Reclaiming The F Word

A Fragile Victory

It won't surprise those of you who are familiar with First Things to know: I'm not exactly a big fan. But Thomas Hibbs' recent review of The Dark Knight, posted on that website, is worth a read. His analysis of what makes this a postmodern film - with premodern leanings - is especially interesting. Here's a very short excerpt:

If in certain prominent instances in this film, the hopes of the audience for these [three key] characters are dashed, the film does not succumb to The Joker’s vision. It is not nihilistic; it is instead about the lingering and seemingly ineradicable longing for justice and goodness that pervades the film. As Batman put it in the original film, “Gotham is not beyond redemption.”

I saw this film on opening day and am headed to the IMAX theater on Navy Pier to see it again this week. If you haven't gone yet, go. 

First of all, it's just a darn good movie. In other words, it makes you forget you're watching a movie. You're actually living the story, which in this case is pretty freakin' intense.

But it's also about as meaty, from a theological point of view, as any film I've ever seen. It'll give you stuff to talk about for weeks. What is human nature? Where does evil come from? What it the purpose of life? IS there a purpose? 

I know a lot of people who are nervous to go see it because it looks violent and scary --- or think it'll be dumb because it's a "comic book" movie. I feel sorry for the last group because, well, comic books are cool. But I get where the first group is coming from. It is violent and it is scary.

Go anyway. Just take a pair of eschatological lens with you. Good wins in the end --- but it is a fragile victory.

Let me know what you think of it.

Go Speed Racer, Go

OK I admit it: I went to see Speed Racer on opening day. This is a picture of me (on crutches - don't ask!) wearing my Pitt Pass, waiting to get in.

Are You Down With It?

According to Eileen Lindner, editor of the yearbook for the National Council of Churches and an unapologetic number-cruncher, one of the primary reasons the mainline has struggled so much over the past few decades is as simple as national demographics. For example, the regions of the country where the mainline has traditionally thrived (north, midwest, east) have been the hardest hit economically, leading to a population drain. Also, the builder and boomer generations, who filled mainline churches in the middle of the last century, are getting older. Eileen says, if it seems like mainline churches are dying, it's at least partly because...well...our members are dying (from a presentation delivered at the Lutheran Theological School in Philadelphia, spring 2007). OK, I'll buy it. But the mainline church is not the only institution ever to face a crisis caused by changing demographics. According to an article in The Washington Post today, colleges and universities across the U.S. are a few years away from a demographic crisis of their own:

The Time For Justice Is Always Right Now

Last weekend we walked right past The Bucket List and Alvin & the Chipmunks (imagine that!) to see The Great Debaters. This is the Denzel Washington/Oprah Winfrey production that tells the true story of the impossibly great debate team from little Wiley College in 1935. Wiley was the first black college west of the Mississippi. Against all odds, its debate team beat every big historically black college to their east...and a couple of famous white colleges, too, including Harvard. The film is, at moments, almost too painful to watch. It's the American south. It's 1935. But you know that the heroes are going to win out in the end - you want to believe they will, anyway - and [spoiler alert] they do.

Doesn't Poor Harry Have Enough On His Mind?

(Click here to find the source for this cartoon: The site is called Exposing Satanism. You may want to wait until after you've had breakfast.)

As if the boy wizard didn't have enough troubles, what with acne and first crushes and the arch enemy who-shall-not-be-named. He's got Christians mad at him, too. Although I think now the disapproval is mostly taking the form of "let's pretend he's not there and maybe he'll just go away" instead of boycotts, at least in the public arena. Well except, according to the Mad Priest, for a few demon hot spots around the world. My guess, though, is that closer to home there are a lot of sermons these Sundays exposing the faithful to the dangers of all things Potter.

What's up with this?

Newly minted M.A., emerging-church guru, ace photographer Ryan Torma says he's looking forward to the last installment in the series. And he leans on the wisdom of Lynn Schofield Clark, who's done a little writing on related subjects, to help him think through the controversy Harry stirs among some religious people. Check out his blog and hers.

What both of these bloggers are poking at is an age-old question: How are the followers of Jesus to relate to the culture in which they find themselves? I'm so tired of R. Niebuhr's 1951 model (christ against culture, christ of culture, christ above culture, christ and culture in paradox, christ the transformer of culture), I could spit. But it still seems to work.

Right?!

Are Evangelicals Really More Scared Than Scary?: See What You Think

A friend from the Detroit area and a regular commenter on this blog (thanks, Lauren!) sent me this link to a video clip from a program called “The National” on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.). It originally aired last December but she saw a rebroadcast of the program earlier this week. The reporter, Mark Kelley, spent seven days “in God’s Army” learning about and from Evangelical Christians in the U.S. bible belt. Mark describes himself as a Christmas, funeral and wedding kind of church attendee upon whose "door" Evangelicals have been "knocking" for decades. He doesn't start out exactly hostile to the Evangelical crowd but he isn't expecting to be surprised by what he finds, either. He is.

Mark's concluding statement: "I used to think [Evangelicals were threatening to change me and my world]...but now I think they're more scared than scary."

It is definitely worth a watch to see how he arrived at this conclusion.

Click here to watch it for yourself.

Pakistani Icon Has Message For Mainstream Christians: Do Something

Most Americans have probably never heard of him but Rohail Hyatt of the 1980's era Pakistani rock band, Vital Signs, is credited by the BBC with co-writing the third most popular rock song in world history...a tune called "Beloved Pakistan." He is, in Pakistan, a national icon. And he is risking it all by writing a soundtrack for a movie titled "In the Name of God," due out today.

Hyatt is, in some ways, a role model for Christians interested in reclaiming the f word today...

Where Faith Is Found

Doug Coupland, the Canadian visual artist whose 1991 novel “Generation X” popularized the term, has written a film that just finished a week long run here in Chicago. “Everything’s Gone Green” was shot in Vancouver, British Columbia. Interesting choice. Vancouver – a relatively inexpensive place to shoot a movie or a TV show – often shows up disguised as an American city. In other words, it’s a place where fakery is literally part of the landscape. And that’s what this film is about.

Paulo Costanzo plays a 29-year old slacker named Ryan waking up to the fact that his life is a dreary, lonely wasteland. His girlfriend leaves him, in search of something more than “IKEA Billy shelves,” presumably the sort of life only money can buy. But money is hard to come by in this post-industrial age where nobody actually MAKES things anymore and where even the most loyal workers (like Ryan’s dad) are tossed out onto the street like garbage once they become too old (i.e. expensive) to have around anymore. Besides, Ryan discovers, money doesn’t lead to any sort of promised land. His best friend (an entrepreneurial guy also on the edge of 30 who owns a little dairy company to cover up the fact that he’s operating marijuana franchises all over B.C.) warns him that all those people with the mini-vans and suburban McMansions might look happy but they’re no less lonely or miserable than anybody else. What makes all this even worse, Spike says, is that “We never even learned any words to describe this.”

That’s where Coupland comes in. He does his best to give us words. Or, if not words, at least a compelling set of images. First of all, he takes us behind the set and shows us all the tricks that make us believe we’re watching people live happy, happy lives. Ryan’s brother, the “successful” one in the family, is running a real-estate scam. Ryan’s new blond bombshell of a girlfriend pays her rent by appearing on the online SlutCam four times a day. Ryan’s boss at the Lottery magazine has apparently had a slow brain leak over the 20 years he’s put in behind his dead end desk. And Ryan himself, in spite of the new sports car and slick clothes he’s managed to buy after having been caught up in a scam to sell winning lottery numbers to the Japanese mafia, realizes he’s “never spent a more miserable couple of weeks” in his whole life. The whole deal, Coupland says, is just one big fake. The life we’re living – whoever “we” are – is a fraud. It’s no more real than the “California” palm tree that gets carted around Vancouver whenever they need a shot for whatever movie of the week is being filmed there.

The only (possibly, just maybe) “real” thing in the whole story, Coupland seems to tell us, is…ready for this?...love. Not that it’s easy to find or recognize or hold on to. But Ryan seems to see it in the crazy old knife-wielding Chinese grandmother of the smart, witty, and simply beautiful woman named Ming who he’s got a hopeless crush on. He even sees a glimpse of it between his parents who, in spite of getting arrested in a late-night police raid on their suburban home, seem to fall in love again as they work merrily side by side to make their new marijuana “grow op” (growing operation) a booming success (thanks to Spike’s help and encouragement!). Most of all, Ryan seems to feel it for Ming. And, he hopes, it seems like she feels it for him, too.

That’s how the story “ends,” in fact, with this single word on Ryan’s tongue: Hopeful.

As you might expect from the guy who seared “Gen X” into our cultural consciousness, the movie manages to avoid preachiness. It is, however, surprisingly unpretentious. It doesn’t pretend, in any way, to have discovered something new. Having been born in the same year as Doug Coupland, I know how tempting it is for this generation to imagine we know things no one else has ever been smart enough to figure out. But this film doesn’t make inflated claims.

It’s just the story of a guy who wakes up, sees through the lies his world tells, discovers the promise of something lasting, and decides to live on the edge where faith is found.

If you’re wondering whether or not “the f word” matters in our day, go see “Everything’s Gone Green” when it comes to town. Let me know what you think.

Now She's Meddling

"The Atlantic" is not exactly Proletariat reading material. It's not, for example, sitting on the table in the grimy waiting room of your local car repair shop or in the magazine rack at your local beauty parlor. At least not the ones in my neighborhood. This is a magazine with articles about "Stalin on the Eastern Front" and "A Safari by air over Namibia's haunting sand" and "Why we should worry about the military's increased political assertiveness" and "Freeloading aesthetes and the women who kept them." There's a whole section on POETRY every month, ok? Enough said.

But in this month's issue there is a fascinating article praising, against all odds, the virtues of Reality TV. Nothing is easier to make fun of. Mention it at your next social gathering and watch people turn their noses up, as though somebody in the room just had the audacity to fart in public. No one with any CLASS would admit that they're a fan - and I mean a real fan, not an embarrassed "I-can't-believe-I-watch-it-either-I-just-can't-help-myself" fan - but a real FAN who really CARES about whether or not LaKisha Jones will have a career after getting booted off Idol before her time (Blake survived?!? Puh-lease!!) and whether or not she'll be able to support her little girl, struggling single mom that she is. [If you missed it live(!), you can catch up at http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/sns-ap-tv-american-idol,1,7040377.story?coll=chi-entertainmentfront-hed] Reality TV is a sign of America's demise, right? The end times have to be near! And the 45 million people who voted for this week's Idol are barbarians who are responsible for the decline of our civilization. God help us all. But this author, convincingly!, argues that nothing on TV today takes more risks or is more vibrant. "Real Housewives," he says, charts the spiritual decay of life in gated communities where financial anxieties, fraying families, fear of aging (and, we can surmise, the absence of sidewalks) leaves people grasping for meaning and happiness. "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" captures the stories of real people who have fallen through the cracks in the Bush era, ravaged by health-care crises and layoffs. There is no predictability in Reality TV, no assurance that, in the end, lessons will be learned and order restored. What's more, says the author, "Narrative vibrancy is not the only thing that electrifies these shows. Reality TV presents some of the most vital political debate in America, particularly about class and race."

The author, Michael Hirschorn, makes his living producing Reality TV shows and so you might expect him to have a biased opinion. But he's right that no one is even bothering to look for the good in these shows. They just roll their eyes. And I've got to admit, I was almost cheering when he finally made his point that the only reason anybody is picking on Reality TV is because they are snobs.

Now maybe I was so taken by Hirschorn's willingness to name the ugly classist attitudes that run like poison through the crowds I travel in because, although my car radio is tuned to NPR, my vehicle of choice is a pick up truck. And I happen to have my most meaningful worship experiences when there is a good drummer driving the beat. And I feel uncomfortable when the preacher uses that "God" voice and insists on using words that have more than three syllables or sound like Greek to me (because they actually ARE Greek). And it makes me a little nuts when the worship leaders are prancing around in robes that were originally designed to keep priests warm in the unheated cathedrals of Northern Europe but now form the basis of a Sunday morning pageant, instead of just dressing and sounding and acting like normal people. And I really LIKE it when there's a projector and screen in the sanctuary, especially if it's being used to show movie clips or photos that illustrate the point of the sermon and communcate the good news and make the Biblical stories come alive. Maybe I was cheering for Hirschorn because my dad was a mill rat - a factory worker - and I was so incredibly offended to learn that one of my colleagues, when I was a member of a seminary faculty, told his students that lay worship assistants (whose main job is to read prayers the pastor writes out for them and hold the book so the pastor can make just the right hand motions at just the right time) can jokingly be referred to as "blue collar clerics." Another colleague taught his students that guitars have no place in worship because "all guitars make people think about is sex." I'm so not kidding.

It is my experience and my observation that when it comes to doing worship - and being church - differently, a lot of the resistance comes down to a simple and horrible case of classism. And I just can't figure out why we're not dealing with this. We seem willing enough to at least talk about our racism, our sexism, and the various issues we have around sexual orientation. But we aren't talking about why we don't have the NASCAR crowd at worship on Sunday morning. And, since NASCAR is like the most watched sport in the country, this might explain why we have such a hard time reaching ANYBODY outside our walls including, by the way, our own kids (who are, of course, the biggest consumers of Reality TV).

Frankly, I think most of the people INSIDE our walls would secretly like to see things be different (i.e. a little "Reality Worship," perhaps?!?) but they think they have to dress up & "worship UP" to be a part of our churches. In other words, while we long ago stopped telling non-Western people that they have to act Western in order to be Christian, we are still telling working class/blue collar/proletariat people that they have to act snooty (for example, listen to classical music for at least one hour a week and look like you're enjoying it...if you're in a traditional church, that is...listen to jazz and wear your best torn up jeans...if you're in an emerging one) to be members of our churches.

I don't think anybody explains better than Martin Luther why it's important for worship to be deeply contextual (see the article below about his Preface to the German Mass)...but all that theology aside...I just think it sucks that we treat people so poorly.

Sorry if I appear to be meddling where I don't belong. I'll just slink away and pop in my DVD of "Talladega Nights." That'll keep me laughing...and out of your hair for awhile.

Labels: classism, contemporary worship, emerging worship, missional church, reality TV, Talladega Nights