… the trinity of America’s Christian diploma mills, the three-point theology of our creedal unaccrediteds, the pivot-point ministry of our basketball brethren — UD loves to watch dribblers for the deity at work on her soul.
These college students “focus,” says one team’s coach, “on bringing glory to God in whatever we do,” and losing games by hundreds of points is what they do to bring undecideds like UD to the Lord.
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But the scoffers! O lord, the scoffers!
They are blocking UD’s prayer shot.
Want to make some money? Start a divinity school offering a Bachelor of Theology degree in Pastafarian Studies, and round up some buddies. Troll the coaching forums or hang out at the Final Four, tell coaches you’re the USM Noodly Appendages head coach, and you’ve got an open date on some Saturday in November. Book the game, show up, lose by 100, and cash your $50,000 check.
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To grapple with the theological implications of all this, go here.
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UD thanks Dave.
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Update on one of America’s universities:
– Their website doesn’t load and they don’t have a Wikipedia page
– They do have an regularly updated Twitter:
Are u interested in playing basketball or volleyball for the Champion Tigers? Call 501-623-2272 for more information on our sports programs!
– The person that Twitter says is the school’s president, Eric Capaci, is also listed as the school’s head basketball coach …
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Okay, try this.
Take this painting of Saint Sebastian …
… and imagine him pelted with basketballs rather than arrows. This puts Champion Baptist squarely in the martyrdom tradition.
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Wow. This here’s getting to be a big national story real quick. Google News is going razorback wild!
Now ol’ UD‘s gonna make a perdiction. You jest set there and listen.
Champion Baptist University is in Arkansas, and you don’t gotta read too much University Diaries (put the word ARKANSAS in my search engine) to know that pret’ near the whole state of Arkansas is one big fat insult to the word university. So this here latest thing don’t help.
Airgoe, UD makes the following perdiction. We’re gonna be hearing from Mike Huckabee any minute. Somebody’s gotta step up and defend the state, and that’s gonna be – gotta be – our next president. Y’all hold on and see if I’m not right.
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Attendance: Just a smidgeon over two hundred souls. ‘Course now it’s famous, everybody’s gonna claim they was at the game.
And I know you’ve heard this before on this blog, but I’ve just gotta say it one more time: The whole spectacle was paid for by you and me. Your education taxes at work.
… an onion, with layer upon layer…”
And it ain’t just the Torah, as the ultra-orthodox of Israel have discovered.
An ad agency put a billboard up in their neighborhood; the billboard promoted awareness of violence against women.
On that billboard, the agency put the photograph of a woman.
They did this knowing that the nice people in that neighborhood would immediately walk over to the billboard and rip the image of the woman to shreds.
But these men are Torah scholars! These men must know about the onion!
Less than 24 hours after the poster went up, just as [the ad agency] had predicted, the face of the woman in the poster was ripped off … revealing a message that read, “International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women 25.11.03.”
Not to worry, though. I’m sure the haredim will set fires under what remains of the billboard.
From a New York Times column:
“It is a fair thing to point out,” said Shannon Hale, a Mormon who writes young adult fiction, “that there have been very prominent Jewish writers that have received a lot of accolades, and worldwide the number of Mormons are comparable to the number of Jews, so why hasn’t that happened?”
Ms. Hale’s theory is that literary fiction tends to exalt the tragic, or the gloomy, while Mormon culture prefers the sunny and optimistic.
“When I was an English major, then getting a master’s, most of the literary fiction I read was tragedy,” said Ms. Hale… The books she was assigned treated “decline and the ultimate destruction of the human spirit” as necessary ingredients for an honest portrayal of life.
UD‘s not sure she’d put it like that. Take a novel always ranked Number One and unlikely (if the NYT column is correct in its descriptions of Mormons) to generate enthusiasm or writerly inspiration among most Mormons. Take James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s not a tragedy; as Joyce Carol Oates points out here, it’s a comedy.
The highest and most spirited comedy is by necessity democratic — even anarchic. It celebrates life: the livingness of life, not its abstract qualities. Where [T.S.] Eliot saw the contemporary world as futile because disruptive of the past, Joyce, the realist-fantasist, the unparalleled mimic, gave life to these clamorous voices without passing judgment on them.
True, the novel follows dispirited Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom as they drag their asses through Dublin; yet although both men feel themselves to be in decline, there’s nothing destructive about their shared fates this particular day: They are fortunate enough (thanks to Bloom’s kindness) to meet each other, and to forge a compassionate and perceptive fellowship. They celebrate the livingness of life, singing, gazing at stars, reciting poetry, telling jokes, sharing memories, and of course going outside and peeing together:
At Stephen’s suggestion, at Bloom’s instigation both, first Stephen, then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition, their gazes, first Bloom’s, then Stephen’s, elevated to the projected luminous and semiluminous shadow.
Similarly?
The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations were dissimilar: Bloom’s longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 210 scholars: Stephen’s higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent vesical pressure.
What different problems presented themselves to each concerning the invisible audible collateral organ of the other?
To Bloom: the problems of irritability, tumescence, rigidity, reactivity, dimension, sanitariness, pelosity. To Stephen: the problem of the sacerdotal integrity of Jesus circumcised (1st January, holiday of obligation to hear mass and abstain from unnecessary servile work) and the problem as to whether the divine prepuce, the carnal bridal ring of the holy Roman catholic apostolic church, conserved in Calcata, were deserving of simple hyperduly or of the fourth degree of latria accorded to the abscission of such divine excrescences as hair and toenails.
I don’t think it’s the gloomy aspects of modernist novels like Ulysses that seem at odds with Mormonism; rather, I suspect it’s precisely these novels’ non-abstract, non-judgmental, earthbound, ongoing livingness – their straightforward and candid capture of the way we actually think and feel and act from moment to moment – that’s jarring.
An Intercultural Whatever professor at Florida Atlantic University made each of his students write JESUS on a piece of a paper and then throw it on the floor and stomp on it.
http://www.upi.com/blog/2013/03/22/FAU-student-suspended-for-not-stomping-on-Jesus/2111363965625/
One of them refused to do it and complained to an administrator. The student was thrown out of the class.
— is once again on the receiving end of a spanking delivered by a Jewish newspaper. “Moral bankruptcy… exists at the institution… [Yeshiva] must immediately undertake an independent investigation which examines moral issues at the institution.”
The author reviews some – not all – of the scandals emanating from Yeshiva just over the last few years. He wonders why Yeshiva covers them up, denies them… UD has asked why Yeshiva refuses to respond to angry public letters from alumni, fails to change its incestuous form of governance…
Far from being willing to examine its structural corruption – a corruption which will continue to generate scandals – Yeshiva shows every sign of believing itself to be morally superior.
How long can a large complex organization remain delusional?
UD gives it another five years before it will be put in some form of receivership.
… is out front on the latest Yeshiva University scandal – a decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse. And the cover-up continues.
[A Yeshiva alumnus] said he was dismayed when [the Yeshiva-appointed investigator] told him that her report might be delivered to the Y.U. board orally rather than in writing. He said he was even more alarmed when [she] said that unlike the [Penn State] Freeh report, which was disseminated publicly the same day it was presented to the board, she “could not say whether… the board would release the report to the public.”
[The alumnus] sent a letter, signed by 18 Y.U. high school alumni [the abuse took place at Yeshiva’s high school], to the chairman of the university’s board on January 3, asking that the investigation follow the blueprint laid out by the Freeh report. By January 8, the chairman, Henry Kressel, a managing director at a private equity firm in Manhattan, had not responded.
When a reporter from the Forward called Kressel on January 7 and identified himself, Kressel cut off the call. Kressel’s assistant later directed the Forward to Y.U.’s press office. (Y.U.’s press office did not respond to several questions, including a request to know who on the board is overseeing the investigation and when the board might decide to make the report public.)
Other high-ranking Y.U. officials declined to speak to the Forward. Reached at his New York home, David S. Gottesman, a billionaire investor and a Y.U. chairman emeritus, said: “I don’t talk to reporters. I never have.” Another chairman emeritus, Ronald P. Stanton, who made his fortune in agrochemicals, said, “I have no comment, sorry.”
… Seymour also declined to respond in regard to whether any member of her investigation team has any past or present ties to Y.U….
Yes, Yeshiva, following its long-established M.O. (denydenydenydenydeny), is covering itself in glory once again.
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Brava to this Yeshiva professor who takes advantage of her tenure (keep this in mind when considering the benefits of tenure) to go after Yeshiva. I’m sure Yeshiva will punish her in other ways; but they can’t fire her.
We now can see that there is a paradigm of institutional cover-up, and have named institutions that stand in that line: the Roman Catholic Church, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish organizations, Penn State, Syracuse University, the Citadel, Poly Prep Country Day School, the Horace Mann School, and now my own employer, Yeshiva University, among many others too numerous to name. At the same time, the paradigm is crumbling before our very eyes. No institution can expect to protect its secrets of abuse and assault any longer.
… between the author of an article about him (“Harold Bloom is God”) and a reader of the article.
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Your article states that Bloom was born in 1930 and then goes on to assert that he “voted for Norman Thomas every time he ran for president.” Thomas ran for president in 1928, 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944 and 1948, thus making it highly unlikely that Bloom ever voted for him. Had you done even the most minimal fact checking — say by following your own link to the Wikipedia article about Thomas — instead of indulging Bloom in his self mythologizing, your profile would have been much more interesting.
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Fair enough, Mr. Schwartz. The article has been updated.
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Mr. Fishbane, you have indeed updated the article. However, its new assertion that “Mr. Bloom, a lifelong man of the Left, said he voted for Norman Thomas,” fails to point out the impossibility of that claim, a not unimportant fact given the article’s characterization of its subject as God.
“[A]s one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, … moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night,” writes James Wood, in a New Yorker review of a book about secularism.
Like André Comte-Sponville, who, in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, celebrates as ‘atheist spirituality’ the experience of Rilkean moments of self-dissolution which allow one to feel the true being of the world and one’s natural place in it, the contributors to The Joy of Secularism (its cover archly done up to resemble The Joy of Cooking) argue that secularism is “not a negative condition, not a denial of the world of spirit and of religion, but an affirmation of the world we’re living in now; that building our world on a foundation of the secular is essential to our contemporary well-being; and that such a world is capable of bringing us to the condition of ‘fullness’ that religion has always promised.”
One of Joy‘s contributors, Bruce Robbins, extends Comte-Sponville’s ecstatic immanence, his worship of the earth and of humanity’s habitation upon it, beyond the mystically experiential, arguing that religious fullness – of meaning and value – may be derived from social action. Wood writes:
[Robbins] faults Charles Taylor for assuming that modern secular life “is beset with the malaise of meaninglessness.” Weber’s word for disenchantment, Entzauberung, actually means “the elimination of magic,” but it is a mistake to infer the loss of meaning from the loss of magic. If a malaise besets contemporary life, Robbins writes, it may have been produced not by the march of progress but by the faltering of progress — “by the present’s failure to achieve a level of social justice that the premodern world did not even strive to achieve.”
Here, Robbins, like many secularists, aligns himself with Camus’ existential defiance of meaninglessness through the free, creative, ascription of meaning to a Sisyphean world – a meaning which, founded on the human, and on the love of the human, would inevitably have social justice at its core.
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But Wood points out that all the secular – indeed, all the religious – affirmation and comfort in the world can’t really stop us asking our “tormented metaphysical questions.” (Why is life so short? So inexplicable?) As Adam Phillips, a contributor to the Joys volume, says elsewhere:
There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail… [T]here is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.
Indeed we prove recalcitrant even to the foundational project of spiritual calming, or at least spiritual clarity; we continue to harbor hatred of, and rage at, our stingy, undisclosing world. Wood quotes a passage from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse:
For one moment she felt that if [she and her companion] both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. “Mrs. Ramsay!” she said aloud, “Mrs. Ramsay!” The tears ran down her face.
Beautiful, joyous, vigorous, wise Mrs. Ramsay must be summoned from the dead to share her wisdom about life, and to tell us why she, so vigorous and good, had to die; yet she stays as silent as the friend Donald Justice addresses in his poem, Invitation to a Ghost:
Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life.
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“The main condition of absurdity,” writes Thomas Nagel in a 1971 essay, The Absurd, “is the dragooning of an unconvinced transcendent consciousness into the service of an immanent, limited enterprise like a human life.” He anticipates the problem with Comte-Sponville’s atheist spirituality: we simply seem constituted toward transcendence, toward the positing and sensing of so much more than this. We try to allow ourselves to be dragooned (a gloriously absurd word, that) back into the limited enterprise of a human life, but we remain unconvinced; as soon as we get there, a collision occurs “between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt.” When we’re truly earthbound, our curious but rather impressive “capacity to see ourselves without presuppositions, as arbitrary, idiosyncratic, highly specific occupants of the world, one of countless possible forms of life” is activated.
Hence our absurd predicament: We may have trouble believing in heaven, but we are, most of us, entirely unable to believe exclusively in earth. For us, things seem always to ramify, things are fraught, things are always spiraling outward with transcendent implication. Caught on an earth which ever catches us up, we’re in a predicament, writes Nagel, both “sobering and comic.”
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If there’s not much disentangling absurdity discursively, there’s its aesthetic treatment (hence Wood’s recourse to Woolf), in which this dilemma is staged in ways that elucidate it and reconcile us to it.
In his preface to a selection of Philip Larkin’s poems, Martin Amis attempts to account for Larkin’s status as the best-loved of post World War II British poets. It’s odd that he’s so loved, given his sour – even ugly – personality, and what Amis rightly calls the “militant anti-romanticism” of the poems.
Seamus Heaney’s misgivings are probably representative: Larkin is “daunted” by both life and death; he is “anti-poetic” in spirit; he “demoralises the affirmative impulse.”
Yet of course Larkin, more powerfully than any other poet of his time, places himself precisely in the thick of absurdity; he is the emblematic sober and comic stick in the mud.
His greatest stanzas, for all their unexpectedness, make you feel that a part of your mind was already prepared to receive them – was anxiously awaiting them. They seem ineluctable, or predestined. Larkin, often, is more than memorable. He is instantly unforgettable.
We absorb him like that because he captures our recalcitrance to our projects, and even makes this recalcitrance sing. We recognize ourselves in Larkin’s resigned irony because so often that is exactly where we are. Larkin doesn’t whisper to us beautiful secrets; but he whispers our strange and even somehow beautiful truths.
