Empty Thrones

June 3, 2012 By vorjack 24 Comments

Our neighbor Fred Clark is is having a distinctly American reaction to the sight of the Bishop’s Throne in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City:

This particular throne, in a photo by the New York Post’s Robert Miller, is being redecorated for Archbishop Timothy Dolan.

Set aside all the arguments about church polity and all the dubious theological implications of a “Christian” throne, of a throne decorated with its opposite symbol, the cross. This post isn’t about ecclesiology or Constantinian blasphemies. This post is about democracy.

There should be no such thing as an American throne. Yet here is a picture of one. An actual throne. In America.

I hope Clark will forgive me, but this begs to be paired with one of John Roger’s memories from Kung Fu Monkey. He tells to story of the night a Saudi Prince visited the resturant where he was bartending:

Giannino’s owner was a young guy named Paul. Paul was a tough, wiry bastard from Holland who’d come to New York, flat broke at 16, to learn the restaurant business. He spoke with a weird, hybrid Dutch/Brooklyn accent. The sort of New York accent an actor puts on when doing a cab driver from the 30′s. But on Paul it fit. He was also, as are many immigrants, fiercely patriotic when it came to the US. Zeal of the converted, etc.

[...]

Paul pulled out all the stops. Our chef was amazing to begin with, and they put on a hell of a banquet for the event. Paul called in our best waitress, Kate, to do the dinner. If you’ve ever worked in the restaurant/bar business, you know that the staff is a roiling blend of high school drama class emotions and Desperate Housewives style intrigue. If you’ve worked the business, you also know that there is always that one person everyone actually likes. Sweet, sincere, working their way through college … that was Kate on our staff. Even the heroin-addicted commie waitress liked her.

Near the end of the meal, I heard a buzz from the wait-station. Kate was in a corner, pretending not to be freaking out. Paul came out from the kitchen. The Prince had been playing grab-ass with Kate all night. The other servers had seen it. She’d tried not to make a big deal of it, but when it became plain that she wasn’t into Captain Handsy, our visiting dignitary had launched into a particularly nasty set of comments.

A bunch of us followed Paul out as he crossed onto the patio. He nodded to the Saudi. “Yeah. I gotta ask you to leave.”

Objections arose. Paul shook his head. “She works for me. I don’t allow that for any guest. Now I gotta ask you a second time, please leave. Meal’s on the house.”

The Saudi’s lackey starts to yell: “You can’t talk to him like this! This man is Prince –”

Paul cuts him off with a whistle, a New York cab whistle. Sets his shoulders and says:

“This is America, which makes you the Prince of absolutely fucking nobody.”

The single most patriotic moment of my life.

Cardinals are still sometimes called the Princes of the Church, so let’s allow little Timmy Dolan play his game of thrones. But when the time comes, we’ll be there to remind him. This is America, which makes him the prince of absolutely fucking nobody.

Filed Under: Catholicism, Uncategorized 24 Comments

Goodnight, Doc

June 2, 2012 By vorjack 4 Comments

When Earl Scruggs died, I had a feeling that his longtime friend Artel “Doc” Watson would soon follow. I hate to be right sometimes.

Doc Watson died on May 29th. It’s hard to explain my relationship to the man’s music. Growing up, my father would go down in the basement and play from his collection of folk and bluegrass records. He had huge speakers, the old kind that could serve as end tables or coffee tables, and the music wafted up through the floorboards. As a result I grew up not so much listening to bluegrass but surrounded by it.

Doc Watson is a mutual favorite. The old blind man from Deep Gap North Carolina had a deceptively simple style that could appeal to both generations. He was best know for his flat picking, which he demonstrates to good effect in this version of Black Mountain Rag:

This is one of my favorites, Doc’s “courting song,” Shady Grove:

Doc had a knack for surrounding himself with talented friend. Earl Scruggs is a good example. Here’s Doc with his friends Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Douglas, David “Dawg” Grisman and Tony Rice:

Filed Under: Music, Videos 4 Comments

Atheism and Pantheism

June 1, 2012 By vorjack 48 Comments

My attempts to understand the history of atheism have led me back to the early Enlightenment. It’s a very confusing time. Up to that point, the streams of thought had been largely confessional (Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, etc.) As some point, probably during the mid-17th century, that began to break down. It gets harder and harder to classify people.

The politics of the arguments don’t help. Frans Kuyper, who was recently mentioned, is a good example of the problem. Kuyper was a religious radical: he was a unitarian, he rejected the idea of original sin, etc. Yet his printing press turned out attacks on anybody who was slightly more radical, or radical in a different way. And Kuyper wasn’t precise in his use of language. Everybody was a Spinozan, a Quaker and an atheist.

Moderates attempted to distance themselves from radicals by calling them atheists. Conservatives tried to lump them all together. Radicals tried to defend themselves by praising God in pantheistic terms. The result is that it’s very difficult to tell the difference between one person’s atheism and another person’s pantheism. And the difference could be a matter of life or death, as it was for Giulio Cesare Vanini, executed in Toulouse in 1619 for his perceived atheism.

When God and Nature are the same, does God fall away? Is it just a shift in language? How much of the philosophical difference between the two positions is real and how much is just hair-splitting in order to avoid the charge of atheism?

Sometimes I think I understand the differences, but then I run across a poetic atheist like Neil DeGrasse Tyson:

I wanted to become an astrophysicist not because I chose it … in a way the universe chose me. [...] I was called by the universe. I had no choice in the matter.

Poetry or Pantheism? Is that spiritual atheism?

James McGrath once asked Why Be an Atheist Rather Than a Pantheist?. Pointing out that Dawkins once called pantheism “sexed-up atheism,” he asks why we don’t opt for the version with more bells and whistles. Does anybody have an answer?

Filed Under: Atheism, History, Philosophy 48 Comments

When You Listen To God…

May 31, 2012 By Daniel Florien 10 Comments

Yes, this is exactly how it works.

(via)

Filed Under: Church, God, Humor 10 Comments

Child Soldier in the Culture Wars

May 31, 2012 By vorjack 23 Comments

From the mouth of babes. A four year old sings a song that includes the refrain “ain’t no homos gonna make it to heaven”

Joe.My.God reports that this is at the Apostolic Truth Tabernacle in Greensburg, Indiana. This happens to be the same Greensburg Indiana where Billy Lucas committed suicide. One of the reactions to Lucas’ death was Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign.

Savage comments:

The Apostolic Truth Tabernacle is in Greensburg, Indiana. That’s the town where Billy Lucas was bullied to death for being perceived to be gay by his classmates. I wonder if they stood up and cheered at Apostolic Truth Tabernacle when Lucas died—hey, another homo in hell. I wonder if any of Lucas’s tormenters attend services at Apostolic Truth Tabernacle. And remember: I’m an anti-Christian bully for pointing out the connection between what straight kids are taught about “homos” in the shithole mega-churches they’re dragged to by their parents and what they turn around and do to “homos” they encounter in classrooms. And what if that precocious little four-year-old singer is gay?

Filed Under: Christianity, Sexuality, Videos 23 Comments
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