The facts are…

• We’re getting older
• We’re getting smaller
• We’re getting poorer
• We’re getting less and less important in our social stature

Well, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT!!!????

• Should we eschew hierarchy?
• Should we come up with THE missional strategy?
• Should we maybe wear khakis to preach?
• Should we mess with the liturgies? Make God more feminine; black; expansive; Celtic; relevant?

Now, these are not all merely banal questions (though perhaps some are), but I would like to suggest that so long as the beginning and focal point of the discussion is centered around decline and “stemming the tide,” then we’ve already failed.

This line of reasoning puts us immediately in a reactionary position. “What are we going to do about this threat?  (This too is where the “identity fetish” creeps in. Constantly going in circles trying to fence the boundaries of identity means that less and less do we care to look to Jesus to judge what we think it important about our identity).

It also creates an atmosphere where even practices and beliefs that are very good are swept aside by the well-meaning or self-proclaimed “prophets” and “reformers.”

What often goes overlooked is how deeply institutional this line of reasoning is, and how ironic it is that these questions are often under the guise of being “anti-institutional.” Concern about numbers and colleges and seminaries and ages are all very institutional issues. (Though, far be it from me to be anti-institutional.)

Allow me to suggest that whether numbers are waxing or waning, the primary issue ought to be one of praying, working, longing, to be faithful to our Lord and faithful to the proclamation of the Gospel. I know this might seem just empty and pious word-mixing. The point I’m trying to make, though, isn’t about out-piousing anybody, but about shifting the seat of discernment from one of reactionary concern about structures to a positive freedom to love and worship our Lord and love our neighbor without concern for “maintaining” the Episcopal Church.

Doing otherwise evinces a deep lack of faith. As if somehow Christ isn’t risen and it’s up to us to pick up the Church by her bootstraps and keep her going! (Thus, even now the pelagian shadow of liberal protestantism lurks behind every question and every answer)

I think we could all stand to learn from people like Derek Olsen, who when prodded on the question of a drop in numbers responds not by saying what ought to go in order to stop the bleeding, but by pointing out what ought not be negotiable because they are the things that help to keep us faithful to the Gospel that we’ve received. Or +Rowan Williams who concludes his astounding essay “God” in this way:

“In a church that is in many ways deeply wedded to ‘territorial’ preoccupations, it is unlikely that the gift and promise of the non-territorial God will be clearly discernible. In other words, a church that is concerned about its internal politics will not transform the political in the way that is in fact made possible by Jesus. The desire to secure purity and control in the Church (which can be a preoccupation as much of ‘progressives’ as of ‘traditionalists’) looks to a territory in which believers may see in one another a reassuring sameness; and when believers are looking at one another to test that assurance, they are less likely to be attending to the foundational absence on which the life of the community rests. And if the contemplative life is central in some way to the integrity of the Church at large, it is because of this: not to point to ‘values’ above and beyond the concerns of the world, not to pass judgment on the unspiritual conflicts of the Church or society, but to witness to the way in which a life may be constructed in which all acts are referrable to God and in which the consequent ‘deregionalizing’ of the life of the spirit, life before God, impacts increasingly upon the understanding of prayer. It is to do with the poverty and wealth of the everyday; with the fullness and emptiness of faith.”

But I have an idea based on how I generally approach beer drinking. I don’t know about people with a healthy enough income to sustain a line of upper-crust six packs in their chill box, but I know that I don’t have that kind of money, but I still enjoy a beer with lunch or dinner most days. And so what I often do is sustain this habit with an affordable and multi-use beer. Here in MN it’s usually something from Summit or Schell’s since they are able to keep basic 12 packs down near the $12 range. And then for special occasions or for limited releases, I’ll get the ‘nicer’ stuff.

So then, the idea. I’d love to see a brewery brew up a seasonally released session ale of some kind, like a Kolsch or Saison in the Summer, a Bitter or Mild in the Fall, a dry Stout in the Winter, maybe a Bock come Spring, or whatever, and keep it hovering at $1 a bottle. This could form the “Base” from which to launch other specialty beers or what have you. Among other things this would do, it would continue to put pressure on the mass lagers and loosen their stubborn grip on the “average Joe drinker.” There’s nothing wrong with making an “average Joe” craft beer is what I’m trying to say. Plus, it would help our current craft beer markets to start being more subtle with ingredients. Not every beer need be massively loaded with hops. Subtlety is where American beers need to start getting better.

Happy Christmastide.

(Apologies for the pathetic tone of this post. I’m putting it up to be cathartic and because I imagine there are a good handful of people in my position that can relate. Nevertheless, it’s got rhetorical questions and the like, and we all hate blog posts filled with rhetorical questions)

‘Tis the season for grad school applications, and there’s nothing like filling these out to make one consider the path of one’s future. I myself am in discernment limbo; my diocese has given over a year of false starts and the official discernment process has yet to begin. That puts me in the awkward position of needing to apply to seminaries without any clear direction or support from the diocese or put off school for another year in hopes that things will start moving soon. But I don’t want to just hang around for a year.

Yet this isn’t even the only issue. The question that keeps coming before me is, “Do I see myself pursuing the traditional academic path?” MDiv or MATh, to PhD, to adjunct, to tenure track… Someone like me gets asked fairly often whether ordination is even “necessary” for what I want to do. Well, is it? And what do I want to do? (More importantly, I suppose, is what does God want me to do) Do I want to be a traditional academic teacher, or a parish priest who teaches on the side? A teaching-priest? Much of this will presumably get hashed out with discernment, but pragmatic questions are important enough to think through even now.

The fact of the matter is I can’t cut it in the current institutional situation. There are too many young, childless, straight-A students out there that will automatically qualify over me when it comes to getting into schools for degrees and for careers. Everyone knows tenure is shrinking, moreover I can see just how abusive the adjunct situation is. It practically has to be like this to deal with the emerging system. I don’t really want to subject myself to a decade or more of adjunct work, at least not where it’s my primary vocation and means of living. I’ve heard too many stories of people with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans and not one bit of potential work to show for it. Helping out institutions and teaching on the side seems all together more healthy and desirable.

And that’s the way I’m leaning. Under a healthier education system, I feel confident that I could contribute and find work, but for now at least, I think I just wanna be friends.

“Is not history – the history of Jesus – completely fixed and immobilised in this representation? Is it not suspended in eternity like a beautiful figure inside a glass ball?”

For Ben, as with certain Protestant aesthetics, the icon represents our own fantasies, a muting or even denial of the via crucis.

“The presence of the saints makes the cross safe, familiar, and accessible. There is, the icon assures us, a proper human posture that corresponds to the event of the cross.”

I would like to suggest, though, that the reverse is actually true. It is the unceasing and unthinking (because no meaning can be made of the Cross) gaze upon the dead flesh that completely fixes and immobilizes the history of Jesus. There is, on this take, no history for Jesus after the cross. The truth of God is utterly and without reserve made manifest in this one moment. There is nothing of God left and no true thing can be known of God —  only the ‘brute fact of the cross of history’ remains. It is important here that Grünewald depicts below the crucifixion, not death, hell, and the grave, pierced by the cross as for the icon, but simply the idolotrous veneration of the corpse of Jesus. The body can be done away with now; sealed up in stone, covered and abandoned. The disincarnate word has now the characteristic of geist, it can be spoken everywhere, but felt nowhere.

But for the icon, the revelation of the cross is not an end. It is not the last word. Ben’s own words are, perhaps, telling. The icon speaks of truth, but Grünewald of fact, of immediate presence, but not of relationship nor therefore of reconciliation. The icon in fact speaks of new life, of freedom, of movement, of the continued unfolding of what has happened. We find this iconic truth in the icon of the Nativity. In the Nativity, the whole history of Jesus is shown. There is no fixed point at which to rest. While the center is, of course, Jesus, our eyes are led to the Cross, to Hades, to a post-birth washing, etc… Here, who Jesus is cannot be reduced to any one part of his life or death, and the circular pattern of the icon, forever drawing our attention to Jesus and forever drawing it out to the entire and inexhaustible scope of salvation, forecloses the possibility that Jesus is to be found alone in one historical place. It is also to be found in the Gospels, in for instance, the quote of John which entitles this reflection. The dramatic date of the crucifixion indeed was as it is for Grünewald, and we dare not make it otherwise. It was, for the moment, absolute negation, total abandonment, sheer meaninglessness. As the women looked on, it could have been nothing but this. (It is curious that attention is not drawn to the whole Grünewald altarpiece which also includes an overwhelming resurrection scene. A consideration of the whole work leads more to my interpretation of the icon, that even of the Altarpiece is iconic.)

Yet for the icon, as for St. John’s Gospel, that was not the whole truth, because Jesus now can be known in greater depth than he could otherwise ever have been known had he remained on the hard wood of the cross. There is more to learn about what has happened. Jesus’s identity can be, in fact, added to, learned about — his life is not confined to a single corpse now, it has been broken and can therefore be distributed and ingested, nourishing and revealing, judging and reconciling.

The resurrection, the via gloriae, is not the abandonment of real material history. As John Updike, himself a barthian of sorts, knew. In his Seven Stanzas at Easter he comments,

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

The dead god, the one who remains in the tomb, is rather the one who can now be done with. The rotting body of Jesus is, for Updike, what secures our fantasies because to us the resurrection is an offense.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

The cross is still the door, there is simply no other path to new life than through death.

But ‘Death, be not proud.’

In my class on Tacitus, we’re doing a lot of ‘what’s really going on in Tacitus’-talking, a large portion of which proceeds from basic assumptions about either the author himself or ancient historiography in general. Yet these assumptions have been insufficiently established imo.

For instance, the editors of our primary text have an introductory essay on ancient historiography which runs roughshod over the explicit aims of the ancient historians themselves and asserts, despite the contrary primary evidence, the old tired line about the difference between ancient history and ‘modern history.’ Yet here the editors go further than simply suggesting that these performed history poorly and unobjectively (unlike modern history, clearly), as goes the common – and sometimes correct – assertion, and argue, based nearly exclusively on some passing remarks on the rhetorical style of history in Cicero(!) , that history was intended to be quite loose with respect to ‘facts’ and serves more as moral instruction.

Now, I have no objection whatsoever to examining whether in performance any historian, ancient or modern, is able to stick to their principles – they may say they value a certain style of history yet fail on purpose or accident to do thus – but there’s gotta be something like an honest assessment of the primary work to bear it out, one that relies more strongly on the explicit aims and methods of history according to how the historians describe their work, rather than a convoluted meta-hermeneutic that reads over these passages a reading-into the performance of their histories. As if all the talk of historiographical method in these authors was just a purposeful misrepresentation of what they were really getting at, which, to understand properly, one must ignore instead for a reading-between-the-lines approach that will at long last finally lay bare their true purposes. According to this method, ancient history was really a puzzle game for those in the know. Anyone who thought they were trying to report things that actually happened is a pathetic knucklehead (though if they could read and have access to Tacitus, they couldn’t have been that stupid!) who has missed the point.

The same goes for certain styles of biblical criticism as far as I’m concerned. For instance with regards to some of the wild claims about the genre of the Gospels and Acts. Thankfully we have works like Samuel Byrskog’s Story as History – History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History, or Richard Bauckham’s important Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony to illuminate more properly just what these historians were saying about the work they were doing. Here again, as in establishing critical texts or in giving historical-grammatical examinations, biblical studies blazes ahead for Classics.

A while ago I wrote up a post to recommend a few Greek and Latin resources for working through Homer and Virgil. I also said that I was going to make some recommendations on translations, on which I never followed through. I was going to do so soon but was given another reason just today. A friend informed me of the news that the great translator Allen Mandelbaum died today. Though famous for a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, he also happens to be my favorite translator of the Aeneid. I pay homage by recommending his text.

For both The Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, I will briefly describe the translations of three major modern poets and explain where my preferences lie and why. Knowing the languages gives my opinion a certain bias. Those who know original languages notoriously are either endlessly critical of any translation, or naively unfeigned in their abundant praise. I read these classics for two reasons and it’s my desire to be greedy and demand both be sated by any translation I use. The first is for sheer pleasure. I’ve found that I am quite fond of epic poetry. Something there is in it that moves my soul. Especially Homer. The second  is for my academic interests. These poems have formed the cultural context and imagination of grand swaths of Western history, including late-antiquity. I need to be able to check my own primary language work against a reliable translation. This tends to make me lean toward ‘conservative’ translations. I understand basic translation theories, why people prefer dynamic equivalence or ‘literal’ or whatever, but whereas at one time I enjoyed these with no concern for ‘accuracy’ – since I didn’t know the languages – I now need more than simple aesthetics.

There are four (and now apparently a fifth) major modern translators of Homer. I pass over Stanley Lombardo for two reasons. One, I’m not familiar with his translation, and two, his is written specifically for oral performance. It is thus slightly less a piece of ‘literature’ as we conceive it generally today. It would be a great experience, though, to see a performance. Luckily, my preferred translation can be read aloud with pleasure, and indeed, I believe one should try and do at least some portions aloud.

• Robert Fagles is probably the most widely read contemporary translator of all three of these poems. They’ve been my required translations in mythology and even in my Latin Aeneid course. (No doubt in large part because one of our major profs had him as doctor father.) One of the reasons he’s so widely read is his work was adopted by major publishers, including Penguin. Another is that his style is contemporary, informal, lively, and punchy. Indeed, I’ve often wondered if I should use him to read to my girls when they come of an appropriate age. Nevertheless, of the three here mentioned, he is far and away the most loose in relation to the ‘literal’ sense of the Latin and Greek. He was of almost no help whatsoever in translating. Most damning, in my opinion, is that this looseness leads to his work being, as was said of Alexander Pope so long ago, more the work of the poet Fagles than the poet Homer or Virgil. Homer is plucky, plain, and repetitive. He will very often repeat whole lines and otherwise follows strict formulas to fit his work into dactylic hexameter. Sometimes entire paragraphs are repeated verbatim. Of this repetition and style, arguably most the most important, and certainly among the most enjoyable aspects of his style, are the repetitive epithets and name-adjective formations. “god-like Odysseus,” grey-eyed Athene,” strong-greaved Achaians,” et. al. These are nearly never repeated and very often entirely skipped in Fagles work. Virgil on the other hand is stilted, formal, and full of pathos. He fares better here if only because Virgil can’t very often follow a pattern in his work because he’s making up his tradition as he goes along. (Homer was an oral poet and part of a tradition of oral poetry. Virgil was a writer and his was the first such epic dactylic hexametered poem in Latin.) Yet even here, as I noted, he is not close enough to help with translation. The ready availability, including a lovely boxed set, make Fagles a tempting offer, but only if your interest is more for the enjoyment of reading and don’t need it to get a feel for the original.
• Robert Fitzgerald too has translated all three major epics, and his work has been chosen by the ever-handsome Everyman’s Library series. Though it’s probably a rather unfair way of putting things, I often think of Fitzgerald as a medium between Fagles and Lattimore. His style is much closer to the original than Fagles, though this is muted by the his format of rather short lines of poetry. He is still not quite as formulaic as Lattimore (or thus Homer), but – on the Latin side – before I had a copy of Mandelbaum, he was much more helpful for translating Virgil than Fagles. Importantly, more so than the other two, Fitzgerald is concerned for his poem to also be a work of English literature. He keeps in plenty of English archaisms (as did the writers themselves keep archaisms) yet the pace still keeps up. Interestingly, he gives significant praise to Lattimore for his translation. Here it really depends more on personal opinion. I enjoyed reading Fitzgerald and, given the lovely editions, I see no reason not to recommend him for either Homer or Virgil.
• Richmond Lattimore is, though, far and away my favorite translator. But, he did not translate the Aeneid. He was a Greek man through and through. He did, however, co-edit with Greene and sometimes translate a University of Chicago Press edition of the complete Greek tragedies. Unfortunately, as is the case (till recently) with Lattimore’s work, for reasons I’m not entirely aware of, these went out of print and, though they can often be found in used bookstores, they can cost you a pretty penny for the later editions. If you can get your hands on them, I strongly advise you do and skip the Penguins. I will comment more on editions in a second, for now I’ll talk about his translations. Lattimore somehow worked a feat of magic. His style feels homeric. He, more than any other English translation I’ve read, keeps in the repetitive phrases and epithets. Thus it is only in his work that this crucial feature of homeric style is preserved. He’s not quite systematic about it, but he’s pretty damned close! Moreover, while it is standard fare in a translation for there to be two sets of numbers, one for the original lines of text, and one for the English lines, somehow Lattimore is able to translate to the line, so that the lines of his poem are the same as those of the Greek. This means that for both reference and translating, his is unequaled. Yet not only is his work not then awkward and nonsensical, it is outright enjoyable in the manner of Homer’s simple, high-formal, and descriptive style. With no hesitation do I recommend his work, especially to those most likely reading this blog. A significant problem with Lattimore, though, is the poor quality of currently available editions. I myself have an old U of Chicago Press set in stately hardcover, and it is not hard to find other older editions, but publishers just haven’t kept up with him. I mean, Penguin and Everyman’s are to go-to series for classics and so it’s understandable that since he’s been neglected for these, he won’t be easily found. This Haper Perennial Modern Classics edition of the Odyssey is the only modern one I know of, and it’s pretty trashy. The paper is flimsy, the text is small, not very strongly printed, and it’s poorly edited for reference. I did not enjoy using this for class. Yet there is good news! U of Chicago Press has just this year put out a fresh edition of the Iliad, with substantial introduction, helps, and thoroughly up to date bibliography, in both soft and hardcover. I can’t testify to the physical quality of these, but I can at least assume that the hardcover, though quite expensive, is pretty nice and likely the soft will be as well. I do not know if there are plans to also rerelease a thus updated Odyssey, but one can hope. In addition, both the Odyssey and the Iliad have companions keyed to his translation that act as intermediate running English commentaries.

In a previous post, I cited some examples of Christian life in the Middle East I found strange and hard to reconcile to my own experience. Two were to do especially with violence, one toward and one by Christians. At a certain point in my reading From the Holy Mountain, I was beginning to despair of ever really feeling at home with them, and thus (not that this is a bad thing) the book was relativizing my inherited beliefs. Luckily for my mental health, later in the memoir I race across a few stories that shot the narrative through with glorious light.

One such story is that of the Christian town of Kafr Bir’im near Nazareth. Dalrymple comes to the village of Safad and is welcomed by the married Marionite priest to have Turkish coffee while he tells him the story of what happened to Kafr Bir’im. Not long after everyone is getting situated, an old man comes in with a piece of paper with all sorts of dates and information relating to the story written on it, lest someone tell the story wrongly. (Enter sarcastic comment against the normal comparison of ‘modern history’ to ‘popular history’ here…)

On October 29th 1948, Haganah soldiers arrived in the village, who were received by the old men and priest with a white flag. The villagers gave them food and allowed them to occupy some houses for a little while. After 15 days, though, the villagers were told they must leave. They had to be five kilometers away from the village or they’ll be shot and killed. So it was in the cold of December they were forcefully evicted without shelter or aid from the village to live in caves or squat under trees, all without justification despite longstanding ‘friendly’ relations with Jews to this point. Several babies died from the exposure.

A twist in the story comes with the information that all 1,050 people of the town were given Israeli citizenship. When the Minister for Minorities arrived and saw them living under trees he ordered the Christians be given the homes of the nearby village Jish, which had been abandoned by fleeing Muslims. After 15 days, the minister said, they would be allowed back to their homes in Kafr Bir’im. There were even allowed a few men back into Bir’im to guard the houses and crops. But after six months, even these were ordered out of the village.

At this point, the village brought their concerns before the Israeli High Court.

The (Maronite!) priest here told Dalrymple:

“The people of Bir’im have never resorted to violence. We have always fought by law and by Christian principles.”

This story came as a surprise in this the last  fifth of the book. It was as an oasis in a desert. I noticed immediately the casual matter-of-factness with which the Father indirectly said that ‘Christian principles’ would not allow his village to offer reaction with guns and violent retaliation. Sadly, the story continues all the way to an ironic post-apocalyptic end.

The people of Bir’im won the case. The court declared the evictions unjust and ordered them back to their village. Yet the very next day the Israeli army declared the area a military zone and they were once again forbidden from coming home. In the afternoon, by an aerial bombing, they destroyed Kafr Bir’im, the buildings with all their possessions, as the people watched from afar, as if at some bizarre fireworks show, on a hill subsequently named the ‘Crying Hill.’

Their fields were given to a new Jewish settlement and the town made into a National Park. The history of the town, and the fact that their real citizens were still alive and nearby, is erased from the public memory. Instead, signs draw attention to the ruins of a second temple synagogue near the center of town, yet the homes built by the people of Bir’im, are imagined as ancient ruins by the Israeli school children who come for field trips; a well dug by one who told the story was labeled instead as one built by a leader of the Jewish revolt circa 66AD.

Now, the villagers – at long last! – can visit their homes, but only if they pay the entrance fee and compete with tourists for a view. Fr. Suleiman laments:

“They say that once you let one Arab back, you admit that the others have rights too. That is why, despite everything, they dare not give us back what is ours. Israel says it is a democracy, and it is true. But it seems that for us Palestinians there is no justice.”

There are many more interesting details, and I strongly recommend you read this engrossing book for them and all the other stories.