And he spoke to them in parables…

On Twitter, I started drawing analogies to the global financial system and then realized that it would be easy to adapt many of Jesus’ parables to reflect contemporary economic realities. For instance:

• The global financial system is like a man who found a pearl in a field. He took out a loan, bought the field, sold the pearl, and skipped town.
• The global financial system is like a woman who cleans her whole house looking for her lost coin, then her house gets repossessed.
• The global financial system is like a shepherd who leaves behind 99 sheep to find one lost sheep, so he can sue it.
• The global financial system is like if the Prodigal Son’s father hired him and gave him a payday loan to help him get back on his feet.

Alex suggested I post them here, which has the benefit of preserving them for posterity and also allowing us to ponder other parables that can be adapted at greater length. Let us make such attempts in comments, dear readers!

Brainstorming on creepiness

My current running joke is that I’m going to complete my pop culture trilogy by following up on Awkwardness and Why We Love Sociopaths with a volume on creepiness. Surely this means that I will wind up writing it eventually, as I seem to be doomed to be taken in by my own jokes. (A sidenote — I have another running joke about how I should write a book entitled Bonhoeffer: A Religionless Interpretation. That will be fun.)

The concept of creepiness is less clear to me than either awkwardness or sociopathy, however, and so I have made it a point to try to talk it through with various audiences. In one conversation, we focused on the way creepiness focuses on a certain bodily excess, starting with the classical figure of the “nerd,” with his exaggerated glasses, ill-fitting clothing, bizarre posture, bad skin, etc. We then moved on to the classic SNL character “Pat,” whose ambiguous gender was a paradoxical way of highlighting his or her bodily existence, making us obsessed with Pat’s genitals precisely by hiding them so completely.

On another occasion, the focus was on comedy in the Andy Kaufman vein and the various creepy Adult Swim shows (above all Tim and Eric’s work). Here there was a sense that they exceed awkwardness because they may or may not be aware of the inappropriateness of what they’re doing — i.e., they might actually be insane.

In a more recent discussion, the paradigm was rather the creepy guy who falsely believes himself to be a seducer. There was also the question of whether women could be properly creepy in this category, and we wondered if the proverbial “cougar” is the exception that proves the rule — a woman turned creepy by being masculinized.

So I’m sure that you all will have completely different ideas as well.

Virtue, the way of the world, and contemporary theology

I’ve been working my way through Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit this summer, and perversely enough I’ve been enjoying it — although the details can be totally opaque, I feel I have a better grasp on the overall movement this time, and it’s interesting to see how the more famous passages (master-slave, the Antigone part, etc.), which are often referred to as set-pieces, fit into the work as a whole. Particularly gratifying are the passages where he actually descends into recognizable human language, such as this bit from “Virtue and the Way of the World” (quoted from Pinkard’s translation), which I believe has some bearing on many debates that have occurred in the theological blogosphere:

“Household Apples”: A Reading

It’s a scandalous to admit and weird to think that it has only been roughly a year since I first discovered how much I adore the fiction of William H. Gass. A glance through the archives of AUFS will show a solitary, fairly short post written about his first novel, Omensetter’s Luck, which doesn’t nearly do adequate justice to the impact his writing has had on me the past year. Friends will testify to the incessant emails and IMs sent to them whose only content, without benefit or hindrance of context or commentary, is a quote of his, sometimes just a phrase, that for one reason or a million pricked my ear. Gass is famous for doing a lot of “pomo” gestures in his writing, especially with regard to the visual elements of the page–how text is laid out, erratic font changes, etc.–but for me, the visual element is subordinate to the aural. His prose has a musical quality to it that I’m not entirely sure I have the tools adequately to describe.

Tonight I finally got around to finishing his short story collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. At some point, I may get around to writing something about the collection. (Or perhaps if one or two of you are interested, we might set up a format by which we can discuss the stories for all the blogosphere to see.) For now, though, I thought I might share a bit of this aural element as a kind of experiment: to see, that is, if it translates, or if it is “just me.” Upon reading for the first time this passage from the collection’s title essay, in a section labelled, “Household Apples,” I immediately raced to the living room, muted the television, and begged my wife to listen as I read it a second. Still wishing to read it again, a third time, I scrambled for the phone so that I might this time record myself. This is all quite self-indulgent, I know, pretentious even, but so be it. I delight in the fact that the reading below, effectively the fourth of the evening, this time might be for you. [Here's a MP3 if for some reason you'd prefer a download.]

A thought on pedophile scares

It is undisputable that the greatest danger of child abuse comes from people the child knows and trusts — their father first of all, but also close relatives or authority figures. Although abduction and abuse by a stranger is a horrible tragedy, it happens very rarely. Thus it seems clear to me that efforts to target pedophile strangers — such as sex offender registries, or the more recent program in New York City whereby you can be ticketed if you’re near a playground unaccompanied by a child — are disproportionate.

Even worse, however, they put the child at even more danger of family abuse, as it has the effect of turning the family unit into a kind of fortress.

Yet another post on The Tree of Life

The reference to Job is obvious and to the point. I’d suggest an additional inspiration, however: Augustine’s Confessions. It fits amazingly, even down to the commentary on Genesis. Maybe we can talk it out.

Nazism as Misconceived Anti-Capitalism

I have already highlighted an article on Nazism and anti-Semitism by Moishe Postone that Voyou has linked to. Postone first came to my attention due to the extensive passages in Living in the End Times in which Zizek engages with his work, and this article convinces me that I definitely need to take a closer look. In it, Postone argues that we need to view Nazism as a kind of misconceived rebellion against capitalism, in which anti-Semitic ideology plays a determinate functional role. The whole piece is definitely worth reading, but I want to highlight one portion that particularly struck me.

Review of Lars Iyer’s Spurious

While reading Lars Iyer’s recently released novel Spurious I had the curious feeling that he had somehow hacked my Gmail account and read the by-now-countless conversations I’ve had with my closest friends. My suspicion is, considering you lot keep coming around here, where posts untold were first given life in and left germs all over our respective chat archives, that if given the chance you’ll find Iyer cribbing from your conversations as well.

As with Beckett and Bernhard before him, nobody will be fooled by the apparent simplicity of Spurious. Two men, both reasonably intelligent academics, talk. And that is it, really. They talk on trains, on the phone, at the pub. There is talk of action, but no action as such. Well, no, that’s not quite true, is it? Talking is an action, too, after all. It may be more dull than, say, sex (one hopes), and more slow than a high-speed chase, but conversation, the simple being-with somebody else, is perhaps a more primal act than we, who are often bored with those with whom we have to spend time, might wish to believe. The main characters of Spurious, W. & Lars (the first-person narrator), are bound together in this primal act. They are, in fact, in talking, and I dare say only in talking, each other’s Messiah (149)—i.e., the (one) “to come” that “has come.” Fitting, perhaps, that the Messiah of a world such as ours should be so gloriously pitiful.

Two light-hearted thoughts on gay marriage

I am of course very glad that New York has legalized gay marriage. I have two light-hearted ideas to share in relation to it:

1. Discussing with The Girlfriend, we noted that the hospital visitation issue isn’t that big a deal for us as a straight unmarried couple — if we just claim to be married, they will probably go with it. It’s not as though married people have to carry around their marriage certificate at all times to prove they’re really married. Same-sex couples’ exclusion from legal marriage also removes their ability to bend the rules in this regard (and the rule limiting visitation to family is a stupid rule that deserves to be circumvented).
2. Everyone is familiar with the “slippery slope” arguments offered by conservatives: if we legalize gay marriage, suddenly everyone will want to commit incest and bestiality, etc. What few seem to realize is that conservative legislators are in a unique position to test this proposition. After gay marriage has been legalized in a given state, they should introduce bills to legalize incest, bestiality, marrying your car, or whatever else. If the “slippery slope” theory is true, the gay-loving legislators should be raring to go for the next perversion. (This idea is inspired by Dan Savage’s challenge to conservatives to prove homosexuality is a choice by choosing to become gay.)

Raw: A Poetic Journey

I  just found my copy of Raw: A Poetic Journey, which has yet another subtitle, Finding a Way From Conflict to Revelation, in my mailbox.  The book is edited by Amiee Saude Sims, features a foreword by Jennifer Knapp, and is published by the new press NuWine Press.  The book is a collection of poetry and reflections by LGBT Christians and their supporters.

My contribution is a poem and reflection of my Divinity School days, back at the University of Chicago, where I took a summer course with the University’s poet-in-residence, Alane Rollings.  The course was, I think, a typical creative writing course, and as a college course cross-listed as a graduate-level course in the summer, it had a bunch of high school kids in the class.  In fact, I think I was the only one who wasn’t a high schooler in the class.