A friend passed along the recent New York Times article from Sept. 6, 2020 by Giovanni Russonello entitled, “Is Jazz Capable of Meeting This Moment?” In the article, they talk to historian Robin D.G. Kelley about teaching jazz in the […]
My friend Garrett sent me an article 17 months ago. I wrote a response and forgot about it. He just sent it to me in case I wanted to post it. I’m posting it. My friend Garrett recently sent me […]
I will often listen to something while I’m eating breakfast. Lately, it’s been the Lotus Sutra. On the same day that there was a list of names in the daily reading for morning prayer, I heard this passage from the […]
During lunch this week I watched this discussion between Wright and Greene. It’s mostly harmless stuff, and it’s a good primer for dilettantes like me who want to hear about issues in physics without doing maths. It only gets really […]
Sitting at home instead of on a plane to Ireland today. All the gigs have been cancelled. All the international trips have been cancelled. So I hit a downward spiral and listened to Robert Wrights interview with Steven Pinker. There […]
Normally, Jonathan Sacks is one of my favorite thinkers, and he’s also normally pretty careful. He gets a couple things wrong in his recent essay. I’ve reprinted part of it below. “Some measure of the radicalism that is introduced into […]
Listened to Robert Wright interview Galen Strawson about pan-psychism. I think David Bentley Hart is correct on this. The pan-psychists are trying to solve the problem by mashing it down to the sub-atomic level, but it’s really just a shell […]
Here is the first collection of videos from this year. It’s my side of the contributions. John Conahan and I will work on some more to make them more easily available. I started with a Liszt O Tannebaum. I borrowed […]
Once upon a time, I was practicing the organ at St. Mark’s on the Campus in Lincoln, Nebraska. Unbeknownst to me, a stranger wandered off the street, and he managed to make his way, silently, up to the organ loft. I was in the middle of a passage that was giving me some problems. I lifted my hands and feet to give the section another try. In that brief moment, the stranger very softly said, “Hello.” I nearly leapt from the organ bench.
I turned to see him standing by some filing cabinets, and after taking a breath to calm down, I said, “Hello.”
“Oh,” he said. “I’m surprised you could hear me. I said that very softly.”
“Well,” I replied, “I am a musician. Listening to stuff is kind of what I do.”
I normally enjoy a good conversation with the odd sorts of people that wander into churches. I decided engagement was the best tactic, and began talking to him and walking him downstairs. He began griping about a judge’s order that gave his parents guardianship over him even though he was almost thirty. It did seem a little unfair that he couldn’t make decisions for himself, and I was sympathetic for a moment…and then it happened.
In a passing sentence, he managed to drop in an “I in I” and there was a “Selassie” not far behind. Whenever middle-class white people from the mid-West start dropping Rasta crumbs for me to follow, I am immediately on the hunt to find out where the trail begins. After a few more questions on my part, I got to the core of the thing. It was quite a beautiful little speech in its own way. As it began, a little bit of an affected Jamaican accent was peppered across a few words. By the end, he was speaking with a full on fake accent and interposing lots of “hey mon” between words.
“This is what I’m trying to explain to you about my parents, mon. They don’t understand the I in I. Just because someone likes all of Bob Marley’s music, and begins dressing in a Jamaican style, and speaking in a Jamaican accent, mon, and just because they start calling themselves Bob Marley, mon, and they only reply to people using lyrics from Bob Marley songs…just because they do all that stuff doesn’t mean, mon, that they actually believe that they are Bob Marley.”
“Yes,” I said, “but, you can see how someone might be confused about the difference.”
He could not see that and went away quite disappointed that I didn’t really see how the difference might have mattered.
It was not many verses ago that Luke was telling us about Peter weeping bitterly after his denial. David Bentley Hart rightly points out that this is a big deal for Christian aesthetics. In the classical world, a minor peasant […]
The strangeness of Jesus’ stories is always part of the confrontation. There is this man who plants a vineyard and then goes away. Are we supposed to think this is God? Does God plant Israel and then go away to another land for a long time?
Also, this man doesn’t do things the right way. We all know how to do things. If we send a servant to collect the money and they abuse him, and — for whatever reason — we decide to be patient and send a second servant along and they abuse that one too…well, at that point, we’ve learned our lesson. We don’t send a third. When they abuse the third, how does this man (God?) send his son “that he loves” expecting a different result.
There is the secondary problem of the tenants. Under no system that I know of, when you have a man who is powerful enough to kill you, is there a rule that says, “If you kill a powerful man’s son, you get the rental property where you’re staying.” That’s just weird. It makes their actions especially cruel and seemingly designed to strike despair into the heart of the land owner.
There is always the overwhelming urge to historicize it. He was talking to 1st century Pharisees etc. You can actually read the thing and think of how it affects others without really doing the work that Jesus is asking you to do.
Where is the vineyard that I am protecting for myself?
What crops from my vineyard am I holding back as my own?
Where is the place where I have been patiently asked, too patiently asked — to the point where it doesn’t make sense that so many messengers keep coming — to turn over some of the fruits of my labors?
Where do I actively work to keep Jesus and his messengers away from my work?
It is easy to take Jesus as some sort of clever wordsmith. He’s confronted with an opponent, and he uses his wits to best someone. I want to read it like it’s a youtube clip being shared around on social media of a pundit “owning the dems” or “destroying a conservative.”
This approach conveniently helps me to feel good about myself and to avoid doing the work that Luke is asking me to do.
First of all, we need to get the “mean Jesus” idea out of our heads. I don’t suggest that he wasn’t human and didn’t get angry or frustrated and all that. I’m just suggesting here that we begin form the place that Jesus is always moving and speaking in love. The point of this confrontation is not some kind of “gotcha.” Jesus is saying the most loving thing he can say to the Pharisees, and if I am going to do the work that Luke is asking me to do, I have to dig out those parts of myself.
I have to find those places in our culture and in my life where God is moving and I’m not acknowledging it. I have to find the places where I am afraid to talk about the movement of God because it would mean fessing up to the fact that I “didn’t know the time of visitation.” I have to find the places where I am maintaining a convenient balance between not fully living in to the Baptizers call for justice and not saying that it’s wrong.
The trick is to find the Pharisaical parts of myself which is always the part the — and this is important — places the distance of correct theology between me and the motion of God in the world.
As usual, Jesus goes straight to the heart of the problem.
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