Arthur Farwell Paper

Three big things I have learned from my Arthur Farwell paper:

1. People at the turn of the century were INCREDIBLY optimistic -- always thinking we were right on the edge of a unifying, uniting, assimilating, “epochal” force. A huge change and shift, which would bring all Americans together in a gloriously unified national spirit, and at some point the world in a universal one.
   
2. People at the turn of the century were INCREDIBLY racist. Everything agreed with it -- religion, science, personal experience, experts, “common sense.” But for some lightning bolt of grace or stubborn insanity, I don’t see how ANYONE could have avoided buying into it.
   
3. Zow. How messed up are people 100 years down the road going to think we are/were?

Favorite Farwell quote: “If conservatism and radicalism existed in some divinely ordered proportion in each person, we would be close upon the millennium.”

And here's another link about him.

The 'Ideal Christian Life'

So. The Ideal Christian Life. (The Distracting Question of Doom, at the moment).

1. We can't get it perfectly, whatever it is, because we're flawed and sinful and imperfect human beings. But this doesn't mean that we can't strive to hit as close to the mark as possible.

2. There's diversity in the body of Christ. How does this relate to the 'ideal Christian life' question? Does it? How much room is there for our different gifts, roles, focuses, and personalities? Does God perfecting us into ideal Christians involve a "making us more ourselves than we've ever been"? With us all ending up being quite different from one another in the end? Or is that, if we were ideal Christians, we would all have pretty much the same and focus and approach to things, with a slight bit of variation? Where does the good variation end, and where does Christianess vs. un-Christianess begin?

3. Perhaps a way of rephrasing the last one: What are the adiaphora of our actions, or of how we relate to people...and what are the essentials?

4. Another kind of rephrasing (which gets down to the main reason I'm wondering about all of this): When can one say, "You're not thinking and acting like a Christian. Stop it."

5. Is the "Look at what would happen if everybody did!" approach a good way to go about thinking about this? (I was indoctrinated with Kantian ethics as a child! YES!!!).

6. Imitate Christ. "Imitate me as I imitate Christ." I sure wish there were a lot more stories to go off of, right now. (Also...I'm pretty sure Paul didn't mean it to the extent of "everyone should be a foreign missionary." So how far, or in what manner, is his "imitate me" exhortation meant?)

The San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival

Well -- the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival strikes again. And I have yet to get my thoughts on the matter wholly in order.

I haven't actually seen any of these movies. I'm working off of scattered summaries, trailers, and mission statements at the moment. But I definitely want to get my hands on one of the festival DVDs at some point. If this is the future of Christian filmmaking, I want a solid picture of the mess it's heading into, and hopefully some solid ideas of ways to provide a counterpoint.

Note the word "counterpoint." Unlike last year, I'm not going around yelling that the SAICFF is a disgrace to Christian art and culture, a dead end, and that should we scratch the festival and its guidelines and start over. There are problems, to be sure. But I was far too harsh in my initial assessment. I've reread the 2004 entries, and there are some promising summaries in the mix. After Hours, The Art of Play, From Joseph's Quill, and Nellie, among others.

I have no clue if the finished products do justice to the summaries or not. Images of horrific acting, bad lighting, poor scoring, poor dialog, and glaring moralizing immediately spring to mind, and I'm inclined to think that the answer is "or not." But I can see good films potentially being made out of some of these summaries, and this is a most encouraging thought. The festival and its guidelines do not have to be a dead end street. A good director can make something thoughtful and worthwhile under them.

Many of the movies this year also appear promising. No Greater Love, The Narrow Path, and A Journey Home, among others. Again, good acting, good filmmaking technique, good development, characterization, wit, and subtlety would be necessary (especially for other possibly good ones like Bubble Trouble,Growing Up, and Engel in America).

Assorted scattered reports say that the quality has risen this year, so maybe a couple of these hit gold this time.

Either way, they're clean, family friendly, moral, encouraging, Christian films -- just like the guidelines and festival makers want.

And as wonderful and encouraging as all these might be, they also come nowhere close to encompassing the potential breadth and depth and impact and height of Christian filmmaking.

If the SAICFF becomes the face of Christian movie-making, we are in quite a bit of trouble. Making family-friendly movies is a worthy goal; making clean movies is a worthy goal; making movies that have a nice and wonderful resolution (with clear answers!) at the end can be a worthy goal. But I can't agree that these are the only truly and deeply "Christian" movies that can be made. Or that they're the ideal standard a Christian movie should strive for.

First off, this world is a screwed up place, where bad things happen, where evil things happen, and where things aren't always nice and pretty and family-friendly. And often, if you're going to tell a story fully and deeply, you're going to have to deal with this sort of thing. If you're going to write a film that grapples seriously many of the evil, difficult, messy parts of reality, you're going to have evil-difficult-messy-uncomfortable parts in the film. Often things that you can't just brush over with a happy smilie Jesus-loves-you! face at the end.

Secondly, this world is a place where the answers to things aren't always clear and obvious and written the sky -- where people make horrific choices and mistakes, and where people think they are doing right, but are actually doing quite the opposite. And where the old man still exists in the redeemed, and where God's common grace shows up in the unredeemed. If you're going to make a film that tackles deeply important things fully and truly, this sort of mess and difficulty will probably show up in your film as well.

Going back again to the CS Lewis lectures...one of the incredible things about fiction is that it can be "at rest in a degree of ambiguity." It can "provide the exceptions to our generalizations, reminding us that our generalizations are generalizations."

SAICFF films appear to run into barriers and problems in both of these areas. There's a strict limitation on the portrayal of negative parts of reality. And, although it's a bit harder to pin down, SAICFF films also seem a bit reticent to allow a "degree of ambiguity," or to focus on "exceptions to the generalizations."

In one sense, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

People like me who tend to like a degree of ambiguity need people out there saying, "NO! SOMETIMES THINGS ARE CLEAR AND OBVIOUS! GET BACK IN LINE, YOU PROTO-HERETIC!" And while dark and troubling movies serve a good and necessary purpose, warm and encouraging and uplifting ones serve at least as vital a role.

SAICFF films will tend towards a certain emphasis and tone. Flickerings films tend toward another. Other Christian groups will tend towards other ones. Counterpoint. Hopefully. As long as we aren't killing one another over it, in which case it'd be more like John Cage than Bach...

(And really, it's not that simple, because these groups are often saying rather mutually exclusive things about culture, art, and Christianity's relation to the world. My brain hurts at the moment, though, and I've got a paper to write, and this is thing is already super-long, so part 2 will not get written anytime soon).

Nation Building Fun

NationStates is a pretty neat place. You get to set the initial political and social parameters of a country, then make decisions about various laws and issues that arise. The first Big Issue appears to be voluntary vs. compulsory voting.

My two countries are in their infancy, created out of thin air tonight with 5 minutes of button-clicking. And they've got lousy names...I really should have thought them out better, rather than typing in the first things that came to my head.

The Nomadic Peoples of Illing are a demi-communist Christian community. Or an attempt at one. The initial parameter settings didn't come out quite right. And by the time the voting mess is figured out, I don't know WHAT they'll sound like.

The Federation of Rhadika is sort-of libertarian country, and a slightly more serious attempt at nation-building.

I also wanted to make the Byzantine Empire. And Hillsdale College. Plus throw theonomy into the mix for another country. And other randomly fun stuff. :-)

Mayoral Elections

For any of you non-Hillsdale people who read this...

Hillsdale just elected 18-year-old Michael Sessions as mayor. We've a somewhat crazy city to match our somewhat crazy college, now. :-) Should be interesting to watch what happens, at least.

More links:
The latest news on the matter
And an article about the campaign
And an article about the victory

Floating Islands!

NYT has an article about floating islands. Because I'm in CS Lewis/Perelandra-mode, I thought it was especially cool.

Some key and interesting parts:

...there are dozens of floating islands, sometimes called floating bogs, in several states including California, Indiana, Maine, and Ohio. Many others once floated but have since been destroyed or become land-locked...


...The islands usually form in wetlands, where plants take root in peaty soil or sphagnum moss in a shallow lake or riverbed, said Dave Walker, a senior project manager with the St. Johns River Water Management District in Florida, where, he said, "you can get acres and acres of floating islands on a lake."

When the plants decompose, they release gases that can create buoyancy, he said. And if there is a surge in the water level, from a flood or hurricane for instance, the peaty mat can break away from the bottom and float. Mr. Walker said some islands could even be precipitated by "a large alligator burrowing" on a lake bottom.

The islands, which can be as big as an acre and six inches to six feet thick, are rich environments for wildlife, allowing small creatures to outfloat predators. Many of the islands sprout trees, which act as sails; the 20-foot birches, alders and pines on the Island Pond island can ferry it across the entire pond in as little as 20 minutes, residents say.

In some parts of the world, like Loktak Lake in India and Lake Kyoga in Uganda, people live or fish on floating islands, Mr. Van Duzer said.

In Springfield, few people seem to venture onto the Island Pond island; some residents say they worry about falling through its spongy surface. But it teems with birds and amphibians, and there is even rumored to be a turtle the size of a bear, nicknamed Big Ben, that ostensibly feasts on ducks, geese and anything else it can snap up.


...many Island Pond residents feel affection for their itinerant island. Dan Blais tried to plant tomatoes on it and named a pair of geese who return to it each year Hansel and Gretel.

"It's like walking on a waterbed," said Mr. Blais. "I love to see it moving around."

Thee, Thou, Ye, You!

I realized a few weeks ago that I use the familiar ("thee" and "thou") when talking with friends. (I also talk with my hands, and I also lapse into "fake German" and "fake French" when English words fail me. But that is beside the point).

My sisters and I refer to one another as "thee" and "thou" all the time. It's now apparently carried over to my interaction with other people. When I run into Jessie or Laura or someone else I know very well, my immediate reaction is to say, "Hi! And how art thou doing?" If I have time to think about it, I can check myself and say "How are you doing?" But it sounds very forced to my ear when I do so.

I have also recently realized that English has no second person familiar plural pronoun. Or at least none that is distinctly familiar.

In somewhat simpler English: There's no clear way to address two or more people at once as "thou." In my particular case, I ended up saying something like, "Hi! How art...how art thou two? Thou and thou? Thou all? doing??"

And if you are still utterly confused (which is quite utterly likely), here is a picture to straighten some things out:



(If you examine the chart closely, you will see that there's technically no way at all to definitively refer to multiple people in the second person. We get around this problem in everyday English by saying things like "you all" or "you guys" or "you people" or "y'all." But in standard English, there's no way to distinguish a plural "you" from a non-plural "you." Or a familiar plural "you" from a formal plural "you".)

ANYHOW! Laura brought up the word "ye" as a possible solution. And I have finally gotten around to researching the precise usage of the word, and its potential to solve this dilemma.

Basically -- it allows us to have an official second person plural. It does not, however, allow a distinction between familiar 2nd person and formal 2nd person:



Moreover, "ye" can only be used as a subject or predicate nominative. It can't be used as a direct object. We have to use "you" again:



Finally, "ye" has perhaps more connotations of the formal than familiar.

And here is a short history of why all of these things are the case, and of how we ended up with the mess of pronouns we have today:



And now I'm going to bed.