Three Ways Of Feeling Disenfranchised By Orthodoxy: William Hale White, George Harrison and Jack Kerouac

Odds are, you missed this excellent little piece by Paul Zahl when it was published in the July 2009 issue of the Journal of the Mark Rutherford Society, Ed: Nick Wilde. We thought we'd reprint it here:

The initial reason I became interested in the novels of "Mark Rutherford" (aka William Hale White) was because of his way of being a Christian. Ever since his expulsion from theological college, he never felt himself to be an actual part of the Christian Church. He could not break away from some core Christian convictions and ideas, but nor could he go to church. He said this often, and even to his children. Yet as we all know, his books and letters and journals are full of religion! Specifically, his work is full of an inward, lifelong, and also extremely well informed struggle with Christianity as he had received it in orthodox Dissent.

William Hale White did not regard himself as a credal Christian, but his works are full, absolutely and undeniably full, of a wrestling with those very deep preoccupations of Christians with Original Sin as the normal human condition and with Christ Jesus as the Deliverer, or Savior, from that normal condition. Almost always, White comes across as a wistful Christian, someone who looks (back) on traditional Christianity with admiration yet also with disappointment for its failure to leaven the lump of his own life. No more wistful words occur in all of White's work than the closing sentences of his "John Bunyan" (1910):

We cannot bring ourselves into a unity. The time is yet to come when we shall live by a faith which is a harmony of all our faculties. A glimpse was caught of such a gospel nineteen centuries ago in Galilee, but it has vanished. (pp. 49-50)

For myself, as a member of the Mark Rutherford Society and as a Christian minister whose life has come straight up against reality, reality which is a brick wall in relation to so many common aspirations for happiness and satisfaction, William Hale White's work is a courageous and almost unflinching engagement to deal with reality, yet from a Christian point of vantage. The fact that Hale's life story was filled with "reality", with sorrow and impasse, makes his religious grappling with that reality enormously appealing or convincing, and also instructive.

In the light of Hale's struggle, combined with his refusal to give up the relation of his struggle with traditional Christian ideas and hopes, I have also become affected over the last couple of years by the music of George Harrison. 'George Harrison!' you say. ' I thought he was a Hindu.' He was. Harrison left his childhood Roman Catholicism quite early, and in mid-career as a Beatle adopted the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita as the mainstay of his life. This is visible in everything Harrison wrote and composed from the 1970 classic album "All Things Must Pass" right on through to the last record he worked on, entitled "Brainwashed". Not only is Krishna the hero and be-all of Harrison's work, but Jesus gets some nice mentions, too, as time goes on. Harrison was something of what we today call a "Gnostic Christian" toward the end of his life, although he prayed to Krishna right to the end.

Where the comparison of William Hale White, who had an allergy to "theosophy" and almost anything resembling what is today called "New Age" or "Eastern" spirituality, with George Harrison is interesting lies in the fact that both were "bruised reeds" in relation to Western orthodoxies, yet both were religious Englishmen. What White would find in Spinoza -- a universal form of acquiescence and resignation in the face of natural law and the givens of life and nature over which human beings seem to have little control -- Harrison would find in the broad sweeps of "Eastern"-style resignation. Both men were drawn to theories of controllessness, both were receptive to universal ideas of God found in the life of Jesus as they understood it, and both were on the distinct margins of conventional Western religiosity.



May I add one more "boundary" figure? This is the quite hot (just now) American novelist Jack Kerouac, whose classic novel On the Road had its 50th anniversary in 2007. Kerouac is the subject of a massive and authoritative exhibition in 2008 at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. Many people think that Kerouac was a Buddhist. He was a Buddhist, for a period. But he was also a Christian of broad sympathies, who returned very passionately to the Roman Catholic Church toward the end of his life. Like his near contemporary Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac was a "hipster" artist who was actually interested almost solely in Christianity. On the margins of American literary culture, Kerouac wrote about religion, and never stopped writing about religion. When you realize that religion, first Christianity, then Buddhism, then, later, Christianity again, is the core theme of Kerouac's several novels, not to mention his journals and also the great many oil paintings he created in later years, then you can spot, again, an artist of the highest quality who, like "Mark Rutherford", was portraying reality, indeed the suffering reality of life, in the context of Christian ideas. All this is set out systematically in an elaborate new "coffee table" book produced for the New York Public Library and written by Isaac Gewirtz entitled Beatific Souls: Jack Kerouac on the Road (Scala Publishers London, 2007).

As a Christian minister and an admirer of William Hale White, I am fascinated by the comparisons that such an exhibition evoke, and not to mention the work in music of George Harrison. These three were all religious men, to their toes. Each had left formal Christianity. Each also, however, was attracted to Jesus and his teachings, in relation to the sufferings and transiency of life. I have recently told my Episcopal congregation, in Washington, D.C. , that I wish I could imagine a conversation of Hale White with the later English artist George Harrison -- Harrison was so mild-mannered that I think Hale would have listened to what he had to say -- and also with the American (French-Canadian) writer of "stream-of-consciousness" novels Jack Kerouac, who could not 'shake' his Christianity nor fully embrace it (except at the very end).

Aren't you interested, too, within our secular era, in artists who refused to throw out the ancestral religion completely but were also locked in the normal life struggle with suffering and transiency? After all, Christians of any stripe, and possibly religious people of almost any stripe, are wanting to ask questions of reality by which the possibility of God, or even just some universal essence of love, call It what you will, can co-exist with reality. I see "Mark Rutherford" locked in a pretty big struggle to bring things together in the light of Christianity, just as George Harrison was fixed upon religion as the dialogue partner with all life as he perceived it, and just as Jack Kerouac observed the world through his acute sensorium in the light of his religious quest.

The Beats Having Their Tea (And Drinking It Too)?

A pretty thought-provoking little essay by Lee Siegel in last week's NY Times about the similarities between the Beat Generation and the Tea Party, which touches on insider-outsider dynamics, and the Christian religion's inherent allure when it comes to "losers". A few excerpts of which include (ht MS):

American dissent turns on a tradition of troublemaking, suspicion of elites and feelings of powerlessness, no matter where on the political spectrum dissent takes place.

The origin of the word “beat” has a connection to the Tea Partiers’ sense that they are being marginalized as the country is taken away from them. According to Ginsberg, to be “beat” most basically signified “exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out . . . rejected by society.”

It’s too bad that the movie “Howl” reduces the sociopolitical meaning of the Beats to the obscenity trial that took place in San Francisco in 1957, when Lawrence Ferlinghetti stood accused of printing and selling “Howl,” Ginsberg’s explosively profane long poem. Hollywood loves self-righteously to portray now-unchallenged liberal causes under siege, even though in this case the cause of free speech was vindicated when the presiding judge ruled that “Howl” was a work of “redeeming social importance” and that Ferlinghetti was innocent. What the movie should have spun out into its own subplot was the fact — never mentioned in the film — that the judge, W. J. Clayton Horn, was a conservative jurist locally renowned for his Sunday-school Bible classes. Horn might well have been as much an outsider in San Francisco’s sophisticated social circles as Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were in the eyes of the law. It takes an outsider to know an outsider. Or perhaps Horn had a glimpse of the future. The eventual assimilation of Beat hedonism ensured that by the end of the millennium, white middle-class Christians like him would themselves be marginalized — at least by the dominant culture — as the “silent majority.”
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Kerouac, Tolstoy, and The Egyptian -- Lenten Reflections

In Paul Zahl's remarkable recent piece on the 1950s film The Egyptian, he puzzles over Jack Kerouac's wild hatred of the film, especially as (PZ notes):

"The title character, take away the toga, is [Kerouac] himself."

Perhaps the puzzle contains its own key?

I defer to PZ here -- since by far he's our greatest expert on 50s movies and JK. But somehow Kerouac and The Egyptian reminded me of a similar puzzle: namely Tolstoy's baffling hatred of everything by Shakespeare, and the way he had reserved especial venom for King Lear, a play considered by cultural historians as one of the greatest ever written. (Full disclosure: I'm a big fan of Lear... grin.)

George Orwell wrote an essay ("Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool") where he speculates about the hatred Tolstoy reserved for the play, and asks if it could well be due to the curious similarity of Tolstoy's own story to Lear's, and to the fact that he suffered disappointments of the same nature after renouncing his estate, his aristocratic title and his copyrights.

Orwell reflects at fascinating depth on this which I won't try to summarize here. And in truth I have no idea whether Orwell is right in this particular instance about Tolstoy, or whether the same might explain Kerouac. Who knows our hearts save One?

But what is clear to me, and seems so very meet and right to consider during Lent, is that something like it operates in all of us. Which of us, when presented with an agonizingly accurate portrait of ourselves (Dorian Gray!) can stand when it appeareth? Which of us does not respond by flight, denial, or a desire to destroy/deface the too-true image?
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Monday Tidbits: Mr. Fox, The Hill and Wood, Kerouac on Brothers K

1. The first images of Wes Anderson's The Fantastic Mr. Fox were released last week! The trailer comes out next week... Stay tuned.























2. The Hill And Wood. First Charlottesville, then the world... We love these guys. Check out their recent performance:

3. An index of Jack Kerouac's colorful (and funny) one-liners about cities and states, very much worth your time, among them "this New York world of telephones and appointments", "overcommunicating America" and "California TOO MANY COPS AND TOO MANY LAWS and general killjoy culture". Then there's this recent quote of his, unearthed by our favorite Kerouac scholar:

"The happy ending of the 'Brothers Karamazov', called dull and uninteresting by some critics, is not the laughing mockery of a great genius of understanding, but rather, it seems to me the admission that though human beings do not need 'happiness' they might as well be happy. This is like God's gratuitous sunshine after a bad storm, and it is good. I say to these critics: 'Don't be assholes all your life.'"

Jack Kerouac

I read "On The Road" one summer during high school for the same reason I did a lot of things: because the cool kids told me to. I don't think I understood it; in fact, it sort of gave me a headache.

So I was more than a little surprised when my father insisted that I go see the New York Public Library's new exhibit of Kerouac's life and work. If you have a chance to see it, you should! It's there until March 16th and focuses primarily on his spiritual life, which, it turns out, was very deep. Kerouac started out life as a Roman-Catholic, became an Atheist, then a Buddhist, then a Buddhist-Christian, and then, at the end of his life, a straight-up Christian.

But don't take my word for it - here are a couple of the journal entries that were on display:

"There is a grave fault in the nature of human life. Somewhere in the soul there is an error in the construction, a dark misgiving intimate and mute that prevents us from being happy when there seems to be no particular unhappiness abroad in our lives. In this dark cave is stored the universal essence of all sufferance." - 1945

"Nothing else in the world matters but the kindness of Grace, God's gift to suffering mortals." - 1961

Next to one of his many mid-60s paintings of the Crucifixion: "Yet I saw the cross just then when I closed my eyes after writing all this. I can't escape its mysterious penetration into all this brutality."

And my personal favorite, from his 1964 poem, The Northport Haiku: "Whatever it is, I quit."

PZ's Podcast This Week: Preaching 101 (with Prof. Kerouac)

We here at Mockingbird couldn't be more excited about PZ's Podcast, the new weekly offering from the Very Rev. Dr.theol. Paul Zahl. (Subscribe for free on iTunes by clicking here.) Paul has over 30 years experience as an ordained clergyman in parish ministry and even longer as an astute observer of the human predicament (and it's only known Cure, which is what we Mbirds are all about.) That One Cure has always been Paul's focus too, whether writing scads of books, teaching theology, or preaching sermons. Which, incidentally, is the subject of this week's (Two Part!) Podcast.

For quite a while PZ has wanted to say more on the subject of preaching, which has become a sort of Achilles Heel for Christianity in this country, a hamstringing impediment to getting a good message out. Here, in a two-parter, he aims at what he thinks may be the heart of the preaching problem. He thinks it may be a problem faced by communicators in every time and place.

Because PZ finds much to help him in the "List of Essentials" written out by Jack Kerouac in 1953 and later amplified in Kerouac's "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose," he has entitled the first podcast on preaching "Bohemian Rhapsody." (Available free from iTunes here.) The title for the second podcast, drawing on a song by The Go-Go's, is called "Beatnik Beach" (Get it here.)

The biggest problem in preaching, he has come to find out, is not the text, it is the preacher, the person of the preacher. When that problem is engaged, everything else falls into the place. The same would go for communicators in any medium: Problemo Number One is the communicator. When the communicator knows himself or herself, what he or she is really trying to say tends to come naturally. Then the seeker in you will connect with the seeker in another. This goes for music and movies, it goes for poems and lit, it goes for religion.

Let the enduring communicator of the Twentieth Century, who "speaketh still" to youth of every age, to inquirers of every size and both sexes, help us here. I'm talking about the Sage of Lowell.

Now, open the door of your imagination, and take a walk on Beatnik Beach. 

Christmas with Kerouac: The Nazareth Principle [plus Roald Dahl and Subcontrario (In Stereo)]

Some Monday morning surfing suggestions: 1. Head over to mardecortesbaja.com for a stirring report from my father on Jack Kerouac's humble origins. [PZ has become a semi-regular contributor over there]. The first paragraph reads as follows:

Our son Simeon says that faith is summed up in something he calls the "Nazareth principle". This refers to the question in the New Testament where someone scoffs at Jesus the carpenter by asking, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"

The idea was that Nazareth was a city, in the region of Galilee, which was known for its "mixed-blood" and therefore suspect practice of Judaism. Because the carpenter/prophet came from Nazareth, didn't that disqualify him from being the real thing?

Yet as Simeon says, in life -- time after time -- the best things come from the unlikeliest places. And this "Nazareth principle" extends to the fact that out of trouble and wounds, disappointments and closed doors, come often the actual breakthroughs of personal life.

2. While there, be sure to check out his review of Roald Dahl's short-lived 1961 television show Way Out. The particular episode which caught PZ's attention was "Soft Focus", the summary of which is just too good not to reprint here:

"Soft Focus" is 29 minutes of Barry Morse playing a photographer who has invented a retouching agent for his portraits of people, which has the side effect of retouching their actual faces. Thus a little boy loses an ugly birthmark which "Dr. Pell" has erased in the lab. Then, too, an actress whose face has been scarred is able to be beautiful again with the help of Dr. Pell. Dr. Pell's wife, however, Louise, is involved with her husband's young assistant. Louise doesn't know that her husband knows what is going on.

He begins to 'touch up' a photograph of her. She starts to age. (He touches up his own photograph, too, to make himself look younger.) When she begins to look about 50 or so -- and she looks awful -- her boyfriend jilts her. Enraged and abandoned, she enters her husband's studio and right in front of his eyes, pours the whole bottle of solution on his portrait. He screams, and in the climax, which no one who saw it in 1961 ever forgot, he turns towards his gloating wife, and towards the camera, with half his face wiped away, a perfect blank.

3. Finally, run don't walk over to rcrdlabl.com and download the first official release from our very own Trevor Giuliani's upcoming debut album, Subcontrario (In Stereo), due 7/21. The track, entitled "Wasting Your Town", is available for free and will blow your mind.

Breaking The Fourth Wall: The Mockingbird Preaching Seminar

A few priceless transcriptions from the second talk of the preaching seminar that Paul Zahl conducted at our Pensacola Mini-Conference. The first talk had to do with the message itself, while this one, entitled "Breaking the Fourth Wall" (also the title of seminar as a whole), dealt mainly with the means and method of its communication. The full preaching seminar files are now available on a pay-what-you-want/can basis, by clicking here or on the button at the bottom of the post: 

I see the preacher as a channel for the uninterdicted compassion of Christ that connects with the listener who is in some kind of need. How does the preacher get through to the real issues of a person’s need? The expression in drama is “breaking the fourth wall.” The chancel in a basilica church is based on Greek drama: a stage surrounded by three physical walls. When I say break the fourth the wall, I want to break through an invisible wall that separates the listener from the speaker. Great artists have been breaking the fourth wall forever.

How can I break the fourth wall? The answer is very simple: by communicating with myself. You know yourself well enough to be able to identify with that part of them that you have in you. If you do that, you’re on the same level playing field. And that is the essence of communication.

I’ve discovered that the overwhelming problem with most preaching is the person, not the message. Why is this person not connecting with the congregation? 1. They don’t have a clear bead on what it is they’re saying, or 2. They don’t know who they are. Now, obviously I’m not talking about morbidity or self-indulgent sentimentality, or someone crying in public…

A preacher does not write a talk, or a lecture, or a teaching. He’s not trying to “come up with something” on a Saturday night. Instead, a preacher comes to a text from a position of complete vulnerability. I used to say that the preacher, like the scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, is the person who puts his hand inside his chest, takes out his heart and holds it up to all of the worshippers. It’s close. What preaching is, is actually taking your ribcage, cracking it open and lifting your heart out, and exposing your heart and your insides to the world. Not because you’re indulgent or because you have anything unique going on, but because when you do that, a part of you is going to be relating to the kidney over there, or the eye over there, or the lower intestine over there.

When you do that, people will ask, “were you a fly on the wall last night in our house?” Or worse, “How dare you preach about me?!” (The preacher says to himself, “I hardly know you”). But if you’re in touch with yourself even to some extent, you will connect at that point.

Jack Kerouac put it like this, trying to explain how he was able to write his amazing book The Subterraneans:

"The essentials of spontaneous prose: Write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then the reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-excitement by the same laws operating in his own human mind."

Announcing PZ's PODCAST!

We are proud to announce another very cool new resource, our first foray into podcasting: "PZ's Podcast"! A weekly transmission from the world of, you guessed it, Paul Zahl. To subscribe (and listen to the first three installments), click here.  But first, a word of, um, introduction from the man himself:

This will be a series of talks, most of them about 35 minutes in length, which try to bridge the gap between Old Ancient Teaching (the phrase is from an epic religious poem entitled "Mexico City Blues") and popular culture.

“PZ's Podcast” is the voice of a lost Space-Child, who, it turns out, is broadcasting live from the New York World's Fair of 1964. PZ ventures out weekly from Flushing Meadows to find answers from various heroes of his, beginning with the American playwright Thornton Wilder; then the 'Beat' writer Jack Kerouac; then the English muse Terence Rattigan; then to the misanthropic and now forgotten philosopher-novelist James Gould Cozzens. Each of these people gives to PZ whatever he can.

At one point, our Space-Child, almost demented by loss, is reduced to reflecting on giant crab movies, so desperate has become his search.

PZ seems to travel from the ridiculous to the sublime in no time at all, and doesn't always know which is which. He has to trust that Ancient Teaching, too, as he circles back each week in search of antidotes for human miscreance and mourning.

Initially, PZ will publish three of his reports. Then, on a weekly basis, he will publish new pages from his Diary of a Madman (de Maupassant and Vincent Price). We have high hopes for these ecrits. We'd bet they'll be lively, maybe even worth telling someone else about.

Luckily, it's "Only the beginning, only the beginning, only the beginning" (The Phantom Planet, 1961).


"PZ's Podcast" is brought to you proudly by Mockingbird. The podcast is free, of course, but if you wish to make a much-needed contribution in support of it,  please go here. And to obtain one of our last few copies of his New Persuasive Words DVD, go here.

PZ's Podcast: The Gothic

EPISODE 19

I've been thinking about this subject for 50 years, but only recently I think a little light has dawned.

In other words, I begin to understand now, in my head, what my ten-year-old Celine-Dion heart understood right from the beginning.

We're talking about the Gothic, the "Gothic" strain in literature and movies -- the spell cast by the Gothic on all who behold it with unveiled face.

What is the Gothic? Quoting The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales: "A Gothic tale will invoke the tyranny of the past (a family curse, the survival of archaic forms of despotism and of superstition) with such weight as stifle the hopes of the present (the liberty of the heroine or hero) within the dead-end of physical incarceration (the dungeon, the locked room, or simply the confinements of a family house closing in upon itself)."

Podcast 19 looks at three of the Gothic tales of Irvin S. Cobb, including the one story of his that is still read today; Ray Russell's tetanus shot of a tale, Sardonicus, together with his lame though harrowing novel "Absolute Power" (which I would not recommend); Roger Corman's delving interpretations of the Edgar Allan Poe cycle; and that masterpiece of Gothic television, "The Guests", from the original The Outer Limits. The latter combines Luana Anders, Jack Kerouac, an Alien Brain, Gloria Grahame, Christianity, and the original Norman Bates house. (It's Perfect, in other words.)

Moreover, what do the fans tell us? What are the millions of fans telling us? And what is the substance of the Gothic saying about us? That is the question.

Podcast 19's answer? Something in the line of 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat'.

To listen click here. To subscribe, here.

BONUS QUOTE: From Michael Moorcock's introduction to his 1996 Tales of Terror and the Supernatural:
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PZ on The Future of Evangelicalism

The most recent issue of Modern Reformation contains an interesting little piece from my father on "The Future of Evangelicalism". Here are a couple choice paragraphs:

The reputation that evangelicals-and I count myself as one-have earned as being "intolerant" and "exclusive," and especially homophobic, seems to have stuck. Many people are convinced that we draw lines and build walls, where they are looking rather for open doors and open minds... I believe that evangelicals have lost the great culture war of the 1990s and early 2000s, and that we are in a shadowy time of defeat and regrouping.

For myself, regrouping means a period of trying to understand what went wrong. We inherited and then took on a "conflict structure" in Christian experience that was ill suited for times when religious conflict is the opposite of what most people want or say they want, especially seekers. Just at a time when the culture was looking for a word of peace and "a little tenderness"-just when just about everybody was asking, "What's so funny about a little peace, love, and understanding?"-we appeared to give them the opposite. We appeared to give them...we did give them! I gave them, if I may say it personally, the odium theologicum of the Thirty Years War. Our inner divisions, anchored in the passing and extremely contentious issues of the day, paraded to the world the antipode of "what the world needs now." Notice this use of pop-song "standards"-Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe, with Otis Redding. The popular tunes of life call for the opposite of what the church has offered. I am myself convicted by the very songs I love.

I believe the answer to our problems is a return to the core of God's grace, the "Old, Old Story of Jesus and His Love," deepened by the Reformation insight of grace in relation to law- though I no longer want to use too much historical language. But Luther especially saw into Paul's teaching and Christ's living with diagnostic brilliant freshness. Luther was, to quote Kierkegaard, a "patient of great importance for Europe." In other words, Luther's grace/law receptor was finely and highly tuned. It gave him a diagnostic allergy to law in its many forms. I wish he were here today. We need people again who are allergic to law as the preached word and go, rather, to the enabling word of Christ's grace, and not just to outsiders but especially to the law-burdened Christian communities we have failed to strengthen and sustain. If I have a "recipe" for these times, it is the gospel of Christ's grace for Christians.

-------------------------

The word "evangelical" is still a good one, if it means justification by grace through faith. It is still a good word if by it is meant the love of God for sinners, or what Jack Kerouac in a poetic vein called "consanguine partiality/ devoid of conditions, free." I still seek, still seek, to tell the Old, Old Story, which means in practice this: judgment kills, love makes alive. I realize that such a formula is quite "reduced" and could use a lot of enhancement; but we are going to have to begin again, our almost Sisyphean evangelical task now, by putting the core of Christ in simple, simple epigrams. Let's sponsor an evangelical Haiku contest! The prize?: A complete set of the Weimar Edition of the works of Luther.

Another Few Weeks End: Hitchens & Galli, OK Go, Shaun White, Big Love and more Elvis

After taking a few weeks off to ponder all things Elvis-related, and to try out a new smaller-but-more-frequent approach to posting, I am returning to the weekly round-up. Mainly in response to the surprising and flattering popular demand (a la EP...?). Regardless, it will probably end up being more of a bi-weekly round-up from here forward. Here goes:

1. Everyone's favorite evangelical atheist, Christopher Hitchens, brings us another blast of what is becoming his trademark 'insightful lack of insight' in Vanity Fair this week, rewriting the 10 Commandments [Warning: considerable language and smugness]. It is truly astonishing - in the same way that his bemoaning the offensiveness of "vicarious redemption" (aka substitutionary atonement) in God Is Not Great ends up underlining exactly what is so powerful and shocking and good about Christianity - here he unintentionally brings out the true purpose of the Law. Hitchens has an uncanny knack for voicing the exact same stale objections that apologists have addressed for centuries (as if he was the first person to think of them - objections which I had always suspected Christians were unfairly charicaturing...), almost as if he were working from a script written by a straw man-happy evangelist, albeit a very witty one. Speaking about the 10th Commandment, he writes:

"This is the first but not the last introduction in the Bible of the totalitarian concept of “thought crime.” You are being told, in effect, not even to think about it. (Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament takes this a step further, announcing that those with lust in their heart have already committed the sin of adultery. In that case, you might as well be hung—or stoned—for a sheep as for a lamb...) Wise lawmakers know that it is a mistake to promulgate legislation that is impossible to obey." You said it, Chris!

On a Hitchens-related note, apparently this is for real... It would appear that these atheist groups have no compunction about sinking to the level of their opponents. Or perhaps they're just playing catch-up? Either way it seems pretty self-defeating [ht JD].

2. On a more positive note, current Mockingbird hero Mark Galli (aka the reason we subscribe to Christianity Today) offers up another of what is becoming his trademark brilliance with "What To Do When You Find Yourself Praying To The Quid Pro Quo God".
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Monday Afternoon Links: Faith & Works & She & Him (plus The Joan-Girl)

1. Run don't walk to Lutheran Theology and read our very own JDK's "A Brief Introduction To Faith And Works". It's a stunning accomplishment and a great "next step" for those of you interested in the theology which informs our perspective. Bravo! One stirring excerpt from the end:

"Only work done in the faith and security of God’s promised mercy towards us is a good work. Period. The seeming ambiguity of this position is profoundly unsettling, because it removes any ability we have to measure our “progress” in the Christian life, takes the ruler of introspection out of our hands and forces our eyes on the Cross. We can neither look to works as meriting our standing before God, nor can we rest in a false distinction between justification and sanctification, as if that helps."

2. 'Adorable' is not a very rock-n-roll kind of word (or attribute). But somehow She & Him make it so... The video for their snappy new single "In The Sun" being a prime example:



3. PZ's "Visions Of The Joan-Girl" appeared yesterday at mardecortesbaja. A profound reflection on a letter that Jack Kerouac wrote to Neal Cassady in 1951 about an experience he had in St Patrick's Cathedral. Among other things, the post touches on the meaning of tears in church (and tears in general). Must read.

Bill Mallonee: If I Should Fall From Grace With God

Bill Mallonee rose to prominence in the 1990s with Vigilantes of Love, an indie rock/alt-country band out of Athens, Georgia. (Their breakout album was Killing Floor, produced by Peter Buck of REM and the amazing Mark Heard.) Paste magazine ranked him #65 in their 100 Greatest Living Songwriters poll. Mallonee’s music is dark, honest, and full of bleeding love. In other words, he is a Christian. That is, he is breathtakingly blunt about the excruciating suffering life entails, and through it all he hangs by his fingernails to the cross. His records should be on the shelves of all Gospel-lovers. I've been a fan for a long time and just want to "share the love."

Many of Mallonee's songs tell biographical stories, also, from lives of people that have been crushed by rejection, the Law, and the weight of existence. Some of his best in that genre are “Eleanor,” about Eleanor Roosevelt; “Skin,” about Vincent Van Gogh; and from his critically-acclaimed release Audible Sigh comes the song “Hard Luck and Heart Attack,” about Jack Kerouac, which includes these lines:

Arms around me if I'm going through the ceiling
Service stations of the cross, yeah the doctors they need healing
Things clear for a moment when you're coming off desolation
Between nothing and the atonement it all bleeds behind your cadence


Can you stand it?! But Mallonee's song, “If I Should Fall From Grace With God,” has captured me recently with its depiction of Romans 7. The lyrics, especially the last two stanzas, speak for themselves. Mallonee recorded the song in his home, and it sounds appropriately raw. From his 2007 Circa, here it is:



I've been sober for nearly forty winks
Beating those odds ain't one of my strengths
When your faith's a beat dog howling chained in some front yard
If I should fall from grace with God

Sonnets of love and Gethsemane carved deep beneath my skin
Hometown gatekeepers didn't like it much so I never did get in
Somewhere between strawberry fields my backyard full of stars
If I should fall from grace with God

Now I have stood in large places, but mostly they've been small
I've ventured into spaces where I shouldn't have been at all
Remove your shoes figuratively this is holy ground we're on
If I should fall from grace with God

Well faith has its thorns 'cause faith she is a rose
You can still smell the scent if you lean in real close
Make them pry it from your hand after you're dead and gone
If I should fall from grace with God

Judas was the traitor, Peter the cowardly man
Which one I most resemble, the thirty pieces the silver in my hand
My eyes were always set on high, the heart so deeply flawed
If I should fall from grace with God

For those in the Pittsburgh area, Mallonee will be playing at St. Stephen’s Church, Sewickley, PA, this coming Wednesday, Feb 18, 2009, at 7 PM. $8 at the door. You can see his tour dates on http://www.billmallonee.net/. You can find his (and Vigilantes of Love) stuff on amazon and iTunes, but you can also buy all his albums (25 and counting, some self-released) at http://www.volsounds.com/.

PS--I highly recommend this article about Mallonee from October's Christianity Today.

THE MOCKINGBIRD SINGS: Pensacola & Good News for People with Big Problems, Plus

1. The Pensacola Mini-Conference is a mere 11 days away! November 19th and 20th are your long-awaited chances to experience Mockingbird in all its physical, um, glory. The theme is "God's Grace When We Need It Most: The Gospel For Hard Times," and we promise it will be more fun than it sounds (you can read the previews of the content here), especially with the Mockingfather himself, Dr. Paul Zahl, speaking! Believe it or not, what we're most looking forward to is PZ's pre-conference seminar on preaching/ministry/life - not that any of us need help with our sermons, of course...!

Register today: The cost for the main event is $65/person, $75 for the preaching/ministry seminar, and combined for the ultra-affordable price of $120. If you'd prefer to pay in person, that's fine, but please email us at info@mbird.com ASAP to save your spot. The ball's in your court... you know what to do.

Oh and after you register, be sure to check out the reports from Dr. Zahl's recent pilgrimage to Paducah here, including some truly astounding pictures of a Presbyterian church in Tennessee built during the (very) short-lived Egyptian Revival. No joke! [FYI, in order to give Pensacola his full attention, the maestro has put PZ's podcast on hiatus until December].

2. The recordings and handouts of the freshly-reworked Mockingbird 101 course, "Good News for People with Big Problems" are now up on our website. Presented by David Zahl during our meetings at Christ Episcopal Church this past Fall, you may listen/download by clicking on the talk titles below. Enjoy:
[CONTINUE READING]

PZ's Picks Of 2008

We asked the very merry Rev. Paul Zahl to contribute a year-end list, and he graciously obliged (Thanks Dad!):

1. Anything by Thornton Wilder, author of “Our Town”. His two novels that are absorbing me right now are "Heaven's My Destination" from 1934 and "The Woman of Andros". I had a most illuminating visit recently with his literary executor and nephew -- Wilder touches important nerves Christianly and contemporarily.

2. Jack Kerouac's notes on religion remain stunningly up to date. Those are worth keeping under your pillow.

3. I am also looking forward COMPLETELY to the Roberto Rossellini television reissues on DVD in January: Cosimo de Medici, Blaise Pascal, and Cartesius -- it's the number one DVD event of the early new year, so far as I am concerned. These were done in the late 60s for Italian television, and are just full of inspiration (I trust) -- and almost no one has ever seen them.

4. Mark Rutherford's (aka William Hale White's) short story on marriage and eternity, entitled "The Sweetness of a Man's Friend" from his very, very last publication, entitled "Last Pages from a Journal". "Sweetness" has a definitely "Our Town" feeling, with a strong Christian feeling and theme.

Oh, and let's not forget "I don't want to be a freak (but I can't help myself)".

Slightly Expanded And Significantly More Organized Conference Book Table List

Here's the full list plus a couple of relevant additions, linked to sites where they can be purchased. Although everything comes highly recommended, this is by no means meant to be a definitive list (stay tuned...). For the sake of newcomers we have divided the non-fiction into three itunes-inspired categories: Basics, Next Steps and Deep Cuts. In other words, the books are organized according to accessibility rather than importance.

NON-FICTION
Basics
1. Alcoholics Anonymous. The Big Book.
3. Manning, Brennan. The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News For the Bedraggled, Beat-up and Burnt Out
3. Martyn, Dorothy. Beyond Deserving: Children, Parents And Responsibility Revisited.
4. Norris, Sean. Judgment And Love. [out-of-print, 2nd edition coming soon!]
5. Paulson, Steven. Luther For Armchair Theologians.
6. Vieth, Gene. The Spirituality Of The Cross: The Way Of The First Evangelicals.
7. Walker, Paul. Sermons From The Cathedral Church Of The Advent.
8. Zahl, Paul. 2000 Years Of Amazing Grace: The Story And Meaning Of The Christian Faith.
9. Zahl, Paul. Who Will Deliver Us? The Present Power Of The Death Of Christ.

Next Steps
1. Allison, C Fitzsimmons. Fear Love And Worship.
2. Allison, C Fitzsimmons. Guilt Anger And God.
3. Barnes, Robert. The Reformation Essays Of Dr. Robert Barnes.
4. Capon, Robert Farrar. Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage And Vindication In The Parables Of Jesus
5. Elert, Werner. Law And Gospel.
6. Forde, Gerhard. On Being A Theologian Of The Cross.
7. Greene-McCreight, Kathryn. Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response To Mental Illness.
8. Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed.
9. Long, Anne. Listening.
10. Luther, Martin. Commentary On Galatians.
11. Luther, Martin. The Bondage Of The Will.
12. Norris, Sean. Two Words Devotional [teaser].
13. Pless, John. Handling The Word Of Truth: Law And Gospel In The Church Today.
14. Rosenbladt, Rod. Christ Alone (Today's Issues).
15. Zahl, Paul. Grace In Practice: A Theology Of Everyday Life.

Deep Cuts
1. Bayer, Oswald. Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation.
2. Forde, Gerhard. A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement and Ecumenism.
3. Forde, Gerhard. The Preached God: Proclamation in Word And Sacrament.
4. Holcomb, Justin. Christian Theologies Of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction.
5. Holl, Karl. The Distinctive Elements in Christianity.
6. Holl, Karl. The Reconstruction Of Morality.
7. Mattes, Mark. The Role Of Justification In Contemporary Theology.
8. Null, Ashley. Thomas Cranmer's Doctrine Of Repentence: Renewing The Power To Love.

FICTION
1. Eliot, T.S. The Cocktail Party.
2. Eliot, T.S. The Family Reunion.
3. Giertz, Bo. The Hammer Of God.
4. Kerouac, Jack. Big Sur.
5. Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce.
6. O'Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories.
7. Tolstoy, Leo. The Great Short Works.
8. Wilder, Thornton. The Collected Short Plays.

MUSIC
1. Brown, Dusty. Dusty Brown.
2. High Street Hymns - High Street Hymns.
3. JAZ. I Played Sports.
4. Mejias, Alex - Alex Mejias.

So... what were we missing? We're especially eager to find more "basics". And did we get the labels right? We're all ears...

Kerouac, Take Three

A final collection of Jack quotes, courtesy of my father:

“Forgive everyone for your own sins”

“Okay I know”

“May I wear Your cross in this world as it is?
No matter what happens, may I wear your cross?”

"Pay increases for prosecutors. Now there's your story --"

“The Book of Pure Truth consists of a bunch of mirrors bound in a volume.”

“The tool said to the fool: ‘Work me!’”

"Wake up Scribe! Pharisee!
OW OH ALL
OFFICIAL SEMINARY"