Man-Children and the Women That (Don't) Love Them

When did The Wall Street Journal become the go-to place for provocative social commentary? An editorial by Kay Hymowitz entitled "Where Have All The Good Men Gone?" has been raising plenty of eyebrows this past week, doubling as a gender specific follow-up to this past summer's landmark NY Times article about The Age 30 Deadline (not to mention last week's conversation about high-school wrestling). Both articles explore the identity politics of "extended adolescence"/"pre-adulthood" in fascinating ways, and both hit on the various contradictions involved in the culture of self-definition. There might be a slight note of "woe-are-they" buried in here, but the observations themselves about the man-child phenomenon seem sound, that the law of human identity in this case (i.e. who society tells us we must and should be) is literally killing love. Much of this, of course, has been played out/mirrored in the church - and I know some would point to "secularlization" as a key part of the problem. But regardless what you see as the root cause, there's a lot of food for thought:

The knowledge economy gives the educated young an unprecedented opportunity to think about work in personal terms. They are looking not just for jobs but for "careers," work in which they can exercise their talents and express their deepest passions. They expect their careers to give shape to their identity. For today's pre-adults, "what you do" is almost synonymous with "who you are," and starting a family is seldom part of the picture.

Unlike adolescents, however, pre-adults don't know what is supposed to come next. For them, marriage and parenthood come in many forms, or can be skipped altogether. In 1970, just 16% of Americans ages 25 to 29 had never been married; today that's true of an astonishing 55% of the age group. In the U.S., the mean age at first marriage has been climbing toward 30 (a point past which it has already gone in much of Europe). It is no wonder that so many young Americans suffer through a "quarter-life crisis," a period of depression and worry over their future.
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American men have been struggling with finding an acceptable adult identity since at least the mid-19th century. We often hear about the miseries of women confined to the domestic sphere once men began to work in offices and factories away from home. But it seems that men didn't much like the arrangement either. They balked at the stuffy propriety of the bourgeois parlor, as they did later at the banal activities of the suburban living room. They turned to hobbies and adventures, like hunting and fishing. At midcentury, fathers who at first had refused to put down the money to buy those newfangled televisions changed their minds when the networks began broadcasting boxing matches and baseball games. The arrival of Playboy in the 1950s seemed like the ultimate protest against male domestication; think of the refusal implied by the magazine's title alone.
[CONTINUE READING]

Lyre Bird Ministries

ht BM (post number 2000!)

Another Year Ends: Mockingbird at the Oscars

Insert idolatry-related caption here.

As you all know, this Sunday brings us the Academy Awards. I was too far behind to comment on the best films of 2010 in December, but a few months grace-period(!) has allowed me to catch up and compile some Mockingbird Oscar picks: films that succeed on their own terms artistically, without turning a blind eye to our favorite themes (judgment and love, guilt and absolution/forgiveness, the quagmire of identity formation, redemption in suffering, the level-playing field of original sin, the bondage of the will, addiction, Jesus, resurrection, grace, grace, grace, etc). Fortunately, the two are seldom mutually exclusive, reality being what it is. In fact, as CNN picked up on, this year had more quality Grace in Practice-friendly films than any in recent memory - Get Low, King's Speech, and Toy Story 3 stand out particularly in that regard.

Disclaimer: The major releases I still haven't seen are Winter's Bone and Another Year. Also, it should go without saying that all of these movies have ratings, and that regardless of how non-glorifying/real they may be, if frank depictions of sex and drugs make you uncomfortable (which is perfectly valid!), don't watch Blue Valentine or The Fighter, respectively. The King's Speech has plenty of bad language, and True Grit some serious violence. Toy Story 3 has a scary bear (and clown).
[CONTINUE READING]

Rid of My Disgrace: Hope and Healing for Victims of Sexual Assault

We have the privilege of presenting an excerpt from Lindsey and Justin Holcomb's brand-new book Rid Of My Disgrace: Hope and Healing for Victims of Sexual Assault. I've read the whole thing and can honestly say that it is an indispensable resource, a work of deep compassion and pastoral sensitivity, bringing grace to bear on a very dark corner indeed. A truly important and unique accomplishment. The first chapter begins thus:

If you have suffered as the result of a sexual assault, this book is written to you and for you—not about you. What happened to you was not your fault. You are not to blame. You did not deserve it. You did not ask for this. You should not be silenced. You are not worthless. You do not have to pretend like nothing happened. Nobody had the right to violate you. You are not responsible for what happened to you. You are not damaged goods. You were supposed to be treated with dignity and respect. You were the victim of assault and it was wrong. You were sinned against. Despite all the pain, healing can happen and there is hope.

While you may cognitively agree that hope is out there, you may still feel a major effect of the sexual assault—disgrace, a deep sense of filthy defilement encumbered with shame.

Disgrace is the opposite of grace. Grace is love that seeks you out even if you have nothing to give in return. Grace is being loved when you are or feel unlovable. Grace has the power to turn despair into hope. Grace listens, lifts up, cures, transforms, and heals.

Disgrace destroys, causes pain, deforms, and wounds. It alienates and isolates. Disgrace makes you feel worthless, rejected, unwanted, and repulsive, like a persona non grata (a “person without grace”). Disgrace silences and shuns. Your suffering of disgrace is only increased when others force your silence. The refusals of others to speak about sexual assault and listen to victims tell the truth is a refusal to offer grace and healing.
[CONTINUE READING]

Graham Schuyler and Churches for the Sake of Others

The convergence of two of our favorite things: Friday Night Lights... and Graham Schuyler:

From W. Somerset Maugham's "The Happy Man"

The opening lines of the great author's (very) short story: 

"It is a dangerous thing to order the lives of others and I have often wondered at the self-confidence of politicians, reformers and suchlike who are prepared to force upon their fellows measures that must alter their manners, habits, and points of view.  I have always hesitated to give advice, for how can one advise another how to act unless one knows that other as well as one knows oneself?  Heaven knows, I know little enough of myself."

Episode 36 of PZ's Podcast, which talks at length about Maugham and the nature of Unconventional Thinking is up now!

February Playlist

1. (It's Good) To Be Free - Oasis
2. Nowhere Man - The Replacements
3. V - Golden Smog
4. Don't Carry It All - The Decemberists
5. Everything Is Free - Gillian Welch
6. Revival - Deerhunter
7. ONE - Yeasayer
8. Behind The Mask - MJ
9. Isolation - Joy Division
10. Car Song - Elastica
11. Everything Will Flow - Suede
12. Someone To Talk With - Mark Olson and The Original Harmony Ridge Creekdippers
13. Up Above My Head - The Jayhawks
14. Campers In Control - The High Llamas
15. Sound Of Free - Dennis Wilson
16. Let It Shine - Brian Wilson
17. Pray For The Many - Roger Joseph Manning Jr.
18. Nothin' Will Ever Change - L.E.O.
19. Chinatown - The Move
20. The Beat Goes On - Beady Eye

Picking up on a theme...?

A Couple More Relevant Fails

Brene Brown on The Power of Vulnerability

A courageous address from Brene Brown at last year's TED summit in Houston, jam-packed with insight and premised on a concept of 'enoughness' which has more than a little in common with what we talk about on here so frequently. It's, um, enough to make one wonder where Brown, the social worker responsible for that fantastic article on Perfectionism a few months back, is coming from. That is, it seems positively soaked in Christian understandings, endorsing in roundabout ways the healing power of repentance, our enslavement to self-justification and inherent obsession with righteousness, the entire idea of strength in weakness, she even touches on grace in parenting. And minus a grounding in something a bit more realistic/Eternal, her notion of 'whole-heartedness' is almost a direct borrow from the church, going so far as to co-opt religious language.

Of course, there are plenty of bones to pick - this is not a theological talk - but the congruence is remarkable. And her wonderful delivery is a case in point re: the power of vulnerability. Has she listened to Breaking The Fourth Wall? You be the judge, ht CC:

Technology, Honesty, Loneliness and Identity: Facebook Making Us Sad, Take 2

A follow-up to the recent post about Facebook making us sad is the full-length review in the NY Times of MIT professor Sherry Turkle's new book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. She's basically exploring the psychological side effects of the Internet, which of course, have an enormous amount to do with identity, anxiety, control and what we call the Law. Although one does detect a slight air of curmudgeonliness ("in my day..."), and some of the insights may strike you as awfully self-evident, it nevertheless sounds like a worthwhile and important book:

Many of the adolescents cited in her book express a decided distaste for using the phone. One high school sophomore says telephone calls mean you have to have a conversation and conversations are “almost always too prying, it takes too long, and it is impossible to say ‘good-bye.’ ” Another student says: “When you talk on the phone, you don’t really think about what you’re saying as much as in a text. On the telephone, too much might show.”

Texts, in other words, offer more control — and the ability to keep one’s feelings at a distance. Many young people “prefer to deal with strong feelings from the safe haven of the Net,” Ms. Turkle writes. “It gives them an alternative to processing emotions in real time.”
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Noting that the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson regarded identity play as part of the work of adolescence, she argues that the Net not only supplies teenagers with lots of opportunities to explore who they are and what they aspire to but also generates added anxiety, heightening peer pressure and encouraging many to construct, edit and perform a “self” in an effort to win friends and influence.

Of an interview subject she calls Brad, Ms. Turkle writes: “Brad says, only half jokingly, that he worries about getting ‘confused’ between what he ‘composes’ for his online life and who he ‘really’ is. Not yet confirmed in his identity, it makes him anxious to post things about himself that he doesn’t really know are true. It burdens him that the things he says online affect how people treat him in the real. People already relate to him based on things he has said on Facebook. Brad struggles to be more ‘himself’ there, but this is hard. He says that even when he tries to be ‘honest’ on Facebook, he cannot resist the temptation to use the site ‘to make the right impression.’ ”
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There are other consequences to constant networking as well. When we are always tethered to our offices, our families, our friends — even when hiking in the woods or walking by the ocean — then solitude becomes increasingly elusive, and creative, contemplative, carefully considered thought increasingly gives way to immediate, sometimes ill-considered reactions.

At times, Ms. Turkle can sound primly sanctimonious, complaining for instance that the sight at a local cafe of people focused on their computers and smartphones as they drink their coffee bothers her: “These people are not my friends,” she writes, “yet somehow I miss their presence.” Such sentimental whining undermines the larger and important points she wants to make in this volume — the notion that technology offers the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy and communication without emotional risk, while actually making people feel lonelier and more overwhelmed.

Emily Dickinson - Poem 341

After great pain, a formal feeling comes --
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs --
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round --
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought --
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone --

This is the Hour of Lead --
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow --
First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go --

Women Are More Forgiving Than Men?

At long last, the truth is out! A brief and very interesting but - let's face it - pretty inconsequential report from Medical News Today, concerning a study from The University of the Basque Country, ht JD:

According to the study, parents forgive more than children, while women are better at forgiving than men... "A decisive factor in the capacity to forgive is empathy, and women have a greater empathetic capacity than males", Carmen Maganto, co-author of the study and a tenured professor at the Psychology Faculty of the UPV, tells SINC.

What drives forgiveness? Children believe that "one forgives with time", while parents point to reasons such as "remorsefulness and forgiving the other person" and "legal justice".

The authors of this study say that parents who have forgiven most over the course of their lives have an increased capacity to forgive "in all areas". Parents and children use similar definitions of forgiveness. Not bearing a grudge, reconciliation and understanding-empathy are the terms most used by both groups to define forgiveness.

However, there are greater differences between men and women. Both see "not bearing a grudge" as the best definition of forgiveness, but men place greater importance on this characteristic.

Hmmm....

NYC Conference Update: Talk Titles

We are very excited to announce the official, appetite-whetting titles of the talks at our upcoming conference in New York City:

Thursday March 31st

7:00pm "Jesus Shot My Dog: Fear, Control and the End of the Law" - Jady Koch

Friday April 1st

9:15am "The Religious Culture of Control" - Mark Galli

2:30pm "The Liberating Grace of Chaos" - Mark Galli

Saturday April 2nd

9:30am "Grace in the Midst of Mere Religion" - Mark Galli

11:00am "What We Talk About When We Talk About Freedom: The Discontented Self and the Love of God" - David Zahl

The full schedule is up on the conference site, as are a host of other details. It's starting to fill up - Register Today!

Another Week Ends: U-Bending Happiness, South Park Religion, Charlie Sheen, Louie CK, Friday Night Lights

1. From one of the December issues of The Economist, some interesting findings about "Age and Happiness". The main discovery being the "U-Bend" - i.e. the finding that people are happiest in their youth and old age, and least happy in between. The most relevant section for us has to do with "the death ambition" (ht VH):

Maybe people come to accept their strengths and weaknesses [as they grow older], give up hoping to become chief executive or have a picture shown in the Royal Academy, and learn to be satisfied as assistant branch manager, with their watercolour on display at the church fete. “Being an old maid”, says one of the characters in a story by Edna Ferber, an (unmarried) American novelist, was “like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.” Perhaps acceptance of ageing itself is a source of relief. “How pleasant is the day”, observed William James, an American philosopher, “when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”

2. A great overview on Slate of South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone's dealings over the years with religion. They've certainly not shied away from the topic, as their upcoming Book of Mormon musical boldly drives home. Parker has always seemed to be the driving force, so it's a shame they didn't interview him, but nevertheless [vulgarity warning - duh]:

What Parker and Stone do isn't religion-bashing. It's religion-teasing. And it's born more from fascination than disdain. "I'm an atheist that admires and likes religion," Stone told me in an interview. He describes the new musical as "an atheist's love letter to religion." If you had to classify Parker and Stone's world view, you might call it Hobbesian absurdism.[CONTINUE READING]

Chantal Delsol on Demiurges and Gardeners

From the French philosopher's The Unlearned Lessons Of the Twentieth Century: An Essay On Late Modernity, ht MS:

The interplay of frailty and promise forbids us to dismiss all philosophies of man as illusory and compels us to reflect on humanity. Because the human fabric remains imperfect, it cannot be reinvented by the will or indefinitely molded by desire. It commands respect through its weight and resistance to manipulation. We must try to understand this frailty before we can put a face on the promise. The presence of evil prevents the future from creating its own order; it must respect a certain givenness of being which must always remain largely unknown.

The Constitutive incompleteness of man forbids him to attempt to turn perfection into reality. But he can care for what exists, and it is probably this caring that defines what is uniquely and properly human. This style of being, as it were, expresses itself in the attention man pays to the world he has inherited in order to understand that world. The world we inherit and share is full of being, in the sense that forces are at work that we did not ourselves introduce. Having focused on reinventing the world, we must now turn our gaze toward the potentialities of being. Our fascination for planning must be replaced by attending to desirable possibilities. In order to care for, improve, and clear the brush away from what exists, we must keep in check our will to begin again ex nihilo, loving both existence and those beings who exist. That is, we must love them more than the products of our own minds.

The failures of the twentieth century reveal who we are. We are not demiurges. We are gardeners.

Sweet Emotion on American Idol?

Not being a huge American Idol person, or post-Rocks Aerosmith fan, everything in Jon Caramanica's article in this past Sunday's NY Times, "Steven Tyler Escapes From Idolatry," was news to me. Those of you who've seen the episode in question can tell us whether it was indeed a lightning-striking instance of grace on TV or a carefully played media-moment (or both, as the article suggests). But there's an unmistakeable note of Nazareth here - in regards to Mr. Tyler, that is - of folks being caught seriously off guard by his charisma/character/kindness, of their preconceptions being exposed for what they are (myself included), not to mention the sheer unexpectedness of grace, ht CW:

Fame isn’t all gold, honey and massage oils; it’s also the successful navigation of a steady stream of unlikely and uncomfortable situations. At this, the first few weeks of the 10th season of “American Idol” have proved, Steven Tyler is an unalloyed genius.

The moment when Mr. Tyler, one of this season’s new judges, claimed the show as his own came during the third night of auditions. Chris Medina tried out with a muscular version of The Script’s “Breakeven” after telling the story of how his fiancée, Juliana Ramos, suffered a brain injury that left her in a wheelchair, able to move her left arm and little more. After he sang, he brought Ms. Ramos in to the audition room at the judges’ behest. By any measure it was difficult to watch, testing the viewer’s urge to turn away, to wish for a speedy change of scene.

Randy Jackson and Jennifer Lopez introduced themselves to Ms. Ramos, but Mr. Tyler took charge. “Hi, girl,” he said, shaking her hand. “I just heard your fiancé sing, and he’s so good.” At this point, as she teetered back and forth, he was gripping her shoulder and staring at her comfortingly: a rock, a confidant, a seducer. “You know, because he sings to you all the time,” he said, leaning in to her, stroking her hair, kissing her warmly — all with tenderness — then whispering in her ear, “That’s why he sings so good, because he sings to you.”

It was a stellar embrace, the sort of practiced sincerity that’s one of the wages of extreme celebrity. Except that, over time, it can shake free of its dishonesty, as was the case here. In that moment Mr. Tyler was both deeply practiced and deeply humane. It made for a stunning display of kindness unusual not just for “Idol,” but for all of popular culture in matters of dealing with the severely disabled. [CONTINUE READING]

Tina Fey and The Baby-Career Dilemma

Tina Fey plays the double messages of modern life better than anyone, particularly those that relate to women. On 30 Rock, her character Liz Lemon is a catalog of contradictions, constantly (and hilariously) battling the differences between the ideal and the real, her 'shoulds' and her 'wants', her convictions and her appetites, etc. She mines those discrepancies for laughs, and in doing so, has become something of an icon for (a certain kind of) modern woman, a walking commentary on contemporary gender politics. She adds just enough straight-man self-deprecation to get away with some fairly subversive comedy, and whenever 30 Rock veers from that mold, it gets pretty shrill/snobby, pretty fast. Anyways, Fey recently put her considerable skills to work for the New Yorker, examining the question of whether or not to have a second baby, "Confessions of a Juggler." The piece, which is really very funny, doubles as a crash-course in moving-target Judgment, both the internal and external kind, and the fruit it produces: sleepless nights, canker sores, counter-judgments, etc. And in the final paragraph, if you substitute "minister" for "gynecologist," (and assume Christ as the basis of the assurance), you almost have Law/Gospel treatise on your hands... I'm only sort of kidding: 

"What is the rudest question you can ask a woman? 'How old are you?' 'What do you weigh?'... No, the worst question is: 'How do you juggle it all?' 'How do you juggle it all?' people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes, 'You're screwing it all up, aren't you?' their eyes say. My standard answer is that I have the same struggles as any working parent but with the good fortune to be working at my dream job. Or sometimes I just hand them a juicy red apple I've poisoned in my working-mother witch cauldron and fly away.

The second-worst question you can ask a woman is: 'Are you going to have more kids?'
[CONTINUE READING]

George Eliot on Exhortation and Helplessness

Also from "Janet's Repentance" in Scenes of Clerical Life. Janet Dempster, in a moment of absolute despair, suddenly remembers the minister, Mr. Tryan. She gets the inspiration that maybe he can help her:

"No! She suddenly thought -- and the thought was like an electric shock -- there was one spot in her memory which seemed to promise her an untried spring, where the waters might be sweet.  That short meeting with Mr. Tryan had come back upon her -- his voice, his words, his look, which told her that he knew sorrow.  ... that look of his came back on her with a vividness greater than it had had for her in reality; surely he knew more of the secrets of sorrow than other men; perhaps he had some message of comfort, different from the feeble words she had been used to hear from others.  She was tired, she was sick of that barren exhortation -- Do right, and keep a clear conscience, and God will reward you, and your troubles will be easier to bear.  She wanted strength to do right -- she wanted something to rely on besides her own resolutions; for was not the path behind her all strewn with broken resolutions?  How could she trust in new ones?  She had often heard Mr. Tryan laughed at for being fond of great sinners. She began to see a new meaning in those words; he would perhaps understand her helplessness..." ( p. 252)