As an uninformed but opinionated teenager working my way through both youth group
and Honors World History, I grew obsessed with the Fall of the Roman Empire. I must confess that my interest in the subject did not drive me to any book beyond the text for my ninth grade social-studies course (and given my grade in that class, I doubt I read even that book very closely). No, I was interested in a sort of spiritual Roman Empire; I knew it was big, and evil, and anti-Christian, and I had the vague notion that its downfall was caused by orgies, human sacrifices, an influx of foreigners, and steep tax hikes. Naturally, I loudly declared the United States to be the “New Rome.” (My politics, let us say, have changed dramatically in the intervening decade and a half; to the degree that I see in my country a belligerent and doomed Colossus, it is for different reasons altogether.) A budding songwriter, I even wrote an alternative-rock number that made the case for the similarities. I can remember only the chorus:
Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome
Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome
Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome
Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome
With a silver tongue like that, how could I fail to convince everyone who heard me? Fortunately, no one did; I grew up before the ascent of the Internet and the availability of affordable home-recording software, so this song and the many others I wrote in high school are not living off in the ether somewhere. (Including, thank God, one called “Planet Dramamine”–and yes, the chorus was, “You all make me sick.”)
What I didn’t realize at the time was that the founders of this country very self-consciously looked to Rome as a model for their fledgling republic. And why not? Education in the eighteenth century followed the classical model, so future statesmen like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson learned Latin at an early age (an early age according to our lowered modern expectations) and took to heart the lessons of Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and the other giants of Roman letters. Madison and Jefferson–along with John Adams, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the other educated founding fathers–entered adulthood valorizing the heroes of the Roman Republic. When the American colonies revolted against their “tyrant” motherland in the 1760s and ’70s, the colonial leaders almost certainly saw themselves as contemporary Catos and Bruti, risking their lives for the good of the republic. America was indeed the “New Rome,” and not at all in the way I thought when I was fourteen.
All of this is well-documented elsewhere. What I’m interested in, for the sake of this post anyway, is the way the “New Rome” mentality translated itself into American cultural and literary life. For all of its mighty accomplishments in the realms of politics and imperial victories, Roman literature was doomed to lag behind the Greeks whom they so admired. Even the Roman gods were Greek deities with different names and (sometimes) a fresh coat of paint; it’s no wonder that the first important Roman literary figures are playwrights like Plautus and Terence, who borrow their plots wholesale from Greek dramatists. Likewise, the two most important Roman philosophers before the common era are Lucretius and Cicero, and even they are philosophers the way that Malcolm Gladwell is a sociologist–in other words, they’re far better at accumulating the thoughts of Epicurus and Plato than in coming up with their own.
Lucretius and Cicero both felt the Roman/Greek divide strongly. Lucretius in particular is wildly dissatisfied with Roman culture and with the Latin language; he can’t even satisfactorily present the ideas of Epicurus, he complains, because when compared to Greek, Latin is the language of a toddler:
Nor does it fail me that discoveries–obscure and dark–
Of Greeks are difficult to shed much light on with the spark
Of Latin poetry, chiefly since I must coin much new
Terminology, because of our tongue’s dearth and due
To the novelty of subject matter.
(The Nature of Things I.135-139)
Later, he will have to use a Greek term “Due to the dearth of our mother tongue” (I.831). Lucretius’ frustration with Latin as a language bubbles up from time to time in The Nature of Things–exacerbated, no doubt, by his admiration of Epicurus as a thinker.
Indeed, the Roman linguistic inferiority complex is inextricably linked to the Roman cultural inferiority complex. Rome was unsatisfactory as a producer of art and philosophy–or at least it seemed that way to its more high-minded citizens. Cicero, for example, who turned to philosophy after being repeatedly disappointed by politics, seems largely ashamed of the intellectual achievements of his countrymen. Even when he points to famous Romans like Cato or Laelius as examples of men to emulate, he praises them for their resemblance to the Greek model. Thus, in On Old Age, Cato admires Titus for his Greekness: “For I know you are a moderate, even-tempered man–who has imported more than just your surname from Athens! You have brought back a civilized, intelligent point of view as well.” Rome has become a cultural Third World, thirsty for colonists from Greece. (Cato also refers sneeringly to a man who is “for a Roman, very well read”; Cicero at this stage is clearly a man with little respect for his fellow citizens–and for good reason.)
And yet even in Cicero’s work we see the line of quality between Greek and Latin literature break down a bit. Less than a decade after Lucretius complained of having to import Greek words to cover the holes in Latin, Cicero has one of the speakers in The Nature of the Gods admit that
A number of people who were familiar with Greek culture could not previously communicate what they had learnt to their fellow-citizens because they did not feel able to express in Latin what they had studied in Greek. But in this field we now seem to have made such progress that in vocabulary at least we were on equal terms.
Latin had arrived as a language, and if Roman culture still lagged behind, it was at least on its way. Cicero wrote The Nature of the Gods in 45 B.C.E.; Rome was at that time only 26 years–a single generation–away from its greatest literary achievement. I speak, of course, of The Aeneid.
National literatures, according to the conventional wisdom, require national epics. These mixes of poetry, fiction, history, and mythology allow cultures to place themselves in a more global sense of time, purpose, and spirituality. Fittingly, The Aeneid, Rome’s great epic, feeds off The Iliad and The Odyssey the way Terence and Plautus feed off their Greek sources. But (largely) unlike Terence and Plautus, Virgil pushes things forward; his poem begins as a spinoff of Homer but becomes something dazzlingly original, something that (again, largely) kills Rome’s cultural inferiority complex.
Early American culture was defined, like Rome’s, by its anxiety standing next to that of other nations. I am speaking here of the early nineteenth century; the Puritans were less concerned with their literary output than with the state of their souls, and–excepting potboilers like Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple–the colonial and revolutionary eras mostly produced political tracts and poetry that has largely been forgotten. But once the fledgling nation had gained its political independence, its citizens began to crave a cultural independence.
Unlike the Romans of Cicero’s day, nineteenth-century Americans could not blame their cultural deficiencies on the weaknesses of the language. The British had, after all, produced Shakespeare and Milton using the English language; the former colonies had thus far come up only with Anne Bradstreet and Philip Freneu–neither writer without his or her charms, but nether even coming close to the achievements of the English Renaissance.
The canonical writers of the time tended to look across the Atlantic for inspiration. Many of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, for example, are set in Germany or France, and virtually none of his best and most famous tales explicitly take place in America. (One exception is “The Gold-Bug,” the first story one encounters when moving from those Poe stories known by all educated Americans to those known chiefly by scholars and specialists.) Or take Washington Irving’s Sketch-Book, fully half of which takes place in Great Britain. Even Irving’s stories that strike our ears as deeply and resonantly American–I refer, of course, to “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”–are virtual retellings of Dutch folktales, effectively transplanted into New York State.
The most unapologetically American of American writers in this era was James Fenimore Cooper–and his popularity outraced his actual talent exponentially. The literary journals of the time, especially the North American Review, issued periodic calls for an American literary messiah, a writer who could eliminate the qualitative distance between American and European letters.
Those calls continued into the period we know as the American Renaissance. Most famously, Ralph Waldo Emerson–a writer of skill and some originality but not, let us admit, of genius–called in 1843 for an American poet who would save American culture from the morass in which it found itself. “I look in vain,” he says, “for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance.” This new American poet, then, must break with the past; he must sing America in its glories and heartbreaks, and he must do so, if not in a new language, as Virgil did, then at least in a new diction.
America has never really had a national epic poem, largely because the novel had supplanted the most as the most popular and effective literary genre by the time the colonies became a nation. (Thus, one used to hear about the “Great American Novel” before it became unfashionable to speak of such things, but there’s no such thing as the “Great Greek Novel.”) Aside from culture-defining prose works like The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the closest thing we have to a traditional epic poem is Longfellow’s utterly tiresome Song of Hiawatha. But if Emerson is right about what the new American poet had to look like, we would expect him to define American culture in a radically new way–or, to put it more bluntly, to write an epic poem that is not, strictly speaking, an epic poem.
In the comment section of our most recent podcast, Chris Winn asks what I think of Harold Bloom’s positioning of Walt Whitman at the center of our canon–as the “Shakespeare of the American Canon,” to use Chris’s phrase. My answer is that the position is correct but that the author metaphor is off. The English epics are located on either side of Shakespeare: Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost (though of course the latter is not a national epic). Shakespeare is the most celebrated of all British authors, but Chaucer and Spenser did far more to establish the island as a cultural powerhouse. No, Whitman is our Virgil, not our Shakespeare: his thunderous Old Testament free verse simultaneously connects him to the cultural past and severs the connection, just as Virgil’s adaptation of Homer did for Rome.
Our national epic, then, is the seventy-plus page lyric poem Song of Myself, which, like all great national epics, is more often skimmed and praised than read. Here Whitman destroys the self/other dichotomy that ruled Western thought for centuries. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” he says in an act of staggering egotism. But in American democracy, to praise oneself is to praise all, and Whitman continues, “And what I assume you shall assume / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Only our representative American could find in his every molecule the entire world–and vice versa.
Whitman, in Song of Myself, sets forth the American character the way Virgil sets forth the Roman character in The Aeneid–which is to say he talks about the myth of who we are (magnanimous, democratic, inclusive) rather than what we actually are most of the time (petty, oligarchic, snobbish). He positions our country historically and, even more, geographically. More importantly, his raving verses establish an American literary accent; it is safe to say that no British poet ever could have written Song of Myself. In this, Whitman asserts his nation’s cultural and literary independence. Calls for the American literary messiah ceased in the late nineteenth century, and our cultural inferiority complex eased substantially. (At least in the area of literature.)
Whitman, I should say, is by no means by favorite American poet. I seldom read him. But his social role in American history is nearly undeniable. One must love Whitman if one is to love American literature, if only because it was him who made us believe in ourselves as true producers of culture.
General Introduction
- The end of an era
- What we want on our statues
- What’s on the blog?
- Freshman comp clichés
- More on DVD players in cars
What is a Canon?
- The Biblical Canon
- Inclusion and exclusion
- The Western Canon
- The six types of criticism and canons
- Lack of communication
- The relationship of canons and universities
- The element of suppression
- Multiple canons
The Biblical Canon
- Canons within canons
- The Lectionary as a cure
- The deuterocanonical books
Shakespeare! Shakespeare! Shakespeare!
- The center of the British canon?
- Poet or dramatist?
- Decentering Shakespeare
- Can we say who’s “better”?
- We take on the Shakespeare cottage industry
- Shakespeare and the “performative”
The American Canon
- Who’s our Shakespeare?
- Taking down Twain
- Creating the American canon (yes, I meant World War I)
- Modifying the canon
- Longfellow’s disappearance
- The broadening of American-ness
And Now…David Grubbs Talks Beowulf
- How Beowulf misleads the masses
- The dearth of copies and references
- Possible replacements/supplements
- The tyranny of anthologies
- Chaucer’s similar situation
- Exilic literature
Blank Studies and the Canon
- Affirming specialized studies
- Do studies courses go too far?
- Biting the hand that feeds you
- Using studies tools in service of the canon
- A whiter shade of pale
The Canon and the Classroom
- How to shove it all in?
- Make them do the work
- Derrida and core curriculum
- Advice for laymen
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anglo-Saxon Poetry. Ed. S.A.J. Bradley. New York: Everyman, 1995.
Beowulf. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York: Norton, 1993.
Derrida, Jacques. Deconstruction in a Nutshell. Ed. John D. Caputo. New York: Fordham UP, 1996.
Dickinson, Emily. Collected Poems. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York: Tribeca, 2011.
Felix. Felix’s Life of Guthlac. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.
Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Tribeca, 2011.
Freer, Coburn. The Poetics of Jacobean Drama. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.
Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, 2002.
Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. Trans. Andrew Galloway. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Western Michigan U Medieval P, 2006.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics. Trans. Bernard Bosanquet. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Hemingway, Ernest. Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner, 1998.
Lauter, Paul. Canons and Contexts. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Poems and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 2000.
Lydgate, John. The Troy Book. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Western Michigan U Medieval P, 1998.
Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. New York: Norton, 2004.
Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 2008.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2008.
—. Pudd’nhead Wilson. Lawrence, Kansas: Digireads, 2005.
Wilson, Harriet. Our Nig. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2010.
Revised Common Lectionary Page for 1 May 2011 (Second Sunday of Easter, Year A)
Acts 2:14a, 22-32 •Psalm 16 •1 Peter 1:3-9 •John 20:19-31
Thomas wasn’t there, and that matters.
Too often, when I’ve heard people talk about the “doubting Thomas” story, the verses immediately leading up to his most famous ultimatum (“Unless I see…”) never figure into the account, and the whole encounter becomes an allegory for modern atheists and modern believers, as if Thomas, though he had been among Jesus’s friends just as any of the others had been, had remained a sort of Enlightenment-style skeptic, one unwilling to entertain the possibility of “miracles” where the rest of those called friends of the master simply did not have the intellectual reservations that Thomas did.
Nonsense.
A slightly closer look and a bit of imagination reveal a different sort of story, one in which Thomas is away from the locked place (perhaps to get supplies, or perhaps to investigate how close the Judeans, the regional authorities, were to closing in on the followers of the recently-executed subversive), then returns no doubt to meet a room full of people who claim that their dead teacher had appeared to them bodily, breathed on them, and granted to them (but not to Thomas, because Thomas wasn’t there, and that matters) authority to bind and forgive sins, the temple-authority that made Jesus both such a danger to the Temple faction and an insult to those whose lives were ordered around living holy lives for the sake of God’s coming kingdom. In short, as Jesus acted on earth as a Davidic king, Thomas’s fellow disciples were claiming that they were now the same kingly figures. Thomas was not some proto-David-Hume so much as he was a faithful follower, a bit slow to grant that the followers of Jesus could themselves act as agents of Jesus now that Jesus was gone.
Knowing this casts a slightly different light on the words of Christ when he appears in the room: the faithfulness that Christ commends in those “who do not see” certainly involves the modern sense of “belief,” but another part of that faithfulness is faithfulness to the apostles, those who were there (now including Thomas) and whose authority and testimony now govern the Church. Certainly one too readily given to suspicion (not unlike Thomas) could see such a move on the written gospel’s part as a sort of power grab, a legitimizing move, and certainly there’s been no shortage of scholars in the last couple hundred years who have made just that move, preferring to set themselves up as the authoritative Jesus-story-tellers by casting suspicion about the centuries-long authoritative texts. My point here is not that this text dispels the possibility of such a move but that it boldly sets the possibility forth, anticipating the central rhetorical move of the Jesus Seminar and their less-famous compatriots, noting that even Jesus’s disciples were given to suspect that their fellow-apostles might not be trustworthy.
Thus right before the Gospel of John affirms its own purpose, to write the signs so that faithfulness might ensue, the mysterious fourth gospel poses the first hermeneutics-of-suspicion reading of the Gospel of John. Derrida could not hope for a better example of a text that asks for its own deconstruction. But in a book where the final teaching of Jesus before the crucifixion is the dizzying prayer of mystical unity in John 17, such a move is fitting. I only wish that it would give us moderns, who tend to take the written as already suspicious, something more to go on. Perhaps our own souls need some adjusting.
As Eastertide continues, may God grant us faithfulness to what stands written, even when our pride would put to the test the most holy text.
MOST glorious Lord of Lyfe! that, on this day,
Didst make Thy triumph over death and sin;
And, having harrowd hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive, us to win:
This joyous day, deare Lord, with joy begin;
And grant that we, for whom thou diddest dye,
Being with Thy deare blood clene washt from sin,
May live for ever in felicity!
And that Thy love we weighing worthily,
May likewise love Thee for the same againe;
And for Thy sake, that all lyke deare didst buy,
With love may one another entertayne!
So let us love, deare Love, lyke as we ought,
–Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught
General Introduction
- The Dennis Miller ratio
- What’s on the blog? And where’s that McLaren review?
- On the rhetoric trilogy
- A string of feel-good clichés
Beginning with the Personal
- David’s frequent road trips
- Nathan’s front porch
- Michial stays in the hotel room
- Planes, planes, planes
- Email us: Should Nathan have an in-car DVD player?
The Home/Road Dichotomy
- David free-associates
- Parochialism vs. cosmopolitanism
- Exile at home, exile on the road
- The travails of being a rock star
- The interdependence of the dichotomy
Biblical Folks on the Move
- Sojourning with the Hebrews
- Striving for the unseen
- Christian missionaries
- Psalms of Ascent and Psalms of Exile
Movement in the Middle Ages
- Viking as a gerund
- The pilgrimage
- Chintzy souvenirs and Medieval hipsters
- Margery Kempe as the first ugly American
- Class implications of pilgrimages
- The co-op pilgrimage
Renaissance and Enlightenment Travel
- Colonization as travel
- American exceptionalism
- The end of British colonialism (at least in the Americas)
- The need for European travel
- The other kind of colonialism
American Spatiality
- Vaguely Western and Southern movement
- From town to country
- The trucker movement and cowboy musicians
- American suburbs and highways
- Study-abroad programs and spring-break trips
Vacations
- Spring break, Austen style!
- In which we get jealous of our rich students
- The Banana Family goes to Disney World
- Pilgrimages vs. vacations
1,000 Places to See Before You Die
- St. Augustine
- Istanbul (Not Constantinople)
- The mid-sized city
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.
Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.
Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Karl, Frederick R. American Fictions 1940-1980: A Comprehensive History and Critical Evaluation. New York: Harper Collins, 1983.
Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. Trans. Barry Windeatt. New York: Penguin, 2000.
Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. New York: Penguin, 1982.
Steinbeck, John. Travels with Charley in Search of America. New York: Penguin, 2002.
Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “Ulysses.” The Major Works. Ed. Adam Roberts. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.
Revised Common Lectionary Page for 24 April 2011 (Easter, Year A)
Acts 10:34-43 or Jeremiah 31:1-6 •Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24 •Colossians 3:1-4 or Acts 10:34-43 •John 20:1-18 or Matthew 28:1-10
I’ll admit that, in my own judgmental way, I think of the Resurrection of Jesus as one of those moments in the Bible that will reveal in a hurry what sort of Bible reader one is dealing with. Just about every careful reader of the New Testament will see that Mark has the women telling nobody and Matthew telling the disciples; that Matthew and Mark have Jesus tell the disciples go on to Galilee and Luke has Jesus command them to stay in Jerusalem; that John and Luke have Peter visiting the tomb and Matthew and Mark do not; that differences abound among the accounts. But the differences among the texts are nothing compared to the differences among readers. The Resurrection is not unlike Jesus’s parable of the sower, a word that falls differently on different sorts of readers.
The simpleminded will see the differences and assume that, since there is not a singular source-story to be found, that all of it is “legendary,” stories appended to the “tragic” death of Jesus so that simple-minded ancient folks (who are by no means as bright as us moderns) can believe in their magical stories of life after death. These folks get boring in a hurry.
Some more sophisticated readers might look upon the differences as a sort of divine challenge, the four gospels giving a diligent reader pieces to a jigsaw puzzle that fit together to compose one super-story of the resurrection. Where details seem to disagree, the interpreter (usually a preacher) chooses the option that gives the best narrative punch. This sort of thing has been the stuff of most Easter sermons that I can remember hearing–in this super-story, remaining in Jerusalem usually takes precedence over going to Galilee (privileging Luke), the folks who journey to the tomb include not only women but also Peter and John (privileging John and ignoring that John never gets named in John), Jesus always speaks to the disciples after the resurrection (privileging the so-called “long ending” of Mark to the shorter versions in the oldest scrolls), and the content of Jesus’s words tends to be the “Great Commission” (giving Matthew the final word).
Still others focus on the “raw event” of the Resurrection itself, declaring all of the “literary details” of the four accounts to be secondary to the moment itself. In the one Easter sermon I have ever preached, I’m ashamed to admit that I leaned towards this reading–my sermon spent very little time on the literary particulars of John’s gospel, which was ostensibly my text, and all sorts of time fleshing out the philosophical and theological ramifications of Resurrection as a theological concept. There’s no overt denial of the truth of the four texts here, but there’s no great attention paid to them either.
And then there are folks like N.T. Wright (whom I had not read at length in 2001, when I preached my Easter sermon), who want to take the Bible seriously as it stands, taking the plurality as constitutive of the Bible’s goodness rather than saying to God, “Thank you for the texts you’ve given us, but they’re a helpless jumble right now–let me show you how they should have been arranged.” (N.T. Wright, of course, makes this fictional conversation with God far more witty. Who can compete with British intellectuals in brevity and wit?) In my own preaching and teaching over the last decade, I’ve tried to follow in the footsteps of Wright in this regard, taking the particularities within and even the differences between the four gospel accounts as seriously as I can and resisting the temptation to “get behind” them or to forge my own Diatesseron because they make me uncomfortable. I still maintain that God knew what God was doing when the Church handed us four gospels rather than one, and to the extent that I have it in me, I try to dwell in each of the four in its own right rather than negating any of them by refusing to take it in its own terms before I move in systematic directions.
So in that spirit (now that I’ve written a 700-word preamble), I’ve chosen to look at Matthew’s version of the Resurrection, one of two options afforded by this year’s Lectionary listing, and I see not an incomplete attempt to narrate the events of the first Resurrection Sunday but a picture of salvation whole in its own right. When the Magdalene and “the other Mary” approach the tomb, the angelic act of rolling the stone (how does it feel to be all alone?) has caused the very earth to shake (Greek seismos), echoing the shaking at the crucifixion (in Matthew’s version) and giving Dante material for altering the geography of the Inferno. The angel himself, brilliant in appearance like a figure out of an apocalypse, frightens the guards into a deathlike state but call on the visiting women not to fear.
Jesus, the angel announces, has been “raised up,” the same sort of thing that will eventually happen to those anointed by the elders while deathly ill at the end of the epistle of James. The angel invites them to take a quick look at the empty tomb, but the women’s mission is clear: they must tell Jesus’s disciples that Jesus will meet them in Galilee. The tomb thus ceases to bear any importance: Galilee, specifically the mountain in Galilee where Jesus delivered his famous oration, is what matters. By the end of the book, on that mountain where Jesus had before told them what it meant to be a city on a hill, Jesus will give his own disciples the command to make disciples, spreading the Kingdom of God not coercively but rhetorically, teaching rather than conquering, or perhaps conquering by teaching. The presence of the risen Christ will be with them until the end of the age, and their mission is not to bend the world towards the kingdom but to convince those who would be convinced themselves to be bent.
But the mountain should not come too quickly; after all, in Matthew’s version, before the women get back to the disciples, Jesus appears among them. After greeting them and telling them once more not to fear, and in the midst of their worshiping him, the risen Jesus tells them precisely what the angels had told them, that Galilee is where to go.
In Matthew’s version of the Resurrection, the teaching of Jesus becomes the centerpiece, not only in the text of the Great Commission but in the very geography of the resurrection. I’ve heard at least two preachers make note that the Great Commission has only one imperative verb, that Jesus commands them to “teach” but merely assumes that they will be “going” rather than commanding the travel itself. What some close attention to Matthew’s version of things will highlight is that when any of Jesus’s followers is “going,” she or he is always “going” forth from the mountain, from the place where Jesus called for a secret piety and a love for enemies, where the revolutionary blessings upon the meek and the persecuted get paired with the image of the embodied light of the world and the abolition of the right to divorce. Matthew’s is no incomplete vision of things: as the risen Christ sends the disciples forth, He sends forth lights that are not to be hidden under bushels, salt for the earth who bring a new announcement and teachings that only come to make their fullest sense in light of that announcement, people who can genuinely be the Church precisely because their new Moses is also the Son of Man and the very Presence of God, the God who brings life to the dead, on earth.
May our own lives be sent lives, teaching lives, Gospel lives.
BLOOPBLEEPBLURGH
General Introduction
- What’s on the blog?
- The feud continues
- Polymathery
Cybernetics as Governance
- Not a portmanteau!
- Getting organized as a spiritual gift
- Rudder-steerer
- Modern definition
- Military purposes
- David Grubbs’s computer-programming past
- Feedback loops and exploding robot heads
- Cyborgs vs. androids
The Myth of Theuth
- Writing and memory
- Dialectic as a cure for writing
- The irony of the Phaedrus
- Writing as technology
- How providential is the time of Christ’s coming?
- (The use and misuse of providence)
- What are we giving away?
Cultural Cyborgs
- How the Tin Man became tin
- Blade Runner complicates memory
- Poe tries to get funny
- Cybernetics, villains, and disability
- Are children afraid of Darth Vader?
Heidegger: The Video Game
- Is the Guitar Hero stage part of Dasein?
- The appeal of video games
- Expanding the world
- Heidegger’s hammer and the physical world
- Entering into stories
The Technological Classroom
- Look-up-ability
- Memorizing facts to connect facts
- Spell check—quelle horreur!
- Phone numbers and birthdays
- Our limitless memories
- Nathan’s inability to memorize Bible verses
Where Do We Draw the Line?
- Are eyeglasses cybernetic?
- Resisting technology
- Why you never shed human limits
- Technology is part of humanism
- Breaking cell phones
The Takeaway Point
- Humanity doing its job
- Avoid idolatry
- Grace and avenues of it
- Breaking the mind/body dualism
- Be willing to change your anthropological model
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abe, Kobo. The Box Man. New York: Vintage, 2001.
—. The Face of Another. New York: Vintage, 2003.
Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan. New York: Henry Holt, 2003.
Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: North-South, 1999.
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Oxford UP, 2007.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie. New York: Harper, 2008.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.
Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Christopher Rowe. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man That Was Used Up.” Poetry and Tales. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1984.
Postman, Neil. Technopoly. New York: Vintage, 1993.
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