Fallen Into Knowledge

I’m testing a new blogging editor and also thinking about reviving this poor, neglected blog.  It has been nearly a year since this site has been updated, and I have to admit that it has been good:  blogging, like journaling (another writing habit that I do not practice) had become burdensome – mostly I felt guilty for not updating enough.  I may continue to not update enough, but I am feeling again like I want to nurture the practice of writing, and this provides a ready made outlet.  So, here goes!

I’ve been tagged in a meme by David, who seems to think that I have refined tastes in music.  Unfortunately I don’t, but the poor hapless soul that happens across this page will be subjected to my music preferences nonetheless.  At least the albums don’t automatically start playing!

Here’s the deal:  I am to rattle off my favorite album from each year starting the year I was born.  Since I had no preferences for music (other than the music my mother made on the piano as I was falling asleep, of course) before my teenage years, these are the albums I like now:

1978: Blondie: Parallel Lines

1979: Pink Floyd: The Wall

1980: B-52’s: Wild Planet

1981: U2: October

1982: The Clash: Combat Rock

1983: Violent Femmes: Violent Femmes

1984: The Doors: Best of the Doors

1985: Tears For Fears: Songs from the Big Chair

1986: Beastie Boys: License to Ill

1987: REM: Document 

1988: Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man

1989: Bad Religion: No Control

1990: Dire Straits: Money For Nothing

1991: U2: Achtung Baby -  this was my first and remains my favorite U2 album

1992: Emmylou Harris: At the Ryman

1993: Soundtrack to Schindler’s List

1994: Tom Petty: Wildflowers

1995: Smashing Pumpkins: Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

1996: Cake: Fashion Nugget

1997: Pink Martini: Sympanthique

1998: Gillian Welch: Hell Among the Yearlings

1999: Moby: Play

2000: Aimee Mann: Bachelor No. 2

2001: Five o’Clock People: In the Bleak Midwinter

2002: The Velvet Teen: Out of the Fierce Parade

2003: The Black Keys: Thickfeakness

2004: Jolie Holland: Escondida

2005: The Decemberists: Picaresque

2006: Cat Power: The Greatest (although Tom Waits’ “Orphans” takes a close second)

2007: Iron & Wine: The Shepherd’s Dog

2008: Black Keys: Attack and Release: (which is a great album, even if its not the best Black Keys Album)

Partly because I’ve been tagged by David, and partly because I haven’t updated this site for too bloody long!

1. One movie that made you laugh:
Thank You For Smoking

2. One movie that made you cry:
Dancer in the Dark

3. One movie you loved when you were a child:
The Swiss Family Robinson - seriously, what’s cooler than living in a treehouse?

4. One movie you’ve seen more than once:
Serenity

5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it:
Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior

6. One movie you hated:
300

7. One movie that scared you:
Blue Velvet - and just about anything by David Lynch

8. One movie that bored you:
Being John Malkovich

9. One movie that made you happy:
Kung Fu Hustle

10. One movie that made you miserable:
Crash - David Cronenberg’s verson.

11. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see:
Donnie Darko

12. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with:
Ana Pascal, Maggie Gyllenhaal in Stranger than Fiction

13. The last movie you saw:
The Counterfeiters (highly recommended)

14. The next movie you hope to see:
Up the Yangtze, or maybe Noise

David, who I tagged (once upon a time, in a land far far away), has tagged me back. Apparently he thinks that after two years my list might have changed. Quite so.

Actually, over the last couple of years I have spent less time in theology and more time studying literature and philosophy: though, it must be said, I am ready to return to theology. However, my revised list may not be the “most influential books ever,” but these are some books (and thinkers) that I am mulling over right now.

1. John Milton: “Paradise Lost.”

When I first read this (over two years ago) I did not like it. But Milton is dealing with some serious theological ideas. Specifically, I have thinking about the role of language after the Fall and how that Fallen language changes the ways we relate to each other.

2. Louis Althusser: “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”

Perhaps Althusser stands in here for a whole school of thought that I have been thinking about: The Frankfurt School. This text is particularly pessimistic about “culture,” but Althusser most clearly describes the process in which we are shaped by “culture:” we are “always already interpolated as subjects.” That is, and to borrow from Heidegger, we find ourselves thrown into a culture, and find ourselves as having been shaped by it.

3. Dick Hebdige: “Subculture: The Meaning of Style”

Along similar lines as above, I have been thinking about how sub- and counter-cultures interact with the “mainstream” culture. The reason should be clear: on the whole, the church functions like a sub-/counter-culture in the societies in which it find itself. Hebdige thinks about how artifacts of a culture are re-invested with meaning by a counter culture, thus allowing a counterculture to distance itself from the “mainstream.” It seems to me that Christianity in America has been largely been overwhelmed by the values of the “mainstream,” and if we are to distance ourselves we have to act thoughtfully in order to make that distancing representative of our beliefs to those from which we are distancing ourselves.

4. Giorgio Agamben: “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life”

So, part of being “Post-whatever” is distancing ourselves from the Enlightenment. One of the most enduring legacies of the Enlightenment is Humanism: the belief that humans have intrinsic values, are fundamentally equal, and have “inalienable rights.” Much good has come from this belief, to be sure. But, strictly speaking, its not quite biblical. Agamben is wrestling with just how we are to think about humans as we leave Humanism behind. And we are, like it or not. Much of Christian theology, also, in the last couple of centuries have assumed Humanism: they did not need to defent their humanism, nor, probably, even thought much about it. But now, a Christian Anthropology needs to cease riding on the coattails of the enlightenment.

5. Wendell Berry: “Home Economics”

This book pretty much stands in for all of Wendell Berry’s work. As you may know, I have been concerned about “ecology:” How we live on God’s earth. My concern, partly thanks to Wendell Berry, has been widened beyond simply “conservation;” it has been widened toward sustainable communities.

What I am reading now:

I am reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” somewhat half-heartedly, and also De Lubac’s “Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture.”

I have been tagged by what seems to be the weblog version of a chain letter, except no one has promised me untold riches if I play along.  Tre tagged me and the price of release is to answer a couple of (not so simple) questions and tag some people myself:

How many books do you own?
hehe.  I think I’ll pass on counting, thank you - I am certain the number is well over a thousand:

I have more than that, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, on the floor…you get the idea.

Last book I read:
Well, beside the bible, the last book was the recent Harry Potter book.  Right now I am working on Walter Bruggemann’s book, The Creative Word:  Canon as a Model for Biblical Education.  I am really excited about this one, I already know that I recommend it.

Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me:

Oh boy, I refer you, dear reader to the above picture:  only five?!  Besides the Bible:

Stanley Grenz:  The Social God and the Relational Self:  A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei.
I read this book a week after it was published, I grieve Dr. Grenz’s recent passing partly because the series of which this book was to be the first volume will not be completed.  I read this book as I was myself starting to think about how theology might be done after modernism (and after its characteristic mode of hermeneutics) and after rejecting the notion that humans can be autonomous agents.  Grenz came along at just the right time exploring what Human identity might look like in light of a robust Trinitarian theology and as shaped by a community.  Good material to think on.

John Howard Yoder:  The Politics of Jesus and Walter Bruggemann:  The Land:  Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith.
I’m cheating, I know; but these two books belong together in my mind.  Not because I read them at the same time, but because they represent a major shift in the way I read the Bible; Bruggemann in the Old Testament and Yoder in the New.  I just taught a class wherein I explained the rough outlines of this shift and it took 5 weeks, so I will not even attempt it here:  suffice it to say that the Promised Land is perhaps the most important Theological Symbol in the whole Bible, and we cannot understand what Jesus was up to sufficiently until we understand Him as speaking from within a collection of questions regarding Second Temple Judaism’s relationship to the Promised Land

Neil Postman:  Conscientious Objections; Stirring up Trouble About Language, Technology, and Education
I have read this book dozens of times; and I regularly assign portions of it to my students to read. Postman alerted me to several ideas, all of which are critically important:
Language - it is the means by which we render the world sensible.  Everything we know is the result of a question (consciously or unconsciously asked), every one of those questions was made possible by our capacity as language users.  It is therefore very important to study how language works, how we mean things, how we use it to make sense of the world, and the assumptions about the world embedded in the language we use.
Education:  Is primarily concerned with learning languages; that is, ways of talking about the world - modes of discourse.  For example, a scientific truth is not the same thing as a literary truth - learning the difference (and in which situations each is appropriate) is very important.
The Medium is the Message:  being one of Marshall McLuhan’s star pupils (along with Walter Ong), Postman understood that the technology we use to say something (be it oral speech or television) determines what we can and cannot say about that thing.  Technologies are not neutral:  they always give and take away.

Jorge Luis Borges:  Labyrinths; Selected Stories and Other Writings.
Along with Umberto Eco and George Steiner, Borges is, for me the ideal scholar.  His knowledge was vast - when reading his stories one gets the unshakeable feeling that he might know everything.  His knowledge was general - that is rather than following the herd and specialising in one thing (thus making knowledge a career) all three of these people sought to understand the world in which they lived.  And finally, knowledge and the world were for Borges a playground, infinitely interesting; this interestedness made their vast knowledge welcoming, as if they were saying “come along and let me show you around.”  This attitude is sharply contrasted by another man who may have known everything, but who used that knowledge to lord it over his readers: James Joyce.   Borges stories are endlessly fascinating and thought provoking.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:  I Have a Dream; Writings and Speeches that Changed the World.
One of my two Heroes (the other is Bonhoeffer).  Dr. King’s revolutionary actions were a direct result of his faith.  his writings clearly show that he saw his actions as being the logical result of the Gospel.  Bonhoeffer was exactly the same way, and as a consequence of their Faithful and Radical lives, when they speak they truly speak with Moral Authority.  If Protestants had Saints (like Catholic ones, people who the church recognizes as living exemplary Christian Lives) these two should be included in their number.

Whew.  Now I get to Tag Five People:

Joyce:  Because I know she thinks and reads, and I got to her first.

Ian Durias:  Because I have no idea what would be on his list and would like to know.

Brad Jenkins:  You are always asking for book suggestions, now it’s your turn:  What are you reading, brother?

Grant Watson:  Who is very bright, and who reads a lot.  As far as I know he does not have a weblog of his own (though he is more than capable of making this site look like a virtual Yugo) so he can post in the comment section.

David Horstkoetter:  Who can also post in the comment section, and who I would also like to know about

Also, please feel free to place unsolicited responses in the comments:  I am always on the lookout for good books

It is always interesting to see yourself though another’s eyes. New York Press has an article about Portland bicycle culture; as seen from the eyes of a New Yorker. Interesting to notice what the perception is, I’ll leave it to the reader’s whether or not the article gets it right.
A little background for those who might not be aware, New York authorities are really cracking down on Critical Mass in New York; every CM generates between 30 and 100 arrests; using everything from Motorcycles to helicopters to catch those pesky cyclists

This is a great idea
If you are attached in some way to Multnomah Bible College/Seminary and you have a blog, get on over and let people know!
Onward and Upward

Lawyers representing several record companies have filed suit against an 83-year old woman who died in December, claiming that she made more than 700 songs available on the internet.
“I believe that if music companies are going to set examples they need to do it to appropriate people and not dead people,” Robin Chianumba told AP. “I am pretty sure she is not going to leave Greenwood Memorial Park to attend the hearing.”
RIAA sues the dead | The Register
No comment necessary.

On a lighter note…here is a page-full of photoshopped Mars pictures. Not all of the photos are the greatest in skill or taste, but there are some gems in thar web space. Filter wisely.

Right now we are editing Brandon’s, my brother, blog.
go here and check it out!