RIP Prince Philip and Adam Zagajewski, Joan Didion on obsessive note-taking, and the Feast of St. John the Baptist gives us the excuse we crave to start that bonfire.
By sheer coincidence I’ve just finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, which may offer an answer to the mystery of where all the great theologians went:
‘The executive director of the National Religious Broadcasters Association sums up what he calls the unwritten law of all television preachers: “You can get your share of the audience only by offering people something they want.”
‘You will note, I am sure, that this is an unusual religious credo. There is no great religious leader—from the Buddha to Moses to Jesus to Mohammad to Luther—who offered people what they want. Only what they need. But television is not well suited to offering people what they need. It is “user friendly.” It is too easy to turn off. It is at its most alluring when it speaks the language of dynamic visual imagery. It does not accommodate complex language or stringent demands. As a consequence, what is preached on television is not anything like the Sermon on the Mount. Religious programs are filled with good cheer. They celebrate affluence. Their featured players become celebrities. Though their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings, or rather BECAUSE their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings.
‘I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.’
On that note, I look forward to our favorite gentleman hermit giving us what we need, and not only what we want. Huzza!
Yes..."the medium is the message"...I hypothesize that inasmuch as the tele-visual medium severs the preaching function from the liturgical function, it will to that extent tend to become mere "entertainment" and thus easily discarded for other, better, less demanding entertainments... I would really like to spend some more time getting up to speed on media theory/semiotics...Postman/McCluhan/Ellul/Ong... in the meantime I am cribbing all my knowledge from LM Sacasas: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/
Indeed, it feels like a rather large hole in my education.
Another intriguing excerpt from Postman:
'If all of this sounds suspiciously like Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, the medium is the message, I will not disavow the association … I might add that my interest in this point of view was first stirred by a prophet far more formidable than McLuhan, more ancient than Plato. In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Command of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything… The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered [back] to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction.’
Yes, very interesting... in the early Church the iconoclastic controversies (which continue!) revolved around why and how it was now "allowed" to make use of images in worship...the rationale being that a God who took physical form could and should be depicted in a physical way...in that sense Christ himself is the first/ultimate "icon", the image and pattern of perfect humanity. I think through this lens you can see the Christian view as a sort of higher synthesis of abstract thinking (the Word) as instantiated in concrete reality (the Son)...thus "The Word became Flesh"... as I was trying to say in our other convo this is sort of a resolution of a paradox, the mystery of how the particular can be reconciled with the universal (I say "resolution" but it remains to us an ongoing mystery)...
"The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" by Iain McGilchrist has an interesting take on this, how the Protestant reformation was at heart movement to recover a more text-centered/abstract way of relating to the divine... of course to those of my persuasian it is not either/or, it is both/and... you need both lungs, as it were.
Oh that's interesting. It seems ironic that Plato, despite being skeptical of textual discourse, became the inspiration for a more-abstract and text-based Christianity... McGilchrist's book sounds very intriguing as well!
How apt. How apt indeed.
By sheer coincidence I’ve just finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, which may offer an answer to the mystery of where all the great theologians went:
‘The executive director of the National Religious Broadcasters Association sums up what he calls the unwritten law of all television preachers: “You can get your share of the audience only by offering people something they want.”
‘You will note, I am sure, that this is an unusual religious credo. There is no great religious leader—from the Buddha to Moses to Jesus to Mohammad to Luther—who offered people what they want. Only what they need. But television is not well suited to offering people what they need. It is “user friendly.” It is too easy to turn off. It is at its most alluring when it speaks the language of dynamic visual imagery. It does not accommodate complex language or stringent demands. As a consequence, what is preached on television is not anything like the Sermon on the Mount. Religious programs are filled with good cheer. They celebrate affluence. Their featured players become celebrities. Though their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings, or rather BECAUSE their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings.
‘I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.’
On that note, I look forward to our favorite gentleman hermit giving us what we need, and not only what we want. Huzza!
Yes..."the medium is the message"...I hypothesize that inasmuch as the tele-visual medium severs the preaching function from the liturgical function, it will to that extent tend to become mere "entertainment" and thus easily discarded for other, better, less demanding entertainments... I would really like to spend some more time getting up to speed on media theory/semiotics...Postman/McCluhan/Ellul/Ong... in the meantime I am cribbing all my knowledge from LM Sacasas: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/
Indeed, it feels like a rather large hole in my education.
Another intriguing excerpt from Postman:
'If all of this sounds suspiciously like Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, the medium is the message, I will not disavow the association … I might add that my interest in this point of view was first stirred by a prophet far more formidable than McLuhan, more ancient than Plato. In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Command of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything… The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered [back] to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction.’
Yes, very interesting... in the early Church the iconoclastic controversies (which continue!) revolved around why and how it was now "allowed" to make use of images in worship...the rationale being that a God who took physical form could and should be depicted in a physical way...in that sense Christ himself is the first/ultimate "icon", the image and pattern of perfect humanity. I think through this lens you can see the Christian view as a sort of higher synthesis of abstract thinking (the Word) as instantiated in concrete reality (the Son)...thus "The Word became Flesh"... as I was trying to say in our other convo this is sort of a resolution of a paradox, the mystery of how the particular can be reconciled with the universal (I say "resolution" but it remains to us an ongoing mystery)...
"The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" by Iain McGilchrist has an interesting take on this, how the Protestant reformation was at heart movement to recover a more text-centered/abstract way of relating to the divine... of course to those of my persuasian it is not either/or, it is both/and... you need both lungs, as it were.
Oh that's interesting. It seems ironic that Plato, despite being skeptical of textual discourse, became the inspiration for a more-abstract and text-based Christianity... McGilchrist's book sounds very intriguing as well!