Posts from April 2007

Sister Julie at the Divinity School
Last week Sister Julie Vieira spoke at the Divinity School's Wednesday lunch, and next week she'll be back for the ministry conference. Here are some of her preliminary thoughts on what it means for blogging to be a ministry.
Posted by Benjamin Dueholm at 8:11 AM 0 comments
Friday, April 13, 2007

Something about Mary... Magdalene
So, while I was at home for Easter this past week my dad showed me a History Channel special called, "Something about Mary Magdalene." It was an hour long documentary that followed the work of religion scholars (Rev. Dr. Esther De Boer, Art Historian Susan Haskins, Professor Pheme Perkins, and others). The upshot of the show was that Mary Magdalene was a major disciple of Jesus (first to spread the Christian gospel) and that she could be both the beloved disciple and the author of the Gospel According to John. The narrator claims that this argument is more scandalous than the argument from the Da Vinci Code that Mary is Jesus' wife or the argument of the church that she was a repentant prostitute. Mary Magdalene seems to be a fascinating figure currently in pop culture discussion. This is interesting to me, a Catholic, since throughout the history of Christianity Mary the Mother of God has been the major female figure (especially in popular religion). Why is everyone excited about Mary Magdalene? Why not the Mother? I argue that Mary Magdalene is fascinating because she is such a mystery and because she is a sexual figure. Still, Mary Magdalene is in no way able to compete with the popularity of Mary the Mother. I argue as well that feminists who want to challenge the church's attitude toward women would be better off focusing on the Mother than Mary Magdalene. Mary the Mother has many forms in different cultures and contexts. She is a part of Jesus' life from the beginning and to the end. She offers a fuller image for interpretation and development.I wonder as well if this special was meant to be the more orthodox response to the Da Vinci Code phenomenon. In a few of the interviews with Esther De Boer she was wearing full liturgical robes; collar, stole and all. I believe that the narrator purposely tried to encourage the viewer to accept his interpretation of Mary Magdalene in opposition to the Da Vinci Code. The viewer is more likely to accept her as the author of the Gospel of John than that she was Jesus' wife and mother of his child. Because the scholars that they present are mostly women and at least Esther is not only a scholar but also a minister, this could be seen as a more orthodox concept. Now, what the heck does "orthodox" mean? What I mean is that Dan Brown and his followers are more and more viewed as either non-Christian (secularly interested in the scandal of Jesus' sexuality) or scholarly un-interested Christians. Can "true" believers find a place for Mary Magdalene? Can the feminist underpinnings of the Magdalene phenomenon find church backing? This may be a new movement in the discussion.
This special is just one of many TV commentaries and presentations of Christian topics. My family also mentioned to me that there was a documentary called, “The Lost Tomb of Jesus.” As well South Park recently had an episode that dealt with the Easter message and its connection to the Easter Bunny. The big secret is that St. Peter, the first Pope, was really a rabbit (Peter Rabbit). “Hippitus Hoppitus Deus Domine!” There is a TON of this kind of stuff. What does this do to the image of the church or Christianity in American culture? More importantly, how does this affect the way Christians live their lives?
Posted by Megan at 1:08 PM 1 comments
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Sex on Campus
This is a hard topic to broach in this forum, for many reasons. Most particularly, I worry that discussions of sex among the young and unmarried in a Christian context leads to some very false and very destructive interpretations of what Christian faith is and isn't, as if sexual chastity makes someone a Christian (rather than, say, believing in Jesus Christ). An abstinent atheist is no more a Christian than a promiscuous one, and a Christian, though not sexually abstinent, is still a Christian. So nothing that follows should be understood as: discussing/encouraging sex-->more unmarried sex-->fewer Christians/burgeoning population in hell. It just isn't so.That being stipulated, I took note of an item in Chicago's Redeye, the free newspaper published by the Tribune and aimed primarily at a young, single, and more-or-less well-off readership. It was an article of the increasingly feverish genre of hook-up journalism, in which concern, titillation, and bargain-basement sociological and psychological observations collide, forming a compound that will not necessarily leave you well informed but should certainly leave you feeling a little icky. The topic, of course, is the increasingly informal and even casual nature of college and young-adult sexual and romantic liaisons. A new book, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, by Laura Sessions Stepp, has brought this not very respectable journalistic topic to major newspapers and magazines. From a journalistic point of view, the stories are fascinating as another example of how moralism and luridness can sell much better together than either can separately. But that's not my point here. Accompanying the main story was a sidebar on 'Sex Week' at Yale (starting in 2002) and Northwestern (new this year). Some of it sounds salutary; I'm not the kind of Christian who thinks that sexual ignorance is good for people's souls, and there are a lot of things that need to be talked about more openly than they often are. At the same time, the foregrounding of porn stars and lessons on stripping struck me as . Slavoj Zizek, among others, points out that the permissive 'You may' tends to be come the imperative 'You must' where the superego is concerned, and I wondered how much this has been the case with the 'hook-up culture' and the spirit of openness, exhibitionism, and experimentation that is celebrated by Sex Weeks, elite private school quasi-porn, and so forth. I know women and men who feel vaguely embarrassed by their relative lack of sexual experience or their unwillingness to do certain things that the culture now tells them are all right. Feminists and others complained in the past that sexual repression led to the unfair stigmatization of women who had "loose morals" and had become "damaged goods." Now, I wonder, whether the permissive attitude that an early generation fought for has in fact become an imperative mode in the culture: not, you may if you choose, but rather, you must, unless you want to be considered weird and uptight. Strangely enough, the blisteringly frank gross-out comedy The Forty Year-Old Virgin actually illuminates this question rather well. At first, Steve Carrell's character is depicted as an oddity at best, a neurotic freak at worst. He's an object of pity not just from his sexually exuberant co-workers but also from the audience. As the film goes on, however, he becomes less and less of a caricature and more of a real person, someone who'd had some strange luck and as a result remained both naive (and neurotic) and curiously sweet. By late in the film, he actually looks fairly well-adjusted, while the sexual environment into which his friends have tried so hard to acculturate him looks increasingly disturbing. This is not, I imagine, what many people expected to see from such an explicit film.What all this has to do with Christianity I haven't quite figured out. The church in America needs a way to address a shifting youth culture without reactively holding up bygone standards or passively "affirming" all ways of being (lest the cultural imperative, if that's what it is, go unchallenged), at least if the church expects young Christians to consider their faith in their sexual and romantic decision-making. This is one more area, among many, where church leaders could use a little cultural savvy--something more than is on offer in breathless and/or cynical yellow journalism.As it happens, our keynote speaker, Lauren Winner, has a book on this very topic. If you'd like to learn more about the media and its relationship with the American Christian church, come to the University of Chicago Divinity School Ministry Conference on May 4. Register by emailing ministryconference@gmail.com.
Posted by Benjamin Dueholm at 1:45 PM 1 comments
Thursday, April 5, 2007

Chocolate Jesus
A New York City gallery recently planned a Holy Week exhibit which included a sculpture of Jesus on the cross made entirely of chocolate - 200 lbs of it. The display was titled "My Sweet Lord." See the following links: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6509127.stm & http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11669242/Unsurprisingly, this angered certain Christian groups, and called forth the typical hyperbolic and apocalyptic comments that are often made in such situations: "...one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever."This may illustrate my own depravity, but I have not been able to drum up any feelings of righteous anger of my own. In fact, I find the idea perfectly hilarious. It's kind of like I have to admit, "Hey, Cavallaro [the artist] has me on this one; his point is well taken." Every Christmas and Easter Christians bemoan the commercialization of the holiday, but it's not every Christmas or Easter that something actually gets us to act and spend more thoughtfully. Maybe this will.
Posted by M.R. at 6:16 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Worship Resources (links, 4-4-07)
Todays links are for the preacher or pastor who maybe put the sermon or the liturgical preparation off a little longer than he should have (I've heard this happens) and needs information, exegesis, images, or anything else to make the sermon and the worship come together right. The internet has made this a lot easier than in the old days, when you actually had to read books and know things. Now you just need some good sites in your bookmarks. Here are some:TextWeek is a lectionary-based (RCL) site that is very popular among mainline Protestant pastors. The have good resources, including artwork and film illustrations, and a wealth of links, including to Lectionary.org, which itself has a nice set of links. For those who would like to know more about the history and theology of the church's calendar, ChurchYear.net is a great place to start. It's a mostly Roman Catholic site that gives the background for a lot of practices in a user-friendly way. It has excerpts from patristic homilies and lots of artwork as well.The ELCA sponsors the subscription-based site Sundays and Seasons, which has a whole lot of liturgical and homiletic resources of widely varying kinds. Free tours are available.
Posted by Benjamin Dueholm at 2:17 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Christianity on Film: Into Great Silence
The Music Box Theatre is currently showing a rare and beautiful film, Philip Groening's Into Great Silence. It is something like a documentary, but it has no voiceover and few titles. The setting is La Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the Carthusian Order. This Order is famous for its austerity: apart from the three communal prayer offices, silence is maintained (except for Sunday and festival afternoons); in contrast to some orders, life is largely solitary rather than communal. Sixteen years after his initial request, the house granted Groening access to its inner life. Wisely--or perhaps inevitably--he chose not to make a traditional documentary with interviews, historical material, or traditional narrative and characterization. Near the start of the film, two novices enter the house, and it's easy to imagine a filmmaker trying to turn the film into the story of their initiation, but Groening doesn't do that.It's much easier, I find, to say what this movie doesn't do than what it does. It captures images--of the monastic labor, of prayer, of study, of the Alpine valley surrounding the house--and sounds, all the more striking since there is no soundtrack and very little in the way of dialogue. The film had me early on when it showed the brothers preparing for the long night office, each at a place in the oratory. One by one they extinguished their lamps, leaving the sanctuary utterly silent and dark except for the eternal presence candle. Then came the sound of dozens of kneelers being lowered and knees coming to rest on them, followed by the hypnotically sonorous chanting of the office. I've never seen (and heard) anything quite like it.The film has a large handful of such poignant moments, from the scene of monks sliding down a snowy hill to the garden's early spring growth to the almost tactile squares of sunlight through which the hooded monks walk to and from the chapel. My hunch is that this film has two potentially rapt audiences: church/monasticism enthusiasts and cinematography buffs. Groening has linked these enthusiasms brilliantly by making a contemplative film that focuses obsessively on the concrete, particular, and visible.While the film has generally met with rapturous reviews, Noel Murray of The Onion finds fault with the silence:It's hard to watch Gröning's lone interview—with a blind monk, talking about mortality—and not wish that he had made more of this rare opportunity to pick the brains of inaccessible men. How do they regard each other? What do they regret? Is it really a selfless act to remove yourself from the world at large?Mr. Murray's curiosity about these questions is admirable, but there is a wealth of monastic literature that can answer those questions. Writing is one of the great monastic pass-times. What Groening has done is something much more difficult, and perhaps suited uniquely to cinema: he has given those of us who will not (and indeed may not) set foot inside the home of Christendom's most austere monks the chance to see their lives. My own slight acquaintance with the monastic life gives me the suspicion that you will learn more about it from that silent observation than from all the interviews in the world.To hear more about Christianity and its relationship to the media world, register for the Divinity School ministry conference, Friday, May 4 at the University of Chicago. Email us at ministryconference@gmail.com to register or for more information.
Posted by Benjamin Dueholm at 5:17 PM 0 comments

Speaker: Margaret Mitchell
Meet Margaret Mitchell, Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature in the University of Chicago Divinity School and also in the Department of New Testament and Early Christian Literature. She is speaking at this year's Divinity School ministry conference. A graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School, Professor Mitchell has also taught at McCormick Theological Seminary. She is the author of Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation: An Exegetical Investigation of the Language and Composition of 1 Corinthians and The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation, and editor (with Frances M. Young) of The Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume 1. She teaches the Introduction to the New Testament course at the Divinity School, a required course for ministry students. She also has taken a recent interest in aspects of Christianity in popular culture. She has written pieces on The Passion of the Christ and The DaVinci Code as well as the approaches to Scripture found on Christian websites. We look forward to hearing her talk!To register for the ministry conference, taking place May 4 in Hyde Park, please contact us at ministryconference@gmail.com.
Posted by Benjamin Dueholm at 5:08 PM 0 comments

Speaker: MaryBeth Morehouse
We are pleased and excited to welcome MaryBeth Morehouse to the University of Chicago ministry conference on Friday, May 4. She is the director of communications and marketing at Willow Creek Chicago, a central-city branch of the legendary suburban church. She will be speaking on our second panel, which addresses the topic of discipleship and how the church can use popular culture and modern media to cultivate it.To register for the conference (lunch is free for the first 100 registrants), contact us at ministryconference@gmail.com.