I spent a year of my life living as Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, after I had answered a simple newspaper ad: “Waterfront 1BR Cottage. $215 mo. Refs. Req.”

The landlord was an expatriate Polish aristocrat, regal in his every fiber. The tiny cottage was a wonder, situated on a peninsula thrust into a broad harbor on the Chesapeake Bay. The main house was gorgeous, the grounds immaculate, and the view from the boathouse pier spectacular. Massive and ancient mansions lined the harbor. I spent the year soaking in the elite culture as a quasi-insider.

This was Virginia’s version of East and West Egg, near Williamsburg, where I spent evenings sitting on the screen porch listening to the drifting sounds of parties along the river. During the week, I heard tales of local scandals kept quiet, of surreptitious relationships, and of lives spent filling the emptiness and ennui of days that no longer required actual work.

Baz Lurhmann’s film adaptation of Gatsby (opening May 10) already has been called a visual triumph that pulls back the curtain on the world of the American aristocracy. Most reviewers are tapping what Fitzgerald himself likely viewed as the story’s indictment of bored wealth, but I think the story sketches a much larger, very human story.

If you haven’t read the novel, you might want to wait to read the following, as I can’t proceed without spoiling a lot of the plot. (more…)

I should, perhaps, not admit to the following in print, but here goes.

When I was in fifth grade, in 1973, I bought my first record, taking my dollar to the nearest variety store and buying the 45 of a song I’d heard on the radio late at night. The record: Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” with “Electric Funeral” on the B-side.

I plugged our portable turntable into an outlet in our pink and black monstrosity of a bathroom so that I could hear the songs in all of their splendid glory in that tiled-wall space, playing them repeatedly until my dad (the good Baptist Rev. Fant, Sr.) banged on the door and told me I had heard it enough for one day. I never told him the name of the band; ever since, I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Ozzy Osbourne (the group’s singer).

Given how many Christian youth group leaders have castigated Black Sabbath as blatantly satanic over the years, I raised an eyebrow when I read Matthew Perpetua’s recent posting, “11 Bands You Might Not Realize Are Christian,”  which included Sabbath at #5 on their list, along with a few lyric excerpts to make his point.

From what I could tell, Perpetua was using lyrics as his sole foundational grid for identification. He starts with U2 (though how on earth someone would not know about their faith commitments and love for scripture is beyond me) and moves through a number of alt-Christian favorites: Mumford & Sons, the Avett Brothers, Sufjan Stevens, and a few others that are pretty well-known to Christian audiophiles. Perhaps the only two entries that would surprise most would be those of Sabbath and Lenny Kravitz, the mystically cool rocker who has wrestled openly with balancing his faith walk with his celebrity lifestyle.

I would dare say, however, that there is a pretty substantial difference between using “Christian” to signify a cultural framework and “Christian” as a spiritual/theological commitment. (more…)

I love maps. Adore them. I grew up with those crazy folding road maps and now I refuse to download certain map apps for my smartphone because I am afraid I will disappear into such a rabbit hole that my wife and children will give up on me. As Dirty Harry once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

This does not keep me from visiting Frank Jacobs’ “Strange Maps” blog for an occasional scratch of my cartographic itch. I thought this week’s posting on Vatican City might interest our readers. There is a nice discussion of the political and historical tensions over  the property itself and the possibility of two patches of the terrain that continue to be of some discussion as to legal authority. Perhaps I’m just a Baptist bumpkin, but these technicalities were quite fascinating to me. The site is well-worth a click when you have a moment.

When I was a teenager, our family suffered from the embarrassment of not having cable television. We had only five channels to watch, and my brother and I were mortified by this travesty. One year, we hit on a strategy that solved our problem. My dad’s cousin (Rod Gilbreath) played infield for the Atlanta Braves, which were televised on the “Superstation,” WTBS out of the Peachtree City. Steve and I gave dad the installation of the cable and one month’s subscription costs as a Father’s Day present that spring, hoping that he would be hooked on the ready access to baseball and shift the ongoing costs to the family budget. The strategy worked and we found ourselves finally blessed with thirty channels of static-free programming.

I mention this because of the strange ability of cable TV to bring new life to old series. We all know that older series like The Brady Bunch enjoy a form of semi-eternal life on the upper-tiers of non-broadcast television. Even still-extant series can benefit from the broader exposure. I never watched Wings in its first-run form, but when it moved to reruns on cable, I got hooked even as I ignored the overlapping new episodes that aired during prime time.

I have found myself doing the same thing with The Big Bang Theory, which now is the most popular prime-time sitcom. I could not tell you when the first-run episodes air each week and I had to think for a while to remember that its home network is CBS, but when the show hit that aforementioned Superstation, the aggregated ratings exploded and I likewise found myself watching regularly.

When the show originally premiered, some critics said that no one would voluntarily watch a show about funny physicists. Being an academic myself, I can attest to the warped humor of physicists but I had a hard time picturing how that would wear over time. And how the obligatory blond bombshell next door would interact with the guys. My thought was that some dolt at network programming had read all of the pundits and politicians begging for the U. S. to embrace “STEM” education initiatives (“Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math”) and figured they would do a public service by producing a sitcom for the STEM age.

The show is definitely a product of that sort of thinking, with enough scholarly esoterica (more…)

James Poniewozik has an interesting review in Time of the recent Oscar show, looking at the way Seth MacFarlane acquitted himself in his hosting duties. Poniewozik viewed MacFarlane as a flop; the most particular concern was that the host didn’t understand the lines that surround the profligate use of irony throughout the show:

So he delivered an opening routine that was all about inoculating himself against bad reviews, with William Shatner as James T. Kirk returning from the future to warn him against a disastrous performance, including a song directed at Hollywood women called, “We Saw Your Boobs.”

See, it wasn’t a drawn-out, obnoxious Oscar song; it was a joke about doing a drawn-out, obnoxious Oscar song!

The problem — and the problem with his whole table-setting performance — is: . . . a meta-joke about telling an unfunny joke is still an unfunny joke.

Irony, and its near-cousin sarcasm, is the lingua franca of popular culture. The more deeply we tread into this part of our national consciousness, the more we realize the breathtaking vanity of its values. Irony is, in the end, self-referential, so once it becomes self-self-referential, it has created a hall of mirrors that ultimately implodes into meaningless parodies of itself that are, well, humorless even to those toward whom the jokes were originally aimed.

When everything is ironic, irony ceases to be ironic. It lapses into mere meanness, leaving an incredibly bitter aftertaste. Indeed, the life-root of bullying just may be irony. What struck me last night was the utter brutality of much of the attempts at humor. The writers were equal-opportunity offenders, but this is, to some extent, what we find in a worldview where nothing is worth defending or treating as precious. I have a vague recollection that Henri Bergson once said that humor is the first step toward acceptance; I wonder if the corollary is true: if everything is acceptable, is there anything that can be humorous? Do rules, in some rudimentary way, actually generate humor? If comedy is always transgressive and the world (in the interest of tolerance) no longer allows transgression, then have we lost the ability to laugh? Based on the evidence of last night’s show, I have to wonder.

The answer, of course, is not that we have lost the ability to laugh but rather that we no longer knows what true humor is. Humor rightly understood resonates with the joy that should be in our hearts and spirits. Ever since the insult humor of Welcome Back, Kotter! (“Up your nose with a rubber hose!) and even Happy Days (“Sit on it!”), we have continued to debase comedy in a long arc from insults to irony. To update Nietzsche, “Comedy is dead. . . . And we have killed it. How shall we comfort ourselves?” As a good game of Clue might declare, “It was the transgressive comedian, in the family den, with leaden irony.”

A few weeks ago I met with some young scholars who were very interested in Christian apologetics. One of them gushed, “I can’t wait to learn all of the skills of apologetics so I can out-argue anyone and leave them without excuse.” I tried to remind her that Romans 1:20 makes it clear that they already are without excuse; what they lack is the complete Gospel that stands beyond the initiation of general revelation. This is why John (in 1 John 3:16-24) says that we are known by our loving acts, not our argumentation.

In our culture, more now than ever, we need to speak the truth in love, through love, and with love. Without the slightest hint of irony. When we do, we can be sure that we will speak a variety of language that our bruised and broken culture craves.

Beck Hansen. Stage name: just “Beck”.

Avant-garde musician Beck Hansen recently produced a new “album,” Song Reader, that was not released in stores or via mp3 files. Instead, he released the score and asked his fans and other musicians to upload their interpretations of the score for others to hear. The tagline on the website says, “Only you can bring Beck Hansen’s Song Reader to life.”

The idea is quite intriguing for our pop music era: The composer trusts his audience to be true to the score he has provided, allowing them the liberty to interpret his notations in ways that seem interesting or apt to them. Of course, this is the way new music used to be disseminated in the days before Mr. Edison imposed the new authority of the recorded product through the phonograph. There is, as the Preacher once noted, little that is new under the sun.

The uploaded versions of the songs to-date run the gamut of quality and texture. It is an interesting experiment in artistry, to be sure, refusing to dictate every jot and tittle of the sounds and instrumentation and allowing the fans to fill in the blanks, so to speak.

I suspect that Beck intended this move to be an ironic statement about postmodern sensibilities and the vacuum of authority that is left in the wake of irony and subjectivism. Instead, however, he has produced something that is really more of a metaphor about the authority of the author. What unites the products of the project is the shared score that he has provided; if the product has no relationship to the score, it is not a part of the wiki-album.

Indeed, this is something of a metaphor for what God did for us with his revelation of himself through the Scriptures. The notes are there for us to follow but there is a wide allowance for cultural differences. Unlike Islam, for example, where only Arabic is used in the purest pursuits of the language and cultural assimilation is expected on a significantly prescribed level, Christianity has always allowed for a diversity of cultural and interpretive expressions. Sure, we have some difficult passages that we must navigate in terms of history and culture, but to be Christian is not, per se, to be Western or African or Eastern. We have the foundations and circumscriptions of Scripture, Creed, and so forth, but when we tour the world, we find these commonalities articulated in many different ways. And this seems to reflect the timeless truths that we serve a faith that has been sent forth for all peoples in all ages until he returns to gather us home.

When I was a child, Saturday mornings meant cartoons, generally of the Bugs Bunny variety.  Since our television received only two channels, the duopoly of Looney Toons and Hanna-Barbera was fairly iron-fisted, but I never complained.  I was happy to watch gleefully.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld once observed that his entire understanding of high culture / classical music was derived from Bugs Bunny cartoons.  That observation resonated with me somewhat, though my parents gave me the “Peter and the Wolf” introduction to instruments as well, and while our house did not echo with the sounds of classical music (in fact, my mother is a country gospel singer-songwriter and radio personality), I did grow up with a moderate understanding of and appreciation for classical music.  When I got my first speeding ticket as a teenager, I was listening to a public radio station and had lost myself in a particularly rousing stretch of a symphony.  I tried to use it, to no avail, as an exonerating excuse to the attending officer. Perhaps the best testament to the diverse nature of my musical consumption is my continued ownership and playing of a cassette tape of punk impresario Malcolm McLaren’s “Fans,” a hip-hop reworking of opera arias.  [I should note, either ironically or postmodernly, that I am typing this post while listening to the post-punk cynics “Cake” on my Pandora feed, which hardly qualifies as classical fare, despite their use of occasional mixolydian and other modes.]

My daughter is a ballet dancer and advanced pianist, so she consumes a steady of diet of stout pieces for instruments other than guitar and synthesizer.  At dinner the other evening, I made a comment about how few of my students know anything about classical music and my kids remarked that most students now have no way to hear it.  Classical radio has gone by the wayside, fewer kids take instrumental lessons, cartoons no longer use classical music, and churches no longer play songs older than a few decades old.  Critics are wondering aloud just how far things will slide before they reach a plateau.  Apart from some film and video game scores, these masterpieces and more complicated styles of music have just about disappeared.  Weddings still contain the appearance of some of these forms, as do some church services that are sprinkled with violin accents that are lamented by strings players as “football scores,” reflecting the shape of the whole notes that they must play repeatedly as a form of musical gingerbread to elevate the tone of the event.

As a scholar, I cannot help but lament the loss of this portion of the Christian Intellectual Tradition, which seems to be vanishing in our generation.  In other parts of the world which still embrace classical forms, the Gospel still speaks quite loudly through the works of Handel, Bach, and so many other composers (some of whom have, admittedly, complicated personal lives).  I am uncertain about the remedy of this loss for Americans in particular.  Churches can and should play a role, of course, as should Christian institutions such as colleges.  Perhaps we need to do some music (and art!) appreciation programming for our communities?  I wonder, in fact, if music appreciation could become an evangelistic tool in some areas?  I am sure that some churches are doing this; perhaps our readers can provide some links to such programs. I know many churches have cultural outreaches, but I am speaking specifically of Gospel-centered, evangelistic opportunities.

The transcendence of the art form is laden with questions of eternity, beauty, and truth.  I can imagine such an apologist saying, “Therefore, what you listen to in ignorance, this I proclaim to you” (riffing on Acts 17: 23, transformed into St. Paul’s address at Carnegie Hall).   It’s an opportunity the church currently is missing.

NOTA BENE: As I was about to post this, David Mills posted this note about an upcoming course at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary in Yonkers.  Something must be in the air!

From time-to-time, I teach a course in historical linguistics, which is among my favorite subjects. One of the topics we spend a fair amount of time discussing is what’s called “Sound Shift,” which describes how similar vowel and consonant sounds move around over long stretches of time. For those of you familiar with Germanic languages (including English), this is what lies behind “Grimm’s Law” (also called “Rask’s Rule”).

Historically, consonant sounds tend to move around in these groups: /g/, /k/, /h/; /d/, /t/, /th/; and /b/, /p/, /f/. This is why dent- becomes “tooth” in English (/d/ becomes /t/ and /t/ becomes /th/; the /n/ dropped out for some reason) and gen- becomes “kin” (/g/ becomes /k/), and so forth. (Apologies in advance to the specialists among our readers: I am glossing over loads of subtleties for a general audience). Some linguists call these tendencies the “secret decoder ring” for cross-language vocabulary building.

As I watched the news this weekend, a particular report on the current situation in Israel caught my eye. The reporter was based in Ashkelon. I looked at my wife and asked what century it is, remembering Judges 14:18 ff’s description of Samson’s actions in Philistine territory.

The roots of the Middle East’s conflicts are millennia deep. This is even more apparent when we realize that the biblical Philistia / Philistines have been sound-shifted over the centuries to Palestine / Palestinian. Scholars and partisans may argue about whether the term is geographical or genetic, but the reality is that the history of the region is long and complicated. What is easy is this: we should pray for peace in a region that knows little of it.

Some of my friends and professional acquaintances who are secularists complain that religious social agencies  will not provide primary services to persons who do not share the faith commitments of the agency’s sponsors. They imagine a soup line that includes an armed and perhaps leisure-suit-wearing Southern Baptist deacon guarding the food and asking, “Do you subscribe to the Baptist Faith and Message? No? Then no soup for you!” This explains, perhaps, why so many social agencies include statements of non-discrimination in their published materials.

As one such person told me, the government must supplant religious organizations in the service of the poor: religious fundamentalism says who can and cannot receive basic services such as food, shelter, clothing, and even job training.  This person was making the errant assumption that because a social agency might hire only members of their sect or faith segment that they might likewise discriminate in their services. They may have a point when we move to other services such as adoption, but they have set up a straw man for basic services based on a false analogy.

Advocacy on behalf of the poor is a basic tenet of Christianity and it always has been a distinctive of true Christians. Relief to those in need has always been offered freely. Just ask the folks in the Northeast about those Southern Baptists, who wear yellow windbreakers and not leisure suits, as well as the other religious groups that have flooded the region with volunteers who are pushing back the tide of hunger, cold, and loss.

Against this background comes the word that New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg has decided that they must outlaw food donations to the poor  because the materials cannot be assessed for falling within the guidelines for salt and fat. Apparently he has misread Luke 11:11 in the King James, “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?” I have read that stones can fill hungry bellies with a false sense of satiety, and I suppose that stones are the ultimate in low-salt / low-fat material, at least as long as they aren’t halite. Unfortunately, stones are not very nutritious. Neither is the gift of nothing, like the Marie Antoinette-ish admonition, “They have no bread? Let them eat arugula with low-fat dressing!”

This, then, is where we are. We now not only say, “You can’t serve the poor because of your religious beliefs,” we even tell the poor, “You can’t be served because of our secular beliefs.” And it’s the radical secular fundamentalists who are the new Taliban, destroying religious artwork and, apparently, turning into soup kitchen Nazis. This makes perfect sense, after all, because we now live in an era where “up” is “down,” “hot” is “cold,” and “right” is “wrong.” Too bad “hunger” can’t become “satiety” through the mere wave of a bureaucratic hand.