Xico, de son vrai nom Francisco de Assis da Silva, has written one of his fine short posts on GAFCON and the Puritan reformers under James I.
Hurrah for historical perspective - and once again, for the church of the Global Center.
I have said privately and I will now say here that historians tend to be far more flexible in church matters than, say, philosophers. There's a reason for that. If you study history, you know the church is a messy and complicated reality. You also know we've been through most of this before, or at least something closely resembling it.
We've featured the writings of Rev. Cônego [the Rev. Canon] Francisco de Assis da Silva (Xico) here before, during our Latin American series of last Christmas season. Xico blogs at Katinho do Rev. He is General Secretary of the Igreja Episcopal Anglicana do Brasil (Episcopal Anglican Church of Brazil, to which dear Luiz belongs).
... The truth is always a search. There is no port where the truth arrived definitely. The truth is born in the wave of the Spirit that moves always challenging our own convictions. The truth is not an idea: it is fundamentally a praxis. Right confession of right comprehension on metaphysical dogmas is not sufficient to guarantee anything! Remember: The word was made flesh! At the place of a FOCA I think we can propose another alternative: AWA - Anglicans who act! ....
Read the whole essay "Confessing or Practicing?" here.
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Monday, June 30, 2008
Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah on the survival of Judaism and Anglicanism
This essay by an English rabbi comes to us from The Guardian, via Doorman-Priest. Thanks, DP!
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Cognitive dissonance
I have been reading books and articles related to women in the worldwide church, or rather, to women AS worldwide church.
What's the difference? Sometime in the 1980s a shift happened within churches and in ecumenical gatherings, both the formal ones (e.g. the World Council of Churches) and the informal and new ones (e.g. Women-Church) including feminist groups: the focus of women's language about our church participation --at the grass roots and among theologians-- shifted from a "Please, sir, may I have some more" or "Please let us in" approach to a "We are church and have always been church" approach.
I'm talking about the world church here, church across the board, not just Anglicans, but what is sometimes called the oikoumene, from the Greek and meaning "the whole inhabited earth."
And by the way, the pioneers in this new approach toward women and church have often been Roman Catholic women.
Women are church.
Which doesn't mean that all persons are, in practice, suddenly equal.
Women make up a majority of worshippers in all Christian churches. Go up the hierarchical ladder and you find fewer and fewer of us.
Not that this is the only indicator of women's lives as church; far from it.
Over the last few decades women, many calling themselves feminists, others not, have drawn attention to the destructive and interrelated institutional (as in systemic, as in structural, not individual) webs of sexism, racism, xenophobia, heterosexism, and socio-economic class - based bias (sometimes called "classism").
(Stick with me here, this is not about using ideological jargon, it's about the real lives of real people and where the churches are in relation to these people.)
The same women who have drawn attention to the reality of interlocking oppressions --and therefore the need for interwoven movements for liberation and healing-- have also noted the relation between church teaching and practice on the one hand and social practices harmful to women on the other.
Ways of interpreting the Bible or of offering (or not offering) pastoral care directly affect --and reflect-- the health and well-being of women and their dependent children.
Do you know what the major issue (one of four key issues, but the one that came up most often) was during the World Council of Churches' 1988-1998 Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women?
Violence. Violence against women. In homes. In churches. And of course on battlefields, in migrant camps, on streets, but especially in those other places, home and church, the places that should be the safest. No socio-economic class, race, or nationality was exempt. Women from every country and every church reported this.
That was the major issue brought up by church women. As a Christian issue. As an ecumenical issue. As an issue related to who we say we are as friends and followers and disciples of Jesus and as images, icons, of the living God, the one and holy Trinity.
The other issues lifted up by "the Decade," as it became known, were:
- Women's full and creative participation in the life of the church. (Are women participating in the life of the church to the full extent of their God-given gifts? Are women as well as men of all races, cultures, and economic conditions viewed as the images of God? Do the language and the shape of the liturgy reflect this? Do women have access to theological education? If they have access to it, can they use it to the fullest extent of their abilities? Are they remunerated for it? Do we value the wisdom of church women, whether or not they have formal theological education? Do we reflect this in the way we raise our girl children in the church? )
- The global economic crisis and its effects on women in particular. (Women and their dependent children are disproportionately affected by poverty. Everywhere. U.S., Mexico, Haiti, India, Thailand, Ghana, Brazil, Fiji.)
- Racism and xenophobia and their specific impact on women. (If you are dark-skinned and a woman, you are more likely to be poor. If you are a migrant or immigrant and a woman, your chances of suffering from both poverty and violence increase. So do the risks for your children's health and well-being.)
The method of the Decade during its second half involved visits by a team of four people, usually two women and two men, to local churches around the world. It was the first time in its 50-year history that the WCC used this model of local, person to person visits. The WCC chose to call these visiting teams "Living Letters," using the language of Paul the apostle in the Second Letter to the Corinthians:"You show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts." (2 Cor. 3:3, RSV)
(The WCC is now in the middle of a Decade to Overcome Violence whose focus and methodology are in part and quite directly inspired by the Decade in Solidarity with Women. It too has a Living Letters process.)
In the years before the Decade, another WCC project involved a broad number of grass-roots women, extending even beyond the Protestant, Anglican, Pentecostal, and Orthodox members of the WCC to include Roman Catholic and other women. The project, which has become known as "the Community Study," was called the Community of Women and Men in the Church. It lasted from 1978 to 1982 but its roots grew earlier from a number of earlier places and events, including the 1974 WCC conference on "Sexism in the 1970s," the first time a World Council of Churches international gathering used the term "sexism."
The WCC staff person running that 1974 conference on sexism, was a Black South African Anglican named Brigalia Hlophe (or Ntombemhlophe) Bam. Brigalia Bam later served as the Secretary-General of the South Africa Council of Churches. She is now Chair of South Africa's Independent Electoral Commission.
Note the methods or processes by which the two projects, the Community Study and the Decade, came up with their findings: broadly based, grass-roots-involving (and involving church leaders too), ecumenical enterprises involving face to face conversation with much listening, study, and examination of the relationship between faith in Christ and daily life, and the relationship between daily life and the structures and institutions affecting it. A lot of sitting in circles, a lot of breaking or melting of silence, a lot of tension, tears, and anger but also patience, hospitality, and hope.
I know that at Lambeth the Bible study will be participatory and involve a carefully designed process that is not unlike the processes I have described above, though it will of course only involve bishops and their spouses. (With the exception of one duly elected and consecrated Bishop of New Hamphire and his spouse; but I digress.) Gerald O. West, a South African theologian (U. of KwaZulu-Natal) whom we heard speak at the Society for the Study of Anglicanism last November in San Diego, a contextual and liberation-oriented scholar who has also worked with women's concerns and examined approaches to biblical interpretation in the age of HIV/AIDS, has been coordinating the design of the sessions. This reassures me.
But --here it comes-- I confess to having almost the same feeling about Lambeth and GAFCON when I look at them through a feminist lens. Or, if the word "feminist" bothers you, through the lens of women as world church.
Of course, push me against the wall and I'm a Lambeth woman. I'm an Episcopalian --a happy one-- and an Anglican --a heartfelt one-- and Lambeth is my instrument of unity too. (Discussion about the why, what, whether and how of the Instruments of Unity --or Instruments of Communion-- some other time, or not at all.)
But that's part of my point -- the act of pushing against the wall. (Note the violent image.)
Who will be pushed against the wall? Who will push? Who will be outside the circle? Will there be true circles of listening and struggling with difference with integrity, charity, and hope? Will the relation between living Christ's resurrection and building justice be intimate, casual, clear, muddled, ignored, nonexistent?
Both GAFCON and Lambeth raise some of the same questions for me.
Who will be defining the situation?
What is church? Who is church? Where is church?
Who decides? Who interprets? Whom does this benefit?
What is unity? At what cost and over whose backs do we build unity?
What are the truly important matters for the friends of Jesus who call themselves the Body of Christ?
What are the needs of the world and the signs of the times?
Where ought our attention to be directed in these times?
And where, where will be the women and the voices of women, women as church?
I am late with my monthly column for the Episcopal Café because I have been trying to write a carefully worded piece on what ecumenical, worldwide women's questions and wisdom have to say to us in this Lambeth year, a perspective that goes more broadly and deeply than that of Lambeth yet is in some ways marginal to it.
Wherein lies the rub.
The nicely moderate words won't come out and instead I am pondering in public, or perhaps ranting, after realizing suddenly, a few hours ago, that I was having a profound experience of cognitive dissonance. That got me unblocked and writing.
The cognitive dissonance is this: the language and structure and process and concerns of one set of events (Lambeth, GAFCON) seem light years away from the language and structure and process and concerns of the other set of events (the WCC Decade and related gatherings and movements).
I know this is not entirely true. From looking over some of the Lambeth resolutions and some accounts of the last meeting, I see that it is not entirely true. I also see that it is partly true. And GAFCON, which, as most readers of this blog know, is not my thing, may have a participatory process about which I don't know. (Though I would love someone to filter it through the ecumenical experience of women for us. I doubt that any of the reporters or commentators will. Someone, please prove me wrong.)
So that's the lengthy thought for the day, and here I sit.
Can I get a witness?
What's the difference? Sometime in the 1980s a shift happened within churches and in ecumenical gatherings, both the formal ones (e.g. the World Council of Churches) and the informal and new ones (e.g. Women-Church) including feminist groups: the focus of women's language about our church participation --at the grass roots and among theologians-- shifted from a "Please, sir, may I have some more" or "Please let us in" approach to a "We are church and have always been church" approach.
I'm talking about the world church here, church across the board, not just Anglicans, but what is sometimes called the oikoumene, from the Greek and meaning "the whole inhabited earth."
And by the way, the pioneers in this new approach toward women and church have often been Roman Catholic women.
Women are church.
Which doesn't mean that all persons are, in practice, suddenly equal.
Women make up a majority of worshippers in all Christian churches. Go up the hierarchical ladder and you find fewer and fewer of us.
Not that this is the only indicator of women's lives as church; far from it.
Over the last few decades women, many calling themselves feminists, others not, have drawn attention to the destructive and interrelated institutional (as in systemic, as in structural, not individual) webs of sexism, racism, xenophobia, heterosexism, and socio-economic class - based bias (sometimes called "classism").
(Stick with me here, this is not about using ideological jargon, it's about the real lives of real people and where the churches are in relation to these people.)
The same women who have drawn attention to the reality of interlocking oppressions --and therefore the need for interwoven movements for liberation and healing-- have also noted the relation between church teaching and practice on the one hand and social practices harmful to women on the other.
Ways of interpreting the Bible or of offering (or not offering) pastoral care directly affect --and reflect-- the health and well-being of women and their dependent children.
Do you know what the major issue (one of four key issues, but the one that came up most often) was during the World Council of Churches' 1988-1998 Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women?
Violence. Violence against women. In homes. In churches. And of course on battlefields, in migrant camps, on streets, but especially in those other places, home and church, the places that should be the safest. No socio-economic class, race, or nationality was exempt. Women from every country and every church reported this.
That was the major issue brought up by church women. As a Christian issue. As an ecumenical issue. As an issue related to who we say we are as friends and followers and disciples of Jesus and as images, icons, of the living God, the one and holy Trinity.
The other issues lifted up by "the Decade," as it became known, were:
- Women's full and creative participation in the life of the church. (Are women participating in the life of the church to the full extent of their God-given gifts? Are women as well as men of all races, cultures, and economic conditions viewed as the images of God? Do the language and the shape of the liturgy reflect this? Do women have access to theological education? If they have access to it, can they use it to the fullest extent of their abilities? Are they remunerated for it? Do we value the wisdom of church women, whether or not they have formal theological education? Do we reflect this in the way we raise our girl children in the church? )
- The global economic crisis and its effects on women in particular. (Women and their dependent children are disproportionately affected by poverty. Everywhere. U.S., Mexico, Haiti, India, Thailand, Ghana, Brazil, Fiji.)
- Racism and xenophobia and their specific impact on women. (If you are dark-skinned and a woman, you are more likely to be poor. If you are a migrant or immigrant and a woman, your chances of suffering from both poverty and violence increase. So do the risks for your children's health and well-being.)
The method of the Decade during its second half involved visits by a team of four people, usually two women and two men, to local churches around the world. It was the first time in its 50-year history that the WCC used this model of local, person to person visits. The WCC chose to call these visiting teams "Living Letters," using the language of Paul the apostle in the Second Letter to the Corinthians:"You show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts." (2 Cor. 3:3, RSV)
(The WCC is now in the middle of a Decade to Overcome Violence whose focus and methodology are in part and quite directly inspired by the Decade in Solidarity with Women. It too has a Living Letters process.)
In the years before the Decade, another WCC project involved a broad number of grass-roots women, extending even beyond the Protestant, Anglican, Pentecostal, and Orthodox members of the WCC to include Roman Catholic and other women. The project, which has become known as "the Community Study," was called the Community of Women and Men in the Church. It lasted from 1978 to 1982 but its roots grew earlier from a number of earlier places and events, including the 1974 WCC conference on "Sexism in the 1970s," the first time a World Council of Churches international gathering used the term "sexism."
The WCC staff person running that 1974 conference on sexism, was a Black South African Anglican named Brigalia Hlophe (or Ntombemhlophe) Bam. Brigalia Bam later served as the Secretary-General of the South Africa Council of Churches. She is now Chair of South Africa's Independent Electoral Commission.
Note the methods or processes by which the two projects, the Community Study and the Decade, came up with their findings: broadly based, grass-roots-involving (and involving church leaders too), ecumenical enterprises involving face to face conversation with much listening, study, and examination of the relationship between faith in Christ and daily life, and the relationship between daily life and the structures and institutions affecting it. A lot of sitting in circles, a lot of breaking or melting of silence, a lot of tension, tears, and anger but also patience, hospitality, and hope.
I know that at Lambeth the Bible study will be participatory and involve a carefully designed process that is not unlike the processes I have described above, though it will of course only involve bishops and their spouses. (With the exception of one duly elected and consecrated Bishop of New Hamphire and his spouse; but I digress.) Gerald O. West, a South African theologian (U. of KwaZulu-Natal) whom we heard speak at the Society for the Study of Anglicanism last November in San Diego, a contextual and liberation-oriented scholar who has also worked with women's concerns and examined approaches to biblical interpretation in the age of HIV/AIDS, has been coordinating the design of the sessions. This reassures me.
But --here it comes-- I confess to having almost the same feeling about Lambeth and GAFCON when I look at them through a feminist lens. Or, if the word "feminist" bothers you, through the lens of women as world church.
Of course, push me against the wall and I'm a Lambeth woman. I'm an Episcopalian --a happy one-- and an Anglican --a heartfelt one-- and Lambeth is my instrument of unity too. (Discussion about the why, what, whether and how of the Instruments of Unity --or Instruments of Communion-- some other time, or not at all.)
But that's part of my point -- the act of pushing against the wall. (Note the violent image.)
Who will be pushed against the wall? Who will push? Who will be outside the circle? Will there be true circles of listening and struggling with difference with integrity, charity, and hope? Will the relation between living Christ's resurrection and building justice be intimate, casual, clear, muddled, ignored, nonexistent?
Both GAFCON and Lambeth raise some of the same questions for me.
Who will be defining the situation?
What is church? Who is church? Where is church?
Who decides? Who interprets? Whom does this benefit?
What is unity? At what cost and over whose backs do we build unity?
What are the truly important matters for the friends of Jesus who call themselves the Body of Christ?
What are the needs of the world and the signs of the times?
Where ought our attention to be directed in these times?
And where, where will be the women and the voices of women, women as church?
I am late with my monthly column for the Episcopal Café because I have been trying to write a carefully worded piece on what ecumenical, worldwide women's questions and wisdom have to say to us in this Lambeth year, a perspective that goes more broadly and deeply than that of Lambeth yet is in some ways marginal to it.
Wherein lies the rub.
The nicely moderate words won't come out and instead I am pondering in public, or perhaps ranting, after realizing suddenly, a few hours ago, that I was having a profound experience of cognitive dissonance. That got me unblocked and writing.
The cognitive dissonance is this: the language and structure and process and concerns of one set of events (Lambeth, GAFCON) seem light years away from the language and structure and process and concerns of the other set of events (the WCC Decade and related gatherings and movements).
I know this is not entirely true. From looking over some of the Lambeth resolutions and some accounts of the last meeting, I see that it is not entirely true. I also see that it is partly true. And GAFCON, which, as most readers of this blog know, is not my thing, may have a participatory process about which I don't know. (Though I would love someone to filter it through the ecumenical experience of women for us. I doubt that any of the reporters or commentators will. Someone, please prove me wrong.)
So that's the lengthy thought for the day, and here I sit.
Can I get a witness?
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Rosemary Skinner Keller, R.I.P
A great feminist historian, churchwoman, and scholar has died.Rosemary Skinner Keller died this morning of kidney cancer.
Dr. Keller was Professor Emerita of Church History and former Academic Dean at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. She had also taught at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, where she served as the seminary's first woman Dean and Vice President of academic affairs. She was an ordained permanent deacon in the United Methodist Church.
With feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether (who is alive and well), Rosemary Skinner Keller was the editor of In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women's Religious Writings and the recently published, acclaimed three-volume Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America.
The Union Theological Seminary website has a biography of and tribute to Dr. Keller.
May Rosemary Skinner Keller rest in peace after her long and good labors, and may her memory and her work endure.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Mothers' Day
As you may have noticed a couple of posts below, we have a new feature at Acts of Hope, "blog flashback." I was inspired by my friendly colleague Jennifer, she of the fine food blog and priestly ministry. She calls her flashbacks "archive alerts."
Usually I will post these flashbacks at the bottom of posts and not devote a full post to them, but occasionally I will just post a flashback, as I am doing here. I had more wisdom to share a year ago than I do now!
This evening we bring you a couple of Mothers' Day flashbacks.
Blog flashback: Last year at this time:
Mothers' Day: Peace, Not Hallmark
A little late with your Mom's Day greetings?
Usually I will post these flashbacks at the bottom of posts and not devote a full post to them, but occasionally I will just post a flashback, as I am doing here. I had more wisdom to share a year ago than I do now!
This evening we bring you a couple of Mothers' Day flashbacks.
Blog flashback: Last year at this time:
Mothers' Day: Peace, Not Hallmark
A little late with your Mom's Day greetings?
Friday, April 4, 2008
And today we remember Dr. King...
...about whom I was going to blog along with an overdue tribute to César Chávez -- how appropriate to honor them together -- but my bodymind is ready to go to bed and all it can handle is the cat. (See below.)
Tomorrow I will chair a diocesan anti-racism committee meeting in the morning and later in the day or weekend* we will remember Brothers Martin and César here.
May we listen to their lives, walk with them, and not keep them on pedestals far, far away.
Thus will we honor their memories.
* or more like Tuesday. (Added Monday evening.)
Tomorrow I will chair a diocesan anti-racism committee meeting in the morning and later in the day or weekend* we will remember Brothers Martin and César here.
May we listen to their lives, walk with them, and not keep them on pedestals far, far away.
Thus will we honor their memories.
* or more like Tuesday. (Added Monday evening.)
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
"Knoxville, Summer 1915:" James Agee, Samuel Barber, Dawn Upshaw
Late last night, in the early hours of Ash Wednesday, I was cleaning up from the Fat Tuesday party and listening to the radio, and on the nighttime classical music show came a familiar tune which I had forgotten. Then I remembered it in all its beauty as I listened. It is Samuel Barber's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," text by James Agee, sung in this case by the incomparable Dawn Upshaw.
I poked around the web afterward but neither eSnips (which is no longer very helpful) nor YouTube has this, and the various CD-selling sites want you to buy the whole recording, of course (can't blame them). I don't own the recording or know how to work one of those little music thingies (I must get the software) so alas, I can't share this with you, but do listen to it sometime! It's a wondrous work.
I did find online a set of 2004 program notes about the work and its context. It's worth a read. Here it is. But try to get a hold of the full musical piece!
Knoxville: Summer of 1915
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
“We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child” — the opening of James Agee’s essay Knoxville and Samuel Barber’s 1950 composition for soprano and orchestra, “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.”
The American Civil War was the bloodiest war that the world had known up to that time. This war has often been considered the precursor to modern warfare, with its trenches and tremendous death tolls. The Civil War was a harbinger of modern war in other disturbing ways as well. It was fought over attempted cultural hegemony and blatant nationalism, bound up with racial oppression. The civilian population of the South was brutalized in the Union’s vindictive march to the Atlantic Ocean on the Georgian coast. The year 1915—the year that James Agee chose for his essay—was only 50 years after that war, less, in fact, than our distance now from the Second World War.
Of course, 1915 has other implications. That year Americans were determined to avoid the war in Europe, both in spite of and because of the knowledge of the terrible human cost. “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” is poised precariously in the early evening, before the dark horrors of the night of the 20th Century. The family in the Agee/Barber work is a portrait of Southern stoicism and reserve; their quiet small-talk skirts the fears of tomorrow as well as the sadnesses of yesterday, and focuses on life at the moment.
The voice of this text seems to vacillate between that of the child-narrator and the adult-narrator remembering his childhood thoughts. We are not sure where one voice ends and the other begins. The beginning of the piece quotes the music of the impassioned prayer sung later, at the climax. Gradually, the strident leaps in the strings dissolve into a gentle rocking motion against which the text unfolds. While this rocking motive is indeed less vehement, it still contains the same musical element of the fervent prayer, only softened. In this way, the music seems to guide us to that state of being “successfully disguised to [one’s self] as a child.” The pathos is apparent but contained.
In fact, the child’s sense of security is in continual conflict with his sense of existential terror. Most obviously, the streetcar passing by obliterates the previous Edenesque depiction of evening. In its wake remains the rough wet fear of mortality and the loneliness of the night. The night scene is described: “On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts.” The sustaining comfort of quilts, on which the family rests, is only an inch thick; underneath lie uncertainty and mortality in its biblical metaphor of grass.
Childlike simplicity and dark emotion alternate with increasing duress, culminating in the speaker’s desperate prayer for the well-being of his people: “By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.”
The rocking music returns, all the more comforting, if ultimately less reassuring. As the voice of the adult and child fuse, the speaker realizes that with all their regard and love, his family will not—in fact, could not, even when they were still alive—tell him who he is, who he should be. In this tragedy of universal loneliness, however, lies also the hope that one’s spirit, since it must be cultivated alone, will develop on its own terms and flourish.
Barber dedicated the piece to the memory of his father.
— Jed Gaylin
Text, “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”— from James Agee’s essay "Knoxville" and the introduction to his Pulitzer Prize-winning posthumous novel, A Death in the Family
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.
...It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt: a loud auto: a quiet auto: people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard, and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squaring with clowns in hueless amber. A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping; belling and starting, stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter; fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone: forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew.
Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose.
Low in the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes...
Parents on porches: rock and rock. From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.
On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there.…They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine,...with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.
After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.
© 1949 (renewed) by G. Schirmer, Inc. (ASCAP). International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission
I poked around the web afterward but neither eSnips (which is no longer very helpful) nor YouTube has this, and the various CD-selling sites want you to buy the whole recording, of course (can't blame them). I don't own the recording or know how to work one of those little music thingies (I must get the software) so alas, I can't share this with you, but do listen to it sometime! It's a wondrous work.
I did find online a set of 2004 program notes about the work and its context. It's worth a read. Here it is. But try to get a hold of the full musical piece!
Knoxville: Summer of 1915
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
“We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child” — the opening of James Agee’s essay Knoxville and Samuel Barber’s 1950 composition for soprano and orchestra, “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.”
The American Civil War was the bloodiest war that the world had known up to that time. This war has often been considered the precursor to modern warfare, with its trenches and tremendous death tolls. The Civil War was a harbinger of modern war in other disturbing ways as well. It was fought over attempted cultural hegemony and blatant nationalism, bound up with racial oppression. The civilian population of the South was brutalized in the Union’s vindictive march to the Atlantic Ocean on the Georgian coast. The year 1915—the year that James Agee chose for his essay—was only 50 years after that war, less, in fact, than our distance now from the Second World War.
Of course, 1915 has other implications. That year Americans were determined to avoid the war in Europe, both in spite of and because of the knowledge of the terrible human cost. “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” is poised precariously in the early evening, before the dark horrors of the night of the 20th Century. The family in the Agee/Barber work is a portrait of Southern stoicism and reserve; their quiet small-talk skirts the fears of tomorrow as well as the sadnesses of yesterday, and focuses on life at the moment.
The voice of this text seems to vacillate between that of the child-narrator and the adult-narrator remembering his childhood thoughts. We are not sure where one voice ends and the other begins. The beginning of the piece quotes the music of the impassioned prayer sung later, at the climax. Gradually, the strident leaps in the strings dissolve into a gentle rocking motion against which the text unfolds. While this rocking motive is indeed less vehement, it still contains the same musical element of the fervent prayer, only softened. In this way, the music seems to guide us to that state of being “successfully disguised to [one’s self] as a child.” The pathos is apparent but contained.
In fact, the child’s sense of security is in continual conflict with his sense of existential terror. Most obviously, the streetcar passing by obliterates the previous Edenesque depiction of evening. In its wake remains the rough wet fear of mortality and the loneliness of the night. The night scene is described: “On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts.” The sustaining comfort of quilts, on which the family rests, is only an inch thick; underneath lie uncertainty and mortality in its biblical metaphor of grass.
Childlike simplicity and dark emotion alternate with increasing duress, culminating in the speaker’s desperate prayer for the well-being of his people: “By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.”
The rocking music returns, all the more comforting, if ultimately less reassuring. As the voice of the adult and child fuse, the speaker realizes that with all their regard and love, his family will not—in fact, could not, even when they were still alive—tell him who he is, who he should be. In this tragedy of universal loneliness, however, lies also the hope that one’s spirit, since it must be cultivated alone, will develop on its own terms and flourish.
Barber dedicated the piece to the memory of his father.
— Jed Gaylin
Text, “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”— from James Agee’s essay "Knoxville" and the introduction to his Pulitzer Prize-winning posthumous novel, A Death in the Family
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.
...It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt: a loud auto: a quiet auto: people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard, and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squaring with clowns in hueless amber. A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping; belling and starting, stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter; fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone: forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew.
Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose.
Low in the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes...
Parents on porches: rock and rock. From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.
On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there.…They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine,...with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.
After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.
© 1949 (renewed) by G. Schirmer, Inc. (ASCAP). International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission
Agee, by the way, was raised an Episcopalian and attended an Episcopal boarding school in the Appalachian mountains. Here and there in his work you can catch that influence in the cadences and content of his language.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
African American religion and theology
That's a course I teach every year. Here are the required texts. I know I'm boring and minimal in my posts but such is life these days. Well, life is not boring, I just have no time to do anything but go from this to that.
Katie Geneva Cannon, Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community
James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power
Samuel Freedman, Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church
Larry Murphy, ed., Down by the Riverside: Readings in African American Religion
Anne H. Pinn and Anthony B. Pinn, Fortress Introduction to Black Church History
Marcia Riggs, Plenty Good Room: Women vs. Male Power in the Black Church
Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African American Experience
If you want to dip into this field and get just one book, get Murphy, which has a little of everything in short essays by very good authors.
Good class tonight... (This one meets once a week* all evening -- I actually like that and it's good for the adults commuter students but the young 'uns come too.) Also lots of student meetings, lots of pastoral work, and some late night meetings yesterday and today to get some things ready for Convention. We have a table for the diocesan Anti-Racism Committee I chair (in the exhibit area) and we arranged to have it next to the Hispanic Ministries Committee and the Environmental Ministries folks and the Christian Social Concerns committee. I'm into building social justice coalitions :-).
Katie Geneva Cannon, Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community
James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power
Samuel Freedman, Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church
Larry Murphy, ed., Down by the Riverside: Readings in African American Religion
Anne H. Pinn and Anthony B. Pinn, Fortress Introduction to Black Church History
Marcia Riggs, Plenty Good Room: Women vs. Male Power in the Black Church
Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African American Experience
If you want to dip into this field and get just one book, get Murphy, which has a little of everything in short essays by very good authors.
Good class tonight... (This one meets once a week* all evening -- I actually like that and it's good for the adults commuter students but the young 'uns come too.) Also lots of student meetings, lots of pastoral work, and some late night meetings yesterday and today to get some things ready for Convention. We have a table for the diocesan Anti-Racism Committee I chair (in the exhibit area) and we arranged to have it next to the Hispanic Ministries Committee and the Environmental Ministries folks and the Christian Social Concerns committee. I'm into building social justice coalitions :-).
* Actually I have this class twice a week but it's because for the first time I am teaching two sections of the same course; meaning I teach the class Wednesday nights to one group and Thursday nights to another. So two of my courses this semester only meet once a week. Same amount of homework to correct, though, 'cause I assign the same darn amount of work.
More on Convention above, though perhaps not tonight, because on the advice of Paul, my beauty consultant (see below in the Comments), I must attend to some beautification projects, like maybe doing my nails. Last year I wore bright turquoise on with black and grey, and I think this year we're going for bright red. (I wear a lot of purple but I think red is the thing. But I may change my mind by morning.)
Click to enlarge the beautiful picture above. It is a mural by the late Cameroonian Jesuit artist and theologian Engelbert Mveng and is located at Holy Angels Catholic Church in Chicago. All the scenes are biblical and have angels in them! African angels, as you can see. (Including Black heavenly host above the Nativity scene.) Detailed explanation of the mural here. (Small mistake -- the book is called Revelation with no "s.") Home page of Holy Angels Church here.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
North Carolina folk: an important symposium in Chapel Hill this Friday-- how do we remember our slaveholding past and its prominent citizens?
More info at Race, Justice, and Love.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
The exhibit I had to miss
The length of the foodie report I plan to write is growing in my head, but I must get some sleep. I leave for Brussels in the a.m. and my subway ride to the station is nearly as long as the Paris-to-Brussels Thalys ride. Thalys is one of the rapid trains, specifically the France-Belgium-Netherlands-Cologne (Germany) one. Would that we had these in the U.S. I will not go on a rant about U.S. [lack of] rail transportation planning and technology and the attendant [lack of] political will, because I had a very nice black-currant sorbet (again, but this time with whole currants in it) on top of an Italian meal with an excellent Montepulciano d'Abruzzo with three very dear old friends and I do not want to ruin either my digestion or my sleep.
Yes, I have had chocolate mousse. Homemade and not fattening at all. I got the recipe, too.
A good thing people are feeding me because the dollar is dropping against the Euro, more each day; another big dip today. I am not sure how much we are on our own for the meals at the conference (beyond the bed and breakfast and a final banquet for which we must pay in Euros) but it could be a lean rest of the week.
More from Belgium if I can. Not sure what the technology will be like where I am staying. Are Flemish Benedictine monks wired for internet? Stay tuned.
Jane, Girl Reporter
Monday, November 5, 2007
Culture vulture
This was a two-museum day. Time here is short (I leave Wednesday for my conference in Belgium) so one must make haste, slowly, to get a little kultchah.After lunch I found myself heading to the Cluny museum, which was just minutes away and where I'd been thinking of going since yesterday. Or longer. I don't think I had been during any of my adult visits. It's Paris's medieval museum and also is adjacent to the ruins of the Roman baths --you visit the one on the same ticket as the other-- and since I now teach history of Christianity with a serious segment on 12th century Europe, this was a must.
The most amusing part of a visit full of items related to religious devotion plus a few devoted to war was a set of tiny pendants or pins --jewelry of some kind-- which alas I cannot describe because it would draw all manner of undesirables to the blog, but let me say that our medieval forebears may have fasted during Lent and sculpted the Last Judgment on the portals of their cathedrals and feared for the lives of their immortal souls, but they were a randy bunch, and you have no idea of some of the explicit depictions they made. They didn't teach us about that in school.
Yes, I also saw amazing tapestries and statues and tiles and fabric from medieval Spain that showed a lot of Moorish influence and ivory and and stained glass and wood and metal portable altars and reredoses (reredoi? reredoodles?), oh my.
The museum happens to be located in a not too shabby 15th century building which was the Cluniac monks' little Parisian pied-à-terre.
It was after that bit of overstimulation that I headed for the quiet of the Ile Saint-Louis and the Berthillon sorbets. (See below.)
After which it was time for a little something more modern, which I would have saved for tomorrow except that most museums in Paris are closed on Tuesdays. Off I went, still on foot --it was a long walking day-- to the Pompidou Center, a.k.a. Beaubourg (see discussion on nomenclature below), which has an exhibit on the sculptor Alberto Giacometti.
Beaubourg is a monstrosity. I mean, it really does look like a heating plant. But it's a fabulous museum, even if the signage inside is lousy and I got lost twice on the way to the exhibit. And what no one had told me and I had never read anywhere is that the view from the 6th floor (where the exhibit was), at least from the balcony and walkways, is one of the most spectacular in all of Paris on a clear night. And this was a clear night. (The museum has evening hours.) You can see every major building illuminated, clear across the night sky, including both the ugly ones (or the ones Parisians think are mostly ugly tourist traps, like the Sacré-Coeur and the Eiffel Tower) and the beautiful old ones like the Invalides (where Napoleon's tomb is) and the nearby Tour Saint-Jacques and Notre-Dame and the ugliest building in the city, the Tour Montparnasse, which was an accident of urban planning and sticks out like a square sore thumb on the urban landscape. Directly across from Beaubourg are traditional old --or restored-- five- or six-story buildings with the mansard windows so characteristic of the city. Some architect knew what s/he was doing with that sixth-floor glass-enclosed walkway.
It's still ugly from outside, though. But it works.
As for Giacometti, I have always liked him, and I continue to be amazed at how much emotion and detail his thin, compressed sculpture convey. I also love his face. There was a whole room in the exhibit devoted to photographs of him. All the major photographers of the 20th century seem to have taken portraits of him: Man Ray, Brassaï, Gordon Parks, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Inge Morath. He had a beautiful, mobile, sculptured face.
He also made sketches and a tiny bust of Simone de Beauvoir. Who knew? Sketches of Sartre also, but no bust, at least none in the exhibit.
I like his cat:
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Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Friday, October 5, 2007
Francis follow-up: Saint Francis and the Sultan
I promised more Francis fare, and here it is.
This comes from a New York Times op-ed from last Christmas Day by Thomas Cahill. I first heard the story in a sermon for the feast of St. Francis two years ago. So yes, the encounter between Francis and the Sultan really did happen. Read the op-ed here.
If the link won't work, please let me know and I will do a cut and paste job. The link works for me, but I have one of those login thingies --don't you love it when I talk tech?-- with the Times.
In the same vein, here is a meditation on Francis and the Sultan by Jesuit peace activist John Dear.
Here is another by a freelance Catholic writer, Wendy Hoke.
This comes from a New York Times op-ed from last Christmas Day by Thomas Cahill. I first heard the story in a sermon for the feast of St. Francis two years ago. So yes, the encounter between Francis and the Sultan really did happen. Read the op-ed here.
If the link won't work, please let me know and I will do a cut and paste job. The link works for me, but I have one of those login thingies --don't you love it when I talk tech?-- with the Times.
In the same vein, here is a meditation on Francis and the Sultan by Jesuit peace activist John Dear.
Here is another by a freelance Catholic writer, Wendy Hoke.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Upcoming movie on the Carter family (the musical one, not the political one)
I know the last thing you thought you'd find here was Carter-Cash kind of music, but this blog and I are impossibly eclectic and my friend Beth the fabulous documentary-maker has almost finished her movie on the Carter family, and there is a great picture of her with Randy Scruggs (I barely know who he is) on the info site for the movie. Hot if you're a country music fan, fun even if you're not.If you haven't seen Beth Harrington's film "Welcome to the Club" on the women of rockabilly, you must. (It aired on PBS stations a few years ago and I think it's making the rounds again.)
Beth also has movies on Italian saints' festivals in Boston and Sicily, the Aleutian Islands, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, and a "creative nonfiction" autobiographical one called "The Blinking Madonna" which came out a little over a dozen years ago, around the time we became friends. It is set in Boston, Beth's original home. (She's now on the West Coast. Her beloved, now husband and still beloved, is a vulcanologist, and there are no volcanoes in Massachusetts, so she moved.)
Just a little p.r. for our friends. I'm biased, but honestly, Beth is terrific and has been nominated for an Emmy and a Grammy for past films and won all kinds of other awards. She makes great movies and she's one fine person. And you know you want to learn about the Carter family --and hear some fine country-roots music.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Mario Cuomo on the Constitution and the current war(s)
Always good to hear from Mario Cuomo. Also good to remember the Constitution of the United States. Remember the Constitution? See today's op-ed in the Los Angeles Times.
Monday, September 3, 2007
Happy Danes, gloomy Danes, and Nikolai Grundtvig (today's feast)
Who in the world is Nikolai Grundtvig? And what's with "Happy Danes" and "Gloomy Danes"?Read all about them at the ever-reliable Daily Office site of Mission St. Clare.
Did Grundtvig and Kierkegaard get along? Find out here.
There; don't you feel better?
P.S. I mean no disrespect -- in fact, one of the delights of the Episcopal calendar, with its ecumenical and multidisciplinary celebrations of motley holy people, is that it honors in Grundtvig someone who was both cleric and hymnwriter. One of the biographies describes his claims to fame as "poet and divine." I wouldn't mind that descriptor myself. We have a wonderful tradition in the Anglican heritage, that of parson-poets and priest-novelists and bishop-hymnwriters. Some of our best theology, perhaps our best, is that found in our poetry. If you haven't read it already, have a look at my mentor and friend Bill Countryman's The Poetic Imagination: An Anglican Spiritual Tradition.
Friday, August 31, 2007
The Beloit Mindset List Is Out
Feeling old? Read this and you really will.
This list comes out every fall and makes many of us laugh and groan. It's also a good way to get to know the younger generation. (I can't BELIEVE I am now using that term!)
I'll post tidbits from it here when I return and recover from all my meetings. Meanwhile, here is a teaser. Off I go. The site also has lists from the previous years. Well worth a read.
Each August for the past decade, as faculty prepare for the academic year, Beloit College in Wisconsin has released the Beloit College Mindset List. Its 70 items provide a look at the cultural touchstones that have shaped the lives of today’s first-year students, most of them born in 1989. It is the creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and Public Affairs Director Ron Nief.
Latchkey kids for most of their lives, students entering college this fall think nothing of arriving home with parents still at work, then e-mailing or texting their friends, instantly updating their autobiographies on “Facebook” or “MySpace,” and listening to their iPods while doing their research on Wikipedia. They’ve grown up with Rush Limbaugh urging his fellow Dittoheads to excoriate liberals, with having been taught by an equal number of women and men in the classroom, and with women having been hired as police chiefs of major cities.
Food has always been a health concern. Consumer awareness about ingredients and fats has always been energized. They’ve never “rolled down” a car window, and to them Jack Nicholson is mainly known as the guy who played “The Joker.”
As usual, they remind their elders how quickly time has passed. For them Pete Rose has never been in baseball. Abbie Hoffman’s always been dead. Johnny Carson has never been live on TV, and Nelson Mandela has always been free.
As for the Berlin Wall, what’s that?
This list comes out every fall and makes many of us laugh and groan. It's also a good way to get to know the younger generation. (I can't BELIEVE I am now using that term!)
I'll post tidbits from it here when I return and recover from all my meetings. Meanwhile, here is a teaser. Off I go. The site also has lists from the previous years. Well worth a read.
Each August for the past decade, as faculty prepare for the academic year, Beloit College in Wisconsin has released the Beloit College Mindset List. Its 70 items provide a look at the cultural touchstones that have shaped the lives of today’s first-year students, most of them born in 1989. It is the creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and Public Affairs Director Ron Nief.
Latchkey kids for most of their lives, students entering college this fall think nothing of arriving home with parents still at work, then e-mailing or texting their friends, instantly updating their autobiographies on “Facebook” or “MySpace,” and listening to their iPods while doing their research on Wikipedia. They’ve grown up with Rush Limbaugh urging his fellow Dittoheads to excoriate liberals, with having been taught by an equal number of women and men in the classroom, and with women having been hired as police chiefs of major cities.
Food has always been a health concern. Consumer awareness about ingredients and fats has always been energized. They’ve never “rolled down” a car window, and to them Jack Nicholson is mainly known as the guy who played “The Joker.”
As usual, they remind their elders how quickly time has passed. For them Pete Rose has never been in baseball. Abbie Hoffman’s always been dead. Johnny Carson has never been live on TV, and Nelson Mandela has always been free.
As for the Berlin Wall, what’s that?
Saturday, August 25, 2007
A French sort of week(end): Saint Louis a.k.a. Louis IX
Today is the feast of Louis IX. He is never known as Louis IX in France; you always learn about him and talk about him as "Saint Louis," though everyone knows he is Louis IX because in elementary school you learn all your kings and queens and who was the son of whom and the wife of whom and (very important) the mother of whom and (as I noted yesterday) the mistress of whom.
In this case the mother was important, because Saint Louis (pronounced the French way, not the Missouri way) was only 12 when he became king, so like several other kings of France, he had a regent, that is, someone who did most of the governing in his stead, and in his case it was Blanche of Castille, whose name we learned at the same time as her saintly son's. We never did, now that I think of it, learn who his wife was. My memories of Saint Louis are: Blanche of Castille, the Sainte-Chapelle (Louis had it built to house a piece of the true cross and the crown of thorns), Crusades, the building of a famous hospital for the poor and blind, and death from typhoid in 1270 -- and also the fact that he wasn't entirely what one might think of as a saint. Then again, neither were a lot of other saints. But he did sound rather military and most of the other saints did not.
So let's go to the Daily Office bio for a little catch-up. There are errors in there in the French spelling, and I know I am being picky, but Americans who bungle French spelling, on restaurant menus or in historical biographies, or even when trying to be funny, get me irritated. (Ask PeaceBang, with whom I got all huffy (under my Beauty Tips for Ministers pseudonym), and yes of course PB and I are still friends.) I'm a grammar and spelling nut in English too, but there is something about the U.S. messing up of French that drives me particularly crazy. Psychoanalyze that -- I'm not going to bother. At any rate, the bio by James Kiefer is quite interesting as usual, but I have to note the proper spelling of the French cities of Limoges (which has an s at the end) and Périgueux (not Périgeux, which changes the pronunciation) and the province of Roussillon (two ss), from which there are some fine hearty red wines, as Dennis the wine maven will know.
The bio notes what I only vaguely remembered: that Louis was just and wise and had a mix of military valor and personal holiness. My students are always fascinated by the Crusades and by the new military orders (as in religious orders) that arose at the time: how did Christianity come to endorse violence and honor conquest? How did religious orders, which back in the days of Benedict, had almost exclusively been a sanctuary from fighting, expand to include warriors? What fervor for the holy places where Jesus walked drove the Crusaders? How to study the mix of faith, material greed, opportunism, and self-sacrifice present in the Crusades? What were relations with Muslims and Jews like and why? Why and how the killing? Were there friendly encounters as well? Louis's life contains, if not answers, at least illustrations for some of these questions. As a king, he did a great deal of good. I love Kiefer's accounts of Louis' friendships with Robert de Sorbon (yes, the Sorbonne was named after him) and Thomas Aquinas. His was a period of great intellectual and artistic ferment and creativity. One of the answers.com biographies notes that Louis ordered the expulsion of the Jews from France and had many copies of the Talmud burned: he was, alas but inevitably, a man of his time. (Note: the king who ordered the more strict and pervasive expulsion of the Jews was Louis' grandson, Philippe. See this account by the BBC researchers, a little more reliable than answers.com and well worth the read.)
Louis' life reminds us of the strength and subtlety required of those who rule, of the place of self-sacrifice in the exercise of power, of the complexities of every age especially when there is war and social chaos (which he managed not only to contain but to reduce), of the exercise of government with compassion, of the blind spots of all great people, and of an era with whose legacies we still live, in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond: yes, here in the Americas too.
In this case the mother was important, because Saint Louis (pronounced the French way, not the Missouri way) was only 12 when he became king, so like several other kings of France, he had a regent, that is, someone who did most of the governing in his stead, and in his case it was Blanche of Castille, whose name we learned at the same time as her saintly son's. We never did, now that I think of it, learn who his wife was. My memories of Saint Louis are: Blanche of Castille, the Sainte-Chapelle (Louis had it built to house a piece of the true cross and the crown of thorns), Crusades, the building of a famous hospital for the poor and blind, and death from typhoid in 1270 -- and also the fact that he wasn't entirely what one might think of as a saint. Then again, neither were a lot of other saints. But he did sound rather military and most of the other saints did not.
So let's go to the Daily Office bio for a little catch-up. There are errors in there in the French spelling, and I know I am being picky, but Americans who bungle French spelling, on restaurant menus or in historical biographies, or even when trying to be funny, get me irritated. (Ask PeaceBang, with whom I got all huffy (under my Beauty Tips for Ministers pseudonym), and yes of course PB and I are still friends.) I'm a grammar and spelling nut in English too, but there is something about the U.S. messing up of French that drives me particularly crazy. Psychoanalyze that -- I'm not going to bother. At any rate, the bio by James Kiefer is quite interesting as usual, but I have to note the proper spelling of the French cities of Limoges (which has an s at the end) and Périgueux (not Périgeux, which changes the pronunciation) and the province of Roussillon (two ss), from which there are some fine hearty red wines, as Dennis the wine maven will know.The bio notes what I only vaguely remembered: that Louis was just and wise and had a mix of military valor and personal holiness. My students are always fascinated by the Crusades and by the new military orders (as in religious orders) that arose at the time: how did Christianity come to endorse violence and honor conquest? How did religious orders, which back in the days of Benedict, had almost exclusively been a sanctuary from fighting, expand to include warriors? What fervor for the holy places where Jesus walked drove the Crusaders? How to study the mix of faith, material greed, opportunism, and self-sacrifice present in the Crusades? What were relations with Muslims and Jews like and why? Why and how the killing? Were there friendly encounters as well? Louis's life contains, if not answers, at least illustrations for some of these questions. As a king, he did a great deal of good. I love Kiefer's accounts of Louis' friendships with Robert de Sorbon (yes, the Sorbonne was named after him) and Thomas Aquinas. His was a period of great intellectual and artistic ferment and creativity. One of the answers.com biographies notes that Louis ordered the expulsion of the Jews from France and had many copies of the Talmud burned: he was, alas but inevitably, a man of his time. (Note: the king who ordered the more strict and pervasive expulsion of the Jews was Louis' grandson, Philippe. See this account by the BBC researchers, a little more reliable than answers.com and well worth the read.)
Louis' life reminds us of the strength and subtlety required of those who rule, of the place of self-sacrifice in the exercise of power, of the complexities of every age especially when there is war and social chaos (which he managed not only to contain but to reduce), of the exercise of government with compassion, of the blind spots of all great people, and of an era with whose legacies we still live, in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond: yes, here in the Americas too.
Friday, August 24, 2007
St. Bartholomew's Day (La Saint-Barthélémy)
Hey, who needs soap operas? I had all these stories growing up. As I once wrote in the opening sentence of an essay which the New Yorker rejected many moons ago, while my cousins in New York and Cleveland were memorizing the Gettysburg address, I was learning about Louis the Fourteenth's mistresses. Yes, of course in the public schools. We had to learn French history.
The Daily Office people at Mission St. Clare have a little something on Bartholomew here. As they note, we know he was one of the Twelve, but we don't know much about him.
Two portrayals of the massacre: the one above, figurative and very well known, from sometime in the late 16th century (with a detail view) by one François Dubois, painted on wood, and the one below, which I just discovered today, in oils by the contemporary French painter Georges Mathieu (from the 1950s) which in its own way is figurative and portrays really well what we learned and retained as children about that horrible night.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
"Isolating the Images" (more from Nelle Morton)
Here is the second half of the essay excerpt my students read for today in the "Feminist Theology" class. (I'm going to have the registrar change the title to "Feminist Theologies" for the next time I teach it.) We discussed the excerpt from the writings of Nelle Morton (see my previous post for context and this for some background on Nelle Morton) in class today and students also wrote a page of reflection on it. We had a great conversation -- and a very moving one at times.
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