strange and evolving

My friends and family know that since my toddlerhood, I have rooted feverishly for the University of North Carolina men's basketball team. UNC has perpetually been my favorite squad, even when I attended the University of Memphis. If during my undergraduate days, the U of M (Memphis State in those days) had played UNC in the NCAA tournament, I would have been pleased no matter the outcome, but more fulfilled if Carolina had won. Fortunately--sort of--I never had to face that choice and celebrated with screaming abundance when the Tarheels won the championship in 1982, 1993 and 2005. I felt disappointment in the years "we" did not win, but had an excellent chance to do so, this year being the most recent example (although I'm glad the Heels didn't have to play Florida: the Gators simply had a better team than anyone else in a "all else being equal" head to head matchup and I did not want to see either Carolina or Memphis lose in the Final Four).
Since the end of the tournament this year, however, I have felt strange inklings to--well--rearrange my order of teams. I am, after all, a Memphis graduate and have in the last several years begun to do what I could to help the school in this or that way of concern. I feel more of a personal kinship to Memphis than I do to Chapel Hill and I expect the chance that I may end up living in Memphis someday to be more likely than ever returning to UNC. In a word, 1984 and 1999 (when I graduated and became a member of the Alumni Association respectively) are a lot more recent than 1970 when my family left Chapel Hill. So I feel a logical bent to my inkling, thereby helping to assuage my "inner academic."
Where I'm going here, of course, is to say that I will now unabashedly root first and foremost for my belovedly frustrating University of Memphis Tigers in every sport and UNC second, but only in men's basketball. That has a right feel to it. A note to my friends: you can get off the floor now.

GO TIGERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

New Title

After some thought and more in line with my semi-detachment from politics--not sports--and increasing emphasis on matters theological and literary, I decided to change my blog's name to what you see above. It's a way I can acknowledge both parts of my interests through a reference to the novel that accelerated my moving toward a full-time academic life. In reading Moby-Dick, a near-re-conversion experience took place and I've been "on the road to Galilee" ever since. My geographical reference comes from Mark's resurrection story as the young man in white tells the unnamed followers that the one they seek wants them to tell the (male) disciples to meet him in Galilee. The notion that as disciples, we're on the road still means a lot to me and Melville's novel is a primary way I grapple with what that "trip" and "road" mean.
Needless to say, however, I'll always be attune to sports, especially my belovedly frustrating Memphis Tigers (Joey Dorsey's mouth being the latest example) and the other teams that have captured my allegiance over the years. Nevertheless, where I feel my interests going are an intermixing and dialectical tension (unresolved) between theology and literature. I rather enjoy that.

Scopes and Wind, Part II

I read Inherit the Wind for the first time about twenty years ago, the summer of 1987 I believe. The introduction of my edition indicated that the play's authors--mentioned in the NY Times article I posted earlier--specifically did not write a historical recounting of the Scopes Trial in 1925. They clearly indicated the borrowing of certain exchanges from the trial transcript, but their emphasis--in the 1950s--had to do with the spectre of McCarthyism then engulfing the country.
In other words, the play never was intended to be "history" as much as a commentary on contemporary events through the medium of art. It draws rigidly clear lines of Right and Wrong, portrays characters in overly stark manners and creates too much pathos through Matthew Harrison Brady's death while trying to make the speech defending his principles the day following his losing battle under cross-examination by Henry Drummond. William Jennings Bryan's actual death one week after the trial didn't make for the sort of climactic drama that both stage and screen visualized through the play.

For that matter, except in the most allusive of ways, the play did not refer to Clarence Darrow's defense of Leopold and Loeb--the University of Chicago students who planned in Nietzschean style the "perfect" murder--only a few years before he travelled to Dayton for "The Trial of the Century" (at least before the OJ Simpson disaster). The play also mentioned nothing about John Scopes actually volunteering to be arrested and tried for breaking the Tennessee statute against teaching evolution. In other words, the entire historical episode was designed (intelligently if you will) to create just the sort of confrontation that happened between Darrow and Bryan. The result rested on Darrow's use of Bryan's ego against himself in order to get him away from speech-making (Bryan's best forte) to cross-examination (Darrow's).
None of those complexities, however, have mattered in the 72 years since the trial. None of the biblical, theological, historical (the Civil War played a large, hovering role in the events that led to the trial), social, economic, and cultural factors are explored in the play or, except for sparsely-read books, throughout the culture. Nothing is mentioned about Higher Biblical Criticism and its--more or less--beginnings in 1835 and the efforts by many Christians to accept the new discoveries of science with their proclamation of faith throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Some, but perhaps not many, folks are aware that if Bryan had given his post-examination speech, what he wanted to express was a fear of Social Darwinism that he understood as the logical consequence of evolution and materialism. Even given its performance in the 1950s, the play does not even hint that the historical H. L. Mencken all but advocated racial and social policies in much the same manner as the Nazis did throughout the 30s and 40s. The somewhat apparently awkward choice between defending either a narrow--and idolatrous--biblicism and barely restrained Social Darwinism does not leave one feeling too good about either who "won" or who "lost" at Dayton.

Unfortunately, the image of Darrow reducing Bryan to phrases such as "I don't think about the things I don't think about" is all that most people remember about a very complex series of events and an equally important set of questions. Proclamation of faith, in any manner of which I am aware, is not an easy way to live in an age of technology and--all too common--condescending skepticism. Each manifestation of faith, including secularists, makes various claims of Absolutism with the result of creating suspicion and alienation with people in other proclamations. Much bloviating and little listening takes place; we seem less and less capable of even agreeing to see things differently and, as a former professor of mine interpreted the Abraham and Lot story, to say "you go your way and I'll go mine." What we refuse to recognize is that any claim to Absolutism roots itself in the ambiguities of history, context and circumstance. That does not mean Absolutes aren't somehow "real." I, for one, believe in the Absolute I call God and experience in some way through Jesus of Nazareth. I recognize--at my best--my own context, history and cultural background that shaped my ability to make my profession of faith and subsequent inability to experience the Absolute in any other manifestation. I have Moslem, Buddhist and Christian friends who are much more conservative in their approach than I in mine. I believe God is with them as God is with me.

The American playwright Eugene O'Neill is credited with saying that the search for God rests at the center of life. He did so from the standpoint of a lapsed Roman Catholic and Lord knows he had good reason to be lapsed and to search. I search from the vantage of a "recovering Baptist." Whether my reasons pass muster I don't think matter ultimately. What matters is the search itself.

Scopes and Wind, Part I

I'll have more to write about the play's revival later today. In typical pop-culture fashion, the Yahoo! article doesn't quite replicate the context of either the play itself, the trial, William Jennings Bryan or the biblical account(s) of "creation." Since the overwhelming majority of responsible scholars today posit that Genesis has two creation stories--which was in common understanding, both pro and con, in 1925,--to express controversy about "a" story is to inaccurately relate what actually was heppening in Dayton or, for that matter, in the 1950s when the play first saw production. As I say, however, more later today--

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A revival of a major Broadway play that tackles the U.S. debate over Darwin's theory of evolution is more topical now than when it was first staged more than 50 years ago. ...
"Inherit The Wind" pits Charles Darwin's theory of evolution against the biblical account of creation. It is the fictional account of the 1925 Scopes Trial, otherwise known as the "monkey trial," where science teacher John Scopes was tried and convicted in Tennessee for teaching evolution.
The play's Tony Award-winning director, Doug Hughes, citing efforts in recent years to weaken the teaching of evolution in public schools in such states as Kansas, Pennsylvania and Georgia, said the work had more relevance today than when it first opened in 1955.
"The idea that 50 or more years later there is more controversy about its teaching than there may have been in '55 ... is amazing," said Hughes.
The play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee was written in response to McCarthyism -- the post-World War Two era of anti-communist fervor and investigations.
"The plot, the gizmo, of this play is actually aligned pretty closely with what is currently going on in the body politic," Hughes said.
The play was adapted into a 1960 movie of the same name, starring Spencer Tracy and
Fredric March' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> Fredric March.
Reviews of the latest revival were generally positive and hailed
Christopher Plummer' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> Christopher Plummer's performance. Most noted the timing of the play's subject matter, including a chilling line uttered by Plummer: "You don't suppose this kind of thing is ever finished, do you?"
New York Times critic Ben Brantley noted that "while the subject of teaching evolution and religion in public schools is even more topical" than when it was first staged, "Mr. Plummer at play is something sacred."
AN AMERICAN DEBATE
The play, which opened on Thursday, shows what is an inherently American debate between biblical and secular thought, Hughes said.
"Fundamental belief seems to be very important to us in America. We are among the most religious countries on earth, he said.
"And yet our democracy is founded on an extremely secular document, the United States Constitution, and therein lies the paradox -- how do you square those two things?"
In the play, Plummer and
Brian Dennehy' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> Brian Dennehy play characters based on the real-life opposing attorneys during the Scopes trial, which pitted famed civil liberties lawyer Clarence Darrow against the politician and devout Presbyterian William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic Party nominee for president.
Hughes said the play did not support either side of the debate, recently reignited through a theory called "intelligent design." It argues the variety of living things on Earth is so complex that an intelligent force, which some say is God, must have been responsible.
He predicted the outrage felt by some people that humans could have descended from a "lower order of animals" rather than being "divinely ordained" would persist and could be traced to the Puritans who colonized parts of the United States.
"I don't expect in my lifetime to see unanimity about Darwin's theory or the biblical account of creation," he said.

Stumbling Toward What is

A cousin recently asked why, if relatively few people read what I write here, I spend the time to compose my thoughts. That's a good question, one about which I have thought some since my cousin and I spoke. Frankly, if "blogs" didn't exist, I wouldn't bother to keep a diary, even though I did as a teenager thirty years ago. I also continue to believe that technologies such as "blogs" provide convenience, but we as people have turned them into indispensable idols that give "centering" shape to our existence. In other words, I doubt "blogs" and cell phones and satellite television and those combination computer, email, address and phone book things that my friend Jaymeson showed me do more good than harm. We as people have, I think, thought very little about the price we are paying--and it's increasing by the megabyte--to have these myriad of conveniences, toys and highly advanced playthings.
I suppose that's one reason I write. By using these forms of technology, I can raise questions about them, if only for my own final satisfaction. I am always reminded of Spencer Tracy's major speech during Inherit the Wind about how much we are willing to relinquish to gain what we say we want. All one has to do is update his references and the point becomes immediately relevant. Asking those questions, of course, is not what most people want to do. We all seek security, absolutes and certitude in a world that by its nature offers none. Faith in something beyond ourselves provides access to what most traditions call--in one way or another--the Absolute, but we only experience that in ambiguous, clouded and fleeting ways. Our experience, most traditions say, does not mean we have, as it were, the Keys to the Sanctum Sanctorum. So no matter the issue, be it technology, faith or literary criticism, I feel led to ask questions, read provocatively and admit my lack of final understanding. In writing, reading, thinking and grasping toward being fully human, every once in a while, I'll stumble toward that which I seek.

since my last posting

About ten days ago, I tried to post some thoughts on Shakespeare from his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, but lost them in some sort of cyber mishap. Since then, I have seen Coriolanus-one of his "Roman" plays along with Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra--at the Royal Theatre in Stratford, visited a friend in Northern Ireland and am now heading into my last period of time in Galway.
I've also managed to get some reading finished, mostly about American Naturalism at the turn of the 20th Century, which I find infinitely fascinating and enriching. I'm not really an afficiando to some of the ways in which literary criticism has gone since--I think--certain parts of the academy reached the conclusion that universities are "businesses"--abut 30 years ago, I think--and any department or field of study that does not make a profit somehow is automatically suspect. That being said, I don't think a given work of fiction or drama (loosely, literature) can be read apart from its immediate historical, political, economic and theological context any more than I think the any part of the Bible can be read apart from those same influences. My academic education at Vanderbilt Divinity School helped me to understand that and it's a logical bridge to literature. What issues I tend to have, however, relate more to what the premises of a given critical school and, less clearly, what lengths its adherents are willing to go to implement their ideas. My cultural education at Vanderbilt Divinity School taught me to ask those questions.
Context matters: that's my starting point for reading a given work of literature. Context matters, at the same time, in how it stands in tension with the text being read and discussed. Using a text to make some claim about the critic's school of thought, however, is where my problems begin. To do so uses a text--say King Lear or O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night--for purposes other than what the play or novel or short story addresses in its own context. Such forms of criticism adapt the text for a specific agenda, usually having something to so with "radical politics" as defined by the given critic. Questions about the outcome of such "radical politics" tend to be dismissed or swept aside with bromides like one offered by my systemtic theology professor at Vanderbilt in the fall of 1987: once "liberation" occurs, "everything else will take care of itself."
My professor's context rooted itself in his "Hegelian-Marxist" reading of Christian theology vis a vis the politically-rooted theological movements of Latin America and various expressions of particularization throughout the United States. My professor believed, I think, that once liberation took place (he didn't say how it would take place, as I recall), human beings would somehow stop the behaviors which have defined our existence since we crawled out of the mud however many millions of years ago. I tried to ask "What happens next?," in an effort to get him to describe a society where "everything else will take care of itself." He smiled--condescendingly--and didn't answer my question. His lack of an answer was, of course, his answer in that he had none. From my experience these--wow--20 years later wth literary critics who espouse one form or another of "radical politics," they seem to have almost no answers apart from a designation that capitalism is the great evil in the post-modern world and somehow if we as humans divide ourselves into particularities of experience, we will somehow keep ourselves from doing to one another what we have done since we crawled out of the mud however many millions of years ago (repetition intended).
As a "card-carrying member of the religious left,"--as one of my current professors called me and God bless him--I certainly believe capitalism has more than its share of problems. My father grew up in near-poverty as the son of a sharecropper in Depression-era Missouri and his father worked sometimes three jobs to put food on the table (being white didn't hurt as Dad came later to understand). Wealth distribution is a terrible problem, especially when a few seem to live in conspicuous consumption while billions seem to be without adequate drinking water--never mind anything else. The biblical prophets from Amos and Hosea onward spoke loudly, clearly and with the power of God to the rampant inequalities that existed around them. Jesus from Nazareth, as the Gospels imply, didn't spend his time consorting with the powerful, but those who lived on the edge of starvation, exclusion and hopelessness. Capitalism is inadequate as a system.
To call for "radical--something beyond capitalism--politics," however, without offering specific policy solutions is for these current critics to express the same "defiant optimism" as my theology professor did, also quoting him from 1987. Both literary critics today and my professor then, in other words, were willing to propose next to nothing in the face of, as Reinhold Niebuhr reminds us, "what every page of human history attests" (paraphrase from The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness). Human will behave better, these people appear to say. The twentieth century not withstanding--or the previous 30 for that matter--surely with radical social change inspired by the right readings and inspired action of literature, history and theology, all will become well. I would, rather, continue to raise, hoist and waive the flags of caution, relying upon what has happened and that almost no one denies (these folks rationalize, but usually don't deny). That reliance tells me that how we humans have behaved is--with very, very few exceptions--how we will always behave and that is not a pretty picture. Capitalism, I am led to argue, becomes neither the problem nor the solution. Human beings are both the problem and the potentially mitigating force of solution.
Somehow, as you might have surmised, literature got lost in all of this. That's a good part of my point too.

Ireland thus far

I arrived in Ireland two weeks ago Saturday morning about 7 here, more or less 1 Central Standard Time. Thus far, I've read a lot, walked a lot, worshipped in a church dedicated in 1382, visited Kylemore Abbey at Connemara and seen the Atlantic Ocean from Galway Bay. The weather has mostly been cooperative and I found a comfortable place to live during my stay. Next Tuesday, I take the train to Dublin to see the Irish Museum and hopefuly catch a play of some sort--I'm hoping for Shakespeare.
What strikes me primarily is how the Irish economy is growing. Building is going on everywhere and people walk the streets, "mobile" phone in hand, apparently conducting business transactions or something vitally important--to them anyway. The level of sheer movement reminds of an Obi Wan Kenobi line about Anakin Skywalker in Episode III: "Always on the move." I felt rather foolish in not knowing about what folks have come to call "The Celtic Tiger." It's roaring and evidently has been so since the early 1990s.
The people I've encountered are courteous, helpful and tolerant of my undoubted "American" ways, including my accent (which I'm hoping isn't as pronounced as I fear it is). When I ordered an "Irish coffee without the whiskey" last night, however, I thought the waitress was going to call the Mental Hospital or at least recommend me for psychological observation. I have enjoyed, in any case, seeing Diet Cokes dispensed in bottles, even if they are of the 6 ounce variety.
I realize as well--I think anyway--that Irish people by and large do not eat as much as Americans. I'm not saying, of course, that everyone here is thin and within their recommended weight range, but the size of a given serving coupled with the walking everyone seems to do seems to equate with my general observation of more people being proportionate than otherwise. I've noticed myself thinning somewhat, which is a good result of eating, walking and drinking water, coffee and Diet Coke in fairly large quantities.
I'll be here for several more weeks with trips to Germany and England (Coriolanus in Stratford on March 2--if I can keep from levitating onto the stage!!) planned before my return home. I notice that North Carolina's men team is--well--rather good. It's good to know that some things never change.

check out my friend's blog and our latest discussion

I'm going to try and cut, then paste it, but in case I can't figure it out, check out the latest exchange between my friend "LeftWingCracker" and me on his blog. He can be reached at www.leftwingcracker.blogspot.com . The issue presently is about President Ford's passing and, most specifically, the impact of his pardon of President Nixon. Since "the Cracker" and I have been friends for 23 years, we don't hold much back. I don't think you'll be bored, even as we engage in a bit of "LBJ-esque" language. Here goes--

On the passing of Gerald Ford.
While everyone lionizes the 38th (and only UNELECTED) President, I am going to be slightly less praising of him.To be sure, he was a nice guy, and, like the Rude Pundit says, Gerald Ford WASN'T bugfuck insane, something we haven't been able to say about a Republican President in a LONG time. He seemed average and unassuming, which are good qualities to have in a President, especially when you're succeeding the Worst President in History (remember, neither Reagan nor the Bushes had come along yet).Yet, Gerald Ford (the man who would rather have been House Speaker) will always be judged for the fact that he pardoned Nixon. Most of the Beltway Blatherers laud Ford for "putting this behind us so the country could move forward."BULLSHIT.The fact that Nixon never had to face an American jury is what allowed the Iran-Contra traitors to be pardoned by 41, and may allow 43, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld to avoid the war-crimes trials they so richly deserve. It set a horrible precedent, and deserves condemnation over 30 years after the fact. Would it have torn the country apart? Well, the response to that is this: how much more COULD it have been torn apart?Steve Gilliard says this today about that:1975 was a difficult year. The US military was dysfunctional, American society was shattered, there was a real question if the US could have survived the trial of Richard Nixon for his various crimes.Once he had slunk off, to everyone's relief, there was no great appetite for punishment among Congress.But, by pardoning Nixon, he helped save the GOP, by not exposing the criminal nature of that enterprise. It was allowed to reform as a right wing party, catering to small business and backwoods rednecks. The Dems never really pressed the advantage they could have had by exposing Nixon and his crimes.Read the rest of it, it's terrific.Also, think how much we could have avoided if Nixon had been tried and convicted:No Reagan or EITHER Bush.Perhaps the implosion of the Southern Strategy before it went any further than it did.Folks, if there IS a God, Gerald Ford is doing a LOT of explaining right now.UPDATE: Jeff has EVEN MORE that I had forgotten about at the Pesky Fly!
Posted by LeftWingCracker at 5:12 PM Permalink Comments
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The comments are where we "go at it." I'd also recommend "the Cracker" for other postings about Memphis, Tennessee and periodic entries about sports.