The Pub Fall 2010

Our Staff Editor-in-Chief Development Manager Managing Editor Layout Editor Publicity Manager Buisness Manager Fundraising Manager Copy Editor [essay] Editor [essay] Editor [essay] Editor [narrative] Editor [narrative] Editor [narrative] Editor Assistant [narrative] Editor [poem] Editor [review] Editor Faculty Advisor

Caroline Graves Ian Yue Will Hierholzer Daniel Lipford Debbie Knubley Tim McIlraith Laurel Johnson Ben Gibson TenYangsirisuk Jessie Fletcher Tim Lau Matt Miller Cora Mills Joel Coakley Brian Rowe Caleb Cardenas Meredith Neill Dr. Read Schuchardt

Wheaton’s Unofficial Wheaton’s Unofficial Undergraduate Undergraduate Journal Journal

Reinventing Celibacy I Am Something of an Accidental Anglican The Relics of St. Clive Leave Room for God’s Wrath We Are All Antiques Of Sainthood and Scholarship Beyond the Brush Painted Border The Thing Itself: A Dialogue with Dr. Eric McLuhan Volume 6, Issue 1 Fall 2010

[content]

the pub Thoughts from the Editor I am a collector, though not by choice or

us on a college campus. Wendell Berry, writing about the functions of community, commends the role of communal discourse in creative problem-solving: “It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.” Berry proposes an inclusive method called “solving for pattern.” He defines “patterns” as circular cultural, political, and environmental systems that layer and intersect to form the underlying historical and current context of a subject. The purpose is to regard the well-being of every stakeholder in their role within the pattern; externalities become obsolete. Together, with this process, we can build bridges, beginning with the hard work of community dialogue.

Berry’s challenge is hardly alien to students. Within our campus body, interdisciplinary discourse is present, and our pattern recognition is developing. The Pub hopes to acts as a catalyst for involved controversy, revealing both common ground and brave confrontations. Our pages do not contain dead script, but breathing texts that beg for campus discussion. If, as a student, you find regurgitation and isolation your scribal status, consider this fall issue of The Pub to be an invitation to reflect, rage, and dialogue.

good taste. Paper will accumulate in textbook sleeves, in the dust under my bed, and in the four corners of my desk until it resembles a mountain range of leftover lists and mementos.

My mother considers this habit unfortunate, and sounds objection for aesthetics’ sake. Yet, my inner rhetorician persuades me to preserve, at least, the fossils of my education: my class notes.

One thing is certain, Isocrates would approve. The fourth century BCE inventor of the liberal arts institution cautioned us against academic exclusivity, “not to let our wits go wool-gathering.” Instead, he championed the belief that effective discourse necessitates an interdisciplinary bias. For both scholars of Ancient Greece and those of modern academia, discourse constitutes the framework of societal progress. If discourse achieves the common ground vital for creating resolutions, then shouldn’t Christians be the prophetic artists of this craft? Perhaps, we are culpable of neglecting Isocrates’ petition.

The function of the scribe is to document and replicate texts and records. As students, this kind of retention is inescapable, but the embodiment of learning hinges upon discourse. Because I save lecture notes, I enter the scribal tradition. However, stopping there confirms my exclusion from the kind of interactive examination which is available to

Caroline Graves Editor-in-Chief

The Pub is an Associate Chapter of Vox Clara.

For more information please visit their website at www.voxclara.org

the pub [narrative] 5, 19 I Want to Slap Jon Krakauer in the Face Beyond the Brush Painted Border

Bryn Clark Caleb Cardenas

[poem] 3, 4, 11, 34 Prayer At a Bridal Shower Eight to Infinity Bali

Erin Lynch Erin Lynch Subaas Gurung Meredith Moench

[essay] 13, 26 “Leave Room for God's Wrath:” St. Augustine’s Defense of an Unpopular Theodicy Of Sainthood and Scholarship: A Study in Paradox

Griffin Klemick Ben Robertson

[review] 31 Age of Adz, or, How the Authors Found Themselves Dancing and Rediscovered Their Love for Electropop, or, How the Authors Couldn’t Help Using the Word Oeuvre and Betraying Their Desire for an Album about North Dakota, or, How the Authors Learned to Stop Worrying About Artistic Disintegration and Just Enjoyed the Album

Elise Bremer & Nick Tomlin

[interview] 35

Special Thanks: We would like to give special thanks to Student Government and President's Video for their financial support; to our faculty advisor Dr. Read Schuchardt, for his counsel; and to the wonderful staff of the SAO for all their help. We would also like to thank the Vox Clara foundation for their support and counsel.

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The Thing Itself: A Dialogue with Dr. Eric McLuhan

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Caroline Graves

[poem]

the pub

At a Bridal Shower

Prayer

Erin Lynch

Erin Lynch

Wrappings split like buds displaced by foliage of silk and lace: womanhood’s weeds, hers with the groom.

Is this the way? we hiss. She blooms

This should be vivisection — self unsealed — but I am squeamish and defer incision.

Once the skin is ruptured, peeled back, every cut exposes further — veins and arteries, traced to the heart, fragile parts of warm existence spread out throbbing, bloody on my hands.

I prefer cadavers: more hygienic than my soul, still sealed. At arm’s length, I prod its surface, safely, before God.

Erin Lynch is a senior English literature major from Newberg, OR. She likes to read road signs out loud. Erin.

Lynch@my.wheaton.edu

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[narrative]

the pub

I Want to Smack Jon Krakauer in the Face

it, you cannot type an essay critiquing someone if you just broke your hand punching them in the face.2 My best bet then, is to slap him like his high school girlfriend, turn on my heels and run Bryn Clark like a girl, all the while hoping that he is not as good at running as he is at climbing mountains.3 In short, I am sick of reading his books. I Hard. I am talking a full wind up here: arm have read all of them while sitting cuddled by a cranked behind my back almost to the point that fire in the temperate winters of southern Ohio, pouring over pages upon my shoulder dislocates, every ounce of energy in my My best bet then, pages about how he climbed a 4,000 foot vertical face, bicep exploding forth into a is to slap him like somewhere in Alaska, while violent swing, the type that his high school severely sleep deprived, baseball players rehearse alone, cold, oh and by the for hours. I want my hand girlfriend, turn on my way, was never roped in. I to connect with his face — heels and run like have followed his musings left cheekbone to be exact — with propelling motion a girl, all the while on Christopher McCandless, who disappeared into that will force his head to hoping that he is not the Alaskan wilderness in jerk violently to the right, maybe propelling saliva toas good at running order to grasp some greater meaning on life, losing his wards the ground. I want as he is at climbing own in the process. I have to tell him to stop smoking read them in their entirety, pot, or whatever drug I am mountains. and then read them again, sure he is on, get a real job, and stop writing about his stupid adventures. If mostly with my feet propped up on a pillow and I were a real man, I would punch him, and I some delicious home cooking by my side.

So, before I continue, I must submit to a have seriously contemplated this. I am a pansy, though a smart pansy — smart enough to know certain personal responsibility in this realm. that in a standoff between Krakauer and my- I fall into the same category as a majority of self I would be pulverized and left in a gutter Evangelical Christians whom, upon reading the to bleed.1 That and a punch to the face would Left Behind series, consequentially stocked their probably break my hand. And we need to face pantries with dried food and scanned the news

1 Probably somewhere in Boulder, CO. 2 A punch of my desired magnitude would most certainly break something, my hand being the most likely candidate.

3 Or, just faster than me.

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headlines for any up and coming politicians with the last frontier as a place of mystique, adventure and a Utopia in which McCandless finds peace. the last name “Carpathia.”

I am even worse that that. I read both I went to Alaska looking for that mystique, lookKrakauer’s Into the Wild and Eiger Dreams …and ing for that adventure in what Krakauer seemed then I bought a backpack and hiking boots. And to depict was the most adventurous place on I did not stop there. Oh no. I went ahead and earth — even if it meant death.5 bought a plane ticket to Alaska, even going so Upon stepping off the plane, my preconfar as to make my girlfriend watch the movie ceived notions of Alaska were blown out of the (based off of Krakauer’s book) with me the day proverbial water. Alaska was not, it turned out, before I left, right through the scene where Mc- severely under-developed. From Krakauer’s Candless dies alone in the writings, I had imagined wilderness.4 I was diving Alaska as one big camping Upon stepping trip, and that I would be head first into the Krakauoff the plane, my lucky to see running waer cult. ter. It did not occur to me From my home in preconceived that there would be colthe Midwest, I stuffed my notions of Alaska lege campuses, much less backpack with all the esones with dormitories. As sentials: plenty of hiking were blown out of it turned out there were, clothes, extra socks, warm the proverbial water. and I was staying in one of gear, even a first aid kit. I them.6 I already felt someensured I packed all the Alaska was not, it right rain gear and boots, what thrown off as I unturned out, severely and was adequately prepacked my camping gear, pared for whatever the wiltrying to make my room under-developed. derness may throw at me. I appear as though I had did neglect to bring, however, anything resem- planned for it to be a dorm room, not a tent in bling civilization. I do not remember Krakauer the middle of nowhere. I had to borrow a toothmentioning the need of a toothbrush or razor brush, and later went to the local supermarket in any of his books; I categorized these items (another novelty, in my mind) to purchase soap as too civilized. I was heading to Alaska with a and shampoo, both of which I had previously group of twenty other college-age males, none deemed unnecessary for tent life. From the colof whom I had met. My goal for the trip was lege campus, I drove with some of my compansimple: to discover Alaska. ions down a road and, save for the mountains Krakauer’s book, Into the Wild, describes and ocean in the background, the landscape was

4 It may surprise you that we are no longer together.

5 As long as a famous journalist wrote a book about me after my death.

6 Ironically, they were much nicer than my dorm in Indiana …go figure.

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[narrative]

the pub not terribly different from those in Ohio. On sea could make it more magnificent. The tips of our right was a strip mall, and later, just before the mountains jut out into the western horizon, reaching the grocery store, we saw subdivisions and then the slopes dive down and submerge of cookie cutter houses all in a row.7 As I scanned themselves in the water, as if bowing before the aisles for the cheapest shampoo, I decided that majesty of the ocean. Mountain meets sea, with passion and mystique in Krakauer would never The tips of the between them both. have gone shopping for I could have given shampoo. mountains jut out into Krakauer a high five for Now, I must acthe western horizon, his descriptions. credit Krakauer in some The assurance did ways, and here is one: and then the slopes not last long. More was he adeptly describes the dive down and still to come that would beauty of Alaska. Based submerge themselves destroy my idealized picon his writing, it is no ture of Alaska. wonder that McCandless in the water, as if For starters, there set his sights on Alaska’s bowing before the were parts of Alaska that wilderness, and I cannot blame him. My first majesty of the ocean. were commercialized … severely commercialized. backpacking venture of the trip took me into the heart of the mountains Into the Wild describes a world that is just that: surrounding Juneau. The beauty of the area, wild. McCandless ate rice while he was in Alassimply put, cannot be described. Like any self- ka, the only protein coming from a moose he shot. While I did sample bear jerky, and even respecting writer, I must attempt to do so.

Juneau is a rainforest, which is a little moose spaghetti, most of my meals consisted of known fact. Consequentially, it receives more delicious soups and ice cream from a touristy rain in a week than many Midwestern towns food stand called “Top Frog”.8 Furthermore, in do in months or even a year. We set off on our Eiger Dreams, there was no chance of Krakaubackpacking trip during a typical Juneau day, er stumbling back from his ascent of Devil’s cloudy and drizzling. The mountains, green at Thumb and downing a Big Mac at McDonalds. the peak of summer, seemed to rise around us at Moreover, Krakauer never mentioned the all angles. A euphoric feeling truly exists as one tourist industry that runs amok throughout a gets the sight of mountain peaks stretching as far good portion of the state. Granted, I think this as the eye can see, sprinkled with new snowfall, is because Chris McCandless does not strike me interrupted only by the valleys between them. as the type of guy to buy an “Alaska: been there, Only the placement of mountains next to the done that” key chain, or even Mt. McKinley

7 They weren’t even shaped like igloos.

8 Where the inspiration for this came from, I know not; I saw no frogs on my trip.

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shot glasses, but it still felt unexpected. Juneau ing, mountaineering, kayaking all await in your itself is a city that survives off the tourist indus- backyard, so why not be the next John Muir?10 try. Normally a city with a population of 30,000, The people I encountered, however, appeared during the summer the population is inflated by startlingly average. Most had never even been well over a million tourists. The streets are lined ice climbing or kayaking. with t-shirt shops and restaurants, most of which I spent an afternoon with one group of close down as soon as the last cruise ship leaves. high school students playing soccer outside a loMy final lesson came not so much from the cal high school. After a game that proved my landscape but from the culture in Alaska, specif- complete inferiority in the sport, I sat down and ically the viewpoint of tourists. The cruise ship talked to them about life in the town. crowds and the tourists “What do you do waddle from storefront for fun?”

I asked them.

Tourists and ignorant to storefront in an efThe answer was not fort to find the coolest dweebs aside, the people much more riveting shirt to signify their than those from teenof Alaska are not what cruise-ship escapade. agers in, say, CincinnaI expected them to be.

That state also suffers ti, Ohio: video games, Even upon venturing out movies, high school cynical Midwestern males who think they and theatre. to a very remote village, sports,“Yes, know everything about but what literally 400 miles from the state because they about hiking?” I said. read some other guy’s They would anywhere, I found that book.9 Tourists and igshrug and reply “OcAlaskans are still very casionally.” I was benorant dweebs aside, fuddled. What about the people of Alaska much Americans. the mountains, the are not what I expected them to be. Even upon venturing out to a very sea? Where is the compulsion to just explore? I remote village, literally 400 miles from any- earnestly inquired of them, controlling the imwhere, I found that Alaskans are still very much pulse to grab them by the shoulders and shake Americans. It is naturally assumed, or maybe them.

They looked at me like I was a tourist and at least by anyone of the Krakauer persuasion, that if you live in Alaska, you are going to be ex- then, when I did not falter in my sincerity, like I treme when it comes to the outdoors. Ice climb- was a freak.11

9 They are, by far, the worst.

10 John Muir was an American explorer and bear man who, also, could have used a slap in the face ...donate to The Pub, so I can write about why in the spring issue.

11 I deserved both.

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[narrative]

the pub a place of splendor and adventure if you want it Then they asked me where I was from. to be, but so is anywhere else.

“Ohio,” I answered.

Maybe I do not want to slap Jon Krakauer Their faces lit up.

“I’d love to visit Ohio!” one of them said. in the face. I really do not know how much I can “Do you have an amusement park there?” blame him. As an adventure writer, Alaska beanother piped in. “My family thought about go- comes the land of adventure. He may have left ing there on vacation once, but instead we just some details out and over-glorified a state that does not necessarily need it, but he is definitely went to Anchorage.”

And the list goes on. I talked with two high not the first to do so, and he will not be the last. school girls who told me how eager they were Krakauer wrote about one aspect of Alaska. But to go to college, just to get out of Alaska. I met as with all places, and the people within, there natives who dreamt of the day when they would are many others that he missed.

Despite the fact that my views on Alaska no longer have to look upon the mountains in had altered by the time I hopped on the return their backyards.

For every Christopher McCandless going flight, I still found myself in love. I loved the into Alaska perhaps there are at least four or mountains, I loved the ocean, the salmon, the bears and the small towns five on the other side doing in places most Americans everything in their power to Yes, there was a do not know exist. Yes, get out.

I had idealized a place McDonalds at a trail there was a McDonalds at a trail head, and yes, I and a culture, based upon what the words of some- head, and yes, I was was invited to play “Halo” one else had developed in invited to play “Halo” more often than hike, but the spirit of Alaska is real. my head. With stories of more often than Neighborhoods back up adventure and journeys of self-realization added hike, but the spirit of against mountain ranges, and traffic is stopped beinto the equation, it would Alaska is real. cause of rambunctious have been absurd to expect bears. The great outdoors anything other than the stoic idealization I carried with me to Alaska. is not a cute notion, but a reality there.

And I loved the people: the ones who When I returned to the Midwest, I was not transformed.12 I had a camera full of pictures, played Xbox and watched MTV on the weeksome cool stories, and a better understanding ends and the ones who were ten times more adof what Alaska really was. To be fair, I do not venturous than I ever will be. I did not have to think Krakauer was necessarily wrong: Alaska is look far to find those with whom I could relate,

12 In the spirit of optimism, I must point out that I, also, wasn’t dead in a broken down bus.

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and I also did not have to look far to find people from whom I could not wait to get away. Alaska is a real place, and Krakauer captured that reality, but just a part of it. I do not know if it is truly possible for anyone to do much more than

that, and I do not know if this deems violence against him.

But then again, maybe I would just slap him (and run like a girl) if nothing else to be able to say that I did.13

13 Because really, who can say that they’ve really slapped Jon Krakauer?

Bryn Clark is a senior English writing major from Mason, OH. While in Alaska, Bryn played a game of truth or dare that resulted in him taking a naked plunge into a glacier run off. Now, Bryn just tells the truth. Bryn.Clark@ my.wheaton.edu

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[poem]

the pub

Eight to Infinity Subaas Gurung

Octave legs jointed on the air Pluck and climb, pantomime forth a Cartesian plane Between axes of the grass and the low tree.

Metabolic juices river translucent through the soundless machinery, Eight legs find crevices in the surface of the air.

Three dimensions suffer me Shift Vantage angle, And the lamppost Catches its rays copper on Silkmasonry — Infant infrastructure with the width of a Cutting edge. Technology

“ …And have you not more than they — More than genetics to guide you?

More than instinct?

Remember.”

I’ve an affinity to pull numbers out of the air.

But overthrow the figure-eight to its side, And behold.

Preordained in genetics, known among the nucleic acids!

Standard issue, the spinnerets are nonetheless profound and beauty.

With eight legs attuned to the vibrato of the tripwire.

I wondered Is this a nightly setting up shop — routine, you know?

I mean, have you ever really watched it?

Eight years into the millennium, now old enough to vote — I’d often stared at eight semesters, Felt equipped With only half the required appendages.

But he’s been telling me “Rest assured my eye is on their kind too.

And even Solomon in all his splendor could not Build himself a palace with timbers Of comparable tensile-strength-to-density ratio …

Subaas Gurung is a junior English literature major from Kathmandu, Nepal. He is becoming increasingly proficient at spittin' mad verses on the microphone. Subaas.Gurung@my.wheaton.edu

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[essay]

the pub

“Leave Room for God’s Wrath:” St. Augustine’s Defense of an Unpopular Theodicy

of Augustine’s day and his predominant critic, fiercely opposed Augustine on this point, insisting that any good God must be “utterly divorced from all cruelty”4 — that a good God would not providentially ordain evil to befall his creation.

But Julian was wrong and Augustine was right; human suffering occurs at the hand of God, a Griffin Klemick manifestation of his holy wrath against human sin. Moreover, this account alone can provide any hope or comfort in the midst of suffering; Perhaps no argument against theism is more only if our sufferings are the outpouring of daunting today than the evidential argument God’s wrath can any hope be found in them. from evil. It is not clear why a world created by While in previous years it sometimes felt imposan all-powerful, wholly good being should con- sible to me to live meaningfully in light of loomtain the instances of horrific suffering that have ing divine wrath, I now believe that acknowledging the wrath of God become almost routine in has served as a necessary ours. Late in life St. AugusWrath is far from the precursor to understandtine was still wrestling with this question: “Whence most popular theodicy ing how great the love of God truly is. comes all this evil?”1 In on the philosophical previous years, he had tried market today. Few to interpret these events as The Nature of Wrath good, preaching forcefully churches teach and about the spiritual growth Wrath is far from preach a God of that could arise from his the most popular theodicy congregants’ suffering.2 on the philosophical marwrath, popularizing ket today. Few churches But later he confronted the question directly, con- the idea that he would teach and preach a God of wrath, popularizing the cluding in his dispute with ipso facto not be idea that he would ipso facthe Pelagians that the only omni-benevolent. to not be omni-benevolent. possible explanation of They follow such as C.H. human suffering was that sinful humanity had incurred God’s wrath. He Dodd, whose interpretation of Romans 1:18ff. states his position memorably in The City of God: relies on a history in which Old Testament writ“For God’s anger is this mortal life, in which ers project their fear of the numinous (particuman is made like to vanity, and his days pass as larly natural disasters) onto the person of God.5 a shadow.”3 The wrath of God, then, would signify only the This position was not accepted without inevitable results of sin manifested in creation, not contest. Julian of Eclanum, the leading Pelagian any aspect of the divine nature.6

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First, we must understand that in divine wrath “there is the complete absence of that caprice and unethical quality so prominent in [human anger].”9 God’s wrath is “the natural expression of the Divine nature, which is absolute holiness, manifesting itself against the … iniquity of mankind.”10 Scripture passages such as 2 Thessalonians. 1:6 (“It is a righteous thing “The idea of an angry God is a first atwith God to recompense tribulation to them tempt to rationalize [the feeling of awe that trouble you”) illustrate that it is in God’s naat disaster] …but it is an attempt which ture to judge and therefore also to punish; this is not breaks down as the rational element in God’s mere whim.11 religion advances. In the long run we cannot think with full consistency of God Second, God’s wrath, rather than being in terms of the highest human ideals of opposed to his love, is more accurately seen as personality and yet attribute to Him the the effect of his love for fallen humanity. His an8 irrational passion of anger.” ger is often a response to corporate apostasy and the breaking of his commandments by his covHere Dodd gives the two most common objec- enant people.12 Wrath serves to restore the elect tions to conceiving of God as wrathful. Some to their intended status as creatures in postures see wrath as necessarily capricious, an arbitrary of loving worship toward him. Augustine recogstain on a being purported to be perfectly ra- nizes this in his own life: “But see how close on tional. Others maintain that it is contradictory our backs you were as we fled you, you the punto speak of a God as both loving and wrathful, ishing God and the fountain of pity, who twist us claiming that the two are incommensurate as around toward you in surprising ways.”13 God’s aspects of the divine nature. wrath thus serves as the imFurthermore, underlying petus for drawing people Wrath serves to Dodd’s explicit objections is back into his love. Scripture restore the elect an even more vexing one: indicates that God typithat an omni-benevolent God cally draws us to himself by to their intended must in the end manifest his teaching us to number our love not only to humanity in status as creatures days through experience of general but to each individual in postures of loving his anger,14 which leads us person, and that this is irrecto look for satisfaction in his oncilable with God eventually worship toward him. love rather than in our own sending some persons to hell pursuits and ends.15 Finally, to face his wrath for eternity. I venture to claim Psalm 78 tells us that concerning the Israelites, that none of these objections carries significant “[God], being compassionate ...restrained his weight in a careful consideration of God and anger often and did not stir up all his wrath;”16 wrath rooted in Scripture.

Scripture here indicates that even God’s wrath

Dodd never provides warrant for his assumption that creation’s brokenness is an inevitable result of sin (and vis-à-vis an omnipotent God, could it be inevitable?).7 His project is tainted from the beginning by his key theological presupposition:

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the pub at his people’s sin is restrained and tempered by his mercy.

As to the argument that an omni-benevolent God must love all persons, and that God could not love a person while subjecting him to the divine wrath in hell, Scripture denies the argument’s conclusion, viz. that no one ultimately faces God’s eternal wrath. Romans 9:22 makes clear that God has in fact painstakingly created certain humans as “objects of wrath.”17 It is uncertain, however, which of the two premises of the argument Scripture would deny.18 Nevertheless, so long as we regard Scripture as infallible, we must maintain that one or both premises are indeed false. Yet, our inability to find easily the answer to this argument is deeply troubling. It seems to leave us with instances of God’s wrath that do not bring about good for people in the end. I have little trouble believing that hell is just, given the deep sinfulness I perceive in myself.

But I find it nigh impossible to discover any good that is achieved by hell compared to the good that would be achieved in God electing all to salvation.

We must, then, start with experience. A Biblical answer to the problem of suffering must not start with any specific claim to good achieved by an instance of God’s wrath but with the awareness that we all routinely commit wrong actions, and that punishment of wrongdoing is an intrinsic good.19 This awareness ought to become evident to each individual based on her own experiential knowledge that she is a sinner who deserves eternal punishment. While we cannot know the hearts of other individuals or delve into the mind of God concerning the ultimate goals of any specific instances of suffering, we can be certain that his judgment is just, maintaining faith in his love on the basis of the

[essay] astonishing love demonstrated in the person of Christ and in his death on our behalf.

Why Wrath is a Better Answer We have seen that divine wrath does not contradict the revealed nature of the Christian God. Augustine would claim even that it is the only coherent answer to the problem of suffering.20 Even so, that does not give much reason for celebration. What is comforting about being suffering sinners in the hands of an angry God? An alternative answer has been proposed: God generally allows suffering (without ordaining, it seems, any specific instances of it) because it is necessary to facilitate spiritual growth.21 Julian gives an answer close to this one in Ad Florum 6.17: “For already [fear and pain] …are instead accomplished teachers of those who have not only done no evil whatsoever, but are born with the key-bolt of a good will, helpers and executors of justice.”22 Suffering thus acts as the catalyst for latent human potential to be actualized.

In years before the Pelagian controversy, Augustine himself had an affinity toward this view.23 It is worth noting first that this soul-making theodicy seems to necessitate universalism, as it only works for people who actually come to God.24 Whether this position is consonant with ‘good old-fashioned’ Evangelical exegesis is uncertain. But Augustine’s account of God’s wrath proves better than Julian’s account in one other significant way. It is not clear that Julian actually affirms God’s omnipotence, which, for Augustine, is the opening declaration of Christianity.25 Julian would rather preserve God’s innocence at cost to his power, creating a God Augustine calls “cruelly weak.”26 Augustine is not merely being pithy here; in an effort to free God from

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any complicity in suffering, Julian has “cruelly” sufferer, but illuminates no purpose of suffering; this God does not work all things together for taken away any hope for those who suffer.

Rabbi Harold S. Kushner is the author of the good of those called according to his purperhaps the most famous book on theodicy for pose. No actual hope then exists for those sufthe problem of evil, When Bad Things Happen to fering nor any meaning (beyond constructed Good People. In a recent interview with NPR,27 psychological crutches) discovered in suffering.

Kushner said that following the death of his son, It therefore comes as no surprise that Kushner’s he reevaluated his belief in an omnipotent God, relationship with God has not changed over the ultimately deciding that if his son’s death were decades; his God is no longer really active in the part of God’s plan, “[it was] a bad bargain. I world to be known or worshiped. Conversely, don’t want to have to deal with a God like that.” the God who punishes sins in wrath is the God who uses suffering to So he circumscribed bring about not only God’s power in order Julian would rather justice but also the reto maintain his full preserve God’s pentance of sinners, omni-benevolence. fact which becomes He disavowed his forinnocence at cost to his aincreasingly acute as I mer belief that specific tragedies serve power, creating a God walk with him through the years. divine purposes.

Augustine calls “cruelly The wrath of When asked whether God has been a source his relationship with weak.” Augustine is not of spiritual anguish God had changed as for me since middle he grew older, Kush- merely being pithy here; my arguments ner replied, “My in an effort to free God school; here are perhaps more sense is no. My sense from any complicity the result of this intuis God and I came ition than vice-versa. to an accommodain suffering, Julian has And I do not pretend tion with each other a couple of decades “cruelly” taken away any that my relationship with God flourished ago, where he’s gotten used to the things hope for those who suffer. upon acknowledging his wrath; I spent years that I’m not capable of and I’ve come to terms with things he’s not in high school pleading with God to give me just capable of, and we still care very much about a little longer to live like a Christian, imagining myself standing before judge and perhaps each other.”28 This is an excellent example of how at- teacher but neither friend nor father. But freshtempts to limit God in an effort to make him man year on a retreat with Youth Hostel Minispalatable to our limited perspective ultimately try, I had a profound encounter with the love of disappoint. Kushner’s God feels sorry for the God, recognizing that even in Christ, I remain

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the pub far from the person that I am intended to be (and one day will be), and that for this reason Christ took upon himself not only the punishment, the wrath of God that I deserved, but that he also took upon himself the dread, the despair, the distance from God that I had felt all those

[essay] years I had lived in my realization trying to earn my way back. The sacrifice of Christ was greater still than that. The wrath of God thus gives us hope in the midst of suffering because the one who bore it in full for us emerged victorious over it and thus became the only hope that we have.29

Endnotes 1 Op. Imp. V, 16.

2 e.g., The Literal Meaning of Genesis XI, 35, xlviii, in which Augustine describes all the world’s afflictions as the grace by which God teaches humans not to trust in themselves.

3 The City of God XXI, 24. Trans. Dods.

4 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 397.

5 C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1932), 22.

6 Ibid. 23.

7 I think defensible the claim that the curses of Genesis 3 are not inevitable results of sin but deliberate responses by God, but I will not defend it here.

8 Dodd 24.

9 Geoffrey W. Bromiley, ed., International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, c1988), 3113.

10 Ibid.

11 Furthermore, Francis Turretin argues convincingly that if God’s wrath occurred only at his pleasure and he could have refrained from punishing without compromising his nature, then surely he would simply have so refrained, making the sacrifice of Christ as a propitiation for sin moot (Institutes of Elenctic Theology, v. I, 28).

12 Cf. Colin Brown, gen. ed., The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, c1978), 108-9. This is exemplified in Psalm 78: The Lord’s wrath comes upon Israel because they reject him despite all the miracles he has done for them. We see that God actually kills some of the Israelites in order that the people as a whole will return to him, which they in fact do. See verses 32-35.

13 Confessions IV, 4. Trans. Garry Wills.

14 Psalm 90:12, NIV. 15 Psalm 90:7-11, 14, NIV. 16 Psalm 78:38, ESV. 17 What is more, here the word cannot intelligibly refer to inevitable results of sin, as Dodd wants to claim.

18 I lack space to adequately explore this point. No persuasive challenge to the second occurs to me, but I admit I am very uncomfortable challenging the first.

19 I would posit that these are universal awarenesses, as Lewis is at pains to prove in Part I of Mere Christianity.

20 e.g., Contra Julian IV, 83. In fact, many of his arguments against Julian hinge upon the fact that there is evil

17

which an omnipotent God could prevent, and that if God does not, it can only be explained through an appeal to God’s vindictive justice.

21 A notable contemporary version is presented by John Hick in his work Evil and the God of Love.

22 As cited in Josef Lössl’s very helpful “Julian of Aeclanum on Pain.”

23 Cf. The Literal Meaning of Genesis XI, 35, in which the purpose of the world’s afflictions is to teach sinners humility. This is perhaps a “Christianized” version of Augustine’s Manichean views, which were sharply dualistic; the forces of good and evil are completely separate, with neither responsible for the other.

Augustine was arguably departing from these views even by the time he wrote the Confessions, since in Bk. VII, ch. 13 he writes, “[In] the separate parts of your creation there are some things which we think of as evil because they are at variance with other things …in themselves, they too are good” (trans. Pine-Coffin).

Here, Augustine claims that many things we call evil are created by God, and, in fact, are not sharply separated from the good at all, if only we see them from beyond a finite, human perspective.

24 It is correct that, with respect to those who are in Christ, they are indeed no longer under God’s wrath but, when they suffer, are being chastised as God’s beloved children, for the sake of their spiritual growth. Cf. Turretin, 527-533. But if universalism isn’t true, “for those who are not the elect . . . suffering [is] merely ‘torture inflicted as a punishment,’ a visible reminder of the future penalties of Hell, a horrible overture to the terror of the Last Judgement” (Brown, 399).

25 Op. Imp. I, 49.

26 Op. Imp. I, 120.

27 NPR, The Long View. “Rabbi Kushner: An ‘Accommodation’ With God” <http://www.npr.org/ templates/story/story.php?storyId=124582959>.

28 Ibid.

29 This paper is an abridged version of my Spring 2010 final paper for Mark R. Talbot’s class on the Confessions. Not every detail of the arguments was present in the original, and even more subtleties have doubtless slipped through the cracks in this version. As noted several times in this paper, Augustine’s views on the subject of God and suffering changed significantly over the course of his life. In The Literal Meaning of Genesis (see footnote 23) and his notable work On Free Choice of the Will, Augustine will not emphasize God’s sovereignty to the degree he does later in life. The arguments in this paper are taken primarily from The City of God XXI, Contra Julian (particularly Bks. III and IV), and his unfinished book against Julian, typically designated Op. Imp. (particularly Bk. I). For a reliable account of the development of Augustine’s thought, see Peter Brown’s excellent Augustine of Hippo, Part V of which was crucial to my understanding of Augustine’s responses to Julian. Unfortunately, none of Julian’s own works survive, and thus our understanding of his positions comes mostly from Augustine, which is problematic for obvious reasons. The Lössl article cited in footnote 22 is a more charitable account of aspects of Julian’s thought. I am grateful to numerous editors and readers for helpful comments, but I am particularly indebted to Tim Lau for his encouragement, flexibility, and insight.

Griffin Klemick is a junior philosophy and Bible theology major from Pittsburgh, PA. He has recently been named Wheaton College's biggest hot mess of 2010 by senior Stephen Kusmer. Griffin.Klemick@my.wheaton.edu

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Beyond the Brush Painted Border Caleb Cardenas

On a rocky crest half way between the earth and sky, Jim’s knees and forearms rested on the ground and his head hung over psychotropic vomit. Tips of long locks of hair dangled in the acidic pool — his stomach’s rejection of the white flower’s tea. The words of the last Nagual, Carlos Castaneda, echoed in the wind running through those clay mountains: “When a man embarks on the path of sorcery, he becomes aware in a gradual manner that ordinary life has been forever left behind.” He no longer felt his arms planted in the earth. Dirt clung to his sobbing pores; they had given themselves to the solitary journey following the shaman. His mind could not shut out the monotonous drone of ordinary life despite the number of times that he proved its nonexistence. This world was not his own. He did not belong to it any longer. He had no home. Jim leaned back, his butt on his ankles, his numb ankles against the earth. Slumping his shoulders back and hanging his numb arms with palms turned toward the sun in resignation, he stared into the sky. He saw no eagle but the fluidity of the shining clouds beckoned. He closed his eyes and raked the ground with his fingertips until they connected with solid wood. Grasping it with both hands, he rested his chin on the cold metal tip of the gun.

He howled and as he did, the entire valley held its breath while the tormented echo slipped through the hills. He bolted to his feet and screamed as he stomped on the shrubs and 19

sage and wild red buckwheat. He flung himself into a sumac bush. It tore into his bare back and gashed the soft tissue underneath his eye. Then with tears seeping into and burning the cut on his cheek, he scrambled toward the edge. Knees bent, he hung over the puddle of his vomit and pressed the barrel against his stomach. Then Castaneda’s words cried again in the wind along with the crack of the shotgun’s chamber. Jim collapsed and his hot blood poured into the dirt.

I walked down the stone path along the moseying river through the antique city of Ljubljana. The town that seemed to inherit the properties of the river enchanted me. Slowly gliding through the day, unpolluted and pure of fixation on business, naturally blue waters flowed from the mountains of Slovenia humming the lullaby that set the townspeople into motion.

I strolled down that stone road with café tables lining the river’s edge when I noticed a brown cardboard box lying on the ground in front of a used bookshop. I glanced down into the box and my eyes were instantly drawn to the Aztec style word in the title of a beat up paperback. I pulled it out and was struck with a wave of familiarity with the cover of The Journey to Ixtlan. A black and white spotted hawk soared over a rocky mountainous landscape dotted with cactus, yucca, and other desert brush. In the bottom corner of the page, two men walked along a dusty trail. In that picture, I saw myself and my brothers hiking through the hills across our dirt road which runs clear to the Mexican border, where the trickling Tecate River serves as a sorry natural border.

I paid a 1€ coin for the book and scanned

the introduction as I walked out the door. It de- so. He said that digging would make me strong, scribed the tale of Carlos Castaneda’s appren- but I spent Saturdays digging with my dad to lay ticeship under the Yaqui Indian Don Juan Ma- a foundation under our old house. “Maybe you tus, and the philosophies he learned from that just need some of this to get strong.” He lifted old shaman. I remembered my grandmother’s up his elbow high into the air revealing a fresh prejudice against the Yaqui tribe. “They’re a patch of armpit hair. Laughing, he went back to mean-spirited people,” she would claim when forming his track. The sun went down and the groaning about Mr. Martinez’s angry wife. I coyotes began to bark.

“Maybe we have secretly laughed I remembered my should finish up at my Nani’s prejusoon,” I suggested. dices but wondered grandmother’s prejudice “Escared of caiwhich of her tribal against the Yaqui tribe. yoats, eh?” crazy Beto memories I have inhummed casting a herited.

“They’re a mean-spirited sideways glance in my The plants listpeople,” she would claim direction. ed in the soft pages of when groaning about Mr. “Coyotes won’t this book grow natuattack people, stupid,” rally alongside my Martinez’s angry wife. I reminded my brother, road and in groves have secretly laughed at “especially if we’re in beside Highway 94. a group.”

They have large dark my Nani’s prejudices but “Still, I think we green leaves and wondered which of her tribal should head back.” beautiful white flowThe coyotes ers like psychedelic memories I have inherited. grew quiet for a momartini glasses. The cacti identified grow in the front yards of sub- ment as I surveyed the property. Bushes and urban families, unaware of their natural hallu- boulder patches that grew out of the gulley and cinogenic properties. I slipped the book into my covered the hillside stood between the house and me. The coyotes began their chorus again. camelback and continued down the road.

“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” my brother replied.

Chills poured down my spine, turned My big brother, Dominic, and his friend, Beto, scraped the earth with square shovels while about in my legs, then climbed right back up I sprayed the bike jumps with a hose. We had to into my stomach, leaping for my throat. I heard string together five or six long garden hoses just the rustling of bushes and spun around only to reach that corner of the property where they to see the muddy soles of their feet shoot into the bushes. They popped out sprinting on the built the track.

“Why don’t you dig for a while?” Dominic other side. I threw the hose and tried to run, but asked, but they were his jumps, and I told him the chills were still trapped in my knees and I

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tripped. I landed flat on my chest. It knocked the small opening like the mouth of a cave. One day, wind out of me and I choked on the air grown I took a hatchet and hacked away and hollowed thick with the laughter of coyotes. It was all I out a space inside. I trampled down the weeds at could hear. I did not even notice my own whim- the entrance, but left the patch of spiny caster per as I bolted for the house. It was not until the beanstalks so that those on the outside could not streams of tears blurred my vision that I tried to ‘spy in.’ I carried old chairs to the fort from the control my crying, but the tears continued to cut dinner table, and wheel-barrowed down a row through the dirt cakes on my face and I rubbed of blue suede seats from the old blue van that sat them into mud with the back of my hand. Snif- dead in the yard. I tied rope for guests to climb up among the higher branches, but the best fling, I arrived at the house.

If there was any way that I could get to my seats were the branches themselves that ran low room without being seen choking down wim- and horizontal over the gravel floor. This was a pers, I would have, but by this time in the eve- place of my own where I could take my friends. ning most of my family was watching TV and A place where my little brother would not try to waiting for a turn to use the shower as I passed watch me play Pokémon and my older brother would not beat me up. A place through the living room with snot running from my nose. I landed flat on my I discovered for myself and They all discovered my plight. chest. It knocked crafted into my dwelling.

That night the boys hid in the bushes until my mom stopped the wind out of me “Be careful though,” hollering and the stars came and I choked on Matt, the hostel owner, warned out. the air grown thick when he offered me the job, with the laughter “You might end up staying the whole summer. That’s what I I shared a bunk bed with of coyotes. did, 14 years ago.” I was sitmy older brother while my sister and little brother also shared one that my dad ting on the porch of Chalet Martin, an advenbuilt one Saturday afternoon while migrating turers’ hostel high up in the Swiss Alps. I had clouds danced with the sun, periodically casting spent the last couple days hiking and bouldering crawling shadows over the land. Crammed into all over those peaks. I accepted Matt’s job offer that tiny room, each of us had a dresser to hold to work the next day, laying cement and rock our things. On mine a tasseled Mexican blanket and doing other sorts of manual labor.

My first night there, I slipped into the held my books, Huckleberry Finn, Peter Pan, and Narnia wedged between a red wrist-rocket room underneath the porch. It was smoky and slingshot and a wooden box that reminded me clearly customized by the group of guys who now occupied it. The room was furnished with of a pirate chest.

Although I slept above Dominic in this tree stumps and discarded armchairs. A mural small room, I had my own place out in the yard of South Park characters, big-wave surfers, and as well. In the gulley grew a giant sumac with a promiscuous cartoon vixens covered the walls

along with Afroman lyrics adapted to the hos- ventures and hobbies and the different jobs we tel — which explained why they could not leave have had until the fog came up and engulfed our Chalet Martin. They were an international pot- little hostel on the hillside. I later found out that pourri of drifters: Australian, Scottish, English, it was Chris who suggested that Matt offer me Portuguese, and Brazilian. They all lived in the the job.

After a week in the Alps, I came back from hostel, working in tourism during the winter months when jobs are plentiful, but at this time a long day of weed-whacking and fencing steep during the summer, they broke their backs for hillsides. I walked up toward Chalet Martin.

Matt came out of his house Matt or worked at the only restaurant still open. On On the night before and greeted me. He gave me the money that he owed off days, they hiked and I was supposed to and offered another day of climbed high in the mounleave, I lay in my work. I declined. The group tains where the only other with which I was traveling human lives belonged to bed and thought would soon be leaving those dairy farmers whose famiabout the scene from steep, rocky, green peaks, lies have lived on those green slopes for hundreds Almost Famous when and I wanted one more day to climb before moving on of years.

William Miller tells to Bern. “Bern!? Bern’s just That night, I had finished skateboarding down the infamous Penny another city mate. Catch up with those guys in the the winding mountain road Lane that he needs next one.” I leaned against and poked my head into this the split rail fence thinklocals-only room. The Austo go home. She about the offer. It had sie, whose name was Chris waves her hands and ing been the first warm week invited me inside, wanting to see my board. It turned whispers, “Poof, you of the Swiss summer, and every day I witnessed the out that he had messed up are home.” giant patches of snow on his ankle in Amsterdam and decided to use his board to make the bench for the surrounding peaks shrivel into jagged and the lounge by fastening the deck onto a log. I bare gray rocky crowns. He told me to go on up offered to let him borrow mine while I stayed to the hostel and think about it, “The guys are at the hostel. I told him that while I had been probably wondering where you’re at.”

On the night before I was supposed to hitchhiking to the top of the mountain in Villars and riding back down until the road flat- leave, I lay in my bed and thought about the tened out below the hostel. “You’re not afraid scene from Almost Famous when William Miller of those nutty blokes that live on this mountain tells the infamous Penny Lane that he needs to then, huh?” asked Tom. “It puts the lotion on its go home. She waves her hands and whispers, skin,” he added, and they all roared with laugh- “Poof, you are home.”

I left the next day. ter. We talked late into the night about our ad-

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the pub in my near future and the onset of senior year stalked my little brother’s. We grabbed water, The flick of a deadbolt snapped through sleeping bags, and a hatchet and set out across the noises in the house, and my father stepped dusty Marron Valley Road hiking into the hills. out of the bathroom, fresh from the shower in We climbed over the mountains until we could an old holey t-shirt and plaid pajama pants. He see down into the valley at our destination. Nestilted his head to the side and wheedled a Q-tip tled deep in the valley, eucalyptus, sumac, and in his ear. Glancing down at the desk, he low- scrub oak trees grew all around an old stone ranch house; a giant ered his eyebrows. My The house was over a shade palm decorated father is a quiet man and opens his mouth usu- hundred years old and no what might be called the patio. It was an oaally only to breathe a longer had a roof, but it sis of Southern Caliswift joke or to tell a wild story. Matter-of-factly he was easy to imagine the fornia plant life. The house was over a hunwould tell us about rollancient home in the days dred years old and no ing a dune buggy that longer had a roof, but he made in shop class when my family raised it was easy to imagdown the hillside across from Monte Vista High cattle there on the border. ine the ancient home School. It was a week The two of us sat on the in the days when my raised cattle before graduation, and crumbling stone wall with family there on the border. he pulled himself from the vehicle to see the en- our backs pressed against The two of us sat on the crumbling stone tire school lined along the chimney. wall with our backs the front watching. Or, about offroading on Sunday afternoons in the pressed against the chimney. Our heads tilted bed of uncle Archie’s truck who drank whiskey back and we stared into the star-filled sky; my little brother sighed and broke the peaceful sito fuel his spirit of adventure. lence.

“Is this your book?” he asked.

“It might sound weird, and it’s not like I “I found it in Slovenia. Do you know it?”

“My friend Jim was a follower of Carlos believe in the ancestral spirits or anything like that, but I feel very connected to this land.”

Castaneda. He blew his guts out.”

“I know.”

A pack of coyotes passed in the night and With the summer coming to an end, the the breeze painted the sky with clouds.

I will buy my ticket in the morning. return flight to college in the Midwest loomed Caleb Cardenas is a junior English writing major from Dulzura, CA. His last meal will be barbeque pork ribs and cactus apples. Caleb.Cardenas@my.wheaton.edu

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Of Sainthood and Scholarship: A Study in Paradox Ben Robertson

St. Francis of Assisi, rejecter of money, possessions, and human knowledge, appears to the contemporary conscience as a haunting, irrepressible memory of a life now impossible. To reject the world as St. Francis did is unthinkable and almost unimaginable, as our fragmented, mediated lives separate us from all sorts of experience that St. Francis enjoyed daily. We vaccinate against solitude with recorded music, television, and books, feeling only loneliness.

Mediation saturates our daily experience in these and countless other ways, a fact of which we are conscious at times, though not at others. St. Francis refused to touch money, disparaged books, walked barefoot, and for all this, the Catholic Church venerates him as a saint. The disparity between our mediated experience and Francis’ simple acceptance of the natural order is unsettling. Why is it that St. Francis’ life is unimaginable in contemporary society?

The reasons are clearly numerous, owing to the near-thousand year gap between Francis and us. A helpful tool for exploring these reasons is provided by 1960’s media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of the medium as the message: “the message of any ‘medium’ or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”1 This will help us see how institutionalized education — founded on the media of the phonetic

alphabet and printing press — propagates and instills in its subjects the ideals of individualism and conformity, producing capitalistically minded individuals with a sense of self dependence on possession (of objects, commodities, ideologies, and the like). In this way, the modern disparity between Francis and us is maintained and strengthened.

“The school system,” McLuhan says, is “the custodian of print culture.”2 Print and alphabet technology are closely linked in their effects and in their contribution to education. Inherent in each of these technologies is individualism, a key part of print culture and the school, resulting as a function of abstraction. Abstraction is at the basis of human language — what writer and semiotician Walker Percy calls triadic behavior — and it distinguishes human interaction from dyadic (stimulus-response) interaction through the use of the signifier.3 With the referent and sign-giver, the signifier makes the triad of human language. The signifier distinguishes human language, and this realization reminds us “a word is not the object it represents.”4 That is, words are merely abstractions of their referent.

This practice of abstract thought in human language has led to many technological advancements.

This increased abstraction of the phonetic alphabet is central to its influence and cultural significance. McLuhan describes its influence as giving to man “an eye for an ear.”5 This is a two-fold process: first a spoken word is semantically dismembered into phonemes or sounds; then those syllables are represented with semantically meaningless signs, the alphabet.6 The translation of experience into uniform letters (as on this page) reveals the power of uniformity and serves as the conceptual source of Western

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the pub power — the first interchangeable part — but turer’s dictation and the student’s attention to it is not until the printing press that the concept writing.

The introduction of mass production of manifests itself in mechanization.7 The uniformity and repeatability made possible by the books radically transformed this method. Overmass production of print technology completed coming the problem of scarcity, students no lonthe translation of oral language into a com- ger needed to produce their own books. Print pletely uniform, visual language.8 The powerful shattered the unity of both reading and writing, effects of this translation are clearly seen in the and consumption and production.12 Further, history of education. while the manuscript was a teaching tool, requirBefore the printing press, education was a ing oral, aural, and tactile skills and participavastly different process than it is today. In fact, tion by the lecturer and student, the book was “even ‘book’ learning a teaching machine, was governed by relicheaply available to McLuhan calls the school ance on the spoken and requiring only system “the homogenizing all word.”9 The scarcity the visual skill of litof books gave edu- hopper into which we toss our eracy.13 This visual cation two goals: to integral tots for processing,” translation of percepeducate students and tion allows for a dereferring to the process to produce books.10 A tached point of view and creates the idea medieval classroom wherein extreme stress is words and books as relied heavily on the placed on the visual sense, of “independent and unprocess of dictation, whereby the teacher giving students an eye for an contaminated by human agency.”14 Undictated the text to ear and creating individuals his students while the der these conditions, who think and act in a students copied down the learning process the words. Through is transformed, as the uniform manner. dictation, the student printed book allows both obtained and learned the text, in addition for the translation of shared discourse into preto gaining practice with his writing and pronun- packaged information, “a portable commodciation.11 In this process, the student was simul- ity.”15 taneously the consumer and producer of the With this new teaching machine in hand, works he studied. Through producing the works the school’s function is redefined. No longer conhe was learning, the student participated in an cerned with producing books or serving as the integrative process of learning that depended custodian of ideas (the printing press allows the on the presence of others and the professors’ cheap dissemination of both); the school, refashwillingness to dictate the text. The manuscript ioned in the image of print, becomes concerned served simply as a tool for education, as the with producing individuals. McLuhan calls the learning process depended largely on the lec- school system “the homogenizing hopper into

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which we toss our integral tots for processing,” referring to the process wherein extreme stress is placed on the visual sense, giving students an eye for an ear and creating individuals who think and act in a uniform manner.16 The printbased schools reinforced reading and learning as “an antisocial act,” separating the reader from a social context.17 Accordingly, the previously integrated process of learning becomes divided into separate acts of consumption and production. Much of the print-student’s time is spent in the act of consumption, either during lectures or in reading alone. His role as a consumer is reinforced, and any production is seen only as a response to consumption. Consuming books, ideas, and ideologies commoditized by the print medium forms the basis of the transformed educational process.

This transformation of the school certainly transformed the role of the student, and these changes are key to the way in which we find ourselves different from St. Francis, as they have shaped our sense of identity. Twentieth century theologian Adolf Holl claims that St. Francis’ earnest searching after God was motivated not by excessive piety, but by something we have in common with him: “the consciousness of individual identity,” the development of which coincided with the introduction of coined money.18 Holl shows the bourgeois ego to be characterized by many of the same traits McLuhan identifies with the alphabet and printing press: selfconsciousness, rational thinking, abstract calculation, and goal-oriented sense of time, though all in relation to the acquisition of money.19 Moreover, similarities are present between McLuhan’s individualism and what early twentieth century Italian economist Amintore Fanfani calls the “capitalist spirit,” characterized by

the rejection of extra-economic limitations as well as an individual (as opposed to a social) and utilitarian conception of wealth.20 The similarity between Fanfani’s capitalist spirit and McLuhan’s individualist spirit exists in their relation to the organizing structures of society. Both existed before they became influential social forces, but were held in check by certain institutions: capitalism by the power of the Church, individualism by the conditions of scribal culture.21,22 Today, these old forms have given way, allowing for the transformative process wherein the capitalist and individualist spirits have become social forces rather than individual passions, the norms rather than the exceptions.23 McLuhan and Fanfani’s histories differ in their specificity; nevertheless, we can see clear overlap between the individualist and capitalist tendencies. The capitalist in a capitalist society is freed from social pressures and limitations on the means of obtaining and creating wealth, and the individual is free “to dissociate himself from clan and family.”24 Both shifts are characterized by a new, radical sense of individuality and freedom from previously suffocating social forces. The ideas of capitalism and individualism seem to overlap even in relation to the effects of the printing press, its product being the printed book: “the first uniform and repeatable commodity.”25 Further, print split apart the roles of writing and reading and production and consumption, leading to Europe’s first consumer phase.26 The introduction of print had a large influence in creating certain conditions conducive to both a capitalist and consumer society.

Today, the individualist and capitalist tendencies instilled by the school combine with the newer electric technology to extend certain qualities inherent in the print technology, name-

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ly, the split between producer and consumer. even imaginatively. The reality is that brands With the introduction of electric technology, we create and shape the individual’s idea of what can observe the resurgence of the patterns of creativity and expression really is, and people high participation and low organization McLu- learn to define themselves in terms of what they han identifies in pre-print cultures.27 Identity, consume. They do not create identity, but conin the age of print, centered on the mass me- sume it. Moreover, this process is not limited dium of the vernacular language, which pro- to consumer goods. Anything, as long as it can be possessed in some duced nationalism. In way, grants identity: the electronic age, the Students and teachers products, political cannew mass media has a decentralizing effect in alike often adopt a tribe- didates, bands, movies, and even ideas. eliminating space and like allegiance to their Educational intime while increasing involvement.28 The specific areas of study and stitutions reinforce this transformation of the certain theories, books, sense of identity based on possession, especially structures of human association requires a and authors. This tendency in the realm of ideas. new source of identity, is strengthened not only Students and teachers alike often adopt one, which is by naby the cultural norms that a tribe-like allegiance ture, less organized and seem to dictate such to their specific areas more involving. of study and certain In the twentieth identity formation, but also theories, books, and aucentury the individual by the individualist and thors. This tendency is is completely responstrengthened not only sible for his own “selfconsumerist narratives 29 by the cultural norms construction.”

A clear example is in the embraced by the school. that seem to dictate such identity formation, well-known phenomenon of consumerism, wherein we grant items but also by the individualist and consumerist of daily purchase value by nature of their sym- narratives embraced by the school. Additionbolic, rather than utilitarian purpose. The Nike ally, the school system transformed by print proSwoosh, the Coca-Cola script, and the Obama motes the ideals of individualism and consum“O” all have descriptive value in telling others erism, which are reinforced by certain cultural about self. The consumerist-individual learns trends and the modern sense of identity. The to find meaning in the possession of consumer current educational system teaches students to goods, which become “the very building blocks treat ideas as objects that are either rejected or of our self-understanding as human beings.”30 possessed, a tendency arising from print techThrough this process, we are fooled into think- nology. Thus, in the twenty-some year process ing that we are expressing ourselves, perhaps of schooling, individuals learn to succeed and

define themselves by the possession or rejection exceptions prove the rule, awakening us to the nature of institutionalized education. of certain ideas.

We must not give up hope, but Ellul is In objection, one may say that these ‘skills’ are necessary for success in a modern, techno- particularly incisive when he says “nothing ever logical society. This critique is fair, and but also constrains us to face what is dying when we see evidences the degradation of the dialogic char- it so alive in our images.”34 The word dies in acteristic of “the word” that troubles French so- our classrooms every day when thoughts and ciologist and theologian Jacques Ellul in modern ideas are held out at arm’s length to see if they technological societies.31 Ellul defines “the word” are worth “buying into.” The word dies when as something that is inherently dialogic, and in a course consists merely of lectures and readhis dualism between technology and truth, sees ings to which the students may respond only its humiliation as the result of the dominance on the margins or through their own printed of technology and efficiency over truth. As the word. The word is not resurrected by writing a custodian of print culture, the school functions book (or even a paper) revealing its humiliation.

Something must be lived as the institutionalized huThe word dies in our differently and lived deeply. miliation of the word. InPerhaps St. Francis stitutionalized education classrooms every understood this very fact, based on print is the most day when thoughts and sought to live differserious form of humiliation because it pretends that it and ideas are held ently and deeply a life characterized by freedom and functions otherwise. While supposing that it concerns out at arm’s length to joy in his Creator. Perhaps, itself with the word, the see if they are worth in his rejection of books, St. Francis understood more school often ignores the “buying into.” than he is given credit. But qualities Ellul associates 32 with the word. Yet, none of these concepts why is it that St. Francis’ life is unimaginable in characterizes the educational process. If edu- contemporary society?

It seems possible, if we take seriously Holl’s cation were truly to be word-based, it would transform the learner, as the word would not notion that we share with Francis the bourgeois be something merely viewed as an object, but ego — the consciousness of individual identity something that “deserves to be remembered,” — that Francis understood the danger in such something that has been “lived deeply.”33 The identity.35 Motivated by his bourgeois loneliword, in becoming an object that is to be pos- ness, St. Francis saw possessions (shoes, money, sessed and mastered, loses its most significant books, etc.) as obstacles to seeking God and requalities. Currently, teaching is a task that is jected them. In the 800 years since St. Francis, done to students, not a relational process where we have accumulated more possessions than he all parties can exercise freedom or experience would have dreamed one person could own and something that deserves to be remembered. have come to define ourselves by these possesThat is not to say that this never occurs; yet the sions. Sadly, they can separate us not only from

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the pub God, as St. Francis was aware, but from each other as well. Paradoxically, true solitude disappears from our lives, and we lose the ability to be alone.36 In reality, we are often alone, though we mitigate this situation with our possessions and with recorded music, television, and other forms of media. We trade solitude and communion for loneliness and mediated, trite interaction in an attempt to overcome our own bourgeois loneliness.

Were he here, St. Francis would show us the humor in our situation. The form of the linear argument in a paper printed with repeatable, uniform text epitomizes the product of print education. The tendencies toward individualism, capitalism and consumerism may be inherent in the print-based educational process, St. Francis’ life inspires us to overcome these influences. The words he wrote 800 years ago ring true even today:

[essay] They are killed by the letter who seek only to know the words that they may be esteemed more learned among others and that they may acquire great riches to leave to their relations and friends. And those religious are killed by the letter who will not follow the spirit of the Holy Scriptures, but who seek rather to know the words only and to interpret them to others.37

St. Francis knew that his brothers could easily teach the Word while ignoring its spirit, and we are no different. The disparity between our mediated experience and St. Francis’ simple unity of word and life should prompt us to embrace the transformative power of the word in our education. We can answer St. Francis’ challenge by honestly seeking the unity of sainthood and scholarship.

Endnotes 1 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1994, p. 20.

2 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962, p. 215.

3 Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, New York: The Noonday Press, 1983, p. 95.

4 Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, Englewood: The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company, 1973, p. 58.

5 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 27.

6 Ibid. p. 104.

7 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 201.

8 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 54.

9 Ibid. p. 11.

10 Hajnal, quoted in Gutenberg, p. 95.

11 Ibid. p. 97.

12 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953, p. 328.

13 McLuhan, Gutenberg, p. 145.

14 Ibid. p. 144.

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Ibid. p. 164.

Ibid. p. 215.

Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood, New York: Vintage Books, 1994, p. 27.

Adolf Holl, The Last Christian, New York: Doubleday, 1980, p. 5, 21.

Ibid. p. 20.

Amintore Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, Norfolk, VA: IHS Press, 2003, p. 59-60.

Ibid. p. 65-66.

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 232.

Fanfani, Catholicism, p. 55.

McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 124.

McLuhan, Gutenberg, p. 125.

Ibid. p. 138.

McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 136.

Ibid. p. 21.

Tyler Wigg Stevenson, Brand Jesus, New York: Seabury Books, 2007, p. 14.

Ibid. p. 15.

Jacques Ellul, Humiliation of the Word, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1985.

Ibid. p. 15, 24.

Ibid. p. 123.

Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word, p. 208.

Holl, The Last Christian, p. 5.

William Deresiewicz, “The End of Solitude,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2009, 1 May 2009 <http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i21/21b00601.htm>.

The Writings of St. Francis of Assisi, tr. by Paschal Robinson, Philadelphia, The Dolphin Press, 1905, p. 11.

Ben Robertson is a senior media studies major from Bethel, CT. Back in his childhood modeling days, Ben aspired to be a sumo wrestler. Ben.Robertson@my.wheaton.edu

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[review]

the pub

Age of Adz, or, How the Authors Found Themselves Dancing and Rediscovered Their Love for Electro-pop, or, How the Authors Couldn’t Help Using the Word Oeuvre and Betraying Their Desire for an Album about North Dakota, or, How the Authors Learned to Stop Worrying About Artistic Disintegration and Just Enjoyed the Album Elise Bremer and Nick Tomlin

Sufjan Stevens is a difficult man to stalk.

But the authors have certainly given it a try these past several years by attending live performances, staking out music blogs, and sonically cohabitating with his oeuvre. He has, they admit, had quite an effect on their lives. So, when the authors first heard that Stevens was working on the long-awaited follow-up to Illinoise, they were not only excited, but wanted it to be a

smashing success. When they heard that it was an electronic album, they found their feelings of affection somewhat tested. Three things in particular caused them some anxiety: 1. Their paradigm for Stevens’ electronic work was Enjoy Your Rabbit — an album which, despite the title’s imperative, few could say they really enjoyed.

2. At a show Stevens gave last fall in Madison, he previewed much of the material he was developing for Adz. The songs he played were grating, unfocused, and tediously long.

3. In an interview with Paste Magazine last November, Mr. Stevens commented that “I no longer really have faith in the album anymore. I no longer have faith in the song.” This comment from Stevens was like Freud avoiding the whole sex issue because it was taking things too far.

It was with some trepidation that the authors first listened to Age of Adz. Despite the authors’ fears of dissonance or a career killing flop, Age of Adz seems strikingly familiar to those who know Stevens’ previous work. Adz's clipped, loop-like use of wind instruments, airy lyrics, and its high-concept focus are all major components of prior albums.

On first listen, Adz is certainly a departure from Stevens’ softer folksy sound, but underneath, it layers orchestration around a central lyrical thread (typically carried by Stevens’ voice) in the same way that allowed past projects like Come on Feel the Illinoise and Michigan to seem at once epic and intimate. The title track, which begins with dissonant fanfare, resolves into an acoustic ballad. Underneath the bleeps, bloops, and spastic drum fills, Age of Adz is immanently a Sufjan Stevens album — albeit one that finds him choosing a Casio over his beloved banjo.

Adz is certainly a concept album — it is

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deeply marked by the apocalyptic visions in the two and a half minutes of mournful brass and work of outsider artist Royal Robertson (for electro ‘bloops;’ Adz has stronger tracks, but more details see the article at http://sufjanste- none that manage to be so open, entertaining, vens.bandcamp.com/). But unlike its predeces- and succinct.

Not all is well, however. There are missors Adz eschews mammoth titles and historical steps: the airy, disappointing “Now That I’m conceits to dive straight into the personal sphere of its author. Love and loss have always featured Older” and the last 40 seconds of “All for Myprominently in Stevens’ work, but they have al- self ” bore with their sedate tour of Stevens’ inways been on the periphery of his focus on sto- nerscape; the rest of the album could easily have rytelling. The opening track, “Futile Devices,” fallen prey to the same myopia, if it were not initiates this new approach with an account of so well put together. Sections where Adz drags the troubled lover. The instrumental minimal- prompt the authors to wonder what would have ism reminds listeners of classic Stevens (think happened if Stevens had not marshaled his faith Seven Swans), but the lyrics are uncharacteristical- in the album; perhaps Adz would have been a rawer gem that harnessed ly artless, a fact which the the force of Stevens’ emsong’s final line attempts The instrumental phatic profanity in “I to excuse — “Words are minimalism reminds Want to Be Well” (yes futile devices.” With this kids, Sufjan set us up the pronouncement (a purlisteners of classic F-Bomb). pose statement, of sorts), Stevens (think Seven Thankfully, Adz does Stevens bids goodbye to not leave much room for 53-word song titles and Swans), but the lyrics these musings about what mellow picking-patterns, as 24 seconds of elec- are uncharacteristically could have been. More than the sum of its parts, tronic noise usher in the artless, a fact which Adz feels both wild and Age of Adz. the song’s fi nal line well-timed, which is surAnd there is plenty attempts to excuse prising for an album that to enjoy about this new includes a twenty-five epoch. Choosing album — “Words are futile minute track and aver“highlights” proved a difdevices.” ages six minutes per song. ficult task for the authors.

Stevens’ commitment to Tracks like “Too Much” and “Get Real or Get Right,” shock with their transparency is what makes Adz a step forward almost danceable beats. And for those who for him. The concluding track, “Impossible prefer Stevens’ more contemplative side, “Ve- Soul,” tells a familiar story — the turmoil of a suvius” proves to be a thrilling combination of relationship leaves a lover feeling guilty and inStevens’ transparent writing and mesmerizing secure. If Stevens had left it at that, he would arrangement. “Bad Communication” packages be in good company, but the song takes an opan earnest complaint about relational drama in timistic turn around the half-way mark, and a

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chorus declares “It’s a good life” and “It’s not so impossible!”

All in all, this epic conclusion showcases all that makes Adz just different enough to keep fans interested: electronic loops, lyrical simplicity, an intense internal focus. It manages to sidestep the irrational fears and perhaps even more irrational hopes that surrounded its release and deliver the lyrical honesty that so endeared Ste-

vens to listeners when he started making albums.

Stevens allows his listeners into his “impossible soul” and confesses “I’m nothing but a selfish man.” But rather than wallow in self-deprecation, he resolves things with maturity: “I’m nothing but a privileged brother.” And that admission alone makes Age of Adz worth the listen, because, after all, in our best behavior, we are really just like him.

Bali Meredith Moench Entering a new place is like folding myself gingerly into an envelope. The contents of my days are letters slid inside the white corners, to be read tomorrow. The flap folds over, seals, and not even the air of another place seeps in.

The air here is a continual drag of incense in a hot calm. The smell has been smoothed into the inside skin of the Balinese’s nostrils. It is the scent of offerings on uneven sidewalks — green leaves, pink flowers, orange and golden fruit, and a brown stick of incense — it permeates the sugary twang of the tea and the rice alike. I tread carefully around the folded leaves on the way to the park, until the whisping trail of smoke has died. Then the colours are scattered under heels and flattened into the grey of the street.

This green is one I haven’t met before. It is a dry green in the middle of the day, browning and crinkling at the edges like the hem of sun-dried clothes, cracking like fissures in the pavement.

The green clumps together in palm branches as large as my body, branches that could cover me tightly like a caterpillar in a cocoon.

At night, lying in hammocks made of parachute silk — we listen to the swish and creak of the ropes as bodies rotate on the porch. In the morning when I look toward the gate, a seventy, going on eighty, year-old man, molds his feet flat to the rivets at the top of the coconut tree. His wrinkled head buries beneath the elephant ear branches of the palm tree; his hands are left free to twist the orange coconuts into his newspaper bag.

Life moves in the way the road snakes from Singaraja up the mountain to the mother temple.

Motorbikes curve down the road in a line, like the ants across our kitchen wall. The air gathers in clouds that touch the mountaintops: a sagging canopy over a bed.

Elise Bremer ’09 was an English literature major from Lisbon, Portugal. She can handle anything as long as she’s wearing her intrepid all-weather slippers. Elise.Bremer@my.wheaton.edu

Life here is Riri leaving an offering on the seat of her motorbike as she enters our house — a mother bird carefully building her nest. In the same day, it is Kembar being laid down in the ocean’s waves; she is raised up with a splash and claps. I hold the dry towel on the shore — believing that all of life is as simple as wrapping a towel around the wet, laughing shoulders of a newborn believer. As if when we walk back from the beach, we won’t step across the dried pink petals of yesterday’s offering.

Nick Tomlin ’10 was an English writing major from Geneva, IL. He is proving that you can truly do anything with an English major. Nick.Tomlin@my.wheaton.edu

Meredith Moench is a junior English writing major from Kandern, Germany. She plans on moving to a chalet in the Swiss Alps as soon as she masters a Swiss-German accent. Meredith.Moench@my.wheaton.edu

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[interview]

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The Thing Itself: A Dialogue with Dr. Eric McLuhan

Briefly, explain your definition of technology and of media as culture has evolved from oral to print to electronic to our current state, that of convergence.

Caroline Graves

Eric McLuhan: I quote almost verbatim from Understanding Media: A medium is an environment of services and disservices and side effects that any new gadget or technology brings with it. And that includes all psychic changes and all social changes and all cultural modifications and so on, that you make in order to accommodate this new thing in your lives. One good way to study media is to look for breakdowns. If you have a big transportation strike in Chicago, and all the bus drivers and streetcar drivers go on strike, you can study that medium. Every technology, every new little gadget or invention has a whole pile of these little changes that you don’t notice when they are going on. But if you add them up, then you wind realizing that the computer doesn’t just add itself to what was there. It brings with it a new culture, a new way of life.

And so does the radio, so does television, so do clocks, and so does the internet, and so on and so on. That’s media studies.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Dr.

Eric McLuhan is a Canadian media scholar and professor of English and communications who is renowned for enlarging theories of media ecology in conjunction with his father, Herbert Marshall McLuhan. Raised by English literature enthusiasts, he swore off a career in academia before spending over 30 years as an author and lecturer. While hired to survey summer falls at his first job, he felt lured by the word to reconsider his vow where he spent much of his time reading poetry beneath a tent. His interdisciplinary interests are reflected in his lectures, which map new ground in media studies through inclusion of subjects such as space, myth, sensory effects, technique, and semiotics.

Caroline Graves: Dr. McLuhan, the scores books you have authored, including five in conjunction with your father, thoroughly analyze media structures, their implications and affects in culture through the study of the environment, metaphysics, and the senses, which have altered the fields of communication, English and media studies immeasurably.

CG: In your opinion, where has media ecology evolved in universities as a study and where do you think it will be going in the future?

EM: Well, it’s hardly begun. There are maybe half a dozen places that talk about it. One or two of them are actually giving courses and starting to think ecologically about media. The ecological idea was to begin to take responsibility for what you were doing to your environment.

Ecos means household; media ecology is house-

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keeping: the idea of keeping your house tidy and ordered. Logos, or the study of, ecology, or housekeeping. Media ecology means doing that.

These are the very early days in this particular field. It’s not even a field yet. So, where is it going to go? It’s got everywhere to go. It’s just getting started. I think it’s a wonderful place to go work because you’ve got lots of horizons.

Nothing is nailed down. Nobody can tell you “No, that’s not media ecology.” I wouldn’t let it get too politicized which is almost impossible to avoid.

CG: As an authority in academia, do you consider it your responsibility to speak as an advocate? In other words, Dr. McLuhan, due to the coercive and seductive powers of technology, have you identified injustices that are invisible to Christians in today’s media eco-system?

EM: I hardly know where to begin. The effects of new media are not particularly congenial to Christianity. They undermine our whole sense of private or individual identity and private responsibility. Yet, Christianity is built on, among other things, the idea of individual salvation and individual responsibility and individual sin and redemption. There is real conflict. I’m not talking about the messages or the content of the media, but the way they restructure our sense of ourselves in their nature. The idea of a private self or private ego came with the alphabet, and that was no accident. The alphabet entered the scene about 500 years before Christ entered the scene, and that paved the way. I really don’t think that it was a coincidence. But, now, we have a new kind of challenge. If we are serious about individualism and private responsibility, then

we’re holding out against the flow and dynamics of the new culture. We are now counter-culture, in a way that’s much more than we’ve ever been.

Christianity has always been something against the flow or the trend; it’s uncomfortable. But now we’re really embattled because everything is pushing against us. I have to ask the question: Are we committed to alphabetic literacy?

CG: Because of the internet, pornography is viral. What now? Can our culture become any more pornographic? Can we withstand the cultural ravage?

EM: Every time somebody says we can’t go any further, something new comes along. Pornography is very seductive, and it’s also very destructive. You gather only so much before you go numb. But a large part of you dies. Not just in this one area. It takes a whole lot of your being with it. It is a poison, of course, and everybody realizes that. Here’s a good place for ecology to come in: Manage the poison. Counteract it.

CG: Counteract it with what?

EM: I’m thinking, now, in terms of ecology. If there’s poison in your water or in your air, what do you do? If there’s poison in your intellectual or moral environment, you need to take action, and, in a similar way, to counteract it. Just saying, “No — no, don’t do this,” isn’t enough.

CG: Considering you and your father’s reflections on religion, The Medium and the Light, why does this dialogue matter for thoughtful Christians — philosophically, morally, spiritually?

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EM: I’ve been talking about this in relation to individualism and a sense of private identity, which is an ecological matter entirely. It isn’t the idea of having a private identity. Or, simply having one. It doesn’t come from what you write about it. It comes from using the alphabet, using your mind and your faculties in that way.

Maybe a bad analogy would be a fish swimming around in the water that suddenly spies a worm hanging in the mid-ocean. He swims over and snaps up the worm. He doesn’t realize there is a hook involved. The hook is invisible. This is like the media, and the content are the worms.

Next, the fish hold a conference on good worms and bad worms. They are ignoring the fact that the hook is what killed them. We tend to ignore the ecological truth about the mediums themselves as having very deep and lasting effects on each of us and on us as a group, as a culture, as a society.

T.S. Eliot wrote a book years ago called The Idea of a Christian Society, one of the reviewers wrote in response: “It would be a good idea.”

It hadn’t been tried. Do we live in a Christian society?

CG: No. EM: Right. No, it’s not CG: When the incarnation of Jesus Christ, Son of God, and the incarnate man are studied under the premise that the ‘medium is the message’, how do you believe this unconventional perspective should transform the perspective and depth to which Christians approach God and humanity?

EM: That is the incarnation has been looked at, studied and thought about immensely. But the fact that we have pulled the rug out on our own incarnate existence hasn’t received any attention. Last year, I came across a series of lectures given by Pope John Paul II, collected under the title “The Theology of the Body,” and I started to read it and I found it absolutely compelling.

Nobody had ever said these things about the importance of the body to our existence and to our eternal identity. St. Thomas pointed out that the principle of individualization is the intersection of matter, the body, and spirit, the soul. If you take one of them away, you don’t have private identity. You cannot. There is nothing on which to base it. One of the messages of Christianity is private salvation and private responsibility. This is fundamental. It’s quite different from the approach of the Jews, which is that the Jews are a chosen people. Their redemption is, as a people, not as individuals. Their whole ethos is totally different. Their whole approach and thinking of the matter is different.

We begin there with the Old Testament as part of our own teaching, but the New Testament brings this new angle, this new dimension, to matters of individualism. I think because of the effect of electricity, we need to start paying very close attention to this and to start thinking about the theology of the discarnate. When you go on the phone, you leave your body behind. I pick up the phone there and call my wife. I’m there. And she’s here. We can have a conversation. The fact that I had, or have a body, is no longer the constraint: I am having an outof-body experience. But that changes all of the ground rules. I think that the Father of Lies is quite happy to take advantage of that. The fact that we’re confused and disoriented gives him

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a big opening. We need to pay attention to this and start thinking about it: What is the theology of the body-less. We aren’t angels. Angels are created spirits without bodies, but each angel has an individual soul. We don’t understand that very well. It’s a very big and very important and very necessary subject for study and understanding.

CG: How has your father’s PhD thesis entitled “The Classic Trivium” in its discussion of empirical New Science and philosophical Old Science shaded your approach to cultural analysis? And how is Formal Cause interrelated to this concept, especially in the framing of the four laws outlined in Laws of Media?

EM: Do we have a couple days? Let me just deal with the matter of the trivium and the classical trivium, the, where to start. [chuckles] The trivium is constituted of three roads towards wisdom or understanding called trivia, trivium. Trivial therefore means something very profound as well as something very superficial.

When the trivium was constituted, it was the Ancients’ theory of communication. There is the written word, and the spoken word, and, also, the word in the mind. This abstract word in the mind was a new experience when writing came along. Before that, there was the spoken word; there wasn’t writing.

The word in the mind gave rise to a whole constellation of disciplines that we group under the term Dialectic. Today it includes epistemology, philosophy, logic, and so on. In the ancient world, it was just logic and philosophy — abstract thinking, the science of thinking right, not the right things, but thinking in a proper and

correct manner. Rigorous thinking was dialectic.

Rhetoric was the science of transforming audiences through the spoken word. There’s an awful lot of that in both the Old and the New Testament. The third one, Grammar, takes its name from the Greek word gramma, which means letters, and the Latin word is littera. Grammar is literature. And gramma, grammar, or literature, had two main activities: one is etymology — the roots of words. Words always have their roots in experience, and if you dig down through a real word, you’ll end up with human experience and knowledge and understanding with the meanings sitting on the top. Where the word comes from is another word in another language that means something else, and somehow there’s a relation between the experience in that language and the experience in our language. After etymology, the other handle in grammar is interpretation of text.

You’ve heard about the scribes and the Pharisees: the scribes were largely literary men.

They knew how to read, when most people didn’t.

They were media experts. They knew how to interpret because words were very slippery things and words will often mean many things. They had to know not only how to interpret words but how to take that phrase in the context of other phrases, all the uses, as we do with the Bible, and find a way that’s harmonious. In the Bible, one text won’t contradict another, but if they don’t agree, they may simply be different ways of looking at something, a third thing. Interpretation is really a kind of deep study. Grammar called for extensive knowledge — to be the master of languages. He didn’t just specialize in poetry or literature or in philosophy. He had to be able to read and interpret every text ever written by anybody anywhere. That calls for a

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lot of judgment, knowledge, experience, and not only that, in the Christian tradition, there are two kinds of text.

Both of them have as their author God. One is the written text, the Bible — Old and New Testament, and the other is God’s magnificent speech, which we call The Creation — “and God said.” The saying and creating of it were one, one act. He opened His mouth and uttered Light. Which isn’t exactly the word “light” or the label that we put on this thing; it was the thing itself. The grammarian’s other job is to read what they call the Book of Nature and to take the two texts, the Written Book and the Book of Nature, and reconcile them. Because one would not contradict the other, right here, you can see glimmerings. Maybe there’s a way of reconciling Science and Creationism. Of course, there is! Because science deals with the Book of Nature.

The study of the trivium gives you a handle on some of what we are up to, some of what our responsibilities are in reading and understanding what God has revealed to us. Rhetoric is use-

ful because rhetoric is the science of speech and using rhetoric you can take a speech and work your way back from the speech to the speaker.

So, you can look at either the Book of Nature or the Written Book and using rhetorical techniques, you can discover things about the writer, the speaker, the author.

Rhetoric and grammar were natural cohorts, a kind of Siamese twins. Dialectic was always odd man out, and there’s been a rivalry in that little family of three over the centuries.

Sometimes one is in charge and sometimes another. In our age, the balance is changing, again, and rhetoric and grammar are coming back to the fore. Dialectic, which has been on top since the Middle Ages, is subsiding a bit. So, I think a knowledge of the trivium helps us understand that a lot of what we see on the surface is chaos in intellectual affairs, but also in spiritual affairs.

It’s a useful set of tools.

For further reading, consider borrowing a copy of The Laws of Media: The New Science by Marshall and Eric McLuhan (University of Toronto Press, 1988) from your local library.

[recommendation] [album]

Meredith – Sea Sew by Lisa Hannigan – Nice, Nice, Very Nice by Dan Mangan Tim M. – London Calling by The Clash Will – Hadestown by Anaïs Mitchell Caroline – Brother, Sister by mewithoutYou

[poem] Will – Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins ed. W.H. Gardner – Burning Wyclif by Thom Satterlee Brian – Sinners Welcome by Mary Karr

[novel] Ten – Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel Ian – Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee Joel – Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace Brian – Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe – Chameleon Days by Tim Bascom

[other] Tim L. – City Life from Jakarta to Dakar by Abdoumaliq Simone [non–fiction] Ian – The Economist [magazine] Jessie – Son of Hammas by Mosab Hassan Yousef [memoir]

Caroline Graves is a junior rhetoric major from Kent Islands, MD. She favors a good pickle. Caroline.Graves@ my.wheaton.edu

Cover Photo: Black River Water by Laurel Johnson Recommendations Background Photo: The Path to Gore Creek by Laurel Johnson Laurel Johnson is a sophmore international relations major from Medina, MN. She wants a pair of Mukluks for Christmas. Laurel.Johnson@my.wheaton.edu

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