• Martin Luther Insult Generator
• Cicero on Presidential Campaigning
• The Ideal of the Christian Humanist
• Douglas Groothius on why abortion is still a live issue
• Fred Sanders on the dramatic roots of Pauline vice-lists
• 

General Introduction
- Talking weather
- Listener feedback

The Roots of the Episode
- Who studies the Alamo?
- Davids Grubbs, Crockett, and Bowie
- Stories, not definitions

The Courage of Joshua
- Be strong and courageous
- His previous courage
- Courage as species of faith
- Obeying the law as precondition of courage
- Linguistic curiosity

Thomistic Valor
- How did Thomas adapt Aristotle?
- Fortitude, not manliness
- Martyrs over soldiers
- Daring vs. fortitude

Homeric Bravery
- Courage in the face of absurdity
- Courage as the highest virtue
- The greatest courage in the poem
- Is Achilles invincible?
- Crappy movies

Anglo-Saxon Bravery
- Tolkien weighs in
- The dreary ending
- Nathan complicates matters
- Lost cause-ism

Two Eras of Poetry
- Tennyson’s ambivalent skepticism
- The living dead become the dead dead
- Owen returns the ticket
- Dulce et decorum est pro amico mori

Other Examples
- Camus twists Thomas
- Crane twists Aristotle

Average Everdayness Courage
- The lessons of Joshua
- Spoiling Lord Jim
- Nathan dodges the question
- Platonic rather than Aristotelian courage
- Can courage be allegorized?

Girlchild: A Novel
By Tupelo Hassman
277 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $24.

In her debut novel, Girlchild, the improbably named Tupelo Hassman tells the story of Rory Dawn Hendrix, a girl in her early teens who lives with her mother in a trailer park in Reno, Nevada. The Hendrixes exist near the bottom of the social order, living their lives between a Nobility trailer, a truck stop, and one of the myriad casinos that pepper Reno. Their lives are focused almost entirely on survival, and the conditions under which they live are bleak.

The Hendrixes and their neighbors are, in other words, a group that most of the civilized world has given up on. Even their neighborhood, which Rory refers to as “the Calle” throughout the novel holds in its history a promise and a betrayal:

At the first curve off the I-395 a promise was erected of what was to come, bold white letters against a gold background, calle de las flores—come home to the new west. But soon after the first sewer lines were laid down and the first power lines were run up, the investors backed out because the Biggest Little City in the World was found to be exactly that, too little. With its dry, harsh climate and harsher reputation, Reno could not support suburbs of a middle-class kind, and the new home buyers needed to make the Calle’s property values thrive never arrived. Once the big money figured that out, the big money said adios and Calle de las Flores ended before it’d begun.

Eventually, “de las Flores”—“of flowers”—rots off the sign, and all that’s left is the “Calle,” suggesting that the characters who people this novel live out on the street, regardless of how warm their trailers get.

Even so, Rory and her mother and grandmother are for a time able to form a sort of feminine bower out in the high desert, with most men being unnamed, absent, or ineffectual. And yet it seems that the Hendrixes have tragedy and poverty in their bloodline, making it only a matter of time until what sad and miniature blisses they can form in the Calle are blown to pieces.

This description makes Girlchild sound either like poverty porn or like a vehicle for Oprah Winfrey-style uplift. Hassman flirts with the latter, and at times her novel threatens to collapse into sentimentality and melodrama. She is saved by a streak of experimentalism that runs throughout the book, which features very short chapters written in a variety of styles. The major voice is Rory’s, of course, which at its best recalls Alice Walker’s Celie in its simplicity and pathos—but other chapters are composed as dispassionate sociology, blackly humorous mathematical equations, and parodies of the language of the Girl Scout handbook. Hassman’s narration stubbornly refuses to stand still, much to its credit.

The charge of poverty porn, meanwhile, shouldn’t gain much traction among people who read the novel. Hassman refuses either to romanticize the lives of her characters or to gawk at them. We’re invited into Rory’s world, and we see things that horrify and delight us, but Hassman loves and understands these people too well to allow us to treat them like tourist attractions.

And yet, while Girlchild is an emotionally rich and moving novel, Hassman cannot quite hold onto it. She introduces elements—child molestation, girl scouts, the sad case of Vivian Buck, who was sterilized for being “feeble-minded”—in a way that suggests she intends to wrap them all together, and yet these connections never get made. Rory’s autobiography remains a bit of a jumble, not in the skillful way suggested by the changing narration, but in a way that suggests Hassman wanted to include everything she possibly could. This is not an uncommon problem among first-time novelists, of course, and Hassman clearly has a great deal of talent.

In the end, Girlchild is at its most effective in its emotional fullness and in its ability to stir reader sympathy for a group that most novelists largely stay away from—the group of lower-class whites often pejoratively called “trailer trash.” Hassman’s deep understanding of and clear affection for even the most indolent people in the Calle raises them into the subject of something approaching high art.

General Introduction
- What’s not on the blog?
- Thus begins the triptych of spring 2012

New Testament Humility
- The ethics of humility
- The Golden Rule, further
- Christ’s kenosis and ours
- Greatness requires great humility
- Gregory the Great Servant

Thomist Humility
- Aristotelian balance
- Seven virtues
- The interconnectedness of virtue
- Humility as check on magnanimity

Dante’s Terrace of the Prideful
- Exemplary statues
- The triple humility of the Annunciation
- David’s humble showmanship
- Trajan as model for Christian humility
- Justice needs humility
- The trials of the proud

Nietzsche Deconstructs Humility
- Return to pagan morality
- Inversion of master and slave
- Socratic and Christian humility
- Freud’s Neurotic Humility
- Modern self-esteem

Literary Humility
- The quiet hobbit
- Whitman’s egotheism
- Rebel rebel angels join the chorus

Humility as Tool of the Powerful
- Philippians as cure
- Quiet oppression
- The example of Africa
- Thomas’ pre-solution
- What isn’t humility?
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Christian Classics, 1981. Five Volumes.

Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 2002. Three Volumes.

Franklin, Benjamin. Autobiography. New York: Norton, 2012.

Milton, John. The Complete Poems. New York: Norton, 2004.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Adrian del Caro. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. Seattle: Mariner, 2005.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: Modern Library, 1993.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 4 March 2012 (Second Sunday of Lent, Year B)

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16  •  Psalm 22:23-31  •  Romans 4:13-25  •  Mark 8:31-38 or Mark 9:2-9

When plain speech follows chapters of parabolic teaching, a reader knows to pay attention.  This week’s gospel reading starts with the phrase “and he began to teach,” something that Jesus certainly does in the gospels, but then no parable follows.  Instead, Jesus speaks boldly that the Son of Man (the apocalyptic figure of justice in the vision of Daniel 7) will not act but will suffer.  As hard as it is for a lover of medieval literature like myself to acknowledge, the Greek infinitive does not indicate that the one who goes before the Ancient of Days demanding justice will mount up on the cross, heroically, after the manner of “The Dream of the Rood,” but will have things done to him.  To forget as much is to ignore part of the horror of the passion of the Christ (not the Mel Gibson movie, which is horrifying in its own ways), the fact that the Son, despite our best attempts to say that He really wasn’t anyone’s passive victim, turns out to be just that: a passive victim.

Perhaps Peter was the first of us Jesus-followers to realize that such a conception of the Christ just would not do.  When he confronts Jesus, the verb choice is especially significant: in Mark 1 and Mark 4, two significant occurrences in Mark, Jesus has been the one rebuking, and in both cases, the one rebuked had been a force of evil or at least of chaos, a demonic spirit or a raging sea.  Peter here takes Jesus’s own plain teaching as a moment of spiritual intrusion, a moment when even the Messiah whom he had just confessed starts speaking as if a wicked spirit were in the driver’s seat.  When Jesus in turn rebukes Peter, Mark does not try to translate what he calls Peter but simply transliterates the Hebrew: Get behind me, Satan!

Those who have studied with me in Sunday school or who have been reading my lectionary posts for long will recognize this riff, but I reproduce it anyway, just for the sake of those who have not heard my theory about “Get behind me, Satan.”  In 2 Samuel, after Absalom’s rebellion, Shimei of the house of Saul, who had openly and publicly uttered curses on David when all signs pointed to the aging monarch’s downfall, comes to David and begs his forgiveness.  David, invoking royal prerogative, does indeed forgive his sins.  When he sees and hears this, David’s nephew Abishai turns on his king, saying that forgiving such a traitor is unacceptable.  David, in a Hebrew idiom that’s a bit hard to translate, asks rhetorically, “Who are you, that you should become satan [an enemy] to me?”  Now most translations will transliterate what Jesus says to Peter and translate what David says to Shimei, but the Hebrew word is the same.  In other words, although the writer of 2 Samuel does not show much of a developed demonology, Mark, who does, gives to his readers a strong sense that, in addition to everything else that Peter is, he’s a person who overestimates his own right to say just what a righteous King should be, just as Shimei was a thousand years before him.

When Jesus turns from the disciples to the crowds, the connection between what he tells them and what he told Peter could scarcely be clearer: this revolution will not happen when people take up weapons but when they take up crosses.  Those who would save their lives will lose them, but those who would give their lives will gain life.  What shape the Kingdom of God is not up to the Shimeis and the Peters of the world but given to all, in all of its scandal, and the question is not who will be too weak to make such a Kingdom take place but who will be so ashamed of the forgiveness of traitors and the weakness of the Christ that they abandon the scandal altogether.

In this season of Lent, we do well to remember that sin does not only name those well-defined moral lapses that the old see all around among “kids these days” but also gives us a vocabulary to talk about those who refuse forgiveness, who demand a Christ who wages war rather than suffering passively, who want the visions of the apocalyptic seers rather than the words of Jesus in Palestine to be the starting point for how we treat our neighbors.  We are sinners all, and we do well to remember that it’s in our moments of self-righteousness that we’re most likely to forget.

May the Lord who remembers the faithful help us to remember the kindness of the Lord.

General Introduction
- Dr. Gilmour!!!
- We kid because we envy
- Listener feedback
- The delay in show notes
- What’s on the blog?

What Is Epistemology?
- It’s all indirectly Greek to me
- Mise en abyme
- Connection to metaphysics
- Epistemology junkies
- Invoking epistemology to affirm or deny metaphysics

Ancient Epistemology
- Forms and objects in Plato
- Another remove
- Innate knowledge
- Aristotelian observation
- Telos and the individual object
- Thomist epistemology and Thomist metaphysics
- The necessity of divine illumination

Descartes’ Epistemological Turn
- Hidey hidey hidey ho
- Doubt everything
- Je pense donc je suis!
- Augustinian influence
- Descartes’ unsatisfactory solution
- The Cartesian Reese’s cup
- The difficulty of refuting rationalists

The Rise of Empiricism
- Building ideas
- Nathan’s favorite skeptical atheist
- The elimination of causality
- Today’s inconsistent empiricists
- The cult of the scientist

Kant! Kant! Kant!
- The best(?) of both worlds
- Kant is hard
- Noumena and phenomena
- A priori categories
- On hating Kant more than you love Jesus
- Kant’s relationship to Hume

Post-Kantian Epistemology
- Analytic and continental
- Logical positivism and its heirs
- Hegel’s ghosts and organs
- Thomas Kuhn and the historical scientific question
- The epistemological humility of the Emergent Church
- Pragmatism

What Difference Does It Make?
- The message we must spread
- Breaking apart from the age
- Correcting the mistakes of others
- Avoiding the whig view of history

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Ayer, A.J. Language, Truth, and Logic. New York: Dover, 1952.

Berkeley, George. Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method and Meditations. Trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. New York: Dover, 2003.

Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of History. Trans. A.V. Miller. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: And Other Writings. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007.

Jones, Tony. The Church Is Flat: The Relational Ecclesiology of the Emerging Church Movement. Minneapolis: JoPa, 2011.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. Paul Guyver and Allen W. Wood. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

—. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Trans. James W. Ellington. New York: Hackett, 2002.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von. Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays. Trans. Daniel Garber and Roger Ariew. New York: Hackett, 1991.

Lewis. C.S. “On the Reading of Old Books.” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New York: Oxford UP, 1979.

Peirce, C.S. The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings, 1867-1893. Ed. Christian J.W. Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

Plato. Protagoras and Meno. Trans. Adam Beresford. New York: Penguin, 2006.

—. Republic. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic, 1991.

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1981.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 26 February 2012 (First Sunday of Lent, Year B)

Genesis 9:8-17  •  Psalm 25:1-10  •  1 Peter 3:18-22  •  Mark 1:9-15

When I do preach this on Sunday, I’m going to preach the entire Psalm, in case anyone is wondering.  My essay here will reflect all 22 verses, not just the first ten.

This likely makes me a bad systematic theologian, but I really enjoy the fact that the Psalms are so leaky, theologically speaking.   There’s no doubt that Psalm 25 finds its home securely in stories of sin and redemption and deliverance.  But there’s little sense in the text that those categories fit into any simplistic system.  The one asking YHWH to forgive sins is also the one calling for protection from the violent.  The one rejoicing in the goodness of YHWH is also the one calling on YHWH to remember.  This is no abstract system of thought but the song of people who live lives alongside and under and before and in memory of God, and the movement from section to section implies a storied life that demands both a bold crying-out in the face of injustice and a confident rejoicing in things unseen.  In short, the Psalm is a prayer and says what prayer is like, and that often means an acknowledgement of uncomfortable complexity.

To call such an outlook uncomfortable is not the same as saying there’s no comfort to it.  On the contrary, the persona’s voice in the Psalm (I’m still ambivalent, all these years later, on how to translate l’David) speaks with a strength of personality that I can’t help but enjoy, and more often than not I read the Psalms, especially the lament Psalms, for the sake of emulating their frankness about the world.  My own tendency is to turn bad events into mere material phenomena, to ask the rhetorical, “Well what did you expect?” when a more faithful soul would call out to God not to make sense of evil (that’s all too easy) but to remember God’s promises to do good for God’s people.  But for someone like me, someone entirely too modern for his own good and too given to materialistic explanation as a defense against the unspeakability of suffering and the powerlessness of mortals in the face of our enemies, the Psalms always stand ready to teach me how to be a sinner.  And how to be the righteous man, crying out in outrage.

That the same person should be both is no mystery to the systematic-minded, of course; certainly every system of theology worth studying does something to account for the persistence of sinful desire in the hearts of the redeemed.  But the Psalms aren’t giving an account: they’re the primary materials, the experience of being sinner and saint, translated into Hebrew poetry, set forth for us to recite and upon which to meditate and to preach, and we do well to remember that the “problem” of sin’s persistence, no matter how fascinating as a mathematical conundrum, always emerges from the experience of prayer before it becomes an object of contemplation.  That’s the balance that the Psalms lend to the spiritual lives of examiners like myself.

May our hearts cry out; may our theologies always rise from the rag and bone shop of the heart.

• Slavoj Žižek on some changes in capitalism that Karl Marx did not anticipate
• Some prognostications on the future of higher education in America: depressing or invigorating?
• College sports, Derrida, and Homer’s Iliad
• Kevin DeYoung on why to believe in a historical Adam
• James McGrath mocks Kevin DeYoung as uneducated
• Peter Enns offers a far more nuanced and irenic response to DeYoung
• 

Sorry it’s late, folks–I totally spaced on it!

General Introduction
- Nathan defends!
- How sound editing works
- Listener feedback
- What’s on the blog? And why NOT?

The Sidekick with a Thousand Faces
- Why does Campbell leave Wiglaf out?
- Marginalizing the sidekick
- Meditations on hero-life
- The lone knight and the languishing maiden
- Do sidekicks have an identity of their own?

Sidekick as Reader Surrogate
- A little dumber than the audience
- No unexpressed thoughts
- Robin as audience surrogate
- The blandness of the surrogate
- The death and resurrection of the teen sidekick
- Police procedurals

The Sidekick Ex Machina
- Its prevalence in children’s programming
- Looking down on the hero
- The eleven-year-old hacker
- Competent cartoon dads

The Ethnic Sidekick
- Justifiable uneasiness
- Searching for the noble ethnic sidekick

The Successor Sidekick
- Commander Riker
- The evolution of Ben Kenobi
- Extending the career of the sidekick
- The Adventures of Wiglaf

The Henchman
- The idiot henchmen
- The henchman switching sides
- Evil is more interesting than good
- How real supervillains act

Theological Sidekicks
- The disciples, the apostles, and you
- The beatitudes and sidekicks
- Sidekick, not maiden