In Remix, Lawrence Lessig distinguishes between commercial, sharing, and hybrid economies. The distinction is essential for the thesis of his book: unreasonably criminalizing copyright infringement leads to societal degradation by branding an entire generation of young people “thieves” (or, in Jack Valenti’s unsubtle designation, “terrorists”). Following is a useful example of the way these economies operate in my own life.

I am a house rabbit enthusiast or nerd or geek or fanatic or whatever you want to call it. I dearly love my two adopted bunnies and spend a good deal of time and money ensuring their contentment (and, vicariously, my own). In this effort, I have benefited mightily from the house rabbit community—a noncommercial economy centered around rabbit rescue charities and online communities. Rabbit rescue charities take care of abandoned animals and ensure they are adopted to suitable homes; they also conduct continuing educational and social events. Online communities offer information (www.rabbit.org, www.bunnybunch.org) or entertainment (www.dailybunny.com). No one is making money from these rabbit rescue charities or online communities, as they’re staffed by volunteers or enthusiasts. The benefits they offer are therefore noncommercial.

There are commercial elements to my existence as a rabbit enthusiast. I spend about $40-60 per month on Timothy hay and pellets from Oxbow Animal Health, a small company in Nebraska that specializes in feed and supplies for small animals. I do not expect Oxbow to send me informational brochures on rabbit health (as I receive from rabbit rescue organizations) or cute pictures of bunnies (as I get from the aforementioned Daily Bunny). Moreover, the reason behind my loyalty to this particular brand is its products’ high quality and lack of unhealthy and possibly dangerous filler ingredients. I frequent Oxbow not because of any noncommercial, intangible benefits but because they produce the best product on the market. My purchases operate, therefore, in the context of a purely commercial economy.

Where I buy my Oxbow products, however, is indicative of a hybrid economy. I will, on occasion, buy from a pet store; but under normal circumstances I buy all my rabbit feed and products from BunnyLuv, a rabbit rescue charity shop (www.bunnyluv.com). The transaction is clearly commercial: I am paying market prices in exchange for commercialized goods. BunnyLuv gets to keep all of the money I give them minus sales tax, but they put it toward keeping their rabbit rescue operation going. No one at the organization is paid a salary. The staff of the rescue and shop is entirely volunteer. The commercial and noncommercial aspects of BunnyLuv make it a hybrid economy. Also, my intentions in frequenting BunnyLuv are demonstrative of its hybrid nature. First, I go there because they always have the products I want for the aforementioned commercial reasons. Second, I go there to support a cause I believe in—animal adoption instead of sales. And third, I go there because I want to interact with other rabbit enthusiasts. I can’t banter and brag about my bunnies to some high school Petsmart cashier, but I can with the volunteers at BunnyLuv. The conversation is not included in the price, and it would be abhorrent if they charged me before allowing me to speak. Not only is BunnyLuv a hybrid, my reasoning for going there is hybrid.

Torchwood: Children of Earth was something of a disappointment, but that’s not worth a blog post (or at least, my opinion of it isn’t worth a blog post). What may be worth a blog post (you be the judge) is how uncomfortably British the miniseries is, particularly in portrayal of its lead character, Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman). (I won’t spend too much time summarizing the plot. See the Wikipedia page for a full episode-by-episode plot summary.)

Let’s start with all the ways Children of Earth is affirmatively British (from the perspective of this American science fiction fan, anyway). Like other Torchwood stories, Children of Earth hinges on the interaction between elected officials, civil servants, and quasi-governmental governmental officials (like Torchwood Cardiff). The elected officials, particularly Prime Minister Brian Green (Nicholas Farrell), are almost laughably self-serving caricatures; the civil servants, in the words of one exemplar in the miniseries, “the cockroaches of government,” are dedicated to consistent if morally gray service to Queen and Country; and the quasi-governmental officials are necessary for the darkest needs of the State but ultimately expendable. Civil servants are also expendable, but only to especially cynical elected officials. The civil servants, moreover, become the most interesting and quintessentially British aspect of the series. A long-time bureaucrat in the Home Office, John Frobisher (Peter Capaldi), protects a terrible secret—that the British government surrendered 12 childrent to the 456 in 1965—for decades. When the 456 return, he demands that the previous exchange be taken off the record to protect the Prime Minister and his country’s reputation. Frobisher is then tapped to negotiate with the 456, because the government does not want blood on its hands again. When the 456 demand 10% of the world’s children for their horrifying drug trade (children are morphine to this race), Frobisher is tasked with implementing the plan. And finally, the Prime Minister demands that Frobisher sacrifice his own 2 daughters for the sake of encouraging other parents to do likewise. Frobisher takes a terrible via media, killing his daughters, wife, and self rather than allow his family to be used as political pawns or his children as living drugs.

I spend so long on Frobisher because he is (simplistically, a critic might say) compared in Children of Earth to Captain Jack who, in the miniseries’ climax, uses (and thereby kills) his grandson as a weapon against the 456. That the weapon works in expelling the 456 is not especially important—Captain Jack’s use of his grandson, against the will of his daughter, is supposed to make us uncomfortable. We’re supposed to think of him as morally gray, sincerely working for good but able to do evil when the stakes are high enough. There is a sense in which this is British and unamerican, namely in the sense that Captain Jack is willing to sacrifice the individual for the good of society. Individual liberty is more valued in American than Britain or Europe generally, perhaps because this country was never forced to sacrifice its land and entire generations to its national defense. I think the writers of Children of Earth intend Captain Jack to be a synecdoche for the perpetual national debate between promotion of individual and corporate liberty and security. But they miss the mark.

I read Captain Jack, especially in Children of Earth, as an awkward parody of American rugged individualism. Of course, the character is deliberately constructed as such—the bisexual (tending toward gay) kickass action hero who can cry is most certainly a playful rebuke to John Wayne, Bruce Willis, et al. In many episodes, this works especially well; “Captain Jack Harkness” from season 1 of Torchwood is among the finest TV episodes in the science fiction genre because of this rebuking play on the action hero. Children of Earth, however, shows the limitations of the character, particularly in how he has developed over the past 2 Torchwood seasons. Which is to say, he hasn’t really developed at all. At the series’s worst, Torchwood is driven by Captain Jack’s melodramatic shifts between weakness and brutality, sacrificial kindness and blunt cruelty. The reason that Children of Earth is so overwrought is that these shifts occur minutes apart in nearly all the episodes. This is exemplified by the miniseries’ climax, during which he goes from demanding the government fight back, to weakly resigning to the demands of the 456, to heroically pursuing a way to destroy the aliens, to coldly sacrificing his grandson. I think we are supposed to respect the consistency of the Brit Frobisher and experience discomfort toward the quasi-American Captain Jack, but I just ended up exhausted by the melodrama.

Now I have to bring up the Doctor (warning: I’m referring only to Doctors 9 and 10). It’s not entirely fair to critique Captain Jack by saying he’s not as good or fun or interesting a character as the Doctor, because the latter has had 40 years to develop and the former only 2 years plus 1 miniseries. I do think it’s fair, however, to use the Doctor as a barometer for evaluating whether Captain Jack is at all an effective character. My criteria are debatable, but I think the question is primarily settled by reference to the characters’ national identifications: the Doctor is quintessentially, comfortably British, and Captain Jack (as stated above) is an awkward parody of American action heroes. There is a place for parodies of pop culture, but I find myself drawn to Doctor Who precisely because the character is so well-defined and therefore both compelling and surprising. I agree with Toby Hadoke: the Doctor’s Britishness is defined by his refusal to use blunt instruments (guns, for example) to make arguments. I would add to that, the Doctor understands the need for sacrifice and its resulting sorrow, but he never gives up his principles as a matter of principle (as Captain Jack does ad nauseum). Instead, we find the Doctor making poor choices and learning from them: “Human Nature”/”Family of Blood,” for example, ends with a character’s accusation that the Doctor’s chosen hiding place cost the lives of several innocents, innocents that went unconsidered when he chose to endanger them by his presence. Though his actions are humanly inconsistent, they are characteristically consistent, that is, in terms of the pre-established limitations and expectations of the character. Captain Jack, by comparison, is melodramatically inconsistent, predictably tearing at our heart strings but rarely asking us to think. Not never, but rarely.

I haven’t renounced Torchwood, and I do hope it returns. It’s fun to watch, but it’s not great science fiction. It will be forgotten one day as an interesting but limited experiment alongside the high science fiction giant, Doctor Who. And Children of Earth is further evidence that I’m right in my prediction.

Reading “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” is a bit disorienting: Lethem seems to jump around quite a bit, and his prose isn’t always smooth. Sometimes the setup—that nearly every sentence is cribbed directly from another source—works against him, so that bits of text don’t cohere as they ought. Despite these limitations, however, the essay makes a powerful argument about the nature of art, culture, and the interaction between the two. Specifically, Lethem argues that all art—but literature in particular—should be able to use all aspects of culture in its creation, including both predecessor works and elements of pop culture.

A counterargument must immediately be addressed: that text doesn’t generally have this problem. There are instances where legitimate fair use in text form has been crushed by the long arm of the content industry. Lethem cites two such examples, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone and Holly Crawford’s Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art. Both of these books survived infringement lawsuits and are still in print; even so, other abuses are available to us (for example, why haven’t Gone with the Wind and Mickey Mouse entered the public domain yet?). But how often, realistically, does Coca-Cola or Johnson & Johnson sue for a reference in a novel to one of their products (eg, “He spilled his Coke all over Band-Aid”)? And isn’t textual collage now an accepted practice in poetry and prose? Lawrence Lessig acknowledges as much when he describes one of his college friends, an English major, who created collage essays. While the essays always followed ethical guidelines about citation, Lessig’s friend did not feel it necessary or appropriate to ask permission of his sources.

Had Ben written the estate of Ernest Hemingway to ask for permission to quote For Whom the Bell Tolls in his college essays, lawyers at the estate would have been annoyed more than anything else. What weirdo, they would have wondered, thinks you need permission to quote in an essay? (52).*

There is a similar lattitude given to fiction, especially where satire is involved. Text collage continues, albeit not at the pace that some of us would desire.

But Lethem’s essay is more about attitudes toward text than toward legal issues. Lessig and others do the legal arguments much better than him, and I think he recognized, in the composition of “Ecstasy,” that he had to advance the argument in some significant way. His contribution is the seemingly simplistic belief that appropriation, broadly construed to include works of literature and signifiers of pop culture, is essential not only to making relevant art but to making good art. Or, rather more accurately, good art can be made from collage. The thesis statement for the essay, if there is one, must be the following:

Whatever charge of tastelessness or trademark violation may be attached to the artistic appropriation of the media environment in which we swim, the alternative—to flinch, or tiptoe away into some ivory tower of irrelevance—is far worse. We’re surrounded by signs; our imperative is to ignore none of them. (63)

The word “imperative” opens Lethem up to a charge of hipster elitism—only collage art captures the beauty of the human soul, or something like that. I don’t read his thesis that way, though; I read him as dreadfully concerned that the argument for original art will leave us unequipped to understand the world we live in. He later clarifies his position,

Honoring the commons is not a matter of moral exhortation. It is a practical necessity. We in Western society are going through a period of intensifying belief in private ownership, to the deteriment of the public good. (67)

“Private ownership,” as Lethem makes clear, includes an increasingly unreasonable belief in intellectual property as equivalent to real-world property. He quotes, for the general amusement of his readers, Jack Valenti’s infamous yelp of terror, “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone” (64). Such a claim could only be based on the absurd notion that music and film piracy is equivalent to stealing a handbag—the stated position of the MPAA, which Lethem describes as “ethically bankrupt” (64). Handbags, like DVDs but not like the film itself, disappear from the owner when taken. If we go to the level of appropriation, further down the scale from piracy, we can emphatically state that “the appropriation of an article of ‘intellectual property’ leaves the original untouched” (64). If I photocopied all of Lethem’s novels and emailed them to my two million best friends, that would be possibly lead to fewer physical copies being sold; it would be wrong, but it wouldn’t diminish the presence of the artistic work in the world. And if I quote Lethem extensively but not completely in this blog post, I take even less from him. The words, the complete essay and all the works that he quotes, exist outside of my written interpretation.

This simple fact leads us first back to Lethem’s concern over private ownership and finally to his enshrinement of appropriation as essential to understanding our world. If we perceive all texts and trademarked pop culture elements as wholly owned by their copyright holders, then we are forced to come up with completely original ideas and stories that are divorced from the environment that birthed them. Lethem pushes this point further, arguing that it’s ridiculous when asserted and impossible when tried. He appropriates an anecdote from David Foster Wallace, whose professor exhorted the class to write fiction that avoids “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” The class shot back that the professors own books feature electricity, cars, and modern English, and the “gray eminence” shot back that stories should not include “those explicit references that would date a story in the frivolous Now,” and amended himself further by stating that he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference (62). The extent to which this professor was talked down from his lofty, initial sentiment is instructive, and one wonders if his fiction ever mentions a Ford car or an Edison lightbulb. Even if he avoided such “trendy mass-popular-media” references, it’s doubtful that he could if he were born later, in the post-boomer era. These generations, including mine,*** were “born backward into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cultural environment with which we’ve blotted out our natural world” (63). There were branded products before 1960, but people weren’t awash in them; now, the brands we choose say as much about our selves as anything else (if I say that my favorite brands are Apple, Google, and WeightWatchers, then you know practically everything about me). If I am to understand my world and help others understand it through artistic expression, I’d better not be forced to pay a royalty fee every time these bits of my media language make an intrusion into my prose. Indeed, I have a responsibility to myself and to my readers—who face the same world that I do—to use language we all understand.

This sense of responsibility does not necessarily mean that we have to take an antagonistic position toward the culture we live in, even if we criticize many of its elements. Lethem asks,

[D]oes our appetite for creative vitality require the violence and exasperation of another avant-garde, with its wearisome killing-the-father imperatives, or might we be better off ratifying the ecstasy of influence—and deepening our willingness to understand the commonality and timelessness of the methods and motifs available to artists? (67)

When I reread this sentence last night, I found it so refreshing. I slogged through Kembrew McLeod’s Freedom of Expression®, and by the halfway point, I was sick of paragraphs in praise of Public Enemy, Negativland, and theatre of the absurd. Lethem’s lovely phrase, the ecstasy of influence, contains an imperative (there’s that word again) to participate in the cultural environment that produce collaged texts. That’s why Lethem incorporates comic books into his novel, The Fortress of Solitude. That’s also why Douglas Coupland and Dave Eggers and Chuck Klosterman have made careers out of both participating in and forming the zeitgeist. Down with Dada, Lethem suggests, and up with ecstasy.

——

*It’s worth noting that had it been the estate of Martin Luther King, Jr. or James Joyce, the lawyers would have likely asked for payment.

**Lethem, ever the postmodern smartass, remarks in the “key” to the essay, “Now fill in the blank: Jack Valenti is to the public domain as _____ is to _____” (70).

***For the record, I consider myself part of Generation X, though one of its last members. Depending on who is doing the dating, I was either born in GenX’s last year or the first year of GenY. I have too much trouble relating to GenY, so I don’t claim them as my own.

——

Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin, 2008.

Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” Harpers 314.1881 (2007): 59-71.

My rabbit, Freckles (click on images for video):

From 2009 Bunny vids

One of the key turning-points in anthropological scholarship was the shift from voyeuristic accounts of primitive savages to taking native practices seriously (eg, Howard Bell Wright’s The Shepherd of the Hills v. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God). I say this because I know it is true, and I want you to know that I know it’s true. But I can’t help but feel toward TBN the way Wright felt toward the Ozark folk culture: it may be beautiful in places, but it’s got a long way to go before I’ll call it sophisticated.

Put somewhat less offensively, my attitude is similar to that of A.J. Jacobs toward snakehandlers in The Year of Living Biblically. After visiting a church centered around this practice, Jacob observes:

I wish Jimmy [the snakehandling pastor] would stop handling snakes. My college antrhopology professors would be appalled. . . .But I still have my risk-reward mind-set, and here the risk to Jimmy’s life cannot outweight the reward of transcendence. . . .I want Jimmy to find transcendence through dancing or hymn singing or Sufi spinning. Anything. (299)

My experience of TBN is not unlike Jacobs’s experience of snakehandling: in isolated spurts, as a detached and critical outsider. The network has been on my mind an awful lot recently, too, because of a couple books I’ve read: Jim and Casper Go to Church by Jim Henderson and Matt Casper and Salvation on the Small Screen? 24 Hours of Christian Television by Nadia Bolz-Weber (the latter, incidentally, sports an endorsement by Jacobs on my edition).

These books both have interesting gimmicks, but they are not equally endowed with quality prose. Henderson and Casper (respectively, a leader in the Christian house church movement and an atheist family man), well, go to churches across the United States and write their honest impressions of each. Bolz-Weber watches 24 hours of TBN with a diverse cloud of witnesses in her living room—and it really is diverse, from conservative Church of Christ congregants to gay rights advocates to lapsed Jewish atheists. They’re answering different questions: one asks how Christians are perceived by outsiders and the other asks whether “Christian media” (or, as Bolz-Weber renders it, “the Christian-industrial complex”) contributes anything positive at all to the world. They cover some of the same ground—both books examine the Dream Center and Joel Osteen. As alluded to before, one is clearly a better book than the other. Henderson and Casper really have a rapport, but their transcribed conversations are almost always a little excruciating to read. It’s as if they’re trying to be chatty and to “keep it real” (yes, dear reader, they do utter that phrase to each other), but it hardly ever works. Bolz-Weber, however, is witty and direct and authentic. Her book bears all the marks of a careful revision to make the words just sing.*

Both books were helpful in helping me figure out my stance toward TBN. I’ve usually regarded it, looking down my nose of course, as below me. I thought I could ignore it as simply unsophisticated. But here’s the rub: that’s not what a responsible Christian should do. TBN is theologically unsophisticated and, as demonstrated by Henderson and Casper when they visit Lakewood and throughout Bolz-Weber’s account, oriented toward building and expanding its (and its presenters’) richesse. It is also an essential mover and shaper of ideas about Jesus for millions of people in the United States and around the world. For many people, it is the public face of evangelicalism in particular and Christianity in general. And as Bolz-Weber states,

While maintaining that the properity gospel, the rapture, and Christian Zionism (all TBN fare) are up there with the selling of indulgences and the existence of purgatory as the stinkiest Christian ideas in history, I still must admit that God’s redeeming work in the world does not happen only when we get all the theology and method right. (5) 

Bolz-Weber says, essentially, that God is working through TBN, and it’s a claim that Henderson employs throughout Jim and Casper Go to Church when Casper raises a particularly good question about seemingly bad Christian practices. People are being served, imperfectly, but they are being served nonetheless. I can buy that.

The problem that this admission raises, however, is that TBN is popular among people who feel disconnected from the world. Bolz-Weber constantly wonders about the shut-ins who give their SSA checks and inheritences to TBN, and these people have stayed in my mind. Why are they tithing to TBN? Because they have no other place to tithe. No other place that they identify with so completely that they want to give monetarily. I know—I’m overgeneralizing. It would be naive to say that most or even a third of committed TBN viewers-supporters do not belong to some church. It would be even more naive to say that these viewers-supporters do not tithe to their own church. These people exist, but I’m not concerned with them at the moment. There are a great deal of people who are actually alone, untouched by the church except through TBN. And Christians have a responsibility to ask why. Why are people being abandoned by the church in the world to be sucked dry by the church of the airwaves?

The perceived benefit from giving to and consuming TBN still remains a powerful counterargument. Why worry? There’s some good in what the network does. I can accept that. But my mind instinctively reverts to the Jacobsonian position: I wish they would stop watching TBN. And I wish the rest of us would find them and provide a real, full-Gospel alternative.

—

*She also has the best one-sentence explanation of Jean Baudrillard’s term, “simulacrum,” that I’ve ever heard. I didn’t think that was possible.

—

Bolz-Weber, Nadia. Salvation on the Small Screen? 24 Hours of Christian Television. New York: Seabury, 2008.

Henderson, Jim and Matt Casper. Jim and Casper Go to Church. Carol Stream, IL: Barna-Tyndale, 2007.

Jacobs, A.J. The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally As Possible. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Bill Cork, friend and blogfather of “Refuge,” was the first on my blogroll to alert me about Fr. Albert Cutie’s entry into the Episcopal Church. Then I heard the iMonk, Michael Spenser (3 posts in a row I’ve mentioned him, I just realized), deliver an inspired rant on the issue. This is not an idle issue for me, as I am still about half-Catholic, and I count the Episcopal Church as my current spiritual home.

That said, I find myself pretty much agreeing with both Bill and the iMonk.

As Bill notes, it’s absurd for the Catholic archbishop of Miami to assert that Cutie remains bound by his ordination promise (not vow, that’s something different) to live celibately. It was equally ridiculous for the archbishop to assert that Cutie had separated himself from the Catholic Church. Not ridiculous for the same reason–ridiculous because, well, that was the point of being received into the Episcopal Church in the first place.

As the iMonk notes, it’s not a good thing that Cutie broke his promise to live celibately, but the discipline (not doctrine, that’s something different) of priestly celibacy is equally at fault. While I’m somewhat uncomfortable with the disrespect recently shown toward Catholicism I’ve seen online by triumphant Episcopalians, I think this issue cannot be brushed away. I think a great number of Catholics will try to say, “Well, he didn’t live up to his promise, so why should this be construed as a challenge to the discipline?” And there is a contingent of committed anti-Catholics (both liberal and conservative) who see every moral failure within Catholicism as a derivative of its distinctive teachings.* I don’t, by and large, agree with this group. Sometimes outliers are outliers; many individual cases of people failing to meet the Catholic Church’s more stringent standards are in fact individual, local, or regional failures. Cutie, however, provides a powerful example of how problematic celibacy is for the Catholic Church.

Think of it this way: thousands or millions of people will now assume that this man is morally bankrupt for having a family.

I know that statement seems to obviate his very real moral failure, but I don’t mean to. The priesthood entails a promise that is akin to marriage, and it’s just as binding, even from my perspective. He should have sought to laicize himself first, then exited the Catholic Church if he still felt called to ordained ministry. But I contend that he should not have had to make that choice, and it’s hugely disturbing to me that his family–that being a husband and father–is a source of scandal.

That, to me, is the bottom line: I have always opposed the continued discipline of mandatory priestly celibacy–including when I was in communion with the Catholic Church–because it devalues family life. I know that Christopher West and other Theology of the Body acolytes (both clerical and lay) will contradict me, say that father- and motherhood are equal to the celibate, ordained clergy, but I simply don’t buy it. The language of vocation at the parish level in the Catholic Church is that the priesthood is for those who want to give themselves fully to God–as if people who are married cannot. That the priesthood is for those who are called out of the world to minister–as if people who are married cannot. It’s the theology at the parish level that matters, not the abstractions at the magisterial level, and even the magisterial teaching shares many of these assumptions.

So I welcome Cutie into the communion that I share in every week. I welcome him because he’s a sinner, like me, who needs grace. I hope he finds it in his new spiritual home.

–

*And there is an proportionally equivalent contingent of conservative Catholics who claim that every moral failure within Catholicism supports its distinctive teachings. Eg, the claim by some that the priestly abuse scandals were the result of liberal teaching on sexuality in general and birth control in particular.

I first read Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel when I was still a more-or-less devoted-but-frustrated Catholic, unknowingly leaning toward the emergent church. I didn’t know then why I liked it so much, and I think the reason I didn’t know is because I was an intellectual Catholic or a Catholic intellectual, 1 of the 2. Still not entirely sure when I gave up and stopped being Catholic, but I guess I could do no other, at some point. Anyway, back to the topic sentence: I read it and absorbed the basic message, because my devotion to Rich Mullins (which persists to this day) prepared me to receive it. Here is said basic message:

When I get honest, I admit that I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said [and, if I may interject, so did Swift] I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God’s grace means. As Thomas Merton put it, “A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.” (25)

Here is what I could not understand at the time: the experience of God and the doctrine of Christianity are 2 different things. The doctrine of sanctification (or justification), both Catholic and Protestant flavors, does its best to convince people that once they’ve done X, they are saved and no longer have to deal with the guilt of sin. Confession to a priest or to God clears it up, and we can be happy again. Hell, it might even get easier along the way.

Didn’t you know that virtue is formed purely by good habits?

Yeah, call me when that works out for you.

And the postmodern snark returns. I’m not really as angry as my snark implies, but I’m just now understanding how screwed up I can be. I continue to believe that religious literacy is essential, and I’m not impressed with churches that don’t teach their doctrine, including, yes, their very own doctrine of sanctification (or justification). But Manning and other wily postmoderns (ha!) have shown me, over several years, that knowing a doctrine does not necessarily lead to the assurance of salvation or the removal of guilt, even if the doctrine itself is actually true (which I do not dispute).

I know this is true because I’ve never had a spiritual experience while reading a doctrinal work. This includes works of mysticism (eg, St. Augustine’s Confessions and St. Theresa of Avila’s Autobiography). But I felt an overwhelming, almost out-of-body connection to the following sentences from Douglas Coupland’s Life After God:

My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love. (359)

Life After God is an exploration of what happens to a generation (mine) when the assumption God is removed from it by the previous generation. Coupland charts the resulting spiritual emptiness and hunger for satisfying spirituality. I came to understand religion relatively late in my life (but not necessarily late for my generation); I feel I am only now beginning to understand God, and it’s been through unorthodox experiences initiated by artistic expression. When I read Coupland, I understood my brokenness better than before, and I wouldn’t have gained that understanding via a lecture on original sin.

This is why discerning bloggers and Truly Reformed pundits will always miss the point when reading Manning. I don’t think doctrine is unimportant, and I don’t think Manning does either. He’s a Catholic mystic at heart (stole that from iMonk), which means that he’s absorbed the portions of doctrine worth keeping and expresses it artistically. His books aren’t arguments for Grace, they’re examples of Grace working through a broken sinner to reach other broken sinners, all of whom don’t need convincing that they’re sick and can’t make it alone. They need to be shown.

–

Coupland, Douglas. Life After God. New York: Washington Square, 2005.

Manning, Brennan. The Ragmamuffin Gospel. Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2005.

I’ve recently had an experience that has led me to some conclusions about something I’ve pondered for many years: whether we should tell disaffected or socially outcast young people that their day of victory over the bullies and the jocks is coming soon.  That bullies and jocks eventually work for nerds.

Without going into proprietary or overly personal details, my recent experience was a training event mostly conducted by the Sales Department.  Let me give you a brief primer on my (entirely false, as I found out) preconceptions of biomedical sales culture: the jocks become sales reps, the nerds become clinicians and (in lots of firms) executives.  There’s certainly a nugget of truth there, but I think it’s far more prevalent in the pharmaceutical side of the industry than in the biotechnology side (where I work).  Regardless of how true or false this maxim is in individual cases, I found that it was manifestly false, at least in my company.  I prejudged some of the people surrounding me in the training as jocks I could not learn from.  My faulty prejudgment cost me a good 3 days of disaffection and needless eye-rolling.

The reason I bring this up is that I’m now convinced that we should never tell young people who feel beaten down (physically or emotionally) that they’ll eventually run the world.  This is stock wisdom that needs to be discontinued, and for good.

Now, it seems like the right thing to say, especially with the examples that the world presents to us.  Bill Gates is frequently and perhaps appropriately cited; more mundane examples present themselves to anyone in practically any industry (eg, my boss holds a PhD and an MBA, and there are doctors of medicine and philosophy all the way up my company’s org chart).  But I liken this strategy of bucking up the youngster to effusing about heaven to a jaded terminal cancer patient.  The universal rule of the nerds and the splendor of heaven may both be realities worth looking forward to, but both are purely future realities.  Hope of a management position and yearly bonuses, to bring us back to the disaffected young person, means little to a 16-year-old who has to eat alone at lunch, every day, every week, every month, every school year.

And then there’s the pathological consequence of such assurances, as evidenced by my hasty judgment of the good people around me.  When you’re told “They’re just jealous of your achievement” and “You’ll be their bosses someday”, you build up a resentment toward anyone who resembles a jock.  This can be fatal in modern capitalism, because lots of aspects of businesses, particularly the hypercompetitive cultures of sales and marketing departments, look like jock-run ventures.  Of course, the root cause of this resentment is a deeply entrenched pride about one’s intellect and perceived achievements–and a perception that the jocks don’t contribute or contribute negatively.  I’ve just recently been able to recognize these elements of my personality, present as they’ve been for years, as the result of pathological pride that’s enchained me for far too long.

I think this problem is particularly troublesome for Christian parents.  Telling such things to a Christian teen is bound to stunt his or her spiritual development, because such children learn to think about human relationships in an adversarial, rather than community, context.  It’s more painful–in the short term–to tell a child or teen to love and not hate the abusers at school, but–in the long term–this advice will help to grow and sustain inner peace.

I went to a discussion held by a Catholic young adult group recently, and the topic was evangelism.  There were some good insights, but I came away less sure about the topic than I have been in the past.

A scene from my past gave me some insight into this subject, though.

In high school, there was one Mormon guy in my grade.  Well, there might have been others, but I only knew one who was quite definitely Mormon.  I knew because he talked about it to people, not in a bragging way but the way you might talk about your family life or your favorite TV show–it was part of his life, and other people knew it was part of his life.  It never occurred to me until recently that he actually suffered for his faith, though.  And he did, in terms of social stature, in ways that I can only see after over 10 years of retrospection.  I remember two incidents in particular.

First, he took up our history teacher’s offer to leave the class when we were watching a sexually explicit scene from Legends of the Fall.  He left to snickers from his classmates.  I don’t remember his comportment while leaving the room.  But here’s the funny thing: he didn’t have to do that.  The teacher didn’t require us to obtain parent signatures.  I don’t think my parents ever knew, because I don’t remember telling them.  This was unusual at my school–when we watched Schindler’s List in another history class, every student was required to obtain a release from parents.  But in this instance, when his parents wouldn’t know–only he would know–he chose to leave the class, regardless of what other people thought.

Second, there was the poll he took of other guys that several of us uncomfortable.  As part of a social studies project, he asked guys randomly if they masturbated.  He recorded the yes or no answer.  He elicited weird looks, particularly because none of us expected that he would ever mention sex to anyone else.  We all figured him for a prude.  And if we would have asked ourselves why he was conducting the poll, we might have assumed he was being judgmental.  But that would have been dishonest of us, because after the initial shocked reaction, he always said, “Come on, everyone does it,” implying, of course, that so did he.  This wasn’t an attempt to get blackmail but an honest, straightforward, intellectual inquiry into the sexual mores of his classmates.  He was curious to find out what his classmates honestly thought, and he followed that interest to its most uncomfortable extent, for us anyway.  It’s tough to fit this into the evangelism model, and I realize it’s stretched.  But I see it this way: we all knew he was Mormon, and we all had some perception of his church as morally repressive.  But he defied our expectations not by contradicting his faith; rather, he explored what the rest of us thought and felt without judgment or malice.

From talking about his faith plainly to leaving the room for an R-rated movie to inquiring about his peers’ sexual assumptions, this guy got something right about living God’s word in the world, without pretension or apology.  There’s something to be said for that.  I guess I’m saying it now, over 10 years later.