Academic Politics

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Being the curious sort, I followed up on the post I dropped the day before Valentines.  I had written about Scholars Press and how details were hard to find.  I kept digging after that post.  I learned some things.  The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) used to meet regularly with the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR).  ASOR was all about archaeology.  Then, in the year 1969 SBL and the American Academy of Religion (AAR), formed the Council for the Study of Religion.  The next year they began holding their conferences together.  ASOR was still part of it.  In fact, the three societies, along with Brown University, formed Scholars Press.  (For those in the know, this is why SBL now publishes Brown Judaic Studies.)  Scholars Press churned along, but ASOR was increasingly being shunted aside.  The conference started being called AAR/SBL, with no ASOR.  In 1997 (I remember this personally) ASOR started holding separate conferences.

Two years later, in 1999, Scholars Press dissolved.  SBL, the oldest of the societies, began publishing as Society of Biblical Literature.  AAR partnered with Oxford University Press to do their publishing.  (By the by, AAR started out as Association of Biblical Instructors in American Colleges and Secondary Schools).  ASOR went its own way, and Brown settled on SBL to continue its religious studies publishing.  As a young scholar, I was a member of all three societies.  (I didn’t attend Brown, though.  But I did go to a graduation there once, if that counts.)  I wondered why they couldn’t get along.  In a word, it was because of politics.

Those who know me personally likely know that I have tried to pursue the ordination track in three different denominations.  What they may not know is that the reason I never got through the process was, you guessed it, politics.  I started to learn, when in college, just how many power plays were involved in covens of ministers.  When dealing with the ultimate power, I guess, everyone wants to get the upper hand.  That bothered me as a seminarian.  The second and third denominations both showed their politics up front, and those sharp, flashing teeth made me realize that I’d never be free of politicking had I moved ahead.  I suppose I could go be a hermit and live in the desert—I might escape it that way, but whenever two or three are gathered, the politics start to show.  ASOR, SBL, and AAR have quite a lot in common.  All are under threat as part of the dreaded “humanities” category, and yet that’s not enough to make them want to pull together.  Politics just go that way.

Politics As Usual

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What J. D. Vance does on, or to, his couch is his own business.  Sexual preferences between consenting adults, and furniture, is a private matter.  (Vance isn’t the first writer whose publications have come back to bite him.)   Forgive and forget.  And maybe reupholster.  What Vance has done that’s unforgivable is betray the poor.  I read Hillbilly Elegy years ago and was taken by his enumerating the harms visited on the poor by our capitalistic system.  Having grown up poor myself, I found many of those damages in my own self-inventory.  But even just after I read the book I heard whisperings that Vance really didn’t care for the poor, but for himself.  That puts him in the same category as Trump, I suppose.  A team that would only push what makes them personally look good, if elected.  It’s a mockery of democracy that a convicted felon is even permitted to run for president.

Betrayal of the poor is perhaps the most unconscionable of sins.  To have grown up knowing how difficult life is for many Americans and then to throw them to the wolves for personal aggrandizement is a move worthy of Satan himself.  Indeed, his running mate was born excessively wealthy.  I recently saw a quote from J. P. Morgan: “I owe the public nothing.”  Morgan,  one of the wealthiest men of his era, apparently believed using others to get yourself to the top is fine.  Trump, who sees people as disposable (ask his wives) never had to struggle.  Neither did Morgan.  But Vance, if his book is to be believed, did.  Knowing what it means to grow up that way and then to hitch yourself to the Trump-wagon is, in my opinion, about as low as you can go.  It’s a lack of honesty.

If we’re honest we’ll admit that all people lie.  True, Trump has made eiling (actually telling the truth) a thing.  He basically never eils, so we can assume anything he says is false.  Biden told lies.  Harris told lies.  Vance told lies.  Even though I’m an honest guy, I’ve told lies in my long time on this planet.  Not many, I hope, but I’m human.  Show me a politician who never lies and I’ll show you a liar.  I never thought I’d live to see a major party ticket pair felons, sex criminals, and betrayers together and tell Americans they’ll make the country great again.  The question that won’t let me go, however, is what of the poor?  We know that the rich, left to their own devices, tend toward Morgan’s quip.  Honestly, who will make safety nets for those who are victims of business as usual?

Summerween

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Okay, so why didn’t anybody tell me?  Well, I suppose it’s because few people know me.  But still, I had to find out about Summerween from the New York Times.  Folks, I don’t spend a lot of time online.  I work long days and I read books and mow the lawn.  I just don’t have time.  I wasn’t aware that Summerween was happening.  Interestingly, the idea got started from Gravity Falls, an animated television show based on Twin Peaks and The X-Files.  I actually watched this show because a couple of young friends, who spend a lot of time online, started showing it to me.  I didn’t remember, however, that in one episode the population of Gravity Falls decides to celebrate a second Halloween in the summer.  And now internet influencers (I’m more of an unfluencer) are popularizing the holiday.  

The need for spooky holidays is encouraging to me.  I’ve long been exploring the spirituality of the unexpected, and Summerween has the possibility of contributing to it.  According to the New York Times article there’s no set date for the celebration.  It’s more of a party aesthetic, but, the story notes, Michaels, the arts and crafts chain, has already caught on and is stocking scary summer decorations.  I have long opined (and fifteen years is a lot of daily posting—nearly five-and-a-half thousand of them) that people are afraid.  That’s why they run after unlikely political leaders and seek shelter beneath the wings of the Almighty.  Horror movies, and Halloween, simply bring this out into the open.  And what’s wrong with having a little fun with it along the way?

By the by, if you haven’t checked out Gravity Falls, you don’t know what you’re missing.  It’s a Disney production and it’s aimed at a younger crowd.  That’s one of the disconnects I experience here: Halloween is something younger people love.  At work I can’t count the number of people who’ve said (not to me directly, since few speak to me that way) that Halloween is their favorite holiday.  I guess you wouldn’t expect to find a kindred spirit among old guys who edit biblical studies, of all people.  I venture to guess that any of them would be surprised to learn that someone of my vintage even knows what Gravity Falls or Summerween is.  Well, they’d have been right about the latter, had it not been for an article yesterday in the Gray Lady.  And what a more adult way to find something out might there be?

Copyright: Disney. Summerween trickster, Gravity Falls

Powerful Belief

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Even someone who’s spent a lifetime studying religion can’t know every single sect.  People are far too creative in that regard, and some belief groups are fairly small.  I had never heard of Unarius, for example, before reading this book.  If I had, it simply washed over me, getting lost in the noise.  Part of the trouble with defining Unarius is that it calls itself a science.  Words can be slippery, and Christian Scientists also use that designation in a similar way.  The word “science,” etymologically speaking, denotes “knowledge.”  In our materialist culture we often suppose that means the physical sciences, grudgingly allowing it to be borrowed by the “social sciences.”  There is a science of religion, but this leads to its own set of discussion points.  Let’s look at Diana Tumminia’s title: When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying Saucer Group.  That give you an idea. 

The “prophecy” part concerns a “failed” prediction, or two, of when the spaceships would land.  Being a sociologist, Tumminia’s real interest is what happens then.  And here’s where things get interesting.  Failed predictions generally don’t lead to true believers giving up their convictions.  History has played and replayed this for us—it’s happening around us this very second—and yet “rationality” supposes that when the ships don’t land, people simply move on.  The Millerites outlived “the Great Disappointment,” after all, when the world didn’t end as predicted.  Their heirs include a sizable Christian denomination.  All this talk of AI has muddled our thinking about what it means to be human.  We are emotional.  More than that, we are believing creatures.  Our society is living proof.

Perhaps the most important, and ill-studied facet of being human, is belief.  Belief (no matter what in) is a religious phenomenon.  This study of a fairly small group shows that convinced people cannot be dissuaded, no matter how many facts are presented to them.  One need not look far to find the same phenomenon surrounding Trump.  (I do not condone violence, but history can inform us if we allow it.)  Make no mistake—he is the center of a new religion.  Unarians have absolute belief that their system is right.  Mistaken predictions—even very public ones—will not convince true believers otherwise.  It seems to me that our society, our democracy, cannot survive without intensive study of belief and how it affects the way otherwise completely rational people think.  My study is full of books exploring various aspects of belief, but we are still no closer to any kind of definitive answer.  And voters, at least a great many of them, follow their beliefs.

Mustard Monster

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Speaking of mustard seeds, as a child something troubled my literalist brain.  Mark 4.31, “It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth…” According to subsequent translations after the KJV “less than all” reads, “the smallest.”  Of course, in Elizabethan English that’s what “less than all” denotes.  Since these words came from Jesus, and since the Bible was factually true on every point, I wondered how this error had crept in.  The mustard seed, I knew as a child, wasn’t the smallest seed.  Not by a long shot.  I knew, for example, that poppy seeds were smaller.  Why had Jesus said the mustard seed was the smallest when it wasn’t?  I was too young for the casuistry called exegesis, so a small crisis of faith emerged.

Pardon the resolution: I don’t have a macro lens any more. Mustard (left) meets chia seed (right).

The mustard seed has other roles in the gospels as well.  I still frequently recite “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matthew 17.20).  All of this made me curious as to the history of mustard.  While in Wisconsin we used to visit the Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb.  It’s now the National Mustard Museum and is in Middleton.  It seems that mustard, in its familiar paste form, was developed in China centuries before Jesus.  And people had been using mustard seeds as a spice long before that.  Jesus, like earlier prophets, used nature to make a point.  The problem wasn’t Jesus, it was literalism.  

Jesus also said “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (KJV) in Matthew 12.40.  Modern translations of “sea monster”—for the Hebrew says it was a fish—forced me to dust off my Greek New Testament.  So Jesus said “in the belly of Cetus.”  Cetus was mythical sea monster, not unlike the mythical Leviathan God describes in Job 40.  Good thing I couldn’t read Greek or Hebrew as a kid!  Well, it seems we’ve gone from mustard to monsters.  If you’re familiar with the history of this blog, that shouldn’t surprise you too much.  I wonder what literalists believe about the Loch Ness Monster?  But don’t get me started on that or we’ll be here all day.

Sun Day

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Two holidays in a row!  Although today nobody gets off work because, well, two holidays in a row is too much.  People might come to expect a little more time off.  If you’re like most people, the summer solstice creeps up on you.  Its more somber sibling, six months from now, is more anticipated.  In December we’re light deprived (here in the northern hemisphere) but we’ve been soaking in the sun for some time already now.  Besides, nobody gets the four turns of the year off work.  Christmas is a gimme, but it comes three or four days after the solstice.  We figure Labor Day is close enough the the autumnal equinox, and thank God Easter is a Sunday, at least in the years when it’s near the vernal equinox, so nobody complains.  I feel at my most pagan these days.  Why not celebrate the turning of the wheel?

The other day I was catching up on the Vlog Brothers—John and Hank Green.  Last week they were talking about “Beef Days,” or how to reduce the amount of red meat they eat.  They proposed doing it by setting aside a few holidays a year where they would have it.  Their reason?  The biggest environmental threat to our planet is our dependence on beef.  It’s the reason rainforests are being clear cut.  It is a huge source of greenhouse gasses.  The one thing they didn’t mention, however, is the suffering of the animals themselves.  Industrial farming leads to horrible lives being raised to be consumed.  The conditions in which animals are kept is so bad that it is illegal in some states to reveal the conditions to the public.  You hide things that you’re ashamed of.  I became a vegetarian a quarter century ago, and a vegan coming up on a decade now.   I can’t live being the cause of the suffering of others.

Why not use the ancient holidays as days of some kind of indulgence?  I don’t recommend eating red meat—in fact, I agree with my Edinburgh friend that if you want to eat meat you should be required to kill it yourself.  (He’s not a vegetarian, note, but a wise man.)  In any case, although you may be stuck behind a desk at work, take a moment to ponder that light will be slowly fading from this day on until we reach that other pole that turns another year.  And we can dream of shortened work weeks, although that’s about as likely as being given the summer solstice off as a matter of course.  Speaking of which, work calls.

The Teenth of June

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It’s only really when they have no choice.  The Wednesday holiday, that is.  No convenient weekend a day away.  So Juneteenth is actually celebrated on Juneteenth.  I believe in holidays.  I think they’re more than just time off work, and Juneteenth celebrates freedom.  And it reminds us that our African-American siblings aren’t yet truly free.  We still have much to learn and having a holiday to underscore that is important.  Capitalism does a good job of disguising freedom, of course.  Your worth is weighed by how much value you add to the company.  Taking a day off from that is an opportunity to reflect on how daily living could be improved for all.  Juneteenth is a necessary holiday.  We need constant reminding.

I don’t see many African-Americans flying flags on their houses declaring themselves “not woke.”  We prefer to believe we’ve reached perfection already.  Capitalism is great at spreading myths like that.  The basic premise behind it is greed, and people are easily divided into groups because of skin tone.  It’s a dangerous combination.  Somewhere along the way, “justice” came to be a swear word.  Particularly among one political party that has decided power, at any cost, is the sine qua non of human existence.  If that means oppressing others systemically, or if it means invading a neighboring sovereign state because you have nukes with which to threaten the rest of the world, it’s all the same.  Power is far more addictive than any opiate, but we  don’t have any laws preventing those unsuited to holding it from doing so.  Juneteenth uncovers a host of problems still to address. 

Slavery was hard to let go because it cut into profits.  Human beings love wealth more than each other.  Ironically, without others to compare with, wealth means nothing.  If money makes someone happy I have no problem with that, but it has to come with responsibility.  One way to handle it responsibly is to insist that only so much can be had before the surplus goes to insure that all people have enough.  Of course, where Supreme Court justices openly accept bribes we can’t wonder that there are legal loopholes to help the wealthy circumvent their civic duty.  We need constant reminders.  We need holidays like Juneteenth.  We need to give our African-American siblings the same rights and privileges all people should have.  It’s appropriate to celebrate small steps in that direction.  Even if it means giving a Wednesday off of work.

Under Bite

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Religion and horror have long been bedfellows.  And quite companionable ones at that.  I’ve written a longer piece that I’ve not yet managed to wedge into a book about how the earliest Universal monster movies all involve religion in some way.  Maybe some day it will come out into the light.  In the meantime, I submit, for your consideration, The Cult of the Cobra.  This 1955 horror film was one of a series of movies about shapeshifting.  We’ve recently seen The Leopard Man on this blog, and before that Cat People.  Cult of the Cobra, set in amorphous “Asia” to start, involves the invented religion of the Lamians.  A group of US Airmen pay a Lamian to watch a woman transform into a cobra in an “Asian” ritual.  They’re revealed by trying to take a photograph—they’d been warned that if they were discovered the cobra would hunt them down and kill them.

Convinced this is all superstition, despite one of them dying the next night from a cobra bite, they return to New York City and civilian life.  The cobra woman follows them to carry out her mission.  She’s killed, however, before getting the last two.  What’s so interesting here is the discussion of belief that takes place throughout the movie.  Americans can’t believe in some “cult”—it’s clear from the start that anything not western is cult—but none of them show any inclination to church, or crosses, or even references to God or the Bible.  The only religion shown is that of the Lamians.  The cobra woman falls in love with one of the Airmen and tries to explain that she’s coming to doubt something she’s believed all her life.  She’s caught between religious duty and the experience of falling in love.

The movie failed to impress critics and was largely dismissed as a knock-off of Cat People.  There’s too quick a judgment here, however.  One of Universal’s earlier monsters had encountered a non-western religion but became much more famous for it.  The Mummy was based on “ancient Egyptian” religion.  Indeed, the whole story is premised on it.  The Cult of the Cobra, however, engages with the religion.  As jingoistic as it is, it nevertheless tries to represent “the cult” as a religion taken seriously by an exotic group of believers.  “Lamians” seems to have been borrowed from Greek mythology, however, where lamia were demon-like devourers of children.  I write about them in Nightmares with the Bible.  This isn’t a great movie by any stretch, but it shouldn’t be dismissed either.  It’s an important piece of the puzzle of how religion and horror interact in film.

Campus Monster

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Universal was the studio that gave America its monsters.  Well, it wasn’t Universal alone, but the initial—almost canonical—line-up of monsters were Universal productions.  As horror grew to be more influenced by science-fiction in the 1950s, Universal kept at the monster-themed movies, cranking out many that I missed and on which I’ve been trying to catch up.  Monster on the Campus is interesting in a number of ways.  Directed by Jack Arnold, of Gilligan’s Island fame (or future fame, since this movie was earlier), it’s a story built around evolution.  Pipe-smoking professor Donald Blake has a coelacanth delivered to his lab.  Unbeknownst to him, the prehistoric fish had been irradiated with gamma rays to preserve it—as well as being shipped on ice.  The dead fish is about to create problems.

A dog laps up some of the blood (it started to thaw) and becomes a vicious evolutionary throwback.  Then Professor Blake cuts himself on a fish tooth and sticks his hand in the contaminated water.  He becomes a murderous caveman, but the effect is only temporary.  A dragonfly eating the fish transforms into a prehistoric insect that the professor kills, but its blood drips, unnoticed, into his pipe.  He changes and murders again.  Finally it dawn upon him that he was responsible for the murders.  In a remote cabin he sets up cameras and injects himself with the radioactive coelacanth plasma and ends up killing a park ranger.  Finally, he injects himself so that following police officers will shoot him to death.  Rather a bleak story.

The film has been read as social commentary since its “rediscovery,” but what caught my attention was the easy acceptance of evolution.  This was the late fifties and the creationist backlash was still pretty strong at the time.  If evolution didn’t occur, the professor (and dog and dragonfly) couldn’t have become their atavistic selves, giving the movie its plot.  The classic Universal monster of the decade was the Gill Man—aka Creature of the Black Lagoon—also an atavistic throwback to an earlier time, but also a divergent branch of evolution.  Creature was also directed by Jack Arnold, but four years earlier.  It began with a quote from Genesis 1, bringing creation and evolution together.  The title Monster on the Campus offers many possibilities for co-ed mayhem, but instead opts for a scientist who gets caught up in the tangle of evolution.  The movie was near the end of Universal’s monster run, but in the sixties horror would change forever.  This was a little fun before things got serious—horror school was about to start.

Mystic Thoughts

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Those who know me primarily from my writings on horror are perhaps whiplashed when I muse about spiritual matters.  I don’t mean just religion, but spirituality—the two are quite different.  If life had unfolded differently I would likely have ended up as a mystic.  The problem is “rational mystic” is an oxymoron in most minds.  Either you’re one or you’re the other.  To become a proper mystic, in any case, you can’t be bothered with such things as secular work.  Mysticism—direct encounters with the divine—requires development and practice.  You can’t always control when a trance or vision might hit you.  What if it comes during a meeting?  Say your performance and development review at work?  You see the problem.

I seriously considered becoming a monastic as a young man but I had a problem.  I was a Protestant.  Protestantism was based on the idea that Catholic practices, such as monasticism, were wrong by default.  Miracles don’t happen—haven’t done since New Testament times—and God is a biblical literalist.  Why spend valuable church funds, then, on establishing monasteries?  Still, mystical experiences happened to me.  (You’ll have to get to know me personally to find out more about that.)  I talked to my (Protestant) professors.  “You don’t want to become a mystic,” I was told.  “They always have trouble with the church.”  Eventually I became an Episcopalian, a tradition that was more open to mysticism.  It became clear in 2005, however, that the Episcopal Church wanted nothing more to do with me.  Besides, I’m a family man.

Monasteries for married folk is an idea whose time has come.  Monasticism is based on the idea that you need to isolate yourself from the world’s distractions to grow spiritually.  To me, as I noted recently regarding sacraments, the “distraction” of marriage isn’t the problem.  It’s the constant need to earn money.  More and more money.  Monasteries became wealthy because other people were glad to pay money so that someone else could do the spiritual heavy lifting for them.  You can get into Heaven on borrowed virtue.  (Even Protestants believe that.  If you doubt it, get a degree or two in theology and you’ll see.)  So why not provide monasteries for those poor souls that just don’t fit into the capitalistic ideal?  I have the vision that such places would become havens for artists of all stripes.  And that, with the goodwill of society, locations where your needs were met for an exchange of goods—building good spiritual karma for a world where most people are content with trying to get rich—might just work.  It’s an idea whose time has come.  Who’s with me?

Photo by Luís Feliciano on Unsplash

Horror History

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Trying to make sense of life has perhaps been my only real vocation.  As I continue to work on horror-themed books, reasonable people ask why I keep doing this.  It’s a question I ask myself.  The other day, while working on one of these projects, I had a realization.  The narrative I’d been playing in my head is that I grew up watching monster movies and then, apart from a few slip-ups, fell off the wagon again after my career malfunction.  That’s largely true but I suddenly remembered that seminary was actually another period of my life when I watched a lot of horror.  Regular readers know that I’m intrigued by the connection between religion and horror, but I’d forgotten how early this started with me.

A friend, nameless here, was a fellow seminarian and a total cinephile.  He and I would watch movies together quite a lot.  As I was recollecting which ones, it suddenly struck me that many of them were horror films.  And it wasn’t just this unnamed friend.  Another anonymous comrade frequently talked me into theatrical horror.  He’d go with his girlfriend (something I lacked at the time) but he liked to chat about the movies with me and often invited me along.  So it was that I was watching horror into the mid-to-late eighties.  I stopped, pretty much cold turkey, when I married.  It seemed that the therapy horror was offering was no longer needed.  Life settled into a happy, if weird existence stretching several years into Nashotah House.  This was the locus of said malfunction.

Losing my only full-time teaching post led directly to watching horror again.  My wife had to take a job out of state.  We crammed ourselves into an apartment after having a four-bedroom house.  Jobs were not coming my way, no matter how low I aimed.  Horror was cheap therapy.  What’s more, it’s remained a hobby ever since.  (Read into that what you will.)  People who know me personally (but who don’t frequent this blog) are often surprised to learn that I watch horror.  I don’t act like someone who does.  At least according to this usual, prejudiced image of the horror fan.  What’s more, the friends who share this fascination are nice people.  I was recently asked to speak about Holy Horror to a senior seminar at Transylvania University (it’s in Kentucky).  The students all seemed to be upstanding, bright young people.  They, however, like horror.  I don’t know their stories, but I’m guessing that they’re probably quite interesting.  They’re just beginning to try to make sense of life.

Saint Material

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Miracles don’t often make the New York Times.  The Gray Lady was reluctant to release stories about verified UFO cases, for crying out loud.  But the story about a twenty-first century saint made me pause.  Well, Carlo Acutis isn’t technically a saint yet (at least he wasn’t at the time of the story), but you can’t become a saint without miracles.  Miracles are difficult situations for which to set up a control group.  Often they involve human beings and we really don’t understand ourselves well enough to say what might be supernatural from time to time.  All we know, at least from the “educated” establishment, is that materialism accounts for everything so miracles don’t happen.  QED.  That’s why I found the account of Carlo Acutis so interesting.  A story about a young person dying from leukemia is always sad, but this report doesn’t end there.

In his brief life, Acutis tried to bring good into the world via the internet.  In this shadowy realm where trolls and hatred thrive, here was a young man trying to spread positive things through this collective of anybody who can afford connectivity.  That does make a remarkable news story in and of itself, but that miracle.  Two, in fact.  Catholic practice is not to assign sainthood without out two very carefully studied miracles.  The Vatican has been involved with science for many decades.  The idea of the Big Bang, after all, derived from Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest and physicist.  Controls are set up for miracles, and the church even used to use Devil’s advocates to try to disprove miracles in such cases.  Skepticism was an essential part of the process.  In its own way this is the scientific study of miracles.

The miracle that may put Acutis over the top, according to the Times, is a spontaneous remission of a brain hemorrhage after a prayer was made to the young man.  Such things happen and doctors can’t explain them.  We as human beings have no way to determine what actually causes such unconventional healings—miracles—often deemed impossible by medical science.  A saint is as good an explanation as any other.  What’s fascinating here is that this miraculous recovery in all likelihood would’ve been overlooked by the New York Times, had it not been for this pending sainthood case.  Such cases as this aren’t everyday occurrences, but they reflect realities that modern people may be very slow to acknowledge.  They still do happen, whether they make the papers or not.  Perhaps our world would be a bit better if they did get reported a little more often.

Politicking

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It was weird seeing my face on a 27 x 40 poster.  When I went to give my campaign speech I was wearing dress clothes that I’d bought at Goodwill.  My “campaign manager” said I did a great job, being witty and somehow confident.  I didn’t win.  Still, my stint in politics was not yet over.  The next year one of the presidential candidates asked me to be his campaign manager.  I took on the job with gusto, and, claiming no credit, I would note that he won.  So where was all of this politicking going on?  At the United Methodist Church Conference Youth Council.  I ran for council secretary one year, and lost.  I kept the poster with my face on it for a few years but the ink faded and the paper was cheap, and besides, I’ve never considered myself much to look at.

Thinking about the resources allocations (I didn’t pay for the poster—couldn’t have if I’d wanted to), I have to wonder about the priorities of the church.  Of course, it was only much later, after I’d gained significant seminary experience myself, that I realized just how political a job “ministry” is.  Yes, I had students while I taught in seminary, already strategizing on how to become bishop.  It was a political game.  Such games are no fun without power.  And money is power.  So maybe the Western Pennsylvania Conference was funding some learning experiences on the impressionable minds of the young.  It just took me a few extra years to catch on.  (Some things never change.)

I dislike politics.  Even now I wouldn’t feel compelled to do anything beyond voting my conscience were it not the clear and obvious danger that we’re in, courtesy of what used to be a conservative political party.  Any party that can’t keep a demagogue from receiving its nomination has embraced fascism and that’s a perilous road to travel as Germany and Italy discovered about a century ago.  My dislike of ecclesiastical politics certainly played a large role in my decision not to pursue ordination.  I’ve been a church insider, and what happens at board meetings?  Politics.  The person in the pew often doesn’t realize just how political religion is.  I learned Robert’s Rules of Order from church meetings.  My nomination to elected office in the organization led nowhere.  I was left wondering if there’s anywhere left that politics don’t apply.  The print on the poster faded.  The very last time I unrolled it, it was completely blank.

Finding The Exorcist

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This blog is the closest thing to a diary that I keep anymore.  It’s also the place where I remind myself when I read a book or saw a movie.  I started this blog (actually, my niece did, but I started putting content on) about a decade-and-a-half ago.  Most of the books I’ve read since then (but not all), have been featured here.  It didn’t start out that way with movies.  I watch a lot of films.  The other day I was wondering when I first watched The Exorcist.  I figured that it must’ve been something I’d blogged about, knowing me.  It could be that I watched it before 2009, or it could be that the search function on WordPress doesn’t allow me to find the post, if it exists.  You see, I don’t know what else to search for beyond “The Exorcist,” because I can’t recall what I might’ve written about it.  If I did.

So, in case I haven’t, I do want to say a bit more about that experience.  I was only eleven when the movie was released.  Three movies that I grew up terrified to see were Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen.  I finally saw them as an adult.  Since it was the DVD era (preceded by the VHS era, and followed by the Streaming era—all within about three decades) I bought the disc.  In all likelihood this was at FYE, which used to be a thing, just like Blockbuster before it.  Of course by the time I sat down, trembling, to watch it I’d seen many clips, stills, and parodies.  Still, I was afraid.  The movie, some thirty years old, lived up to its reputation.  I was left trembling more than when I started.

Many books have been written about The Exorcist, and although people sometimes laugh at it today, most horror fans I know still speak of it with reverence.  This movie changed horror.  It also changed demons.  Today what we believe about demons derives largely from this movie.  Its explanatory value is that it offers somewhere to turn when nothing else works.  Religion as a last resort.  And, ultimately, religion works where everything else fails.  It is possible, that somewhere in this sprawl of a blog, that I wrote first impressions of seeing it.  It would’ve been 2009, or perhaps I saw it as early as 2006.  I was struggling with my own demons then.  And, as often happens in such cases, precisely when things happened can be a little difficult to determine.

Wachet auf

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I have a proposition.  Some folks in town have a big “Anti-Woke” (aka, “asleep”) flag on their house, along with various Trump paraphernalia.  Since the Republican Party has largely become reactionary and would, admittedly, still prefer to be asleep, perhaps Democrats should adopt Buddha as a symbol.  I know this would be dangerous in a nation that prides itself as being the city set on a hill, but “buddha” means “awoken one.”  I’m not a Buddhist but I have no problem with it.  The Eightfold Path makes a lot of sense to me.  In any case, a good symbol is something to be cherished.  I think of Gordon Deitrich having a Qur’an in his house, even as a gay man, in V for Vendetta.  Symbols are important.  The anti-woke seem to have forgotten Matthew 24.42 “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.”  The Bible generally advocates wakefulness.

Photo by Mattia Faloretti on Unsplash

Trump-branded Christianity is a strange beast.  Certainly the use of a Buddha symbol would become a cudgel.  Ironically so, for a faith that promotes nonviolence.  The “foreignness” or “not-Christianness” outweighs the positive outlook it entails.  Any religion that advocates violence should reassess its principles.  Buddhism isn’t perfect—no religion is.  The basic ideas of right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration work well enough with Christianity, as Thomas Merton discovered.  For some, however, the Asian outlook (overlooking that Christianity began in Asia) is a deal-breaker.  Strange for a global religion.  Not so unusual for those who prefer to be asleep because Fox News sings them a lullaby.

One of the most stirring Christian hymns is “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme,” based on a Bach cantata.  Perhaps better known as “Sleepers Awake,” the words take their origin from Matthew 25, the parable of the ten virgins.  If I recall correctly, the virgins ready to be woke are those who fare better in this tale.  They’re less concerned with condemning other religions and more interested in being able to wake and trim their lamps swiftly when the time comes.  As I told a friend the other day, I’m an unrepentant idealist.  I do believe that we have it within ourselves to treat all people as having inherent worth and dignity.  The real draw to having Buddha is a symbol would be the introspection.  Instead of telling other people how to live, the principles are applied at home.  Of course, a person has to want to wake up for any of this to work.