Here's an interesting article I spotted on Newsweek's website. I watch curiously to see whether a moderate, democratic culture can develop within the Islamic world, or whether its own cultural and theological heritage will ultimately prove incompatible with that possibility. I'm not willing to bet the farm either way, especially as I have come to realize since the failure of American post-Soviet experience with Russia that democracy is a lot more difficult a reality than Americans think. We've been blessed to have had our own experiment in democracy take root and get settled, and now we "coast" on it. But Aaron Burr wasn't completely around the bend in thinking he could make himself into an American Napolean: our start was much shakier than we typically remember, since Americans tend to too easily accept their own mythology regarding their national origins, and to look at the rise of our government in "Manifest Destiny" terms of a sort of inevitability to the whole process. George Bush forgot even the lesson of Russia and far too glibly assumed we could transplant democracy in Iraq. So, with regard to stories like this one, I try to keep my eyes open and see what possibilities are presenting themselves around the world.

E Pluribis Islam?
The fragile promise of Muslim diversity.
Irshad Manji
Newsweek Web Exclusive

At a recent event in India, I asked Pakistan's former president, Pervez Musharraf, whether he would support his country's tireless human-rights activists. He invited me to pose a different question. I didn't.

"Sit down!" the retired Army general then ordered.

Things probably won't get that tense when Pakistan's current president, Asif Ali Zardari, visits Barack Obama next week. But maybe they should, given the Taliban's growing reach and Zardari's plunging credibility. The two presidents will be joined by a third, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a religious "moderate" who routinely barters away the rights of women and minorities to warlords and mullahs.

As a reform-minded Muslim, I admit that these guys make the notion of diversity in my faith look laughable. Their track records underscore why we have to venture beyond geopolitical hotspots to fathom the future of progressive Islam.

( Read more... )

As I've mentioned before, I have returned heavily to Merton since Chrysogonus's death. Outside of my dissertation reading and work, my reading has largely been Merton. I tore through the epic autobiography of The Seven Storey Mountain while traveling, moving too fast to get any good out of this journal as a reading journal. I was most stunned in my re-reading of it on two related points: the first being one of cultural history, we might say, and the second being more concerned with Merton himself.

I was struck by the reading of the Second World War as a result of a spiritual miasma in the generation leading up to it, of Merton's partial blame for the war on himself – and all others like him, caught up in the cult of Self. What struck me so heavily was that there was no sense in any response I've ever heard of to the book that this reading was condemned. For all those that would mis-read Merton as "going hippie" in the 1960s, there was no condemnation of him as an antiwar "peacenik" in the generation of the war itself: instead people responded very positively to the book. I finally saw all this in contrast to the narrative of the War that I had acquired when growing up from movies, television and especially from all the 1950s youth histories of the war that I read in grade school – my first serious investment in history, and the foundation for my becoming an historian. In all these, the Second World War seemed to be presented as a kind of inevitable triumph of American technology and can-do confidence in responding to evil abroad. There was, in the face especially of Nazi horror, no self-doubt and no questioning about the evil of war itself. I'm not noting this as a pacifist, or as one holding to classical Just War Theory. I'm just suddenly struck by noticing the stark difference between the narrative of the Second World War as I received it, and the narrative as Thomas Merton presented it in a wildly-popular (if clearly penitential) book among those who experienced the war. (Not to sound all Post-Modern with regard to "narratives.") No hint of a perspective on the war as Merton describes it – as of great moral ambiguity, even – has survived in any other account that has made it to me, except in cases where what I'm seeing is a clear projection of Vietnam-era politics back upon the past. That's common-enough in that 1960s-era narratives are still dominant in our entertainment and politics today.

The second thing I was struck by, that more concerned with Merton himself, is a related point. This is the fundamental consistency I'm seeing between two Thomas Mertons who are often set against one another: "the Merton of The Seven Storey Mountain" and "the Merton of the 1960s." This way of looking at Merton is often heard from those who have not read Merton, or at least have not read Merton very closely, it seems to me: even from some Catholic bishops. (It is similar in that respect to those who blame Augustine of Hippo for every imagined sexual dysfunction in Western culture, which is popularly taught among college professors of many fields who haven't read Augustine himself, but who listen closely to other professors who haven't read Augustine.) In that telling, the "spiritual Merton" of the early books gave way to the "social justice Merton" of the 1960s, who had more-or-less gone off and become a Buddhist, or was about to, by the time he was killed. The latter idea is just silly to anyone who knows his writing and his life: it was the depth of his Christianity that was empowering his explorations of Asian religions, and which made the leading figures of those faiths take him far more seriously as a conversation partner than the fundamentally areligious dabblers in Asian religions that became so ubiquitous from the 1960s onward. The youthful Dalai Lama was powerfully affected by their meeting, but has never reported supposing that Merton was a Buddhist or about to be one: it was the depth of Merton's Christianity that so struck Tenzin Gyatso, according to his account of their meeting. So the "spiritual Merton" was driving the "social justice/inter-religious dialogue Merton" of the 1960s, and in The Seven Storey Mountain I was strongly moved by the social justice themes – however much they were articulated in the language of a recent and traditionalist Catholic convert of the 1930s – that ran throughout that text. However much Merton developed as a scholar, as a writer, and as a human being – and there are dramatic differences in style and depth between 1948 when The Seven Storey Mountain was published and 1968, when Merton died at the monasticism conference in Bangkok – there is a fundamental consistency of vision throughout his corpus that I had never before so strongly perceived.

My Saint Patrick's Day was a mellow one, particularly by American standards. If anything, I would have enjoyed hitting the Saint Patrick's Day Mass at Notre Dame and soaking in that liturgy as an aid to a good time of prayer (as well as just great music from the Folk Choir). I was really amused when I learned that Saint Patrick's Day back in Ireland really was more of a religious holiday than anything else, although I'm embarrassed to hear that the ongoing vulgar Americanization of this, too, is making way there. There was a time when the Irish would have found it insulting to have our culture reduced to nothing more than going on a bender. I did have an interesting if random conversation on the bus today (a celebration of my Irish gift of the gab?), when a woman named Anita sitting next to me introduced herself when asking if I was a seminarian. (She had noted my reading material.) When I said I was a theologian, I discovered that she'd done Master's work in Theology at Garrett, with undergrad work in Economics and Mathematics, and had recently gone back to school for another undergraduate degree in something biological, as a prelude to doing M.D. work, with an eye toward combining it all in medical/economic ethics. It was a fascinating conversation, really, as she outlined some of her proposed work, which involved an amazing amount of intersecting expertises. Add to that some of the ethnic/cultural angles she wanted to address as an African-American woman, she seemed to be a potential powerhouse in getting all the credentials to be able to tackle the problematic ways we're doing medical care in our country, particularly as medicine becomes increasingly a corporate animal, and with its rush to implement any innovation, with profit far outstripping ethics as a deciding fact in whether to implement new technologies. Interesting stuff. Another point for public transportation!

Thomas Merton died 40 years ago today, electrocuted by the faulty wiring of his floor fan as he stepped out of his shower at a world-wide conference of monks in Bangkok. The National Catholic Reporter has an article commemorating Merton, which in a Left kind of way seems to magnify the tour Merton made at the end of his life, where he, as one of the West's best scholars of Asian religion, resonated deeply with the forms of Hindu and Buddhist display he encountered there, as though his Christianity were best remembered by not being mentioned, and best characterized by his open-mindedness. By way of contrast, the Wikipedia article on Merton dotes, in a kind of Right way, on the early Merton of the conversion story detailed in his bestselling The Seven-Storey Mountain, as though the deep immersion into the social justice causes of the 1960s was not a direct outgrowth of both his Christian and monastic callings.

When I was at Notre Dame, I was lucky enough to aid Lawrence Cunningham in the editing and production of the 1952-60 volume of Merton's private journals, published as A Search For Solitude: Pursuing the Monk's True Life. It is this little-mentioned in-between period of Merton's life, extending into the 1960s, that has come to be of greater interest to me, and was fed even more by stories from Chrysogonus as he recalled his old friend and teacher at the Abbey of Gethsemani. This was the time of experiments in hermitage, in solitude, of the writing of Thoughts In Solitude and of Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. It was the time of his mystical dream of a Jewish girl named Proverb and his Louisville street corner vision of Love and what is lovely in all people. It was the time of falling in love with a young nurse who had taken care of him in the hospital and of having to let that go in the face of his own true calling, but with the knowledge that he had finally become a person who could truly love another.

The caricatures of Merton – the Christian who fell into Eastern fascinations, or the Christian who left behind Christianity for true Eastern wisdom – are convenient fictions for their promoters. Merton instead recognized and actuated in himself the Second Vatican Council's mandate toward what is good in all religions in the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate; Merton was the liturgical "conservative" who took a number of relics with him from Gethsemani on his "liberal" journey through Asia. He was the Christian monk and scholar of Christian spirituality first so that he could actually be equiped to be a Westerner who could enter into Asian monasticisms, and was recognized as possessing a keener kind of insight by Easterns like D.T. Suzuki or the young Dalai Lama because he came out of a fully-formed spiritual tradition rather than being one of the more dislocated Westerners more commonly exploring Eastern perspectives. He was simply who he was: gifted, extreme, wounded, given to saying over-the-top things, but leveling them out into wisdom through editing and contemplation and prayer.

Been on a roll for hours now, reading on communion ecclesiology, in one of those delicious moods where I'm able to absorb reading and information at great length without losing concentration or ability. I don't know quite what it is that makes that easier at some times than others, but it's a good feeling. It certain helps, though, to have good texts to read. Dennis M. Doyle's Communion Ecclesiology: Vision & Versions, which I got out of the library the other day, is a marvelous example of a well-ordered and instantly-accessible book, and has been helpful for an overview of a number of different communion ecclesiologies and their developmental courses. I've been using the CDF's 1992 letter Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion, which is a central text, and bouncing around both the very useful The Gift of the Church: A Textbook on Ecclesiology in Honor of Patrick Granfield, O.S.B., which Professor Fahey had us use in my seminar with him when I arrived at Marquette, and Cardinal Dulles' classic Models of the Church. So all this will lead into the final-stretch writing spurt to finish off this chapter over the next week.

Yet another job post was advertised yesterday and was forwarded to students by our new Chair, Professor Wood. This would be a delicious posting, though strangely undergrad-free in a theological graduate school, plopping me not only in the heart of a huge theological network, but also having me live in Erik's neighbourhood, which would be a ton of fun for that old friendship. I let him know about that in a note last night, and told him that if anyone asked about me, he still owed me for breaking my rib back during his graduation celebration at Notre Dame, when weaklingrecords packed a very respectable bar into his backpack and set up shop on Stonehenge at midnight after graduation. I got a funny note back from him and the whole exchange made laugh:

Here's a bit of a surprise new job ad that I just got today and for which I am now just finishing my application. If anyone asks you about me, remember: you still owe me for breaking my rib. Bastard.

Mike


That would be awesome, brother. Let me know if/when you get to come out for an interview. Your rib story reference is very timely. I was at ND this weekend for an ACE gathering and I told someone the rib story as we were passing by Stonehenge. I thought to myself, "The sad prick deserved it." ;-)

Truly,
Dr. Bastard!!!!

I do hope he remembered what I thought the funniest part of the story: when I was sitting stunned in the water and gasped out, "You broke my rib!" Bongo Bob, who had helped himself to quite a bit of the drink by this point, slurred "You wuss!" As though my rib had popped by some lack of character. Soaking wet and in some pain, I still instantly thought it was hysterical.

And lastly, a little article caught my eye, given the way I've always thought the Tao in Confucius' Analects lined up so stunningly with Jewish-Christian Logos theology – a point I've used in my Intro classes when I get to the Gospel of John.

Cardinal: Traditional Chinese wisdom contains seeds of word of God

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- For the good of Chinese society and the defense of people, the Catholic Church must engage in dialogue and work with those who defend the traditional values found in Confucianism, said Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun of Hong Kong.

Cardinal Zen told the world Synod of Bishops on the Bible Oct. 15 that, before being written as the Scriptures and incarnated in the person of Jesus, the word of God was the force that created beauty, the universe and the human person.

And, he said, the traditional Chinese wisdom founded in and fostered by Confucianism contains the "seeds of the word" of God that the Second Vatican Council said are present in religions and cultures.

Cardinal Zen said the church in Hong Kong has developed a healthy dialogue with followers of Confucianism, aimed particularly at "trying to preserve the precious heritage of Chinese wisdom."

"If, moved by charity, we are able to instill in the younger generation the Chinese virtues of fidelity, honesty and shame, we will have helped them take a big step toward holiness," the cardinal said.

In too many instances, he said, the Chinese people are losing contact with their traditional values, as is seen in instances of corruption and attacks on human life, marriage and the family.

( Read more... )

Continued From Below

On Saturday, Chad and I ended up talking books a great deal over breakfast, particularly about a Western culture text assessing shifts over the last half-millennium by Jacques Barzun entitled From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present. He took me through some of the thesis of that while I dutifully added it to my mental "must buy and someday read" list. A little while later I was floored when I looked through one of Chad's architectural books, this one called Lost Chicago by David Garrard Lowe, which showed me the gems of Chicago that both had been lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and also that had been built and senselessly destroyed within a few decades to make room for a newer idea. In particular, I got my first glimpse at photographs of what had been standing in Chicago during the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, which I couldn't believe had been torn down. I had mentioned this in my conversation with him the night before: about having been told of the great classical architecture put up along the lakefront, of which (I had been told) the only remnants were the Field Museum and the Science and Industry Museum, and that all the land in-between and been filled with such classical treasures. This wasn't entirely accurate, I now discovered (the survivors are now in fact the Science and Industry Museum and the Art Institute), but I could see why the friend who had told me the story had also mentioned that a friend of his, a scuba diver, said that if you went diving off the coast of the city, where the rubble from the demolished pavilions had been dumped, it looked the ruins of Atlantis. How accurate that is, I'm no longer sure, having had Chad tell me and the book confirm that most of the buildings were not intended to be permanent and were not build of the marble they appear to be, but rather of a stucco of some sort. Plans to finish them in marble later were abandoned when much of the pavilions burned in a fire in 1894. So, anyway, I had to grab Chad and gabble about the photographs and the book with him for a few minutes. And then add that one, too, to the must-buy list. This also proved the occasion for Chad to enthuse about a book called The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson, which I had not heard of, but which sounded great fun. I sat down and strained my brain for a bit to come up with a list of books Chad might like as gifts, which made me remember us talking about books the same way years ago, with me pushing Julian of Norwich upon them with great gusto, and their questions about the types of things I was reading inspiring me (on top of a run of similar requests) to start keeping an ongoing Reading List on my old website. I suppose you'd have to go back through the journal here, and add up all the books tags to get the same thing, though that sounds like an awful lot of work.

Saturday afternoon the whole family headed over to the Lakeview Museum of Arts & Science, to take the kids to an appropriately kid-titled exhibition called "Grossology: The (Impolite) Science of the Human Body" which was a wonderland of cartoonish displays of digestion, burping, mucus and zits. This was in addition to the hands-on and fun science of their Discovery Center. I was a bit more interested, along with Chad, in a display called "Within the Emperor's Garden: The Ten Thousand Springs Pavilion," which I tried and failed to photograph surreptitiously from my hip, under the suspicious stare of the little old lady who had told me that photographs were not allowed. The model of the Pavilion from the Forbidden City was interesting in its own right, but what especially captured my interest was the diagram and side display of how the fitted wood beams of their architecture allowed for such ornate and grand construction without the use of any sort of nails. I suggested to Chad that, in lieu of turning his yard into an English-style garden, he might at least construct a gazebo in their backyard on these principles. But when I mentioned that alone putting their home on the local tourist route, I could suddenly see why that might be unattractive.

On the way over to the Museum, Chad had taken me on a roundabout route through Peoria, past a contract his company was working on for a new ministry center for the Diocese (now headed by Bishop Dan Jenkins, who had been the Rector at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart during most of my time at Notre Dame and with the Folk Choir), through the West Bluff Historic District down West Moss Avenue, an older neighbourhood of wonderfully-restored or -maintained homes of interest, including a pair of Wright or student-of-Wright designs that were as tasteful as ever. Older homes under the shade of older trees. Just the way everyone should be able to live. From the Museum, Chad took me on a route that let me eyeball the magnificent homes on Grandview Drive, which I'd seen one night when Darcie Short drove some of us from LOMC around the sites of Peoria. Here on the high bluff above the Illinois River, I was particularly taken with some of the 1930s-style manors which you could easily imagine Cary Grant stepping out from in old Beverly Hills grandeur. Chad told the kids and me stories of taking drives along here with with mother on Sundays after church as a kid, zooming down the hairpin turns. We ended up near the equally-interesting look of the old Peoria Water Works Company down by the river before Eva hit her maximum tolerance of Dad's architectural enthusiasm and lecture, and I thanked Chad contentedly as we raced home before the looming four year-old meltdown.

Angie and Chad wanted to have an adults-only dinner with me (or at least used my presence as an excuse for an adults-only dinner, themselves) and they took me out to a very cool Italian restaurant down near the waterfront district of Peoria called Rizzi's on State that I liked a lot, and hope to return to someday. There I tackled their Pork Chops Siciliana (Thick cut pork chops sautéed with mushrooms, cherry peppers and onions with a touch of marinara.) with a glass of a Chianti whose name escapes me now, and which Chad tried as well. This is where I discovered, as we talked a bit of wine, that Angie – who, when I first had gotten to be friends with her, had been a teetotaler like me, out of caution – had since discovered that alcohol tended to make her quiet, if not sullen, of all things, whereas for me it makes me more lighthearted, talkative and giggly. ("As if you need that," said Dan to me when I told him this story.)

A block behind us, a photographer was shooting a bride and her party against the background of one of the old brick factories of the Peoria waterfront, and we talked about how that sort of visual juxtaposition had become fashionable lately, while I mentioned beyondthewell and wondered if it was her and her husband taking the shots. I suppressed the urge to go over and find out, though I thought it would be funny to just trip by and surprise her, if so. Their studio is just over in Bloomington, and after describing their business, we then got to talking about paying for serious portraiture and for art in general, and what that was worth to us. Karen herself had written to me about her and Nate taking up Over The Rhine favourite Michael Wilson's availability to do his "Daylight Portrait", and that had gotten me thinking about the value of such things, particularly given that I have an irrational impulse in my head that denies that there could possibly be anything in this world – houses, cars, books – that one ought to pay more than, say, twenty dollars for. [And instantly, Angie's recent citation jumps into my head: From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put. – Sir Winston Churchill]

I asked them a theoretical question about their sense of contemporary attitudes in Evangelicalism on the question of "certainty" in faith that they completely shot down, though I suppose that it might have more to do with my specific observations of Evangelicals who convert to Catholicism than with Evangelicalism in general. But I abandoned that tack of making them speak for all of Evangelicalism in America before I became utterly annoying.


We went walking then, after dinner, along the restored and lively waterfront, which seemed shockingly different from the Rust Belt ruin I remember from college days. It was a delight to see something have come to life again like that. I looked at this piece of now-fading painting along one of an old series of railway supports, from a line that once crossed the river here to descend into the city. We people-watched the other strollers, talked about weird Asian fish that had been disastrously transplanted into the Illinois River, wondered about a WWII submarine memorial that apparently stood there for no reason other than these subs having passed through Peoria, eyed the Segway rentals, listened to a bit of what sounded like a Dead cover-band, and talked.


I tried taking a decent portrait shot of them, which Chad was too amused to take seriously, flashing me a maniacal Joker smile when I tried. Angie had told me that they had shown the girls the shots I had taken when I'd last visited, before the girls had come along, which the girls found quite funny, perhaps because of Angie's unusually short haircut from the time. Myself, I was still having trouble getting used to Chad's short and business-like hair today, as he had then expressed his own preference for wearing his longer, and had wondered, if I recall correctly, whether he could get away with letting it grow even longer than it was then.


As we left the waterfront, I had Chad take me a bit further down the district so that we could go up the climb on Persimmon Street where I then told (or for Angie, re-told) the story of my grand misadventure the night of Darcie's wedding, with her Maid of Honour December Saucedo, Rich Alms, and Todd Peterson. The run back up to the downtown area is no longer the gauntlet of crackhouses, shooting ranges, brothels and clubs disguised as the above (and a police precinct squatting innocently in their midst) that it used to be. Chad regaled us with similar memories of sitting with his Dad in the window of the old brick place where he worked, eating sandwiches and watching police raids like they were quality entertainment.

Back at the house, with the babysitter returned to her family (and after a talk on the virtues of jr. high school girls versus high school girls for babysitting), we three just kicked back and talked the rest of the night. Angie was now having a Mike's Hard Lemonade, which managed not to cause the withdrawn effect we had discussed earlier, and perhaps aided in the talk. A bit more architecture. A long conversation on dreams, particularly dreams of flying, with the discovery that Chad and I experienced dreams of flying in exactly the same way, giving rise to my curiosity as to whether this would be a more common male trait, if we could survey the question broadly. For us, flight in our dreams takes an absolutely stillness of mind, a state of perfect confidence or faith in one's ability to fly, any wavering of which becomes a wavering of flight itself, with the threat of disaster. Furthermore, we discovered that we never remember launching into flight in our dreams: we always enter a flight dream in the midst of flying. Angie, on the other hand, described an actual "take off" process in her flight dreams of running down the street with arms stretched out, airplane-style, which had Chad and I howling at the image, to Angie's mild annoyance.

The next day, I simply got ready after waking and headed out to the Bloomington Amtrak station with Angie. We were listening to the soundtrack from Elizabethtown in the car as we began talking, and memories of the movie struck a certain chord with me at that moment. The film had come up during a long train of our Friday night conversation about movies. Waiting for Chad, I was tempted to foist a digital download of Before Sunrise on her when I found out that she had never seen the film, and I talked about why Linklater's Before Sunrise/Before Sunset duology had had such an impact on me over the last few years, acknowledging that I might have to push my other top favourites (Never Cry Wolf, A Man For All Seasons, The Man Without A Face) aside for them. She had given me a long list of favourite films, most of which I had never even heard of, which was kind of interesting in itself, to find that her taste had gotten so broad and independent-oriented. But Elizabethtown had popped up in the talk, one of the few mainstream movies to do so on her part, which I had just seen for the first time maybe a month or two earlier, and that got me thinking. I thought it was a flawed film (we both pointed to things like Susan Sarandon's dance sequence), but it somehow felt stronger to me for the flaws, if that makes any sense. While certainly the small town feel appealed to me given my roots, I think it was the theme of remaining open to the unexpected turns ahead of us in life that had struck me most strongly, and certainly that kind of openness was something for which Angie was ready to take me to task, as I had described the last few years to her. And so the parallels between themes in the film and themes in the weekend's conversations suddenly appeared in my mind as we set out on the highway to the road-trip music of the soundtrack. Go figure. She had time to get me to the train station and return easily before meeting Chad and the girls at church, and now the talk was pretty light, of odds and ends, and the occasional thought about this chance to catch up as a whole.

We sat there on the cement slab that serves as the "platform" of Bloomington's train station. We talked occasionally about this and that, but mostly I just found myself looking at her, mostly in a kind of quiet amusement and wonder that she was there. Or that I was there. I remembered the day I met her, noticing her red car pulling onto the gravel road leading back to LOMC after mine, a few days before training started, just after the end of the school year, and being introduced to her as one of the Coordinators for that summer. Along with discovering that she was one of my bosses, there was a bit of recognition that there was something about her that I already liked. Now, sitting on the ground this summer morning, I knew that maybe I was being a bit sentimental: it's a job hazard for me as an historian, paying as much attention as I try to to the past. "Did you ever think that we would still be friends after all this time?" I asked her, shortly before we realized it was already ten and that my train had not yet showed up. I continued thinking along these lines after we said goodbye, and while I sat the extra 40-odd minutes for the train to arrive. So many of these other rich, rich friendships from that amazing summer had blurred and faded with distance, but here we were, still talking as intensely and as curiously after all this time, as much as we ever had, late after the campers had gone to bed, sitting out on the Meadows' Deck, underneath the stars. Like everyone else who has ever lived before us, we had laughed about how it really does seem like just a year or two ago. That we would still be friends might be beyond expectations, but that certainly didn't matter: just the fact that it still seemed perfectly natural to be friends was the only thing that counted. Even though it was my own, there was a sense of realizing that I didn't know that the story would be this good.

With the train about 45 minutes late, I still ended up only missing my connection to Milwaukee at Union Station by two minutes. Declining to take part in the mild riot brewing by those who wanted those last two minutes to run down the track to the nigh-departing train, I took the opportunity to withdraw, grab some food, and go sit on a bench looking out across the water at the city, just a bit south of the Adams Street Bridge. I wished I had Chad handy as my personal architecture enthusiast as I looked at the different buildings, and I mused on the last week, at seeing and catching up with Jenny and Angie within a few days, thinking that I only lacked Sunshine strolling down the riverwalk with her husband to round out the sequence nicely. If anything, the last few weeks had both indicated that there was something in my life that was so much bigger than me, if that makes any sense: a sense of symmetry or narrative structure that didn't seem a conscious creation of my own, but also not quite something I'd want to give the grade school theology tag of God "writing my story:" I do believe that God gives us and our universe too much freedom for such a deterministic understanding of events, and yet... there was a kind of grace going on. Perhaps it really means that I've frequently done things right. I hoped so. I hoped that I've really been given a gift for friendship and for love that I've succeeded in using, and in healing where I've putzed it up. Whatever exactly it all is or was, as I sat there with just the two of us – me and Chicago – it seemed to give my presence in space and time a bit of meaning that defied the obvious fact that I was barely in this city long enough to cast an afternoon shadow. And though there were so many things that told me not to be – right then, I was content with that.

Still sick. Unable to sleep more than an hour at a time between my throbbing head and other special effects from this mild flu. Blech. Still had to take care of some business for my Theology Through the Centuries students for today, and so I'm typing some stuff up for them, along with instructions as we turn to reading The Rule of Saint Benedict for next week, and as I ask them to start thinking in terms of applying Christianity to lifestyle. I'm particularly interested in seeing how they think of adapting the fabulously-flexible Rule to contemporary life and beyond its original monastic intent. I want them to really use studying this as an exercise in adapting such an established piece of Wisdom beyond its historical confines, and I think The Rule is particularly amenable to this kind of re-imagining, and so will serve as an ideal subject for such an exercise.

Somehow in the midst of that, I discovered this new website that I was very pleased with, The Asian Christian Art Association. Speaking of "adaptation," I've always been struck by art I have seen where you see the adaptation of such well-established Western Asian imagery as the biblical stories into the forms and motifs of Eastern Asian art. I had a small copy of a Holy Family as (I think) Chinese peasants hanging in my classroom at Saint Joe's that I was very fond of, though I did not know the artist or origin of the piece. There were a number of pieces and artists I was taken with, such as this Nativity by Japan's Hiroshi Tabata, but I couldn't help but notice that all of the work by one artist in particular consistently grabbed me.

So, here in this site I managed to discover a new artist I can or could be very enthusiastic about, one Yu Jiade or Yu Jia-de, apparently of Shanghai, whose slightly more representational style makes the distinctive "adaptations" all the move vivid for me. At the same time, his work hits me as containing within itself a fairly epic sense of the power of a given moment. Unfortunately, there's very little of him represented on this site or on the web as a whole, it seems, and not a hint of being able to purchase a print. Or, there might be at the website of the Amity Christian Art Centre (which shamelessly lifts the web code of the Vatican's website), because this looks rather like his work, but their English version isn't up, and all the text is in Chinese, so I can't tell.... I think my very favourite of the ones I saw of his would be this Nativity, which I would love to give to Haley, for some reason or impulse I don't particularly understand, and in a near second place, his Woman at the Well.



Speaking of art, I couldn't help but be struck by this AP story the other day. I gotta start breaking into abandoned cars more often....

2 Stolen Paintings Found by Swiss
Feb 19, 10:06 AM (ET)

By ERNST E. ABEGG

ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) - Two Impressionist paintings stolen in one of Europe's largest art thefts have been recovered in an abandoned car, police said Tuesday.

The pictures by Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet were among four paintings worth $163 million that were stolen from a private museum in a Feb. 10 armed robbery.

The two other paintings taken from the E.G. Buehrle Collection - one by Edgar Degas and the other by Paul Cezanne - remain missing, Philipp Hotzenkoecherle, commandant of the Zurich city police, told reporters.

The recovered paintings - Monet's "Poppy field at Vetheuil" and van Gogh's "Blooming Chestnut Branches" - were discovered in a parking lot in front of a Zurich mental hospital on Monday. It was unknown how long the white sedan in which the paintings were found had been parked there, Hotzenkoecherle said.

The pictures, worth a combined $64 million, are in good condition and were found still under the glass behind which they were displayed in the museum, he said. They were identified by museum director Lukas Gloor after a thorough inspection.

( Read more... )

The Jesuits have today elected Fr. Adolpho Nicolás, S.J. as the new Superior General of the Society of Jesus. A short description says of him, "Fr. Nicolás, S.J. is 71 years old and was born in Madrid, Spain. He studied theology in Japan and has spent much of his ministry in Japan, as theology professor at Sophia University, as the Director of the East Asian Pastoral Institute in Manila, as Provincial of Japan, and most recently as the Moderator of the East Asian Assistancy." It sounds like the mix of Jesuit Christian spirituality and heritage along with his deep experience of the emerging churches of Asia and their cultures is what made him the choice that captured the imagination and hopes of his fellow Jesuits.

One of my professors here at Marquette, David Schultenover, S.J., who is an expert in modern theological history and who succeeded my dissertation director Michael Fahey, S.J. in the lofty role of Editor of Theological Studies, is a delegate at the Society of Jesus' 35th General Congregation in Rome, where they have been conducting this business of electing their 30th Superior General, the 29th successor to Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Society. The Jesuits, as members of the Society are called, are the largest religious order on the planet, with some 20,000 members, and are famed for their educational and mission work. Marquette University, where I am finishing my doctoral work, is among their many universities, which in the United States alone also include such other leading universities as Boston College, Georgetown, Creighton, the University of San Francisco, and the various Loyola Universities and Colleges.

Fr. Schultenover has been blogging from the General Congregation and his entries describing his experiences can be found on a page the Society has been keeping on the General Congregation on the Creighton University website, which I linked above. As I also wrote above, the Jesuits have today elected Fr. Adolpho Nicolás, S.J. as the new Superior General of the Society of Jesus. While that particular event has yet to make it to Fr. David's blog, it's an interesting, more "street-level" glimpse of this current event in Church History, and so I thought I'd mention and link all this here. I copy and include for my own notebook, the Jesuits' news release Official U.S. Jesuit Conference News Story, with reaction of U.S. Provincials (the leaders of the various "provinces" of Jesuits here in the States).

( The news story the Jesuit Conference released )

Here's an interesting follow-up story to the overture made by Benedict XVI to Chinese Catholics in his recent letter to them. This isn't an official invitation from Beijing, but it certainly has some meaning in that it was allowed to be published by an official of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association. The feelers are definitely out.

I also include an odd, sad and funny little story about WWI having unusual payoffs for locals in Macedona.

Chinese Catholics Ask Pope to Visit
Jul 24, 10:45 AM (ET)

VATICAN CITY (AP) - A senior official in China's state-sanctioned Catholic Church said in comments published Tuesday that he would like Pope Benedict XVI to visit China.

Benedict did not dismiss the possibility but said the issue was "complicated."

Liu Bainian, vice chairman of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, made the comments in an interview with Italian daily La Repubblica in which he praised Benedict's recent letter to China's Catholics as "positive."

"I strongly hope to be able to see the pope one day here in Beijing to celebrate Mass for us Chinese," Liu was quoted as saying.

( Read more... )

WWI Spirits Live on in Macedonia
Jul 23, 8:36 PM (ET)

By KONSTANTIN TESTORIDES

GRADESNICA, Macedonia (AP) - French adjutant-chief Eugene Rouges died with several of his men here when a German artillery shell exploded in their trench on Nov. 16, 1916.

But their spirits live on in Gradesnica.

More than 90 years later, visitors are still drawn to this former World War I battlefield, a remote mountain village in southern Macedonia, where the lure is more than military history: A liquid fortune in vintage cognac and wine lies buried in the old trenches.

Stefan Kovacevski, 64, is among residents who tasted the French army rations that have matured into an exquisite elixir.

"At first we were afraid to taste the dark, thick liquid," he said. "But ... this must be what people mean by the nectar of the gods."

( Read more... )

Long-awaited, Benedict XVI's letter to Chinese Catholics has finally been released and adds an increased impetus to the People's Republic to join the world with an increased freedom for religious liberty to match their economic liberalization.

Pope Makes Plea to China’s Catholics
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: July 1, 2007
The New York Times

ROME, June 30 — In an extraordinary open letter directed to Chinese Catholics and released Saturday, Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged the suffering experienced by Catholics under Communist rule but also concluded that it was time to forgive past wrongdoings and for the underground and state-sponsored Catholic churches in China to reconcile.

Openly hoping for a renewal of relations between China and the Vatican, which were suspended in the late 1950s, Pope Benedict reassured the Chinese government that the Vatican offered no political challenge to its authority, while urging the state-sponsored Catholic Church to acknowledge the Vatican’s control on religious matters.

“The misunderstanding and incomprehension weighs heavily, serving neither the Chinese authorities nor the Catholic Church in China,” the letter said.

It was the pope’s long-awaited first official and explicit statement on China’s estimated 12 million Catholics, the majority of whom worship in underground churches to avoid having to register with the government and swear loyalty to it.

( Read more... )

Watching out for me was daysprings, who forwarded to me a link to a most interesting article from The Atlantic Monthly (July/August 2007; Volume 300, No. 1; 75-84) called "Keeping Faith" on a Bishop Jin Luxian in the People's Republic. As I heard more from the perspective of the Underground Church, this was a really infomative look at a key figure from the government-recognized and -regulated Church in the Catholic Patriotic Association.

Though largely unknown outside of China, Jin is arguably the most influential and controversial figure in Chinese Catholicism of the last 50 years. He played a leading role in persuading the authorities to allow a prayer for the pope to be said during Masses in China’s registered, or “open,” churches and in developing a Chinese-language liturgy, and he was single-handedly responsible for training more than 400 priests—including several who became Vatican-recognized bishops—in Shanghai’s seminary. He’s also been an unabashed supporter of dialogue and compromise with the Communist government. He accepted ordination as a bishop without Vatican approval and has taken a leading role in China’s open churches, all of which still have to register with the Religious Affairs Bureau and are overseen by bishops appointed by the CPA in consultation with local congregations.

Defying canon law, as Jin has done on several occasions, is no small matter for a Catholic bishop. But Rome has tolerated his disobedience, largely because of what he’s accomplished in Shanghai. From his modern office, Jin looks out over a diocese that includes 141 registered churches, 74 priests (most under the age of 40), 86 nuns, 83 seminarians, and 150,000 laypeople. In Shanghai, at least, there’s been a significant rapprochement between the underground Church and the open one, particularly on the leadership level: Jin is the most prominent Chinese open-Church bishop who recognizes, albeit quietly, the authority of the pope.

Material associated with the article, such as an interview with the author, was generally available online. ( Read more... )

Loopy afternoon. After delivering a few CDs (shameless plug), I went to help a Chinese friend with an English grad school application. He insisted on buying me a good Chinese lunch first, and after making disparaging remarks about the Chinese restaurant right off campus, took me out to his car. Then he handed me the keys.

It seems he was nervous about driving in the snow, and so I tried to fold myself into the driver's seat of his Volvo station wagon, laughing quietly as I struggled to move the seat back. Maybe ________ is five feet tall. He got very nervous-looking when I said that in a really bad snowstorm, that's how high the snow could get, and loudly voiced his horror in the classic Chinese accent with his "r"s and "l"s getting all intermangled. So we careened our way to lunch and talked comparative culture, politics and food.

That was actually quite illuminating, particularly the political part, and I think I got some kind of feel for how the intellectual classes seethe under Communist rule, but have learned the hard way to go along with it. He hopes for political change, and is prepared to get involved if it happens, but I gather that everyone is waiting for it to happen in some kind of organic way and no one is ready to try to force it. Not after 1989. I was most moved when he expressed his desire to found a Christian university in Beijing. And now that I've written that, I've gone back and edited his name out of this entry. Overly-paranoid, I'm sure, but why take even a butterfly-effect's chance? Christianity is a martyr's faith in his hometown....

Finished re-reading The Samurai by Shusaku Endo, which I read a good decade ago. I was in a bit of a mood to re-read it after seeing The Last Samurai last week while I was staying with Mom, and wanting to see the East-West meeting told again from the Japanese point of view (and particularly from the non-Hollywood point of view).

First impression: compared to the movie, it blessedly avoids the black-and-white "East=good, West=bad" of Hollywood. The characters from both cultures are flawed and disappointing people in one way or another, as well as having their engaging qualities. Neither culture is idealized, too, which is equally a mercy. Both cultures, the one pagan and the other ostensibly Christian, are both quietly cast in relief by the ugly, emaciated figure that the samurai keeps seeing on the crucifixes of western lands. ...Oh, this is too much for me to really write about now: maybe I can think more clearly about this with a bit more time.

I'm just now struggling with a desire to move on to re-read Endo's Silence. I'm curiously filled with a kind of dread at the thought of going back to it, as though I were faced with a dangerous surgery: The Samurai could be hard to read, but Silence might be overwhelming. I had once thought of having my high school seniors read Silence and Erik Goldschmidt looked at me in wide-eyed shock and burst out, "Do you want to destroy them?!" That kind of book.

I guess that at the very least, that makes this a recommendation: if you want to read something powerful enough to shake you, then The Samurai or, even moreso, Silence will fit the bill.