One More Post on Postman

(See HERE to view my previous writing on Postman) I want to throw out another Neil Postman post, as he has many attention grabbing ideas, but it may be my last at least for a while for as I read more of his articles online these last 2 days I began to again feel drawn to a much deeper and fuller reservoir of knowledge, or may I say, truth of us human beings, that being the work of René Girard. This is not to put down Postman for he helped me come to see much about the human predicament. He made sense out of what was going on around me as a student of human behavior - through my interest in marketing/advertising, as a retail store entrepreneur and as a parent of a special needs child (and his struggles particularly with schooling - right or wrong his mother and I chose public education for him). Anyway, here is a sample of juicy thoughts to ponder from Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Today, some 22 years after this book, I can't help but see where we are beginning to experience some of Orwell's fears coming into play, maybe due in part because of how deeply Huxley's fears took root in our beings and then in our culture. If allowed to bring in a bit of mimetic theory, I think Huxley's comment about our huge "appetite for distractions" easily advances us to what Gil Bailie relates - the generational effect of this distraction, where its fruits are a generation of hearts of indifference or defiance. And these hearts of indifference or defiance will inevitably usher in a "revolution" from outside (enter Orwell's fear). Though great in their overt ways of grabbing the attention of the masses, these 2 authors were telling, maybe in a rudimentary manner, what the Church has been pronouncing some 2000 plus years and what Girard more recently has re-focused in methodology that some sciences can start to incorporate into their research.

Reality Check - Postman to Girard

Most important tip to Athos HERE and Daniel Mitsui HERE

I have been highly influenced by Neil Postman – particularly studying his early works Teaching As a Subversive Activity and The Disappearance of Childhood. It was in his works as well as the work of A.S. Neill that I started to realize the violence (at an institutional level) that we inflict on our children under our particular guise of education or catechizing as well as how that violence is slapped right back into our faces. I eventually fell away from his work shortly after discovering the work of Réne Girard yet Postman reappears here for me again.

All his points on the effect of technology on religious faith are intriguing yet I would like to pick up something from his point #4:

“That is also why we must be suspicious of capitalists. Capitalists are by definition not only personal risk takers but, more to the point, cultural risk takers. The most creative and daring of them hope to exploit new technologies to the fullest, and do not much care what traditions are overthrown in the process or whether or not a culture is prepared to function without such traditions. Capitalists are, in a word, radicals....

“I trust you understand that in saying all this, I am making no argument for socialism. I say only that capitalists need to be carefully watched and disciplined. To be sure, they talk of family, marriage, piety, and honor but if allowed to exploit new technology to its fullest economic potential, they may undo the institutions that make such ideas possible.”

Being a small business entrepreneur AND having studied violence, including the violence at the institutional and structural level, I am in tune with the dark side of Capitalism and I agree with Athos that with a statement like the above Postman opens the door for us to hopefully explore Distributism on a much deeper level.

On a different level I wanted to challenge us: Today we all make harangues (legitimate as they may be) against the encroachment of Islam into the West yet we remain veiled to how we ourselves usher Islam in by how we have allowed our very own culture to divide and conquer us – having us live lives in compartments separating our Christian faith and values from all the other aspects of our daily life. This cultural and psychological delusion of a separation of and from faith propels us into a ‘hell’ of its own needing no help from others of different religions. The implosion - a “failed transmission” of our faith - that the West is headed toward is in large part due to a fatherlessness that results in each later generation bearing hearts of greater indifference or defiance – neither condition able to pass on the viable and passionate faith of Abraham, Jesus and Paul. (Download Jan09 mp3 file of a talk given by Gil Bailie from his Emmaus Road Initiative)

If there is a growing awareness tugging at your heart calling you out of our violence to start the process of blending your separateness into wholeness may we suggest that you not only get fully active at your parish but that you pick up a work of Réne Girard, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture. Gil Bailie and his Emmaus Road Initiative is another great way toward integrating the legions of separation within and finding yourself kneeing in the Real Presence.

Lastly, let me change a word or two in Neil Postman's point #5 to make my final thought.

Our enthusiasm for the West (as we have created it to be today) can turn into a form of idolatry and our belief in its beneficence can be a false absolute. The best way to view the West is as a strange intruder, to remember that it is not part of God's plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us.

The heart of this awareness is a transformed education and catechizing that Gil so aptly talks about HERE:

Precisely because the content of the Christian revelation is the mystery of unimpeded giving and receiving of love within the Trinity, its transmission necessarily depends on a relationship of unguarded trust on the part of the recipient – which, of course, places a special onus on the transmitter, for if the recipient is docile to the transmission and the transmitter betrays the heightened responsibilities that this docility requires, he or she stands under the judgment of Jesus’ words: “If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.” (Matt. 18:6)

If individually and most importantly as we come to realize that it is only through helping others – so also collectively are to find our way back to the narrow path we must be aware that it is only through Him and that all other roads will lead, sooner or later, to a catharsis of blood-letting, nihilism and violence – the culture of death.

The essential things in history begin always with the small, more convinced communities

I truly believe that the 'essential' time is upon us and the only way to spring forth from so much that has strangled life over the last 2 or 3 decades, like the relativism that has polluted our lives infecting many even within our church pews, is a collective effort to get lean and be re-fitted in the amour of Christ. This inevitably means a smaller Church (in actual numbers initially) yet those remaining will have their faith increased in vitality, exuberance and passion of Christ, and once more become the contagion for personal and cultural transformation as like the original 12 apostles and early church.

As Pope John Paul II wrote in 1990 that, "(n)evertheless, in this 'new springtime' of Christianity there is an undeniable negative tendency... Missionary activity specifically directed "to the nations" (ad gentes) appears to be waning, and this tendency is certainly not in line with the directives of the Council and of subsequent statements of the Magisterium. Difficulties both internal and external have weakened the Church's missionary thrust toward non-Christians, a fact which must arouse concern among all who believe in Christ. For in the Church's history, missionary drive has always been a sign of vitality, just as its lessening is a sign of a crisis of faith."

So even though there has been strong negativism directed at Christianity and the Church as well as a waning of activities to convert nations, resulting in a long and dark winter, springtime is approaching (for some of us though maybe not in our lifetime). The question is, "how are we building up the body of Christ" - for the building up of others' faith is the surest way of renewal of your own faith.

In a 2003 interview by EWTN News Director Raymond Arroyo of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger we get a glimpse of how this new springtime will unfold.

Raymond: The Pope (John Paul II) has talked a great deal about the New Springtime and you, yourself have laid out your own ideas. Your vision is a little different from some. Some see the numbers growing and everybody believing and dancing hand-in-hand (the Cardinal chuckles) into the millennium. You see a different picture. Tell us what that picture involves. How do you see this Springtime evolving?

Cardinal: As I do not exclude even this dancing hand-in-hand, but this is only one moment. And my idea is that really the springtime of the Church will not say that we will have in a near time buses of conversions, that all peoples of the world will be converted to Catholicism. This is not the way of God. The essential things in history begin always with the small, more convinced communities. So, the Church begins with the 12 Apostles. And even the Church of St. Paul diffused in the Mediterranean are little communities, but this community in itself is the future of the world, because we have the truth and the force of conviction... But we will have really convinced communities with élan of the faith, no? This is springtime — a new life in very convinced persons with joy of the faith.

Raymond: But, smaller numbers?

Cardinal: Smaller numbers, I think. But from these small numbers we will have a radiation of joy in the world. And so, it’s an attraction, as it was in the old Church. Even when Constantine made Christianity the public religion, there were a small number of percentage at this time; but it was clear, this is the future... And so, I would say, if we have young people really with the joy of the faith and this radiation of this joy of the faith, this will show to the world, “Even if I cannot share it, even if I cannot convert it at this moment, here is the way to live for tomorrow.”

It seems to me that much of our negativism that spawns a nihilism in our youth and that gets transmitted along a number of generations who lose or barely maintain a faith is, as then Cardinal now Pope Benedict XVI identified, a direct result of us "building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires."

Pope Benedict XVI advocated in his trip to America this past April,

“We can and must believe, with the late Pope John Paul II, that God is preparing a new springtime for Christianity.”

This new springtime is ushered in by a mature faith. Pope Benedict XVI describes this as, "(a)n 'adult' faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from truth." This mature faith is fostered by passing it on, evangelizing and mission - by accepting your call to life in Christ.

Much of what I see as negativism is based on the "demise of the West" and there certainly is much to be concerned. Yet the West is not Christianity - the West sprung from Christianity and it is our sinfulness that has us clutching to the West and marginalizing Chrisitanity. I just cannot see where our call as Christians is to build up the West, as if the West is our salvation. The issue is our lack of faith and our unwillingness to be called out into spreading the good news. As Pope John Paul II relates; a "missionary drive has always been a sign of vitality, just as its lessening is a sign of a crisis of faith."

To help the West, if I am not way off base, is to mature our faith similarly as our youth grow into adulthood and take up their vocation whether that be religious or laity (and by way of either procreation or as the supportive community) to sow the everlasting fruits, as Pope Benedict XVI says, "in human souls: love, knowledge, a gesture capable of touching hearts, words that open the soul to joy in the Lord. So let us go and pray to the Lord to help us bear fruit that endures. Only in this way will the earth be changed from a valley of tears to a garden of God."

Here is another great way to describe what a mature faith looks, feels and acts like; it is by Gil Bailie from his January Emmaus Road Initiative:

Precisely because the content of the Christian revelation is the mystery of unimpeded giving and receiving of love within the Trinity, its transmission necessarily depends on a relationship of unguarded trust on the part of the recipient – which, of course, places a special onus on the transmitter, for if the recipient is docile to the transmission and the transmitter betrays the heightened responsibilities that this docility requires, he or she stands under the judgment of Jesus’ words: “If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of
the sea.” (Matt. 18:6)

Let us go forth and spread the good news!

PS: I can't help but think that "small, more convinced communities" is more apropos of distributism than of capitalism.

Comfy Homes Built on Quicksand

(Sign is part of a book cover.)

A couple excellent posts by Athos Desire, Ideology, & Victimization and
1,000 Cuts to Catholicism. I like putting things together so when I read these 2 posts I thought, wow, he is sending us a pretty clear and vital message. I can't help but think that those who wish to identify themselves Christians and yet feel that they are too busy or uncomfortable to "be church" - that is to love and serve God and one another - in this age of (post or) anti-Christianity, need a wake up call. We may simply have had it too easy. We need to drop the silly notions of 'individualism' and 'looking for our-self' and take up our calling to be 'e-persons' - that is we are ecclesial, eschatological, Eucharistic and evangelical persons. We are "persons" made in the image and likeness of the Trinity and we need to step up and claim our personhood within a Roman Catholic sacramental life.

I end with this spirited quote from Karen Hall over at Some Have Hats that I thought was appropriate. (Tip to our friend Gil Bailie from his talk in Session 8 of the Emmaus Road Initiative for the quote.)

Here's the bottom line: all of you compassionate, open-minded people are building yourselves very comfy houses on quicksand. There is only one "Ark of Hope." And dumb, archaic, illogical, legalistic, narrow-minded hate-mongering me? I'm going to be on it.

The Beauty of Nuptiality and Wonder of a Trinitarian Existence

tip to Gil Bailie in the final session of the Emmaus Road Iniatitive of the 2007-2008 season.

The Annunciation
Edwin Muir (1887-1959)

Now in this iron reign
I sing the liberty
Where each asks from each
What each most wants to give
And each awakes in each
What else would never be,
Summoning so the rare
Spirit to breathe and live.

Then let us empty out
Our hearts until we find
The last least trifling toy,
Since now all turns to gold,
And everything we have
Is wealth of heart and mind,
That squandered thus in turn
Grows with us manifold.

Giving, I'd give you next
Some more than mortal grace,
But that you deifying
Myself I might deify,
Forgetting love was born
Here in a time and place,
And robbing by such praise
This life we magnify.

Whether the soul at first
This pilgrimage began,
Or the shy body leading
Conducted soul to soul
Who knows? This is the most
That soul and body can,
To make us each for each
And in our spirit whole.


Let us gaze once more on the first stanza:

Now in this iron reign
(this constraint found in a sacramental marriage)
I sing the liberty
(the paradox of that sacramental sensibility - freedom joined in obedience)

Where each asks from each
What each most wants to give
And each awakes in each
What else would never be,
(perfect description of nuptiality and Trinitarian existence)

Inspiring a Wholehearted Faith in a Half-hearted Age

Emmaus Road Initiative

ERI is a project of the Cornerstone Forum: The presenter is Gil Bailie, author & Catholic layman. - It is a series of monthly presentations for parishioners, students, educators, pastors, and all who are interested in "spreading the faith and bringing it to maturity."

Gil was in Wheaton, IL last night and I was fortunate enough to have been able to attend his ERI presentation at St. Michael Catholic Church. In this introductory session he mapped out the journey for the next few months of the series, giving the audience a taste for what is in store.

As usual there is so much background packed into one of his talks ... I would like to expand on just two statements: 1) Inspiring a Wholehearted Faith in a Half-hearted Age and 2) "spreading the faith and bringing it to maturity."

Where do you start to inspire a wholehearted faith in this half-hearted age? Gil gives us the answer right off the bat: You start with the liturgy - you begin with the food of truth. Here is a link for understanding this and hopefully it will provide confidence in each of us to take ownership in the spreading of the faith and bringing it to maturity.

POST-SYNODAL APOSTOLIC EXHORTATION SACRAMENTUM CARITATIS OF THE HOLY FATHER BENEDICT XVI

Mystagogical catechesis

The Church's great liturgical tradition teaches us that fruitful participation in the liturgy requires that one be personally conformed to the mystery being celebrated, offering one's life to God in unity with the sacrifice of Christ for the salvation of the whole world. For this reason, the Synod of Bishops asked that the faithful be helped to make their interior dispositions correspond to their gestures and words...

The mature fruit of mystagogy is an awareness that one's life is being progressively transformed by the holy mysteries being celebrated. The aim of all Christian education, moreover, is to train the believer in an adult faith that can make him a "new creation", capable of bearing witness in his surroundings to the Christian hope that inspires him.

If we are to succeed in carrying out this work of education in our ecclesial communities, those responsible for formation must be adequately prepared. Indeed, the whole people of God should feel involved in this formation. Each Christian community is called to be a place where people can be taught about the mysteries celebrated in faith. In this regard, the Synod Fathers called for greater involvement by communities of consecrated life, movements and groups which, by their specific charisms, can give new impetus to Christian formation. In our time, too, the Holy Spirit freely bestows his gifts to sustain the apostolic mission of the Church, which is charged with spreading the faith and bringing it to maturity.

The Emmaus Road Initiative inevitably starts here at Christian formation to help us grow and deepen our faith so to be the light of Christ to the world. So do yourself, and the world, a favor - become a regular attendee of the Emmaus Road Initiative.

What is the Most Precious Thing We Have?

Is it fading into focus or out?

A short quiz from Gil Bailie (tape 7 from The Gift of Self):

What is the greatest discovery in the history of humanity?

Answer:

Monotheism! The essence of that discovery is that the God of monotheism is Transcendent. He is not in the stone; he is not in the temple; he is not on the mountain or the storm; he is not in my culture; he is not in my ethnicity or my gender; and he is not in my psyche or my ... He is Transcendent! Monotheism and a Transcendent God are the most important discoveries in history.

On the surface, or in a mind trapped in political philosophy, this answer would be found absurd, but wait, sit in prayer and then invite yourself to the next Emmaus Road Initiative hosted in a town nearby.

A couple excerpts from Athos' post Cassandras -- Keep It Up

"...it is the lack of revelation that leads conventional human religion, anthropologically speaking, to the same destination, i.e., the place of sacrifice. The scandal of particularity is the truth claim of the biblical revelation. Without this claim, we are right back in the relativism of comparative world religions 101. Hence, the Christian faith IS categorically different, superior, and unique in that it claims we are ALL crucifiers, mobsters, etc. capable of bloodthirstiness, betrayal, and cruelty." -- Athos

In the end it was summed up by Nietzsche who said we must choose either Christ or Dionysus. The choice, structurally, is manifestly clear in our world today.

From the post Politics & Apocalypse - Robert Hamerton-Kelly:

"...since monotheism is the first and most effective blow against the pagan sacrificial order, and every great religion is great to the extent that it decodes its own mythology of sacred violence." -- Robert Hamerton-Kelly

The Mass'keteers Call Everyone to the ERI

Calling one and all to The Emmaus Road Initiative. Our friend Gil Bailie starts up a rigorous speaking and travel schedule beginning this Saturday, September 8th at the Washington Theological Union in Washington DC.

The Emmaus Road Initiative is a series of monthly presentations and follow-up discussions for religious educators, pastors, parents, and all those committed to fostering faith and bringing it to maturity.

Pope Benedict XVI has observed that today “theology and anthropology converge as two strains in a conversation.” In an effort to encourage that conversation and make it more fruitful, the Cornerstone Forum brings together René Girard’s anthropological insights into the uniqueness and universality of Christianity and the rich theological orthodoxy which Benedict XVI both espouses and exemplifies.

The result is an account of Christianity that is explicitly Christological, thoroughly traditional, and refreshingly original – something capable of rekindling the faith of Christians and reminding others of the cultural indispensability of Western civilization’s religious patrimony.

Check out a city, date and time here.

Check out the monthly themes here.