Snowden's Globe Has That Old Time Religion
Old TV News Art, Old Maneuvers, Old Iraq, Old Radical Christians, we stumbled into the past and just made it back.
Hello, everyone!
I apologize for the radio silence, it’s been a minute. It’s not for lack of writing or failing to find things that were interesting, but I’ll be honest…a lot of the stuff I’ve been reading has been Off the Internet in the past year or so, and much of what I’ve seen online has been really unworthy of sharing or spreading. There is so much anger, cynicism, escapism, and raw emotion flowing out there right now, most of the cooler heads and clearer minds have taken for cover and waited for the storm to blow over.
It’s probably not surprising, that in a time of public health failures and psychological stressors we are seeing much of our public writing and thinking has suffered too, but I really try to avoid spreading smugness, ignorance, or unhelpfully inflammatory material, and that eliminates a lot of what’s been going on.
My goal is to spread inflammatory stuff that is helpful! That might sound weird, but I think that the challenge these days is to find material on the Internet that engages us and propels us forward—into further learning, into effective action, into communication, whatever part of the world that we feel called to— rather than pacifies us or satisfies us with a false summit of self-certainty.
Anyway, here’s a collection of ideas, quotes, pictures, and writing that I’ve found worthy of sharing. Each should have some element that can hopefully make your days a little more interesting or provoke new lines of inquiry for your own thinking.
And, as Prince warned us back in the 90s, “It’s cool to get on the computer, don’t let the computer get on you.”
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Books
The Silk Roads, by Peter Frankopan
A History of Christian Thought, by Paul Tillich
Resisting Illegitimate Authority, by Bruce E. Levine
Martin Luther, by Lyndal Roper
These copies of the Saturday Evening Post I picked up at a garage sale should be considered books
Music/Audio
High School, Tim Heidecker (way better at music than he has any right to be!)
SOURCE, Nubya Garcia
The World Only Ends When You Die, Skyway Man
Streetlights, Bonnie Raitt
A Lo Cubano, Orishas
Monument, Portico Quartet
Blowback, Season 3
Arkangel’s full-cast recording of Richard III
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If I may, a historical person who I would like to push into the spotlight is Helmut Gollwitzer. A man of the political left and a Reformed minister in Germany, Gollwitzer was a friend and spiritual advisor to several left-wing West German political activists in the middle of the 20th century, including Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction. His book, The Christian Faith and the Marxist Criticism of Religion, has been a fascinating journey to work through. There are several great quotes from the final chapter, “Christian Encounter with Atheism”, and some of them can be found in a decade-old blog series over at DET. Part 1 includes a great line from Gollwitzer that neatly summarizes the challenge for religious communities in the modern moment:
“Christianity must win from its faith the inner freedom to judge its own history relentlessly under the accusations of Communism, without thereby losing its glad confidence in its message, without prejudice and without anger admitting the Communists to the brotherhood in the solidarity of the godless, without thereby losing its freedom and courage to make clear and emphatic contradiction.”
To continuously self-criticize your tradition while maintaining confidence in the tradition’s distinct message? That’ll take a miracle!
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On a related note, Kristen DuMez has a fantastic post about how “White Christian Nationalism” is being discussed in the current American moment, and whether that Christian nationalism can accurately be called “imposter Christianity.” I think DuMez’s answer, that this right-wing nationalist Christendom is both (i) an essential and continuous element in American history since the founding of the country, and (ii) only a fraction of the entire history of Christianity in America, is exactly right.
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Erik Baker tweeted out a portion of this January 1979 Washington Post op-ed, “The Faked Case Against Regulation” that positively crackles with grim familiarity. Besides the reminder of “what’s old is new”, I think it’s interesting that (i) op-eds could be so much longer back in the 70s, and quite complex, and (ii) we are living in the “cartoonish worst-case scenario” of a reasonable person’s argument from 40 years ago.
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There is so much to love in “The Marsh Guide and the English Explorer”, by Leon McCarron and Mohammed Al Sarai— the gorgeous pictures of the communities of the Iraqi marshlands, the fascinating story of Wilfred Thesiger, or the great quotes from his now-91-year-old guide Amara bin Thuqub, take your pick— it makes a little-known part of Arabic culture and history come alive for a new audience. The confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates holds immense symbolic power, and the drying out of the region is one of our time’s saddest tragedies.
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A little open-source intel resource: Nixintel put together a great little list of tools to use for geolocation and improving your map searching skills.
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The pandemic has produced a new interest for homeschooling. Internet Legend Jon Bois has an old piece at Vice about his experience as a homeschooled kid, and the genuine weirdos you meet on that circuit. There are obviously important exceptions to the rule, but in my opinion and experience as someone who grew up around evangelical homeschoolers… parents should try to find a reason, any reason whatsoever to avoid homeschooling, if possible. There might be some real joys and growth for your kid, but you are almost certainly going to place that kid into social spheres with extremely odd people. You don’t want to have your life be full of sovereign citizens, neo-Confederates, and other assorted cranks? Then don’t homeschool. I went to a fundamentalist evangelical high school, and even we thought that the homeschool kids who showed up on PSAT/SAT testing days were too odd. Bois’s account is about as positive towards homeschooling as I can recall from someone within the scene, and it still makes your hair stand on end.
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Memes in history. For as much as we’ve pushed the envelope in creating new forms of video and image production, there’s something oddly comforting in seeing that even the earliest days of photography were full of “funny captions + cat pictures.”
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I recently watched the documentary, A Time For Burning. A vérité-styled movie of a white Lutheran minister in 1960s Omaha trying to push for racial equality and the church’s participation in the civil rights movement, it was nominated for an Oscar but blackballed by the big three broadcast networks. It’s remarkable how many relevant topics crop up in the film: redlining, NIMBYism, black Christian debates, white Christian rationales, property values ruling over religions… all in a 30 minute film. Can’t recommend it anymore highly. The black barber who tears the paint off of the Lutheran minister is a young Ernie Chambers, who went on to be the longest-serving state senator in Nebraska, and a proud atheist critic of organized religion.
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The collection of 70’s TV news art from Detroit, for sale by Type Punch Matrix (one of the best rare book crews around!). Seeing these filled me with a kind of wistfulness I didn’t know I still had. I mean, come on, this rocks:
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Finally, a great man of American letters named Fredrick Buechner died this week. His writings impacted countless people, and he might be the finest writer in 20th Century American Christendom, in part because of his ability to elaborate the doubts and fears that any person with a religious sentiment must contend with. The Internet is full of quotes from his works, I’ll leave you with my personal favorite:
“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
Until next time,
Snow