the lure of sentences

Stanley Fish on Sentences on NPR  Take a look or a listen to this fascinating and instructive story prompted by publication of Stanley Fish's new book How To Write A Sentence: And How To Read One.  There is also an excerpt from the book.  It has nothing, as far as I can tell, to do with Peter Lombard's medieval theological sentences and everything to do with admiration for the effectiveness and beauty of a well crafted sentence such as we can all learn to write.  (That was not an example of such a sentence.)

Some people are bird watchers, others are celebrity watchers; still others are flora and fauna watchers. I belong to the tribe of sentence watchers. Some appreciate fine art; others appreciate fine wines. I appreciate fine sentences. I am always on the lookout for sentences that take your breath away, for sentences that make you say, "Isn't that something?" or "What a sentence!"  from the book

Fish asserts that once one learns to take account of the relationships between the words, one is on the way to writing sentences that are not just "lists of words."

The AmCon connection: Americans have freedom of speech, expression, and the press.  Some feel compelled to use these for good or for ill.  Our democracy depends upon citizens both speaking to and listening to each other; both writing and reading.  Good sentences, well written and pleasing sentences, will encourage understanding, even among people who disagree with each other!

leaders who know their limits

Saw yesterday the film The King's Speech.  It is charming as a period piece and as a human story about friendship.  The (future) king's experience of stammering and the importance of his having a friend to his coming to speech has much potential for discussions of how people "find their voice" and for riffs on how assurance of grace may enable identity and action.

But . . . what I went away thinking about was this: during WWII England had a king who could not speak and we had a president who did not walk.  While the first seems to have been well known and the later was concealed to a degree, surely each man had a deep, visceral awareness of his limitations.  That could lead to a leader who tries to overcompensate and forces the authority of the office on others; but, awareness of one's limitations can also generate humility and reliance on others and gratitude for collaboration.  That second outcome seems well suited to leaders of a democracy.  May we have more of this sort.

p.s. That said, when I made this observation elsewhere I slipped and implied that FDR was a king.  My cousin replied that perhaps he was the closest to a king the USA has had.  This could be the basis of a  novel.  Who is ready to write it?  Opal?

Legislating history?

Another instance of involving legislators beyond their arena of responsibility and expertise.  Here the issue, or potential issue, is the context of public school text books.  (Does this sound familiar?)  Rather than legislating science, some Tea Party activists in Tennessee propose legislating history.  SEE STORY  They want to insure that the nation's founders are portrayed in an entirely positive light, as the sort of heros no one really is.  Rather than obscure or conceal the fact that Jefferson, for example, owned slaves, might we do better to wrestle with the reasons a man who articulated high principles was unable to live up to them personally and participated in collective political decisions that undermined those principles?

History can not teach us, we must learn from it, learn from it and our fore bearers as they really were, not as we wish they had been.  Americans need to learn how to face the tragedies of our past (distant and recent), not hide them in a false story.  I've been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer lately so this brief sentence from Life Together came to mind: "By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world."  

One more point: the job of legislators is to craft laws that help us move toward the future, not to remake the past. 

Free expression and exhibitions

Censorship at the Smithsonian by Amy Johnson Frykholm posted here as a lure into her web-site and that as a sample of what we might hear from Amy and talk with her about when she is on campus February 14-15.  This post is about congress getting involved with removal of a portion of a video in a new show exploring GBLT lives at the Smithsonian.  (More precisely: the National Portrait Gallery's show "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture".)  Amy reminds us that curators have the responsibility to make choices and to compose coherent exhibits that promote the artists expression.  Curators don't include everything; there is not room and they are themselves making statements as they develop an exhibit.  This suggests, to me at least, that when we consider freedom of speech we might do well to link it to freedom of assembly and to remember that this is a group effort.

When Amy is on campus she will be very busy.   She's an alum and has been extremely generous is agreeing to take on several events including a lecture for AmCon 102 on apocalypticism and American religion, a public lecture on her forth coming book (Lecture: Doing It Right: Sex, Bodies, and Christianity in American Media), and a craft talk based on her biography of Julian of Norwich.  More details to come. The lecture will be streamed on www.stolaf.edu.

Another sort of Plymouth: cars and freedom and danger

At first glance I assumed Plymouth rock, in the winter when ice might form on the bay.  Then I read the second line and knew that I was wrong.  This is not a poem about religious freedom and the Puritans; rather it is a poem that evokes the sort of freedom that courts danger; and yet it isn't because the speaker is telling us that the sense of freedom was beyond realizing the dangers of love or thin ice.  The big, heavy car on the ice is also a vivid image of a kind of naive hubris.

 

 The Plymouth on Ice

by Thomas Moore

On frigid January nights we'd
take my 'forty-eight Plymouth onto
the local reservoir, lights off
to dodge the cops, take turns

holding long manila lines in pairs
behind the car, cutting colossal
loops and swoons across
the crackly range of ice. Oh

god did we have fun! At ridges
and fissures we careened,
tumbled onto each other, the girls
yelping, splayed out on all fours,

and sometimes we heard groans
deep along the fracture lines as
we spun off in twos, to paw, clumsy,
under parkas, never thinking of

love's falls nor how thin ice
would ease us into certain death.
No, death was never on our minds,
we were eighteen, caterwauling

under our own moon that
warded off the cops and
front-page stories of six kids
slipping under the fickle surface.
"The Plymouth on Ice" by Thomas R. Moore, from The Bolt-Cutters. © Fort Hemlock Press, 2010.

Not how to conduct a democracy.

Arizona Rep. Giffords Shot At Public Event In Tucson

Information about this event is still fragmented but what is clear: a legally elected public representative (and several other people) were shot while she made a public appearance and spoke with those she represents. This is not rule of law and it is not voting and it is not the sort of self-expression that counts as freedom of speech. In fact, it is the opposite of those. That is even more evident in the irony that Giffords' staff members were on hand to respond to concerns expressed (in speech) by her constituents.

Perhaps we'll learn that the shooter was delusional and had no political agenda. Then we will not be able to point to this as an example of anti-democratic behavior and the need to better form our citizens and to cultivate the habits of democracy. But, even if the shooter was delusional and had no political agenda, those realities will still exist as will the reality that this person had a gun to shoot with.

anthroplogy matters

I knew this.  Still, these recent class discussions about freedom, formation, and vocation have reminded me and made more vivid the tight relationship between how one understands human nature (both idea and real) and how one conceptualizes freedom.

So, those who understand the human being to be made for relationship (with God and other people and the world), as many Christians do; and also understand the brokenness of those relationships, that is alienation and estrangement, to be the core of what is wrong; these people are likely to also understand freedom to include being in relationship and community rather than merely as opportunity for self-fulfillment or the ability to determine one's own "fate."  In this way of seeing the world self-rule may be precisely the problem for individuals rather than the solution.

formation

Discussion today in Lutheran Heritage about spiritual practices and formation after yesterday's consideration of means of grace, specifically sacraments.  A lively exchange among students about whether or to what degree these practices are counter-cultural in contemporary American culture that includes religious pluralism, "churn," and a general assumption that religious identity is a choice for adult individuals.

One student articulated quite clearly his view that Luther's desire that each Christian apprehend the gospel and grow in faith has a resonance with Americans' delight in freedom and self-expression.  Others countered that joining church that is a community of believers and strives to form one into that body is the opposite of freedom.  Yet another position was argued: that both might be true.

Behind it all, a growing awareness, certainly on the part of the teacher, that there is no such thing as an un-formed person.  To become a citizen requires formation because no one is just born with the values, and skills, and habits citizenship demands.  To become a friend requires formation because human beings are not just naturally able to care for one another, to cherish one another, to be friends.

So the question remains, is it possible to be formed toward multiple, overlapping identities?  Does that make us, like Martha, too busy with many things?  I am reminded that Luther was partial to dear Martha.

Hope, Dreams, Destiny

"The defining narrative that Americans have told themselves about themselves for a long time is: anything can happen here, anything is possible," Giridharadas says. "That narrative in America today is in decline. I think it'll come back, but we're not in a good moment for that narrative."
Meanwhile, in India, the idea that you shape your own destiny is gaining traction. "Walking around India, watching TV in India, you feel that India is possessed by a narrative of hope right now and America is not," Giridharadas says.

This from an NPR story about Giridharadas' new book. 

So often westerners think of India as a place of destiny and fate in which one's life is pre-determined by birth and cosmic forces.  This contrasts with Americans belief that in our nation we can each dream of a different life and achieve it no matter what the circumstances of our birth.  If there is destiny, then it is the American destiny to prevail.  Echoes now of the Manifest Destiny for the nation as well as the prospects for individuals.

Here Giridharahas finds that hopeful attitude among Indians even as the American dream seems to be on the decline.

With this in mind, I'm reminded of Stout's Blessed are the Organized.  (See earlier post for link.)  He too is concerned, perhaps even alarmed, about the decline of a specific aspect of American life: democratic participation.  And, at the same time, he offers some hopeful examples of citizens who are successfully engaged in efforts to restore it.