I Hate End Notes – The End
September 30, 2011
Publishers have defiled the work of at least two of my favorite authors, and I am sure there are more to come. What is the dubious nature of these putrescent literary obscenities? End Notes. There is a disturbing trend in which even books that are geared toward educated readers are being published without footnotes. This is unacceptable and I demand that all such activity cease and desist immediately. I present two comparisons to make my case, N.T. Wright and Miroslav Volf. I do understand that their careers and ministries resemble the body of work produced by bands like Aerosmith or Metallica. In Rock n’ Roll and Metal terms, they were purists, pounding audiences with unadulterated music – archetypes of a genre - then, as they became more popular, their music had to become more accessible to the
tastes of the consumerist masses. They turned out music that had the obvious gloss of marketing and brand recognition. Music producers and agents did to their music what publishers are doing to the likes of Wright and Volf.
In fairness, the analogy fails on some points, I know. Wright and Volf have a pastoral duty to make the kinds of important things they say to Christendom accessible to all of the Church. I just don’t think that those of us who see the utility of footnotes should have to suffer through reading works with end notes, that’s all. Here are a couple of examples for you to make your own comparison. First, look at the Grawemeyer winning book by Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace. You’re not even done reading the first ten pages before you realize the depth of study that went into Volf’s writing. You get comments, asides, and further discussion about the content that drives the thesis of the book. It’s like you’re in a dialogue of 
sorts with the author. The Climax of the Covenant, is a great example of the same kind of experience being created with footnotes from the work of Bishop Wright. On the other hand, you get to works like Wright’s “Justification” or Volf’s “Free of Charge” (the book I am currently reading), and you have a completely different experience waiting for you. There is no longer the comfort of knowing you can glance down and get bibliographic information for a source, further insight from the author, or an explication of some complicated point. No, No… now you have to devise some system for keeping your place in two locations of the book: your progress in the material and your progress in the notes must be maintained simultaneously. I know what you might be thinking, “what a lazy bastard!” And, ordinarily, I might agree with you if it wasn’t for the fact that this causes more than the inconvenience of having to have two bookmarks (which, incidentally, you’d think the publisher could provide for the premium price we’re paying for books these days). It is about the fact that I am taken out of the rhythm of my reading to go looking for information
that might as well be easily accessible at the bottom of the page. Now, if the examples I cited were more popular works like Wright’s, “Surprised by Hope” that is intended for the consumption of laity, then I could understand the use of end notes (or no notes at all).
There are, then, at least three reasons I hate End Notes. First, I like the feeling of “dialogue” that footnotes seem to create between me and the author. Not unlike when the groundbreaking series Saved by the Bell used Zack Morris to break the “fourth wall” over and over again. I feel like the barrier between me and the author is lessened when I get the notes (some of them amounting to nothing more than asides, which I like). Second, I get into a rhythm reading. It’s like a dance – the author leads my thinking around the virtual room of my mind, moving to the beat of the argument that is being unfolded. When I have to stop to go read an end note, I feel like the band has quit playing in the middle of the song. My mental interaction with the argument of the book is interrupted when I have to go fishing for a note. Lastly, it’s just inconvenient.
Unfamiliar Voices
September 11, 2011
One of the books I read over the summer was a travel memoir by William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain. In it, Dalrymple follows the footsteps of a Byzantine monk, John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist, who traveled through the Empire from Mt. Athos down to the Egyptian desert oasis Al Kharga. The book is a totally fascinating and engaging description of the very complex situation Christians are finding themselves in in the Middle East. Mostly it is a tale of the degeneration of Christianity in her historic home — an often tragic and brutal tale. Eerily, the book, written in 1997, already seems out of date. The situation is almost certainly more grim now.
The second part of From the Holy Mountain takes place in Turkey. After a brief respite in Syria, being at the time the most stable and safe home for Christians, Dalrymple moves onto Lebanon. The book to this point was unrelentingly strange to my world. Turkey, though officially a secular state, has systematically suppressed Christians there, including especially a physical and historic genocide of the Armenian Christians. By ‘historic’ I mean that the authorities literally travel around to towns and destroy any physical proof of Armenians: their churches, their homes, their graveyards, their monasteries. I found it very difficult to hear described. One thing I wasn’t expecting was for this memoir to challenge my pacifism. It doesn’t take any sacrifice on my part to say that I affirm a non-violent Kingdom here. Upon hearing these stories, perhaps for the first time in years, I became quite sympathetic to the felt need to defend oneself, one’s family, church, and home. Some monasteries that were taken over or destroyed had been there for well over a thousand years. A thousand. years.
In Lebanon, Dalrymple gives a brief history of the the Maronite eastern Rite Catholics. A shockingly bloodthirsty and cruel band of Maronite gangs had waged a long ‘civil war’ with other ethnic and religious groups in what is now Lebanon in an effort to defend what was seen as their own country — aided in no small part to a close relationship to the French. There is one particularly dark incident where Dalrymple is having a conversation with a certain Christian about the Maronite leader Samir Geagea. This man was comparing two towns, one Christian the other not:
“You can eat in Ehden, but make sure you sleep in Bsharre. Sleep in Ehden, and they will shoot you while you are asleep.’ [Bsharre was a town under the authority of Geagea. Dalrymple proceeds to question this man, listing many of the more gruesome crimes of Geagea, including the night murder of a Christian rival, the killing of women and children, a church bombing, and others.] “Geagea is a very honourable and very holy man,’ he said. ‘We are very proud of him in Bsharre…You must not believe what people say about Samir Geagea,’ said Ch’baat. ‘But you can hardly call him holy,’ [Dal.]
‘Certainly yes,’ he said, quite serious. ‘He went to mass every day and prayed by his bed every night. He had a church built wherever he was, where he fought. Every Christmas his troops expected money as a present, but instead he gave them prayer books and rosaries. Of course he went to confession ever week. He never went into battle without his cros. In his office, he always had a picture of the Virgin and a cross: never any picture of Che Guevara or anything like that.”
Another strange phenomenon was reported on multiple occasions. In some places in the Middle East there was a strange fusion of Christianity, Islam, and paganism that I found, to be perfectly honest, curious but repugnant. Apparently there are several churches, monasteries, and Mosques, where people of both faiths will come and pray to saints for healing, or for a job, to get pregnant, or for good weather. This is itself not too disconcerting, though it seems like it has potential problems. Far more troubling is that if the prayer is answered, that person will return with a goat or a sheep and the (Orthodox!) priest or Imam will sacrifice the animal in thanks to the saint! How strange! How utterly foreign to me, and foreign to the strong anti-sacrificial polemics of the Church fathers and New Testament.
I kept going over these sections in my mind. In the end, I found them impossible to understand. I couldn’t wrap my head around this man who praised Geagea, or this, well, gang leader, who could shoot a woman and child over 24 times one day, and go to Mass the next; or the animal sacrifice for saints. I was beginning to question myself strongly. In what ways has my Christian life been truly normative, and in what ways has it been exceptional? According to how I’ve been taught to understand the Gospels and the witness of the persecuted Church, even under severe pressure, the Church shouldn’t be reacting by taking up arms, but caring not about the risks, they should be testifying to another kingdom. Is that simply a position that one in my position can take? Or can it truly occur? Luckily for my sanity, I found several stories that filled me with joy and relief. Perhaps these Christians are not so strange after all?
Dead Shopping Malls
September 1, 2011
This is a longer version of an essay I originally wrote for The Living Church. I’m posting it here to contribute to James’s music series.
When the Grammy for “Best Album” was awarded to an alternative rock band from Canada for an album named The Suburbs over such mainstream acts as Eminem and Katy Perry, various electronic social webs were a flurry with outrage. Many people simply had never heard of them. This despite the fact that Arcade Fire is hardly a small band, regularly selling out very large venues and touring tirelessly. Critics claimed that the Grammy’s had lost touch with pop culture by making such a choice (a notable exception being Kanye West) – see for instance Steve Stoute’s letter to the Grammy’s. I take issue to this accusation. To be sure, Eminem is unquestionably more influential in the pop realm and more indicative of mainstream music in general, but Arcade Fire is among the most culturally aware bands now writing. Lady Gaga is a spectacle of contemporary culture but Arcade Fire is a mirror.
Their first record, Funeral, is a profound expression of unfettered youth, a polyphony of parts barely yet successfully held together by thunderous drums and a chorus of vocalists. It is considered universally to be a modern classic. The Suburbs, their third record (Neon Bible is the sophmore), is in many ways the negation of that record and a searching tale of the modern “Suburban” person. Their first two records abounded in movement, in running, in singing, The Suburbs struggles even to remember what movement was like (“Ready to Start” & “We Used to Wait”). Instead the “Modern Man” waits in a line, accepting with total passivity the hidden and pervasive authority of forces outside of their control. Suburbs are the erie realm of the endlessly flat “Sprawl” on the one hand, and the the rising peaks of “dead shopping malls” on the other. Such an oppressive space feels like “A City With No Children” in it, a space from which vigorous life has been drained, where there is “No Celebration” and where hours now are “wasted” and the “half-lit” nights are spent driving through the streets, recalling when friends used to listen to music together, grow their hair long and dream of getting out.
The album speaks of an exceeding aimlessness to life. Perhaps the suburbanite has a job, indeed perhaps they even have cars and a 70′s house, but there is no real life there. And this situation has been resigned to; there is no sense in which the narrator(s) show us any struggle against the powers, no anger, no zeal. This shows up sonically too. In previous records accompanying vocalists were infused in almost every song, but on The Suburbs they show up rarely and never have the effect of rallying the listeners. Likewise there is a near singleminded focus on the guitar which either drives a fuzzed and droning tempo or drifts listlessly above the chord structure, but the organs, pianos, violins and accordion that we’d become accustomed to are very rarely heard.
Does this sound nothing like a youth culture where there is endless stimulation but few job prospects? Where one might simultaneously be poor yet have several electronic devices and where college is still normed but where students remain skeptical that such education leads to a more prosperous future? Where kids live at home into their 30′s and change careers multiple times?
It is this uncomfortable clarity with which Arcade Fire sees contemporary youth culture that makes them so important. If what they say is true, then it poses the political and social question, to what extent are the politicians and the preachers adequately dealing with this widespread pessimism and skepticism.
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
