Annals of Lewisania

Saw the movie “An Education” yesterday. A small subplot turns on one of the characters pretending to know C.S. Lewis and forging an autograph on a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Debate ensues about whether he goes by “Clive” or “C.S.” I know that he went by “Jack” with friends and family, and the letters I’ve seen are usually signed “C.S. Lewis,” “C.S.L.,” or “Jack.” Did he ever go by “Clive”?

A day of anger and horror

Various bloggers have been offering reminders of the original meaning of Armistice Day, the reason for the season, if you will. See Jim Henley, John Quiggin, and Jacob T. Levy. Levy in particular gets to the heart of the matter:

A Veteran’s/ Armistice/ Remembrance Day observed on November 11 in particular shouldn’t just mean a gauzy and somber honoring of live veterans and fallen soldiers. It should be in part a day of anger and horror about the particular war that ended on this day, the stupid brutality of it, and the evil that followed in its wake. Of course, no continuously-existing government (US, UK, Canada) is likely to create a day officially dedicated to pointing out that its predecessor contributed to the deaths of millions for no good cause. But we have the capacity to remember lessons other than the official ones.

If there’s one thing we could stand to remember in light of recent (and ongoing) events, it’s that citizens’ first reaction when their leaders try to whip up war frenzy should be one of the deepest skepticism.

Quotes for Brother Martin’s birthday

From Kim at Connexions: Happy birthday, Martin!

Two “fall of the Wall” songs

I was a young buck of 15 at the time, so naturally my memory of the events is filtered through rock music:

Jesus Jones, “Right Here, Right Now”

Scorpions, “Winds of Change”

[Edited because of embedding issues.]

Close encounters of the religious kind

The Post had an article this morning on a conference being sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences on religious implications of the possible discovery of extra-terrestrial life.

In principle, I’m not sure most the challenges posed by such a discovery would be all that different from ones we’re already used to. We’re already having to come to terms with the idea that human beings aren’t the center of the cosmos. Why should it be threatening to Christians to think that God, in his overflowing goodness, would want to create other creatures throughout this unimaginably vast universe?

Similarly, the question of salvation and Christian uniqueness with respect to aliens doesn’t necessarily seem to be tremendously different from the question of Christianity’s relationship to other religions on Earth. The basic options would seem to be (1) that the one incarnation in Jesus is salvifically sufficient for all creatures, (2) that there could be multiple incarnations, or other suitable ways of relating to the divine, for each race of beings, or (3) that alien races aren’t in need of salvation, or at least not in the same way that humans are (C.S. Lewis depicted such an “unfallen” alien race in his Space Trilogy). Interestingly, Lewis proposed that the more likely scenario would be one of humans trying to exploit alien races and that it would be better for all parties concerned if we never came into contact with them.

Maybe the most challenging scenario would be to encounter races of intelligent aliens who had no religion whatsoever. Christians have been inclined to think that the development of a certain level of intelligence necessarily brings with it the potential for relating to God. But suppose there were aliens who simply lacked this sense or capability, but were otherwise just as intelligent as us (or more intelligent). Would that count as evidence against God’s existence?

UPDATE: See Caelius Spinator’s thoughts on this at the Monastery of the Remarkable English Martyrs here.

Incarnation and animal redemption

I recently got my hands on an excellent anthology of essays–Creaturely Theology: God, Humans, and Other Animals, edited by Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough. It brings together essays on history, theology, philosophy, and ethics to deepen the conversation about the place of animals in Christian theology and practice.

So far I’ve only read a few of the essays, but they’ve been good ones. In his essay “The Redemption of Animals in an Incarnational Theology,” Denis Edwards, the Australian theologian of ecology, develops a theory of redemption that is inclusive of non-human animals. Following Athanasius, he proposes an incarnational theory of redemption as an alternative to theories that lean heavily on notions of substitution, satisfaction, or sacrifice.

It has the great advantage of bringing into focus the overwhelming and unthinkable generosity of God. It presents redemption as a divine act of self-bestowal rather than as something that changes God. God gives God’s self to us in the Word made flesh and in the Spirit poured out in grace. The Word enters into the world of flesh, that in the Spirit the community of fleshly life might be forgiven, healed, freed from violence, reconciled, and find its fulfillment in the life of God. (p. 91)

In becoming incarnate and living a life of self-giving love, the Son of God bestows the divine love and presence on a sinful and suffering world. In taking the journey into the depths of pain and abandonment he identifies with the suffering of all sentient creatures; in rising he overcomes death and sin and makes possible the redemption of all creatures as the first born of the new creation. In Christ, not just human nature, but creaturely, fleshly nature is reconciled to its Creator. In this scheme, creation and redemption are held more closely together than they are in many other accounts of atonement: the Logos or Wisdom of God is both the agent of creation and of God’s loving self-bestowal on that creation. “In the Word made flesh, God embraces the whole labor of life on Earth, with all its evolutionary processes, including death, predation and extinction, in an event that is both a radical identification in love and an unbreakable promise” (p. 95).

This boundless compassion of God gives us reason to hope that individual animals will find some kind of ultimate fulfillment in the divine life, in whatever way is appropriate to their natures. It also provides the ground for transformed relationships between us and the rest of creation. Incorporating some of the insights of French theorist Rene Girard and the theologian Raymund Schwager, Edwards proposes that Jesus overcomes violence and sin through non-violence and love of enemies. The death and resurrection of Jesus and the sending of his Spirit unmask the powers of scapegoating and death-dealing and form a new community dedicated (however haltingly and incompletely) to overcoming tribalism and competition and exemplifying a more universal, unrestricted love. This should properly extend to our relations with non-human creatures, and part of redemption for animals means transforming human attitudes toward them and beginning to overcome our violent exploitative ways.

Health care reform and Catholic social teaching

Commonweal has an interesting article on Catholic critics of health care reform. The principle of subsidiarity, a key tenet of Catholic social teaching, is often conflated with the kind of small- or anti-government rhetoric you sometimes get from the Right. J. Peter Nixon argues that this is a mistake. His conclusion:

Catholic critics of health-care reform may be correct that, according to Catholic social teaching, a “right” to health-care services does not necessarily require those services to be provided by the government. At some point, though, the burden of proof is on the critics to provide a workable alternative. They have largely failed to do that. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the concept of subsidiarity is being employed to mask an antigovernment animus that has little support in the Catholic tradition. There may be other reasons for Catholics to be concerned about aspects of health-care reform, but subsidiarity is not one of them.

Read the rest here.

Friday Metal: going Dutch

The Dutch band Textures clearly has some heavy Meshuggah influences, but I find their melodic aspects (which are more pronounced in their more recent material) make them a bit more accessible:

Did we save the rainforest?

Not really, as it turns out. Though climate change may be putting it back on the agenda, as the rainforests are pretty important for keeping vast amounts of carbon from escaping into the atmosphere.

Incidentally, this is a nice example of how the “free market” often works in practice: the World Bank bribes a relatively poor country to “develop” its natural resources in order to provide richer countries with things like rubber and cheap meat. This entails, among other things, sending the urban proletariat into the rainforest, forcing indigenous forest-dwellers off their land, and handing over huge tracts of the country’s natural patrimony over to big corporations. Freedom!

A defense of Ghostbusters

As if one was needed! Still one of my all-time faves. Link.