013.

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I had to pick five favorites:

Cable car

Pushing a cable car off the turntable

The clown

Woman opening a car door on a hill in the wind

And, of course, the seagull

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Marine, Gustave Courbet, 1866. Philadelphia Museum of Art.