Ecclesiastical Exceptionalism

Shortly before I was awarded my Master of Divinity degree, a professor who was relatively popular with the students renounced the jurisdiction of the Presbyterian Church in America in order to avoid disciplinary charges being filed against him, a move which (sadly) I've seen repeated on a number of occasions. At the time, a graduated friend of mine said that while I might not like that action, it was to be expected when the Church is merely a voluntary association. I replied that in a presbyterian understanding of the Church, there's nothing voluntary about Church membership: every believer must be, by definition, a Church member.

James R. Rogers makes a similar point in "Ecclesiastical Exceptionalism," noting that baptism unites us as irrevocably to other Christians as it does to God. Thus, we should not view the Church as a voluntary association because "If the Church is no more than a spiritual version of the Rotary Club, then it is no more than another avenue for our self-expression and self-interest."

Men contemplating the Gospel ministry should ask what they would do should the brethren judge their teaching to be out of accord with the system of doctrine taught in the Scriptures. If their impulse would be to renounce their present communion's jurisdiction, they might well wonder whose interests they hold closest to their hearts.

He had a rock & roll heart

Since working my way through "R" during my project of converting audio cassettes to mp3s, I've been trying to figure out how to write about Lou Reed, and now he's dead.

I was captivated by New York when I was in college, a work of social commentary which nailed the cultural vacuity and hypocrisy of the late 80s with scathing clarity and humor. Lou Reed, very simply, was rock and roll: a viciously skillful guitarist, an astonishingly insightful lyricist, and unapologetically self-destructive. Frankly, I'm surprised he made it to 71.

What makes it hard to write about Lou Reed is the stunning variety of his output, some of which is deliberately offensive and off-putting, some boringly sentimental, some listenable only by masochists, and some mind-bogglingly brilliant. I've read a lot of Lou Reed criticism, and I've concluded much of it misses the mark because it confuses his anger for cynicism. That's not the case at all. Lou Reed was absolutely sincere at all times. Even Metal Machine Music, which I am not ashamed to say I hate, was no joke; one doesn't return to a joke thirty years later and form a touring trio to revisit and rework its themes.

The type of anger of which Lou Reed was capable is very specific: it's the outrage of disappointment in a world which consistently refuses to live up to one's romantic expectations. Lou Reed loved extravagantly: his most well-known song, Walk on the Wild Side, finds the human beauty in the lives of tragically self-destructive people. My favorite album is Magic and Loss, in which he explores cancer, grief, and loss and responds the only way he can: with the impotent and eloquent rage of Warrior King. In that album, and in that song particularly, he expressed what it is to live in a world which should have been all that God created it to be but instead is horrifically fallen and broken because of our sin.

Lou Reed was Rock and Roll Heart just as much as he was Metal Machine Music. He never got the Gospel, but he helped me remember why I do.

for Apple geeks

Some of us have been using Apple products since way back when they made computers exclusively. Mac OS fans know the iterations of OS X have, until now, been nicknamed after large cats (ex, "Lion,"  "Leopard," etc). Having run out of notable examples of these, Apple has now moved on to California locales, beginning with a beach called "Mavericks." Seriously.

The indispensable The Unofficial Apple Weblog has some helpful naming suggestions for upcoming releases here. Well worth checking out, even if you're still using Windows 95.

The Most Deserving

The Most Deserving, by Catherine Trieschmann, receives its world premiere by the Denver Center Theatre Company (at the Ricketson Theatre through November 17), but I'm not sure why. It's described thusly in DCTC promotional material:

A small town arts council has $20,000 to award to a local artist with an “under-represented American voice.” Should they choose the teacher/painter of modest talent or the self-taught artist who creates religious figures out of trash? This comedy explores how gossip, politics and opinions of art can decide who is the most deserving.

Comedy is a marvelous form for social commentary, which one hopes The Most Deserving might be. At least, that's what I and Theatre Companion hoped, but while that appeared to be what the first act was setting up, the second act descended into a farce, in which almost all the characters abandoned correspondence to real human motivation and emotion and instead just acted as silly as possible. Granted, it was funny, but not as funny as a truly dedicated farce can be. 

The playwright's choice to move into a farce also destroyed any possibility of social commentary. For example, the play builds to a vote on the recipient of the $20,000 award; however, by the time the vote comes, the characters' plausibility has been so degraded that their votes are incomprehensible. The actors all handed in competent performances and demonstrated good sense for comic timing; the evening passed quickly and was entertaining; but in the end, the play has no point.

Why? This is the United States of America, with more MFA programs and budding playwrights than I can count. Not very many new works get produced, relatively speaking. Is this the best the DCTC could find? Live theater is not only expensive to attend, it's expensive to produce. I wish the DCTC had found a play which aimed to do more than merely make a couple hours pass by.

So vain a presumption

Because we live in an age in which theological liberalism has overtaken much of the academy, one frequently reads comments on Scripture in which the commenter disparages not only the authority, but even the education, of Biblical writers. For example, New Testament uses of Old Testament texts are often criticized for failing to properly understand said OT text. 

In John Owen's day, theological liberalism was unknown, but many of its arguments were deployed by those who challenged the place of the Letter to the Hebrews in the Biblical canon. Against them, he wrote,

[I]t may much more rationally be supposed, that though we all know enough of the mind and will of God in the whole Scripture to guide and regulate our faith and obedience, yet that we are rather ignorant of his utmost intention in any place than that we know it in all. There is a depth and breadth in every word of God, because his, which we are not able to fathom and compass to the utmost; it being enough for us that we may infallibly apprehend so much of his mind and will as is indispensably necessary for us to the obedience that he requires at our hands. …That objection, then, must needs be very weak whose fundamental strength consists in so vain a presumption.

(from An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews (first published in 1668), vol. 17 of The Works of John Owen, Banner of Truth Trust 1991 reprint, p. 40; emphases original)

Before it's too late

Four months after its July 12 release, Pacific Rim is still playing at the Denver-area cheap theatres, which means there's not much time left to see it on the big screen. And let us be clear: you must see this movie on as big a screen as possible. Yes, the dynamism, charisma, and sheer bravura force of Idris Elba as the most intimidating commanding officer since Patton might carry over to your television set, but this is a movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters. That, my friends, requires a giant screen.

To paraphrase Ralph J. Gleason's comments from the Bitches Brew liner notes (you all have read the liner notes to Miles Davis' legendary double album Bitches Brew, yes?): there may be greater giant robots fighting giant monsters movies in the future, but from here on out, any giant robots fighting giant monsters movie has to go around Pacific Rim to get in front of Pacific Rim.

Guillermo Del Toro is some kind of genius. Seriously.

Just Like Us

Just Like Us is receiving its world premiere by the Denver Center Theatre Company (through November 3 at the Stage Theatre), but I have a hard time imagining it will be produced again (except perhaps by a company of very, very earnest high school students). Though competent as a play and as a production, it fails artistically because of its political orientation, and politically because of a deadly artistic choice.

Just Like Us is an adaptation of Helen Thorpe's book of the same name, and tells the true story of four young women in Denver from high school prom through college graduation. The parents of all four are Mexican immigrants of dubious legal status; two of the girls are legal residents and the other two do not "have papers" (a regular refrain in the show). We're told at the beginning (and in the publicity material) that their different statuses lead to divergent lives, but it's hard to see how that's the case: all four graduate from extremely respectable local universities. The divergence is not in outcome, but in experience, as the two "illegals" go through much more anxiety along their academic journey.

As a resident of metropolitan Denver throughout the period covered by the play, I was naturally struck by references to various events and locations. (One very strange note: three of the young women matriculate at the University of Denver, and the other at Regis University. With that, the fourth drops out entirely until the final scene, without any explanation whatsoever, as though she had moved to Boston. Seriously? The schools are 10 miles apart and maybe a 30 minute drive.) I could barely remember a number of local controversies which loomed large in the protagonists' lives, which very much illustrated the different worlds we respectively inhabit.

Just Like Us is an advocacy piece, arguing that the legal status of all migrant workers in this county should be regularized. It attempts to give opposing views a voice (Tom Tancredo actually appears as a character!). However, all these moments are bracketed, and not so subtly invalidated, by arguments from the show's dominant perspective. As an old-fashioned populist and humanist, I happen to agree with this point of view, at least in broad outline. However, political sympathy cannot excuse emotionally and intellectually manipulative moves in a work of art. Humanism demands that people be presented and treated with integrity as human beings, even if they happen to hold what one deems incorrect policy positions.

  In that regard, the play takes an ensemble approach which does not flesh out many of the characters; with annoying frequency, the actors are called on to make public policy statements (very) thinly disguised as dialogue. The exception is Marisela (in a standout performance by Yunuen Pardo), whose experience dominates and anchors the entire show. Less successful is Helen Thorpe, the journalist who documented this story in newspapers, radio, and ultimately a book. As a stage character, Helen Thorpe is the narrator who explains the Mexican immigrant community and experience to the audience. Mary Bacon does not quite bring Helen to life, but this failing lies more with the script than the actor. She is given very few moments of genuine human interaction, and instead has to deliver long chunks of journalistic exposition directly to the audience.

This brings us to Just Like Us's major artistic failing. It purports to give a voice to young illegal immigrants of color and notable accent, but its dominant voice is white and unaccented. Given that theatre tickets run from $50-60, playwright Karen Zacarías may have felt her audience would need a guide to an alien world of poverty and ranchero nightclubs. To Zacarías's credit, a closing scene has Marisela confront Helen over the latter's judgment of the former's choices and whether she had become properly "American." However, this scene does not exculpate all that comes before, as the audience was never given unmediated access to the lives of Marisela, her family and friends.

In the end, Just Like Us falls into the same soft paternalism of Mississippi Burning and The Help. Instead of inviting white, (often upper-) middle-class audiences to enter a truly different world, it reassures them that, so long as they vote in the correct way and give to appropriate causes, they (unlike less enlightened white people) are true friends to the oppressed and downtrodden. The character of Helen Thorpe may have been challenged, but the affluent audience was comforted.

Not to become overly theological, but this is the ultimate end of a humanism unmoored from its Christian roots. In the Incarnation, our Lord identified with those beneath him, with a people oppressed and downtrodden by sin and death. Liberalism unwilling to acknowledge, let alone submit to and imitate, the Incarnation cannot remain genuinely humanistic for long.

This just got real, people

As reported throughout the interweb and other, less-traditional news sources today, the federal government partial shutdown has led to the complete shutdown of the process by which new beers are approved for sale across state lines. This means spring seasonals might not make it to stores in time to replace sold-out stocks of winter seasonals.

On second thought, perhaps this less a disaster than an excuse for me to remain firmly ensconced here at home, where I will still be able to visit and partake from the fresh stock of our great state's nearly-infinite number of craft breweries. 'Tis a privilege to live in Colorado!

Pumpkin beer

Today I used the expression "Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it." It's a favorite, one I picked up from two good friends, entirely unacquainted with one another but united in their distaste for pumpkin pie, aginst which they enjoyed deploying said aphorism. But I love pumpkin pie (preferrably topped with vast quantities of whipped cream), and I'm mighty fond of pumpkin beers.

I write as I finish off a bomber of Dry Dock's Imperial Pumpkin Ale, and as with most everything produced by the Pride of Aurora, Colorado, it's mighty tasty. It's got a much higher ABV and maple notes than my more ginger ale-style pumpkin favorite, Shipyard's Pumpkinhead, but at the moment I am more than slightly happy.

My question: does this make me some kind of lightweight beer dilettante sissy, or an adventurous sophisticate?

Death of a Salesman

Attention must be paid.

In the program notes for the Denver Center Theatre Company's production of Death of a Salesman (through October 20 in the Space Theatre), Dan Sullivan suggests that putting Arthur Miller's signature work on a pedestal is to disrespect it because he fears that when a play is a classic, callow youth will not take interest or pay attention. Perhaps Mr. Sullivan has been in the criticism game a little too long, as he seems to have forgotten that callow youth are not to be catered to by serious artists, or by critics who are judging a work's place in the canon. And in the canon of 20th century American theatre, Death of a Salesman stands astride the earth as a colossus (a metaphor I deploy with full knowledge of its irony). If callow youth choose not to pay attention, it's their loss.

Watching the DCTC production last week, I had a hard time judging the quality of the production. Dustin Hoffman is my generation's Willy Loman, and I never quite adjusted my expectations to Mike Hartman's lanky figure; which is not to say his performance was lacking. With the rest of the cast, he hit all the notes just right. I want to say the script is so perfect it couldn't be botched up, but anyone who's spent more than one evening at the theatre knows that anything can be ruined by a sufficiently dedicated incompetent. Linda Klein was a fine Linda, but John Hutton was notable for the gravity he brought to the mythic figure of Willy's older brother Ben. As Biff, John Patrick Hayden anchored the second act with a compelling distress which never descended into hysteria. Attention must also be paid to Michael Santo's pitch-perfect rendition of Charley.

Speaking of the second act, Theatre Companion and I could not help noticing murmuring among the audience as certain members realized Willy Loman's suicide was imminent. Seriously? What adult who can afford to buy a ticket to a professional production doesn't know how Death of a Salesman turns out? Because Dan Sullivan notwithstanding, it is a classic, one to which callow youth do well to pay attention. I was as callow as they come when I watched Dustin Hoffman's Willy struggle with John Malkovich's Biff back in 1985, but I was profoundly affected. It's probably been a couple decades since I last visited the script, so I was pleasantly surprised by the dialogue's naturalism and versimilitude. One of the benefits of live theatre is the ear catches things the eye misses when reading a script, and I was struck by how many characters call Willy Loman "kid" in the second act (always in a completely unaffected manner), one of Miller's more suble indicators of Willy's diminishment in the world around him. Of course, that easy facility with dialogue and subtext is part of the reason this is a classic: plenty of self-conscious serious works have failed to leave any impression because they failed to capture any sense of real human beings living real lives.

I love Death of a Salesman for many of the reasons which make it such a landmark in the canon. I love Arthur Miller for sticking it to Aristotle and all the other hide-bound traditionalists by making a man of common birth ("Loman" ["low man"] being a fairly obvious indicator) a tragic hero. Now that I am not such a youth (my callowness being a subject for discussion at a date to be indefinitely postponed), this reacquaintance caused me to reconsider the nature of Willy Loman's tragedy. I used to think Miller was telling us to pay attention to the common man, the low man who had led a life of productive work even if he had nothing to show for it at its end. I used to think Willy Loman was a tragic victim of the capitalist system and employers indifferent to a lifetime of service.

Now, deep in the throes of middle age, I realize Arthur Miller is a far better playwright than that. Willy Loman is a fool, a man who claims to be well-liked but knows he is not, a man who claims a noble character for himself and his sons which is radically at odds with the petty one he has created, a self-proclaimed family man who cheats on his wife and consequently crushes the spirit and all the youthful potential of his eldest son. Willy Loman does not fall victim to invincible and cruelly indifferent external forces: he boxes himself into his ignoble end by a lifetime of ignoble choices.

Arthur Miller recognizes this hubris for what it is, and tells us this, therefore, is a tragic hero, to whom attention must be paid. Miller reminds me, once again,  why I love the stage and the screen and books, and also of the necessity of the humanities. The humanities, especially the arts, are necessary because they recall to our attention the human, the human person before us. Willy Loman cannot be admired or held up for imitation, but he is a human being. As such, he has an inherent dignity: although he doesn't know it, he bears the image of his Creator and, for that reason alone, is worthy of a major play and is worthy of our attention.

Attention must be paid to such a man. To not pay attention is to deny our humanity and, perhaps, to deny our faith.

Thanks, public radio!

Not content to allow KUVO to be the only local public radio station wooing the Presbyterian Curmudgeon with grand prizes, Colorado Public Radio awarded me two tickets to all the shows in the Denver Center Theatre Company's 2013-14 season. That works out to ten, and other than A Christmas Carol (to which I will send the curmudgelings in my stead as I simply cannot bear another production of "this holiday favorite"), I hope to offer at least a cursory review of each in this space. Live theater is prohibitively expensive on a pastor's salary, and I don't want to let this marvelous providence go unappreciated or under-exploited.

No Happy Harmony

This month, First Things offers for free "No Happy Harmony," in which Elizabeth Corey offers a deep and much-needed insight for our time. Career success requires focus on the self and a pursuit of excellence, while parenting requires focus on the other, namely one's children. I say "parenting" rather than "mothering" because, while motherhood is Corey's interest in this essay, I think her insight also gives us men something to consider as we negotiate those two aspects of our lives. This piece gets to the heart of the matter better than anything else I can remember reading, and with admirable brevity and clarity.

So that You, by His Poverty

My essay "So that You, by His Poverty" appears on the Stewardship page in this month's New Horizons in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. (Note: you'll have to download the entire issue in order to read my essay. But it's free, and you might find some other items of interest.)

I guess they weren't kidding about the end being nigh

The U.S. federal government "shutdown" has meant the National Zoo's pandacam has been turned off.

Oh, tempora! Oh, mores!

(I was, however, able to stock up on stamps this morning, as a measure against a possible price hike. I love the post office.)