So, Cappella Romana is singing not one, but two concerts in Greece in September — one at the 11th Annual Sacred Music Festival of Patmos, Greece, and at the 6th-century Church of 100 Doors, Paros. They are hoping to record the Paros concert, and they have set up a Kickstarter project to try to raise the funds quickly. They are a good chunk of the way there, but I encourage you to support them — this is a really exciting opportunity for them, and it would be a fantastic addition to their recorded library.
Archive for the 'Media' Category
Another gift idea
Published 28 July 2011 Academia , General , Media , music , The Orthodox Faith 1 CommentTags: byzantine chant, chant, diane h. touliatos-miles, ecclesiastical chant, gift ideas for richard, giorgos kyriakakis, Greek, hazards of church music, liturgical adventures, liturgical music, liturgy, liturgy and life, medieval byzantine chant, modern greek, my kids will learn latin and greek when they're newborns, random acts of chant, sacred music
As always, I know that the two of you of who look in on my blog on a regular basis are dying for gift ideas for me — I mean, did I really need 225 copies of Fr. John Behr’s book? Er, wait… Anyway, in case you think that’s too impersonal and/or obvious, there’s always this one: Diane H. Touliatos-Miles’ Descriptive Catalog of the Musical Manuscript Collection of the National Library of Greece. Nur sage, wenn du verstehst was ich meine.
If you needed a gift idea for me…
Published 20 June 2011 Academia , Early Christianity , General , Media , The Orthodox Faith 1 CommentTags: diodore, Fr. John Behr, gift ideas for richard, oxford early christian texts, st. clement of alexandria, st. irenaeus of lyon, st. vlads, the case against diodore and theodore, theodore of mopsuestia
So, because I know my loyal readers (both of them) are desperately wondering what in the world to get the man who always seems to buy everything well in advance of his birthday and/or Christmas, or are looking for a late nameday gift, I thought I’d pass this on:
The Case Against Diodore and Theodore: Texts and Their Contexts, edited with a translation and a historical and theological introduction by John Behr.
This is a landmark work, providing the first complete collection of the remaining excerpts from the writings of Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia together with a ground-breaking study of the controversy regarding the person of Christ that raged from the fourth to the sixth century, and which still divides the Christian Church. Destroyed after their condemnation, all that remains of the dogmatic writings of Diodore and Theodore are the passages quoted by their supporters and opponents. John Behr brings together all these excerpts, from the time of Theodore’s death until his condemnation at the Second Council of Constantinople (553) – including newly-edited Syriac texts (from florilegium in Cod. Add. 12156, and the fragmentary remains of Theodore’s On the Incarnation in Cod. Add. 14669) and many translated for the first time – and examines their interrelationship, to determine who was borrowing from whom, locating the source of the polemic with Cyril of Alexandria.
On the basis of this textual work, Behr presents a historical and theological analysis that completely revises the picture of these ‘Antiochenes’ and the controversy regarding them. Twentieth-century scholarship often found these two ‘Antiochenes’ sympathetic characters for their aversion to allegory and their concern for the ‘historical Jesus’, and regarded their condemnation as an unfortunate incident motivated by desire for retaliation amidst ‘Neo-Chalcedonian’ advances in Christology. This study shows how, grounded in the ecclesial and theological strife that had already beset Antioch for over a century, Diodore and Theodore, in opposition to Julian the Apostate and Apollinarius, were led to separate the New Testament from the Old and ‘the man’ from the Word of God, resulting in a very limited understanding of Incarnation and circumscribing the importance of the Passion. The result is a comprehensive and cogent account of the controversy, both Christological and exegetical together, of the early fifth century, the way it stemmed from earlier tensions and continued through the Councils of Ephesus, Chalcedon, and Constantinople II.
About the Author
Fr John Behr is the Dean of St Vladimir’s Seminary and Professor of Patristics, teaching courses in patristics, dogmatics and scriptural exegesis at the seminary, and also at Fordham University, where he is the Distinguished Lecturer in Patristics.
His early work was on issues of asceticism and anthropology, focusing on St Irenaeus of Lyons and Clement of Alexandria. After spending almost a decade in the second century, Fr John began the publication of a series on the Formation of Christian Theology, and has now reached the fifth and sixth centuries. He has recently completed an edition and translation of, and introduction to, the remaining texts of Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia. He has also published a synthetic presentation of the theology of the early centuries, focused on the mystery of Christ.
If, perhaps, you’re looking for something a little less spendy, the book on Ss. Irenaeus and Clement would also work. There’s also the amusing anecdote in which I see somebody whom I think might be an usher at a Broadway musical who actually turns out to be Fr. John Behr (to whom I’m still quite grateful for his encouragement, I might add, even if I didn’t wind up going to St. Vlad’s and even if I decided to not go with his more specific research-related questions… yet).
Repost — Review: Fellow Workers With God: Orthodox Thinking on Theosis by Norman Russell
Published 6 May 2011 Academia , General , Media , The Orthodox Faith Leave a CommentTags: book reviews, books, fellow workers with god, norman russell, theosis
I wrote this review about a year and a half ago for a group blog that I’ve discovered has closed up shop. So, here it is again.
—
There’s a reason I’m a historian and not a theologian – or a philosopher, for that matter.
See, I’m a pretty simple guy at heart – I like narrative. I like characters. I like finding out what happened next. As soon as people start talking about contemplating the Godhead or mystical union or appropriation of the means of production or things like this, my eyes glass over until something shiny crosses my field of vision. Somebody Who Is A Big Name once gave me advice that I should try to figure out how to incorporate Hans Urs von Balthasar into my research interests if I really wanted them to be marketable; I got about thirty pages into the first volume of The Glory of the Lord when I had to put it down and admit I didn’t understand a word.
From that standpoint, I think I’m a member of the target audience for Norman Russell’s Fellow Workers with God: Orthodox Thinking on Theosis (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009). Dr. Peter Bouteneff’s foreword says that the book is the product of “a specialist [who] cares enough to rethink [his] subject in non-specialist terms,” and I am definitely a non-specialist.
So what is this non-specialist’s verdict? Well… I can’t say I know any more about the theology of theosis than I did before I started the book, but that’s not Russell’s fault, that’s just a result of me not being terribly smart. However, as a historian, the book is very useful to me as an outline of the major contributors over the centuries to the understanding of what theosis is, and how they differ from one another.
Or is it? This is the problem with being a non-specialist reviewing a book for a non-specialist. I have to take the book’s word for it, for the most part.
At any rate, the overall project of the book is to be a general resource on theosis – what it is, the history of how Orthodox Christians talk about it, who has clarified which idea, and who agrees with whom and who doesn’t. It also spends time discussing how contemporary Orthodox theologians are looking at the issue, and also at least tries to move theosis out of the theoretical realm and to examine just what it means as a practical matter of day-to-day life.
Russell’s core argument is that theosis was a concept that was not fully articulated until St. Gregory Palamas, it was not fully articulated because it was not a matter of controversy until his time (with Russell arguing that all the elements of theosis were in place as normative for Orthodox Christians by the fourth century), and even so it has only been in the last four decades or so that it has taken center stage as a “common expression summarizing the whole economy [of] salvation.” Within the discussion, from the New Testament to the early Fathers, from them to Palamas, and from Palamas to Metropolitan John (Zizoulas) and Fr. John Behr, while there may be disagreement in the particulars of how theosis is described, Russell nonetheless sees a fundamental conceptual unity and convergence.
The structure of Russell’s presentation appears to be to deal with aspects of theosis in order of increasing complexity, which is perhaps why my copy is underlined less and less in later pages. The first question is, of course, is “what is theosis?” with an implied “why do we care?” Russell’s working definition is as follows:
Theosis is our restoration as persons to integrity and wholeness by participation in Christ through the Holy Spirit, in a process which is initiated in this world through our life of ecclesial communion and moral striving and finds ultimate fulfillment in our union with the Father – all within the broad context of the divine economy.
Okay – my eyes didn’t glass over too badly, so I guess that will work. Why do we care? Well, we care because, as stated above, this is the “ultimate fulfillment in our union with the Father”, our end goal as Christians.
From that starting point, Russell works through reasonably concrete questions of the relationship between theosis and salvation and how this relationship is situated within the divine economy, the scriptural foundations of theosis, and the impact of theosis on notions of Christian anthropology. In the last third of the book or so, Russell turns more to questions of a very speculative nature – self-transcendence, participation in the divine life, and union with God. (And before anybody yells at me for just quoting the last three chapter titles, it’s just about the best I can do with this section of the book. Passages like this one from the chapter on self-transcendence are why I’m not a theologian: “This ultimate unity is unity with the divine and yet it is not a unity with anything outside ourselves. It is when the self knows itself in a direct and immediate way that it ‘sees’ the divine.” Uh, okay.)
Thankfully, the epilogue, titled “Do You Live It?” tries to provide something of a practical framework for the more rarefied speculations:
The face that theosis encompasses the whole of the economy of salvation means that it is intended for all believers without exception. To live theosis, then, means to lead our life in an eschatological perspective within the ecclesial community, striving through prayer, participation in the Eucharist, and the practice of the moral life to attain the divine likeness, being conformed spiritually and corporeally to the body of Christ until we are brought into Christ’s identity and arrive ultimately at union with the Father.
And Russell must have known there would be a none-too-bright historian whose eyebrows would be crinkling with the strain of almost getting it, because he finishes the paragraph by saying:
In simpler terms, it means for an Orthodox Christian to live as a faithful member of the Church, attending the Liturgy, receiving the sacraments and keeping the commandments. Nothing more – or less – than that.
The book has a number of strengths; Russell appears to have a great deal of facility with the relevant authors, ancient and modern, and this combined with his organizational structure makes the book accessible and informative either as a whole or in distinct parts. He is also able to adduce evidence that goes beyond literary sources, iconographic and liturgical evidence for example, in a manner that is convincing and helpful. From that perspective, Fellow Workers With God is a useful quick-and-dirty introduction to the historian who needs a rundown of certain concepts and people without getting too confused by the theology; it does not shy away from the theology, however, so it would also seem appropriate as an introductory text for somebody just getting their feet wet in the world of Orthodox theology.
The prospective reader should be aware that this is certainly a St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press publication, for better or for worse (depending on the reader, of course). Among other things, I suspect that Russell will draw criticism from some circles in how he treats St. Dionysius the Areopagite; he follows academic convention in drawing a distinction between the disciple of St. Paul and the author of Celestial Hierarchies. Perhaps this may be seen as tempered by the amount of ink he gives Fr. Dumitru Staniloe, who evidently argued against the later dating of Celestial Hierarchies. I am also not familiar enough with contemporary theologians to know if those whom Russell examines in taking the present pulse of the question represent a group weighted too far in a particular direction. Certainly the citation of Archbishop Anastasios (Yannoulatos), who has apparently suggested that theosis is “a fundamental human right” which thus “cannot remain the exclusive possession of the Orthodox”, leaves me scratching my head a bit. On the other hand, Russell quickly follows that up by reaffirming that “it is only within the Orthodox perspective… that theosis acquires its full theological, spiritual, and ecclesial dimensions.”
I don’t think that this will be a work that will be altogether convincing to scholars who are not already inclined to be sympathetic to the concept; Russell is rather too up front about the amount of human participation assumed in theosis to be able to assuage Calvinists, for example. In the epilogue, Russell references “Lutherans [who] have studied the notion of theosis closely to see how it can enrich their ideas of sanctification and justification,” but the obvious next two questions – which Lutherans, and how many – aren’t answered with any clarity. From this standpoint, it is unfortunate, if ultimately not problematic from a standpoint of Tradition or even in terms of how Russell handles the matter, that one of the shortest chapters in the body of the book is “The Biblical Foundations of Theosis,” clocking in at a mere sixteen pages.
In conclusion, this is a book that, for my purposes, was quite informative and will bear re-reading as a reference. I still can’t quite engage the guts of the subject matter, and I’m not sure I ever will, but I’m at least more informed than I was. I’m not sure that Russell’s work contributed to my theosis, but perhaps my review may contribute to his.
Recommended.
Pulling some old things out of the trunk
Published 1 May 2011 General , Media , The Orthodox Faith 16 CommentsTags: militant americanist orthodoxy, Pretentious Blog Titles, sometimes the internet sucks
In light of some very recent events, I thought it might not be the worst idea in the world to repost this, albeit with some introductory matter; it does seem to me that there is more to say, six years after it was published. For five of those years I’ve been a fairly regular reader of several blogs. For four of those years I have been a minor contributor to “Orthoblogdom”. There have been some, in their own way, high-profile (let’s agree that there’s an asterisk there) conversions to and high-profile departures from Orthodox Christianity that seem to have happened within the blogosphere (even within the last couple of weeks), as though their actual baptisms and chrismations and communion and living out of the Christian life were themselves more or less irrelevant — rather, what was important was how it was going to validate or invalidate what they blogged about. In the last couple of days, it looks like perhaps Orthodoxy in America has developed, at least on a very small scale (although, considering what I expect some of the consequences will be for at least one of the players, perhaps not so small to that person) it’s own version of WikiLeaks-style problems. There are attempts out there, generally bad, to create an Orthodox version of Facebook; to some extent, Orthodox blogging is Orthodox Facebook. It’s looser, less structured, less organized, but would we expect any less — or, perhaps, any more?
I said that there was an asterisk next to “high-profile” earlier. You want reality? Reality is that there is a group on Facebook called “I Bet I Can Find 1,000,000 Orthodox Christians on Facebook” that, three years after it got started, has just over 25,000 members. Reality is that a few months ago, statistics were publicly released for an Orthodox outreach website that was touted as a huge success. When I did the math, I found that the site in question had had less traffic in its entire two years of existence than this very blog had in its first year — a blog that something like five people read on a regular basis. The Internet has a way of papering over this state of affairs. One can start a group blog and call it an “institute”. One can have an individual blog and call themselves a “journalist”. Perspective is important, particularly as regards self-selection and the signal-to-noise ratio. If you’re a blogger, you’re part of a self-selected bunch. If you’re Orthodox, you’re part of a smaller self-selected bunch. If you’re an Orthodox convert, you’re part of a self-selected bunch that’s even smaller than that. If you’re an Orthodox convert who blogs, you’re part of an unbelievably tiny self-selected bunch. You can call yourself whatever you want and you can style yourself as representative of whatever you want, but don’t kid yourself about what you actually are just because you’ve got a premium theme on WordPress and a word in a dead language in your blog title (something I have been in a small way sticking my elbow into the ribs of since day one here, even if I don’t call a lot of attention to it) or because you’ve got a group blog with some pretend organizational name. Some of the self-appointed heroes and prophets of Internet Orthodoxy would do well to remember that a blog that nobody’s paying you to write doesn’t make you CNN, or Meet the Press, or Edward R. Murrow for the twenty-first century. It doesn’t even make you the Drudge Report. It makes you freaking public access, folks. The way some people smugly pat themselves on the back for whatever change they think they’ve effected, or are effecting, by virtue of a self-important blog, and use it to justify some pretty nasty actions (like, say, posting e-mails that aren’t yours that were sent to you by yet another person to whom they didn’t belong knowing full well that somebody else is likely going to lose their job over it — something like that) — how can we call this any form of Christianity with a straight face, let alone Orthodox Christianity? Really? I call it public backstabbing.
Besides the wannabe Woodwardopouloi and Bernsteinevskies, there are the Orthodox bloggers (or ex-Orthodox bloggers, I might also say) who are, plain and simple, cranks who just get crankier with every post. This is a phenomenon that I suspect would be unnecessary in an Orthodox culture; cranks have a social function after all, it’s just that Orthodox cranks don’t have a social function in American culture. What they do have are broadband connections and/or library cards. They may be entertaining from time to time, they may be thought-provoking, they may be outrageous, but what the Internet also teaches them to be is narcissistic and arrogant.
I recognize that somebody criticizing people who blog by means of a blog is problematic, and I don’t have an easy way around that one. What I can say is that as somebody who keeps a blog, even one that virtually nobody cares about (I get 60-70 hits on a busy day, and most of my hits come from people looking for Greek answer keys), I have always tried to be mindful that I published an article called “Becoming Orthodox in Spite of the Internet”. I don’t blog about theology, I’ve never made this about my conversion experience, and in general I don’t get into the various online cockfights (which is why, I think, I’m generally ignored). It’s a wannabe academic’s notebook of random things. I’ve spent more time writing about not getting into (and then getting into) grad school and why I think Christopher Nolan is influenced by The Prisoner than I have about this or that theological position. I’ve written about places I’ve been and things I’ve learned and the things I’m interested in, but I don’t use this blog to try to style myself as an Orthodox Prophet for the Digital Wilderness. The point is, I still think the things that concerned me about Internet Orthodoxy six years ago are legitimate points of concern today, if not vastly moreso, and I’ve tried to not contribute to the problem — probably unsuccessfully, but that’s the reality of being a human being.
Anyway, here it is:
Becoming Orthodox in Spite of the Internet
The Internet provides an unprecedented amount of information on virtually any topic, all at the click of a mouse. Fly-fishing, comic book collecting, the history of woodcarving, how to knit sweaters for your dog–it’s all out there. Some of it’s even useful. Not only that, it so happens that there are a huge number of websites out there devoted entirely to Orthodox Christianity. Sounds like a wonderful thing, doesn’t it? Well, maybe not. The Internet has the potential to be the biggest stumbling block over which an inquirer might trip. As somebody who was recently received into the Church after a two-year period of inquiry and instruction, I certainly found this to be the case.
I still recall my first time in an Orthodox church, and my reaction to it. It was St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Seattle, Washington–it’s a seventy year-old building, with a very tall and ornate iconostasis, candles and icons covering virtually every space on the walls, and decades’ worth of incense permeating everything. As a liturgical environment, it was like nothing I had ever experienced before, and it all added up to a very tangible awareness of the presence of God. You could have knocked me over with a feather. My reaction came in three stages: first, while still in the nave, I felt compelled to light candles. Second, before leaving the premises, I dropped about $50 at their book counter. Third, as soon as I got home, I did a Google search on “Orthodox Christianity” and browsed through the hits.
Sound familiar? And why not? That’s how we’ve been trained, in this age of the Information Superhighway. When I was a little kid, if a new topic of interest made itself known to me, the first thing I would do was to go to the library and look it up there, but the Internet makes it so that you don’t even have to leave your home. Googling “Orthodox Christianity” gives you lots of interesting-looking web pages right off the bat: the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese home page, the Orthodox Church in America home page, something called “orthodoxinfo.com”, the Orthodox Christian Fellowship site, another page called “Orthodox Ireland”, a document called “Celtic Orthodoxy–the Celtic Orthodox Christian Revival”… hm. And here’s a site run by something called “The American Orthodox Church” that claims to be the “Voice of American Orthodox Catholic Christianity”. A note on the page says “The American Orthodox Church was originally established in 1927 with the blessings of the Holy Patriarchate of Moscow. No Other so-called ‘Mother Church’ or jurisdiction has been in existence until 1971-1972 and this is why we are the true Mother Church in the USA and Canada.”
And herein lies the problem with the phenomenon of “Internet Orthodoxy”. There is no barrier to entry with respect to posting pages on the World Wide Web; anybody with a computer and a phone jack can publish anything they want and make it accessible to anyone using a search engine. (Or, as UC Berkeley computer science professor Robert Wilensky puts it, “We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.”) There is a lot out there that the wide-eyed inquirer can easily encounter, for which they simply will not have the spiritual maturity to deal with. At least two of the sites listed above are going to be controversial for people within the Church; how in the world is an inquirer who might not even have attended a service yet going to make any sense of it?
Which brings us to another issue–no amount of information and no amount of reading is going to make one Orthodox. Knowledge will not bring one into the Church; the Holy Spirit has to do that. That’s sounds like a horrible thing to say in our rational day and age, but the books and websites are, plainly, no substitute for prayer, going to services, establishing a relationship with and receiving instruction from a priest. I truly wonder how today’s inquirers would do with the early practice of catechumens knowing nothing of the Mysteries of the Church until after their baptism–and not even being told exactly what was happening to them in their baptism until after it was already done! The Church at that time held that knowledge wasn’t going to do one a lot of good until they were already part of the family and could put that knowledge in context. Perhaps, in this time of unrestricted, instantly available information, there’s something we can learn from that.
In this “do-it-yourself” world, the truth of the matter is that you cannot teach yourself to be Orthodox, regardless of how good the instructional materials seem to be. A close family member of mine is undergoing her own inquiry right now; we recently had a conversation where she told me about having spent three-quarters of her day reading things on the Internet, but she hadn’t yet been to a service. I gently suggested that the next thing she needed to do was to go to a Divine Liturgy, and that perhaps she had better not read anything more until she had done so. If you want to learn more about the Church, go to church. It’s that easy, and that difficult.
Something else that one is likely to encounter on the Internet: chat rooms, discussion groups, mailing lists, newsgroups, whatever you want to call them, proclaiming to be places where one can discuss Orthodoxy. I spent a lot of time in these early on in my inquiry, and for my part, I found the tone of most of these to be as un-Christian as one could get–petty, contentious, often with the overall message of “my jurisdiction is holier than your jurisdiction”, and frequently becoming dominated by arguments over secular politics. What also would inevitably occur is the appearance of non-Orthodox and sometimes non-Christian posters who weren’t truly interested in honest discussion, but rather just being gadflies. Even in some of the milder of these groups, where in theory jurisdictional discussions were off-limits, it seemed that folks had a tendency to be on a fairly short fuse, and exchanges could turn into yelling matches rather quickly. I reached a point where I realized that these groups were distracting my catechesis; they were in no way contributing to it. It was so much “godless chatter”, of which St. Paul counseled avoidance (1 Timothy 6:20).
Are there good uses of the Internet for the inquirer and catechumen? Of course. The home pages for the canonical Orthodox jurisdictions, as well as for most individual parishes, provide a lot of wonderful information, and the outside links they provide are in general quite trustworthy. There are excellent resources out there with respect to the Orthodox approach to prayer, liturgical texts, setting up the home icon corner, as well as a wonderful database of the writings of the Church Fathers. Other websites have made the acquisition of previously not-so-easy-to-find liturgical items a fairly simple matter–prayer books, icons, prayer ropes, incense, home censers, candles, recordings of the music of the Church, and so on. At the same time, it is also true that many of the suppliers of these items are themselves of a questionable status; that’s not to say they’re off-limits, but the inquirer visiting some of these online establishments must exercise caution and discernment about where they venture on these sites. Perhaps, if a local parish has an ordering relationship with a supplier like Light and Life, the inquirer is better off going that route–and that way, the parish will benefit. Ask your priest, once you have a relationship with one.
For my part, I can honestly say that I became Orthodox in spite of the Internet, rather than because of it. It wasn’t until I decided that I would limit my exposure to those sites run by a canonical jurisdiction or to online shops, and avoid pretty much everything else, that a lot of things became clearer for me on my road to conversion. At most, an inquirer’s Orthosurfing needs to judiciously supplement, rather than supplant, their attendance at services, prayer, and talking to a priest. If you want to know more about the various historical and doctrinal issues, your local parish has either a good library, a well-stocked book counter, or both, and the priest can suggest which books to read. Books are still no substitute for going to church, but at least it is more likely that a book by a reputable author and publisher will have been carefully vetted in a way that a website probably will not have been.
Unfortunately, the signal-to-noise ratio with respect to what’s out there on the Net is so low, the wheat will sit right next to the chaff and most inquirers–and frankly, most Orthodox laity–won’t be able to tell the difference. If you still want to attempt to use the Internet as a resource, a search engine is only going to give you a list of hits that will be, at best, confusing once you start working your way through all of them. Better to start out with the home pages of the canonical jurisdictions, and take note of the pages to which they’ve linked.
But hey, a Google search is still great for figuring out how to spin thread from cat hair.
On package deals
Published 29 April 2011 General , Media , music , The Orthodox Faith 10 CommentsTags: american orthodoxy, militant americanist orthodoxy, this american church life, we need more american saints
The “Package Deals” piece over at Ius Honorarium has gotten some attention via the Google Reader circuit and whatnot; an Orthodox friend was chatting with me about it and asked, okay, if this guy’s right, what’s the point of being any kind of Christian, if there doesn’t seem to be any real way of doing it that isn’t completely self-engineered and self-directed? Why not just become a Taoist? He pointed out that many of the things they say plague what Esteban Vasquez calls “militant Americanist Orthodoxy” are things that have plagued cultural Orthodoxy from the earliest times — a cafeteria approach, syncretism, hyper-monastic zeal, and so on. Orthodoxy, this person argues, may be sold in our crass, marketing-language culture in a way that tends toward disillusionment for some people, but the core of the criticism isn’t new or patently American.
I have another friend, a philosophy grad student, a Christian who has occasionally and uncomfortably flirted with Orthodoxy like the girl your friends introduce you to whom you’re supposed to just instantly fall in love with, and you can respect all the reasons they thought you would like her, and you can see that there other people who just think she’s the most gorgeous woman there, but the more you look at her and talk to her the more you’re looking for the quickest and most direct way out of the room. Yes, it might be nice if there were another girl who looked sort of like this girl and who had some of her personality traits, but with this one in particular all you can think about is how it’s just not working for you. And, the thing of it is, it’s not just Orthodoxy that he’s like that with — he’s said that for him to do anything more than uncomfortably flirt with a communion or confession would be for him to acknowledge that communion or confession as something more than he feels able to do. In a pluralistic, postmodern world, he doesn’t feel that there’s any way to choose among the pre-existing options that is going to be any more than simply picking the set of traditions you like the most on a personal level, and he doesn’t see, as he says, how you get any more Jesus that way. His solution is, to use his own word, syncretist — “I want it all,” he’s told me before. “I want Orthodoxy and and Quaker meeting all in the same church. The way I see that we transcend the individual and create a new Christian community is by bringing together a bunch of things that are all intensely personal and then building something new out of that.”
My friend is also a C. S. Lewis devotee. At times when we’ve talked about his confessional wanderings, I’ve brought up the quote from Mere Christianity:
It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. . . . It is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable.
“Yeah, in the present day, Lewis is wrong,” my friend has said. “That presumes a default option, and there just isn’t one in our society. The modern American religious landscape is predicated on the lack of a default option.”
So, as Neo says, the problem is choice. Or, to put it another way, the problem is pluralism.
As I see it, American culture in modernity is fundamentally a culture of being uprooted. I have lived for the last eight years in small-town Indiana after growing up in Seattle, and when I’m at a parish council meeting talking about how we need to be reaching out to families who are actually staying put, I’m quickly told, “Those kinds of families don’t exist anymore.” We have people who commute to All Saints from an hour away or more, which makes trying to do certain things in a regular way very difficult, and I usually hear a speech about “the reality of our mobile society” about once a month. To the extent that this uprootedness is an issue on a personal level, the solution is then to try to construct a personal narrative that either provides one with “virtual” roots or establishes them going forward.
I maintain that for the Christian who is sensitive to such matters, the flaws of American Protestantism become really evident really fast. This can lead to embracing forms of Christianity that at least appear to have stronger historical roots than simply the America of the last fifty years (look at how some Evangelical churches define “traditional” services sometime). Anglicanism is one possibility that at least used to provide some of the trappings without challenging your existing beliefs overly much, if not so much anymore in a lot of parts of the country. Traditional Roman Catholicism, and Orthodoxy of course, provide these things while also challenging one’s existing beliefs (at least to some extent, depending on your resident apologist). Modern Roman Catholicism provides an abstract way of changing your affiliation and beliefs without changing your externals too terribly much.
Still, here’s the problem: if Orthodoxy is the path you choose (and of course implicit here is my own belief that that’s the right path, but we’re not talking about that right this second) you eventually find out one of two things:
- Not everybody there is there for the same reasons you are, and those reasons might not be mutually intelligible, and/or very difficult to translate across cultural barriers.
- You find yourself in a community of people who ARE there for the same reasons you are, but it’s for that exact reason there’s a kind of hyper-idealized vision that is individually held and to some extent mutually exclusive with the hyper-idealized vision other people have.
And, of course, there’s the simple fact that the “true church” isn’t the perfect church in an earthly sense. All of these points have significant implications; Rod Dreher’s insistence that ethnic parishes are little more than “the tribe at prayer” is a serious misunderstanding of what’s actually going on, but that’s a result of the first point, for example.
As regards the second point — well, in retrospect, let’s just say that I see the mass conversion of the EOC in their existing communities as setting a really dangerous precedent. Along similar lines, if you look at the mission guidebook for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, one of the things it mandates is that the initial group of families MUST be made up of a certain number of Greeks. The point seems to be, “We’re not going to let a bunch of converts who don’t know what’s going on just set up shop and go to town.”
In any event, where I think some of the disillusionment comes from is this — I think what happens is that there are people who convert thinking that it’s going to be all awesome sauce and incense and kissing chalices and domes and “Boy, people will just come in droves if they can just see what’s happening!” — the Russian Primary Chronicle all over again, only this time, in America. What happens, however, is that bishops turn out to be fallible, English translations of liturgical poetry tend to clank (let’s talk about the canon for Lazarus Saturday sometime), it becomes evident really quickly that the Episcopalians are able to pay their musicians a lot better, there are folding chairs in the middle of a nave that looks like an office building, and if you can convince your friends to come, more often than not, they are frankly mystified and manage to eke out a somewhat patronizing “Well, that was really interesting and I can see why you’re there” before running for the door. If you’re the kind to educate yourself more, you find that what’s happening in American parishes, even a lot of the ethnic ones, is pretty far removed from much of what happens in the old country parishes (what I think Owen White has called “Orthodox Orthodoxy” once or twice), and you realize that part of why the beauty of Hagia Sophia was able to convert the Russians is because the emperor could basically say “you’re converting” by fiat.
Then there’s the problem that i bring up here — people pick up on the fact that the people and places they hear about in our liturgical texts are called Demetrios and Ephesus, not Joe and Akron, Ohio. That can have a kind of mysterious, otherworldly appeal for awhile, but then you start to think, “Wow, is there really nothing of import in my faith to have ever happened where I live?”
But what the real problem is, and what isn’t comfortable to talk about in a culture where religious freedom is one of the fundamentals, is that there’s an extent to which Orthodoxy has to function in a public, popular way in order to really work, and it can’t do that here. How can you have a village or a city popularize a saint in this country when there are no villages or cities that are Orthodox? This is, I suppose, why the “let’s start Orthodox communities” idea is so popular among some converts, but that’s not really something that can work in this country without it being a synthetic utopia that will fall apart within one generation. Orthodoxy really isn’t intended to function as the boutique SWPL religion that Owen semi-accurately accuses it of being — it’s intended to be the local, popular, public church, and there’s virtually no way for it to be that in this country, not with either Orthodoxy or the USA in their current forms. The religious and cultural equilibrium in this country is, frankly, set up to make sure that such a thing doesn’t happen. Orthodoxy has the problem of being just one more Christian group among lots and lots of other Christian groups in this country, and being so in a country that in theory is already culturally Christian, as opposed to being the Christian group in a pagan country that is culturally pagan.
What’s the answer? I have said it before, but I genuinely think that the rabid insistence on divorcing “little-t” and “Big-T” Tradition turns Orthodox Christianity into an abstraction that one can mold into whatever form of Christian idiolect with Byzantine trappings that one likes. Orthodoxy as received by American converts tends to be reduced down into a palatable form, with certain teachings carefully restated so that they don’t actually say what they are, and various “ethnic customs” being essentially “flavors” that one can mix and match as they so choose. It’s an attempt to transplant Orthodoxy in a way that allows you to transplant yourself into it with minimal discomfort. But here’s the thing — all those distasteful ethnic “little-t” traditions come out of the fact that Orthodox Christianity is lived and received in a cultural context and a particular rhythm of life. Read Juliet du Boulay’s Cosmos, Life and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village for some sense of what I’m talking about. As much as we scions of American Puritanism are uncomfortable admitting it, dancing, feasting, and singing folk songs are as much a part of lived, received Orthodox practice in the parts of the world that are actually Orthodox as eight hour long services, monasteries, beards, chant and stone churches. (I will point out that a big point made at a recent rembetiki concert in Bloomington was that the vocal style of rembetiki is grounded in the technique and theory of Byzantine chant.) We want the asceticism and discipline because it helps us to feel something real in our world of ready-made plastic pleasures, but that doesn’t mean that we know what we’re talking about when we write off Greek festivals and haflis and poppyseed rolls as irrelevant, if not dangerous, externals.
If we want Orthodoxy to give us roots, then we need to watch and learn how Orthodox live their lives and not be so quick to judge or talk about how this or that “little-t tradition” “won’t work in America”. Otherwise we’re still Protestants. And if we’re going to still be Protestants, let’s at least be honest about that. I agree that this doesn’t have to mean monarchism, or sequestering ourselves into SCA-style reconstructions of Russian peasant villages, and that a “package deal” mentality is going to be rife with cognitive dissonance in the long run, but the whole experience of being a Christian in the present day is an exercise in cognitive dissonance in one form or another. And let’s be honest — it always has been, and always will be. Something about seeing through a glass darkly and being a folly to the Greeks comes to mind.
Audio from Orthodox Music Symposium now on Ancient Faith Radio
Published 27 January 2011 Academia , General , Media , music , The Orthodox Faith 1 CommentTags: alexander khalil, all saints bloomington, american orthodox music, byzantine chant, chant, early music institute, ecclesiastical chant, ethnomusicologists, ethnomusicology, friends of music at all saints, hazards of church music, indiana humanities council, john michael boyer, kurt sander, liturgical music, medieval byzantine chant, national forum of greek orthodox church musicians, orthodox music symposium at indiana university, random acts of chant, richard toensing, sacred music, vicki pappas, why do we need beautiful music in churches?
The talks from “We Knew Not If We Were In Heaven Or On Earth: Music, Liturgy, and Beauty in Orthodox Christianity” are now posted on Ancient Faith Radio’s website. Many thanks to John Maddex for making them available through this medium! Also, photos from the event can be viewed here — thanks to Anna Pougas for being the day’s official (more or less) photographer!
Sam Zuckerflynn
Published 18 January 2011 Academia , Beginnings , General , Media 6 CommentsTags: Academia, orthodox music symposium at indiana university, the social network, tron, tron: legacy
My blog has been a touch more unloved in the past few months than I’ve really intended it to be. It’s like a paper diary; you get into a rhythm, then something disrupts that rhythm, and you know it’s going to take longer than usual to say what you want to say about it, so you put it off. Then more things happen while you’re putting it off, which means it’s going to take even longer, so you really have to put it off for a bit longer. Then, eventually, a new rhythm emerges as you fill the time you once spent journaling with other things, and next thing you know you look up and it’s been three months since last you wrote any thing and even longer than that since you did any more than write “Wow, what a day yesterday was, but I don’t have time to write about it right now.”
And, let’s be honest, on a normal day my blog posts are long to begin with. Catching up on several months’ worth of long blog posts is, shall we say, daunting.
In a nutshell, the Orthodox Music Symposium started taking up a lot of my free time about the time I actually realized I could write grants for the thing. By the end of August, school had started up again, and this year I’m a course assistant, so that was also taking up my time. By the middle of September, Megan had left for Germany, which meant that schoolwork, grading, the Symposium, church, trying to keep to a workout schedule and taking care of the house was taking up every waking moment I had.
The Symposium was a blast. The morning before, I got an e-mail from the Order of St. Ignatius saying, sorry this is so late, but a check is in the mail, which meant that we were fully funded before the event happened (if only by a matter of hours) — something I couldn’t say for John Boyer’s first visit a year ago. Anyway, people came, we had fun, everybody gave interesting talks, and I’m starting to take concrete steps towards the next one. The audio will eventually be available on Ancient Faith Radio, and I’ll provide a link here, of course.
In November the History department decided that I had completed a Master’s degree, which was great for all kinds of reasons, not the least being that I’m getting the ratio down — 11 years for a four year degree, and now four years for a two year degree. I may have my Ph. D. (to say nothing of a job) by the time I’m 40.
In December, I spent a week in Alaska with my mother and stepfather after Finals, and then spent 1 day in Indianapolis (thank you, East Coast weather disaster) and 10 days in Germany with Die Frau. I got back on 6 January, and then it was off to the races again. This semester, I’m sitting in on first year Syriac again to try to reclaim as much of it as I can (while also working through Thackston’s Introduction to Koranic and Classical Arabic so that I can have another Semitic language with which to coordinate Syriac, as well as potentially another liturgical language I can fake), taking a seminar on early Christian mysticism, another seminar on Herodotus and Thucydides, and grading for the Greek history course that covers the Persian War up to Alexander the Great. Plus there are these things called “Lent,” “Holy Week,” and “Easter.” In addition to all of that, St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Urbana-Champaign is having me come out this weekend to do a daylong workshop, next weekend I’m meeting my father and stepmother in Memphis, and then the first weekend in February St. Raphael Orthodox Church in Iowa City is having me sing with them in a fundraiser concert. The choir director there, Lori Branch, is my predecessor’s predecessor here at All Saints, and is also godmother to Matthew Arndt of the music theory faculty at University of Iowa and somebody who’s been my friend since the seventh grade, so I could hardly say no.
Okay, we’ll consider that “caught up.”
Yesterday, I was in a Best Buy (now, why I would use the indefinite article when there’s only one Best Buy in Bloomington is inexplicable to me, but “the Best Buy” seems not quite right, and “Best Buy” by itself appears too abstract, like I was in the Platonic ideal of Best Buys) and I played with an iPad for a few minutes. I have to say, I felt a bit like Ed Dillinger in Tron. I even typed “Request: Access to Master Control Program. User Code: 00-Dillinger. Password: Master.” Alas, it didn’t reply, “Hello, Mr. Dillinger. Thanks for coming back early.”
No, I didn’t buy it. Yet.
Two movies came out between 1982-3 that captivated me: Tron and WarGames. The immediate result of the captivation was an Atari 800XL as a Christmas present in 1983, a fascination with computer graphics, and an appreciation of Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Peter Jurasik, and John Wood that continues to this day.
In 1998, having dropped out of school and searching for a job that would allow me to move back to the Seattle area, thanks to some coaching from an old friend to say nothing of sufficient desperation to say “Yes, of course I can do that” to everything they asked me in the interview, I was fortunate enough to get a contract position as a tester for a major software company. For a number of reasons, I won’t name the company, even though it’s reasonably obvious and it’s not exactly a closely-guarded secret. Suffice it to say that, particularly once the job became full-time a year later, what I had would have been somebody else’s dream job. As a 22 year old kid with no college degree and certainly no higher math or computer science courses, even given the state of the tech industry in 1998, I shouldn’t have been able to get that job, but I did, and I was there until July of 2003, when I quit to go back to school. The company isn’t really “computer guy’s dream job” material anymore, as I understand it; it’s a good upper-middle-class place to work, much as Boeing was for years, but the fabulous cash and prizes that made people equate working there with winning the lottery during much of the ’80s and ’90s were basically gone by the time I showed up — at the very least, guys like me were the first generation who wouldn’t see any of that kind of benefit. In a way, that was lucky — the generation of employees immediately preceding mine were those who had to deal with loans taken out against options that, despite assurances that “the stock always goes up, way up!”, were underwater by 2000.
Part of why I don’t want to name the company is because, I guarantee you, they wouldn’t take me back in a million years, but I also wouldn’t want to go back in a million years. For me, that job was a means to an end, a way to support myself while I prepared for my next step as a singer without waiting tables. The work was okay, and it was cool being able to say that I did what I did, but I wasn’t very good at it, a lot of the internal processes weren’t intuitive to me even if I generally understood the basic logic of testing, and I wasn’t motivated to be constantly doing better at it the way everybody else around me was. I was an outsider in a lot of ways; I wanted a day job that allowed me to pursue a dream, not a lifestyle, and particularly at the time, you were expected to make it your lifestyle. Even if I wasn’t singing, though, I wouldn’t have had the motivation to do that, because the writing was on the wall with respect to the tech bubble and what that meant for the company’s stock within a year of being given the new hire stock option grant. Why kill yourself for alleged millions you know you’ll never see? Well, by the time I left, in the unit I was working in, the motivation was just to keep your job — they knew they had hired people in a tight tech labor market whom they wouldn’t have hired otherwise, and they could afford to be more selective of new employees, as well as threatening to existing employees, in 2003. Part of the motivation to go back to school in the fall of 2003 was because I’d strongly suspected since summer of 2002 that I would need to find a way to quit before I got fired. The young artist programs I auditioned for in fall of 2002 didn’t pan out, and the clock was ticking; finishing my degree as far away from the Pacific Northwest tech industry as I could manage was a really attractive option.
(By the way, to this day, when I get the question “What did you test?” and I tell the person what “my” feature of the Major Product Line I worked on was, I’m immediately asked, “Oh, then maybe you can tell me how to turn it off? I hate that silly thing.” All I can say is, don’t blame me. I tried to tell The Powers That Be that users would hate it back in 1999.)
Anyway, I’ve been out of the software world for longer than I was in it, which is strange to me in a lot of ways. In the intervening seven and a half years, Apple overtook Microsoft in market capitalization. Google became the hot, millionaire-making company. Chrome became the browser to watch. iPhones and iPads came out. Facebook happened. Microsoft still puts out the dominant operating system and productivity suite, but that’s kind of along the same lines as Ford making the cars that cops and old people drive — it’s not really what shapes how people on the street think about cars. I remember somewhere around 2000 a friend of mine who was a Microsoft employee telling me, “In ten years, Microsoft is going to be thought of as more of a communications company than a software company.” Yeah, um, no, not so much. That’s what’s happened for Apple, but Microsoft has had to expend too much energy supporting its own weight to be able to innovate in the ways that my friend was anticipating — at the very least, to be able to translate those innovations into products that are compelling in the marketplace. In many ways, if the Justice Department had actually succeeded in breaking up Microsoft, it might truly have been the best thing for them, because they wouldn’t be weighed down as much as they have been for the last decade. They wouldn’t have become IBM, in other words.
I’ve been hearing rumors on one movie site or another since probably 1996 about a sequel to Tron. In 2002, there was a rumor that seemed substantial enough to prompt me to write a letter to Steven Lisberger, the director of the original, trying to pitch myself as a consultant on how to capture the look and feel of of the offices of a modern software company. I got a polite letter back from Disney Studios a couple of months later just saying that no work was at present proceeding on a Tron sequel. In retrospect, I really should have kept on top of that.
I saw Tron: Legacy in IMAX and in 3-D on opening day (the first movie I’ve bothered with IMAX for since Watchmen, and the first of the new batch of 3-D movies I’ve seen), and I’ve seen it once more since. If nothing else, it’s a jaw-dropping visual accomplishment — it is easily one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen, and I’ll also add my voice to the thousands out there that have praised the Daft Punk score (that clearly had a lot of help from Hans Zimmer, but never mind that now). I have to give Disney credit for the guts they’ve shown making an expensive sequel to a cult property 28 years later. I truly hope that they do the work of building the franchise. I think it’s an idea whose time has finally come, and I loved Tron: Legacy. I get the impression it’s become fashionable among my compatriot geeks to hate the movie, but it seems to me they’ve missed what the movie was doing. The original Tron was really based around a very simple idea, captured in the great Barnard Hughes’ line: “You can remove men… from the system, but we helped create it. And our spirit remains in every program we designed for this computer.” What an interesting idea — that a computer program, even something as simple as a compound interest calculator, retains the impression of its programmer. The religious nature of the idea is obvious — that of creating in one’s own image — and is underscored by Flynn taking on the form of a program, coming down from the user’s world to the computer world, saving the system by “dying,” coming back to life, and ascending back to his own realm.
Still, the understanding of the general public of computers in 1982 was pretty simplistic, and the special effects required to sell the idea left insufficient room, let alone vocabulary, to really mine the depths of the philosophical question. The most glaring question was — were these things alive? Well, maybe.
Tron: Legacy has been criticized for not reflecting the more sophisticated integration of computers into our daily lives into its storyline. Instead, it seems to go out of its way to avoid doing so — the computer world is on a private server that’s separate from the Internet and that hasn’t been touched since 1989. Wouldn’t it be more interesting, some reviewers have suggested, to see the battle between Clu and Flynn played out against the backdrop of the tech boom of the late ’80s and ’90s?
That would be an interesting movie, yes. However, it seems to me that what Tron: Legacy is going for is an exploration of the very question that the original sidesteps — are the programs in the computer world alive? If so, to what extent is that life similar to, and/or different from, human life? By presenting the computer world in Tron: Legacy as something separate from the technological advances in “the real world,” it can be explored more freely — what would happen if the world we saw in the original was just left to develop on its own for two and a half decades? That chip around Sam’s neck at the end will presumably suggest a way that the Grid can be integrated into the worldwide computer network of 2011, and if Kevin Flynn’s consciousness is still in there somewhere, then perhaps we might see him appearing to people on the Web — something like Count Zero. The religious ideas here are also very plain — Clu, like Lucifer (same first three letters!), cannot create new programs, he can only repurpose (“rectify”) or destroy existing ones. He intends to lead an army of repurposed programs into the “real world” — to wage war on heaven, in other words.
The main problem that Tron: Legacy has, as I see it, is that the iconic performance of Jeff Bridges since the original isn’t Preston Tucker (a criminally underrated performance in a criminally underrated movie) but rather The Dude, and The Dude already is not unlike an older Kevin Flynn. So, now that you’ve got Jeff Bridges playing an older Kevin Flynn, parts of it will inevitably come across as Dude-like. Oh well; it’s not Jeff Bridges’ fault that they didn’t make a Tron sequel earlier.
This last week I also occasioned to finally watch The Social Network. Whatever its historical merits may or may not be, it’s a fantastic movie. David Fincher, Aaron Sorkin, and the entire cast (including Justin Timberlake! Who knew?) knock it solidly out of the park, and in a lot of ways it’s a very perceptive generational portrait, not entirely dissimilar to David Fincher’s earlier perceptive generational portrait, Fight Club. In fact, one of the things that’s interesting about The Social Network is how it’s a period piece about a generation that would have been very recently influenced by Fight Club. Certainly one can see the Mark Zuckerberg-Eduardo Saverin-Sean Parker triangle as sharing outlines with Fight Club‘s Tyler Durden-Narrator-Marla Singer relationship, although it’s not possible to see a 1:1 relationship. Both Eduardo and Mark have qualities that the other desperately wants, and while Sean Parker certainly functions as a seducer in a lot of ways, the film suggests that he’s the real wannabe of the threesome.
The Social Network is interesting on a personal level for me for two reasons — first, it picks up in fall 2003, almost exactly where I left off in the technology industry. Second, it’s a timeframe and a narrative into which I can easily place myself (I first heard of Facebook probably around fall of 2004). That’s at once interesting and unsettling — interesting because I know where I was at virtually every moment of the film, unsettling because that makes it very easy to compare trajectories and accomplishments.
In a lot of ways, I’d argue that The Social Network and Tron: Legacy are curiously appropriate companion pieces. “Now we’re gonna live online,” Aaron Sorkin has Sean Parker saying in The Social Network, and that’s the very dilemma Kevin Flynn is dealing with by the time his son finds him in Tron: Legacy. Both films are about a software creation that ultimately gets beyond the creator’s control; both depict said software creation effectively freezing the creator at a certain age (the express goal of Facebook, according to the film, is to put the social experience of college, that is to say the social experience of a certain period of youth, online); both offer interesting commentary on the current state of software as a business and the people who run that business. Tron: Legacy gets this part just about exactly right; the ENCOM board meeting is pretty accurate with respect to my experience of those kinds of conversations. Alan Bradley asks what makes the new version of the ENCOM OS 12 different; he is told, “We put a ’12’ on the box,” only to then have Ed Dillinger, Jr. (it’s a very interesting thought to me that Cillian Murphy might be this generation’s David Warner) quickly assert that it is “the most secure operating system” in existence, as though fixing what should have been in place to begin with is actually the same thing as having a feature set that’s compelling for a new release. And, of course, the snafu with the release of OS 12 is intended to evoke Windows 98 bluescreening on Bill Gates at COMDEX.
However, from the point of view of The Social Network, the kind of company that occupies skyscrapers and has “big doors” and even has a “golden master” onsite somewhere is a dinosaur. It’s a business model that has nothing to do with how Zuckerberg has become the youngest billionaire in the world. In fact, the more anybody tries to pin a particular business model to Facebook, the more Zuckerberg claims they don’t get it. The film has him attending a talk on Harvard’s campus by Bill Gates, but he doesn’t come across as exactly inspired by Gates’ reminiscences about what computers were like when he wrote BASIC. He seems to be there more out of disinterested politeness than anything — Bill Gates is yesterday’s news to him. He could have sold an earlier invention to Microsoft and he didn’t — the film explicitly has Zuckerberg awkwardly shrug rather than explain this, but we’re left with the impression that he just didn’t want the old folks in charge of his ideas. Sean Parker is his idol, the guy who lost billions of dollars but still brought down the recording industry as we know it. Maybe Gates can be seen as Flynn in Tron: Legacy — an aging creator who cannot leave his own creation. Flynn’s discovery of the isomorphs may well have had the potential to change the world, but as Zuckerberg might see it, no one would care without somebody like him to make them “cool”.
Barnard Hughes has another great line in the original Tron: “The computers and the programs will start thinking, and the people will stop.” The Social Network seems to argue that as long as a sense of connection with other people is sufficiently simulated, then we users won’t necessarily see this as a bad thing, and it’ll be fun. Tron: Legacy suggests that this idea is actually what will ultimately isolate us as individuals from everybody else, rather than connect us. We’ll be very comfortable prisoners, as Flynn is, but we’ll be prisoners nonetheless.
IU Jacobs School of Music: “ORIENT” — 17 October 2010, 7pm, Recital Hall
Published 8 October 2010 Academia , General , Media , music , The Orthodox Faith Leave a CommentTags: Arvo Pärt, bishop hilarion alfeyev, cyrillus kreek, dmitry bortniansky, henryk mikolaj gorecki, pavel chesnokov, sergei rachmaninoff, victor kalinnikov
The next couple of weekends are significant for Orthodox music getting its due on the IU campus, it seems. This weekend is the Arvo Pärt Jubilee, next Saturday is the Symposium, and then next Sunday at 7pm, the JSoM’s Symphonic Choir is presenting a concert of music by predominantly Orthodox composers. Here’s the program:
Anonymous
Христос воскресе
Pavel Chesnokov (1877-1944)
Спасение соделал
Hilarion Alfeyev (b. 1966)
Богородице Дево
Victor Kalinnikov(1870-1927)
Ныне отпущаеши
Dmitry Bortniansky (1751-1825)
Херувимская песнь 7
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
Богородице Дево
From Всенощное бдение, Op. 37
Anonymous
Возлюблю тебя Господи
Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)
Magnificat
Cyrillus Kreek (1889-1962)
Õnnis on inimene
Henryk Mikołaj Górecki (b. 1933)
Totus Tuus
CONDUCTORS:
Robin Freeman
Benjamin Gulick
Juan Hernandez
Juan Carlos Zamudio
ICONOGRAPHIC PROGRAMMER:
The Rev. Deacon Evan Freeman
Robin and Dn. Evan are friends and fellow All Saints-ers, incidentally.
Very much recommended, especially since they’re including some of Met. Hilarion’s music. As the poster notes, it is free and open to the public. If you’re around, give this a listen. If you’re on Facebook, RSVP to the event here.
Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist 