Editor-in-ChiefDevelopment Manager

Managing EditorLayout Editor

Publicity ManagerBuisness Manager

Fundraising ManagerCopy Editor

[essay] Editor[essay] Editor[essay] Editor

[narrative] Editor[narrative] Editor[narrative] Editor

Assistant [narrative] Editor [poem] Editor [review] EditorFaculty Advisor

Our Staff

Caroline GravesIan YueWill HierholzerDaniel LipfordDebbie Knubley Tim McIlraithLaurel JohnsonBen GibsonTenYangsirisuk Jessie FletcherTim Lau Matt MillerCora MillsJoel CoakleyBrian RoweCaleb CardenasMeredith NeillDr. Read Schuchardt

Reinventing Celibacy

I Am Something of an Accidental Anglican

The Relics of St. Clive

We Are All Antiques

Wheaton’s Unofficial UndergraduateJournal

Volume 6, Issue 1Fall 2010

Leave Room for God’s Wrath

Of Sainthood and Scholarship

Beyond the Brush Painted Border

The Thing Itself: A Dialogue with Dr. Eric McLuhan

Wheaton’s Unofficial

Undergraduate Journal

the pub

1

Thoughts from the Editor

Caroline GravesEditor-in-Chief

We would like to give special thanks to Student Government and President's Video for their fi nancial support; to our faculty advisor Dr. Read Schuchardt, for his counsel; and to the wonderful staff of the SAO for all their help. We would also like to thank the Vox Clara foundation for their support and counsel.

Special Thanks:

[content]

the pub

I Want to Slap Jon Krakauer in the Face Beyond the Brush Painted Border

PrayerAt a Bridal Shower

Eight to Infi nity Bali

“Leave Room for God's Wrath:” St. Augustine’s Defense of an Unpopular Theodicy

Of Sainthood and Scholarship: A Study in Paradox

Age of Adz, or, How the Authors Found Themselves Dancing and Rediscovered Their Love for Electro-pop, or, How the Authors Couldn’t Help Using the

Word Oeuvre and Betraying Their Desire for an Album about North Dakota, or, How the Authors

Learned to Stop Worrying About Artistic Disintegration and Just Enjoyed the Album

The Thing Itself: A Dialogue with Dr. Eric McLuhan

Bryn ClarkCaleb Cardenas

Erin LynchErin LynchSubaas Gurung Meredith Moench

Griffi n Klemick

Ben Robertson

Elise Bremer & Nick Tomlin

Caroline Graves

[narrative] 5, 19

[poem] 3, 4, 11, 34

[essay] 13, 26

[review] 31

2

The Pub is an Associate Chapter of Vox Clara. For more information please visit their website at www.voxclara.org

[interview] 35

I am a collector, though not by choice or good taste. Paper will accumulate in textbook sleeves, in the dust under my bed, and in the four corners of my desk until it resembles a mountain range of leftover lists and mementos. My mother considers this habit unfortunate, and sounds objection for aesthetics’ sake. Yet, my inner rhetorician persuades me to preserve, at least, the fossils of my education: my class notes.

One thing is certain, Isocrates would approve. The fourth century BCE inventor of the liberal arts institution cautioned us against academic exclusivity, “not to let our wits go wool-gathering.” Instead, he championed the belief that effective discourse necessitates an interdisciplinary bias. For both scholars of Ancient Greece and those of modern academia, discourse constitutes the framework of societal progress. If discourse achieves the common ground vital for creating resolutions, then shouldn’t Christians be the prophetic artists of this craft? Perhaps, we are culpable of neglecting Isocrates’ petition.

The function of the scribe is to document and replicate texts and records. As students, this kind of retention is inescapable, but the embodiment of learning hinges upon discourse. Because I save lecture notes, I enter the scribal tradition. However, stopping there confi rms my exclusion from the kind of interactive examination which is available to

us on a college campus. Wendell Berry, writing about the functions of community, commends the role of communal discourse in creative problem-solving: “It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.” Berry proposes an inclusive method called “solving for pattern.” He defi nes “patterns” as circular cultural, political, and environmental systems that layer and intersect to form the underlying historical and current context of a subject. The purpose is to regard the well-being of every stakeholder in their role within the pattern; externalities become obsolete. Together, with this process, we can build bridges, beginning with the hard work of community dialogue.

Berry’s challenge is hardly alien to students. Within our campus body, interdisciplinary discourse is present, and our pattern recognition is developing. The Pub hopes to acts as a catalyst for involved controversy, revealing both common ground and brave confrontations. Our pages do not contain dead script, but breathing texts that beg for campus discussion. If, as a student, you fi nd regurgitation and isolation your scribal status, consider this fall issue of The Pub to be an invitation to refl ect, rage, and dialogue.

the pub

3

Wrappings splitlike buds displacedby foliageof silk and lace:womanhood’s weeds,hers with the groom.Is this the way?we hiss. She blooms

At a Bridal Shower Erin Lynch

[poem]

4

Erin Lynch is a senior English literature major from Newberg, OR. She likes to read road signs out loud. Erin.Lynch@my.wheaton.edu

This should be vivisection — self unsealed —but I am squeamish and defer incision.Once the skin is ruptured, peeled back,

every cut exposes further — veinsand arteries, traced to the heart,fragile parts of warm existencespread out throbbing, bloody on my hands.

I prefer cadavers:more hygienic than my soul,still sealed. At arm’s length, I prodits surface, safely, before God.

PrayerErin Lynch

the pub

Hard. I am talking a full wind up here: arm cranked behind my back almost to the point that my shoulder dislocates, ev-ery ounce of energy in my bicep exploding forth into a violent swing, the type that baseball players rehearse for hours. I want my hand to connect with his face — left cheekbone to be exact — with propelling motion that will force his head to jerk violently to the right, maybe propelling saliva to-wards the ground. I want to tell him to stop smoking pot, or whatever drug I am sure he is on, get a real job, and stop writing about his stupid adventures. If I were a real man, I would punch him, and I have seriously contemplated this. I am a pansy, though a smart pansy — smart enough to know that in a standoff between Krakauer and my-self I would be pulverized and left in a gutter to bleed.1 That and a punch to the face would probably break my hand. And we need to face

it, you cannot type an essay critiquing someone if you just broke your hand punching them in the face.2 My best bet then, is to slap him like his high school girlfriend, turn on my heels and run like a girl, all the while hoping that he is not as good at running as he is at climbing mountains.3

In short, I am sick of reading his books. I have read all of them while sitting cuddled by a fi re in the temperate winters of southern Ohio,

pouring over pages upon pages about how he climbed a 4,000 foot vertical face, somewhere in Alaska, while severely sleep deprived, alone, cold, oh and by the way, was never roped in. I have followed his musings on Christopher McCand-less, who disappeared into the Alaskan wilderness in order to grasp some greater meaning on life, losing his own in the process. I have read them in their entirety, and then read them again,

mostly with my feet propped up on a pillow and some delicious home cooking by my side.

So, before I continue, I must submit to a certain personal responsibility in this realm. I fall into the same category as a majority of Evangelical Christians whom, upon reading the Left Behind series, consequentially stocked their pantries with dried food and scanned the news

My best bet then, is to slap him like his high school

girlfriend, turn on my heels and run like a girl, all the while

hoping that he is not as good at running as he is at climbing

mountains.

5

I Want to Smack Jon Krakauer in the FaceBryn Clark

1 Probably somewhere in Boulder, CO.2 A punch of my desired magnitude would most certainly break something, my hand being the most likely

candidate.3 Or, just faster than me.

[narrative]

headlines for any up and coming politicians with the last name “Carpathia.”

I am even worse that that. I read both Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Eiger Dreams …and then I bought a backpack and hiking boots. And I did not stop there. Oh no. I went ahead and bought a plane ticket to Alaska, even going so far as to make my girlfriend watch the movie (based off of Krakauer’s book) with me the day before I left, right through the scene where Mc-Candless dies alone in the wilderness.4 I was diving head fi rst into the Krakau-er cult.

From my home in the Midwest, I stuffed my backpack with all the es-sentials: plenty of hiking clothes, extra socks, warm gear, even a fi rst aid kit. I ensured I packed all the right rain gear and boots, and was adequately pre-pared for whatever the wil-derness may throw at me. I did neglect to bring, however, anything resem-bling civilization. I do not remember Krakauer mentioning the need of a toothbrush or razor in any of his books; I categorized these items as too civilized. I was heading to Alaska with a group of twenty other college-age males, none of whom I had met. My goal for the trip was simple: to discover Alaska.

Krakauer’s book, Into the Wild, describes

the last frontier as a place of mystique, adventure and a Utopia in which McCandless fi nds peace. I went to Alaska looking for that mystique, look-ing for that adventure in what Krakauer seemed to depict was the most adventurous place on earth — even if it meant death.5

Upon stepping off the plane, my precon-ceived notions of Alaska were blown out of the proverbial water. Alaska was not, it turned out, severely under-developed. From Krakauer’s

writings, I had imagined Alaska as one big camping trip, and that I would be lucky to see running wa-ter. It did not occur to me that there would be col-lege campuses, much less ones with dormitories. As it turned out there were, and I was staying in one of them.6 I already felt some-what thrown off as I un-packed my camping gear, trying to make my room appear as though I had

planned for it to be a dorm room, not a tent in the middle of nowhere. I had to borrow a tooth-brush, and later went to the local supermarket (another novelty, in my mind) to purchase soap and shampoo, both of which I had previously deemed unnecessary for tent life. From the col-lege campus, I drove with some of my compan-ions down a road and, save for the mountains and ocean in the background, the landscape was

6

Upon stepping off the plane, my

preconceived notions of Alaska were blown out of

the proverbial water. Alaska was not, it

turned out, severely under-developed.

4 It may surprise you that we are no longer together.5 As long as a famous journalist wrote a book about me after my death. 6 Ironically, they were much nicer than my dorm in Indiana …go fi gure.

not terribly different from those in Ohio. On our right was a strip mall, and later, just before reaching the grocery store, we saw subdivisions of cookie cutter houses all in a row.7 As I scanned aisles for the cheapest shampoo, I decided that Krakauer would never have gone shopping for shampoo.

Now, I must ac-credit Krakauer in some ways, and here is one: he adeptly describes the beauty of Alaska. Based on his writing, it is no wonder that McCandless set his sights on Alaska’s wilderness, and I can-not blame him. My fi rst backpacking venture of the trip took me into the heart of the mountains surrounding Juneau. The beauty of the area, simply put, cannot be described. Like any self-respecting writer, I must attempt to do so.

Juneau is a rainforest, which is a little known fact. Consequentially, it receives more rain in a week than many Midwestern towns do in months or even a year. We set off on our backpacking trip during a typical Juneau day, cloudy and drizzling. The mountains, green at the peak of summer, seemed to rise around us at all angles. A euphoric feeling truly exists as one gets the sight of mountain peaks stretching as far as the eye can see, sprinkled with new snowfall, interrupted only by the valleys between them. Only the placement of mountains next to the

sea could make it more magnifi cent. The tips of the mountains jut out into the western horizon, and then the slopes dive down and submerge themselves in the water, as if bowing before the majesty of the ocean. Mountain meets sea, with

passion and mystique in between them both.

I could have given Krakauer a high fi ve for his descriptions.

The assurance did not last long. More was still to come that would destroy my idealized pic-ture of Alaska.

For starters, there were parts of Alaska that were commercialized …severely commercialized.

Into the Wild describes a world that is just that: wild. McCandless ate rice while he was in Alas-ka, the only protein coming from a moose he shot. While I did sample bear jerky, and even moose spaghetti, most of my meals consisted of delicious soups and ice cream from a touristy food stand called “Top Frog”.8 Furthermore, in Eiger Dreams, there was no chance of Krakau-er stumbling back from his ascent of Devil’s Thumb and downing a Big Mac at McDonalds.

Moreover, Krakauer never mentioned the tourist industry that runs amok throughout a good portion of the state. Granted, I think this is because Chris McCandless does not strike me as the type of guy to buy an “Alaska: been there, done that” key chain, or even Mt. McKinley

the pub

7

The tips of the mountains jut out into the western horizon, and then the slopes

dive down and submerge themselves

in the water, as if bowing before the

majesty of the ocean.

7 They weren’t even shaped like igloos.8 Where the inspiration for this came from, I know not; I saw no frogs on my trip.

[narrative]

shot glasses, but it still felt unexpected. Juneau itself is a city that survives off the tourist indus-try. Normally a city with a population of 30,000, during the summer the population is infl ated by well over a million tourists. The streets are lined with t-shirt shops and restaurants, most of which close down as soon as the last cruise ship leaves.

My fi nal lesson came not so much from the landscape but from the culture in Alaska, specif-ically the viewpoint of tourists. The cruise ship crowds and the tourists waddle from storefront to storefront in an ef-fort to fi nd the coolest shirt to signify their cruise-ship escapade. That state also suffers cynical Midwestern males who think they know everything about the state because they read some other guy’s book.9 Tourists and ig-norant dweebs aside, the people of Alaska are not what I expected them to be. Even upon venturing out to a very remote village, literally 400 miles from any-where, I found that Alaskans are still very much Americans. It is naturally assumed, or maybe at least by anyone of the Krakauer persuasion, that if you live in Alaska, you are going to be ex-treme when it comes to the outdoors. Ice climb-

ing, mountaineering, kayaking all await in your backyard, so why not be the next John Muir?10 The people I encountered, however, appeared startlingly average. Most had never even been ice climbing or kayaking.

I spent an afternoon with one group of high school students playing soccer outside a lo-cal high school. After a game that proved my complete inferiority in the sport, I sat down and talked to them about life in the town.

“What do you do for fun?” I asked them. The answer was not much more riveting than those from teen-agers in, say, Cincinna-ti, Ohio: video games, movies, high school sports, and theatre.

“Yes, but what about hiking?” I said.

They would shrug and reply “Oc-casionally.” I was be-fuddled. What about the mountains, the

sea? Where is the compulsion to just explore? I earnestly inquired of them, controlling the im-pulse to grab them by the shoulders and shake them.

They looked at me like I was a tourist and then, when I did not falter in my sincerity, like I was a freak.11

8

Tourists and ignorant dweebs aside, the people

of Alaska are not what I expected them to be.

Even upon venturing out to a very remote village,

literally 400 miles from anywhere, I found that Alaskans are still very

much Americans.

9 They are, by far, the worst. 10 John Muir was an American explorer and bear man who, also, could have used a slap in the face ...donate

to The Pub, so I can write about why in the spring issue.11 I deserved both.

the pub

Then they asked me where I was from.“Ohio,” I answered.Their faces lit up.“I’d love to visit Ohio!” one of them said.“Do you have an amusement park there?”

another piped in. “My family thought about go-ing there on vacation once, but instead we just went to Anchorage.”

And the list goes on. I talked with two high school girls who told me how eager they were to go to college, just to get out of Alaska. I met natives who dreamt of the day when they would no longer have to look upon the mountains in their backyards.

For every Christopher McCandless going into Alaska perhaps there are at least four or fi ve on the other side doing everything in their power to get out.

I had idealized a place and a culture, based upon what the words of some-one else had developed in my head. With stories of adventure and journeys of self-realization added into the equation, it would have been absurd to expect anything other than the stoic idealization I carried with me to Alaska. When I returned to the Midwest, I was not transformed.12 I had a camera full of pictures, some cool stories, and a better understanding of what Alaska really was. To be fair, I do not think Krakauer was necessarily wrong: Alaska is

a place of splendor and adventure if you want it to be, but so is anywhere else.

Maybe I do not want to slap Jon Krakauer in the face. I really do not know how much I can blame him. As an adventure writer, Alaska be-comes the land of adventure. He may have left some details out and over-glorifi ed a state that does not necessarily need it, but he is defi nitely not the fi rst to do so, and he will not be the last. Krakauer wrote about one aspect of Alaska. But as with all places, and the people within, there are many others that he missed.

Despite the fact that my views on Alaska had altered by the time I hopped on the return fl ight, I still found myself in love. I loved the mountains, I loved the ocean, the salmon, the

bears and the small towns in places most Americans do not know exist. Yes, there was a McDonalds at a trail head, and yes, I was invited to play “Halo” more often than hike, but the spirit of Alaska is real. Neighborhoods back up against mountain ranges, and traffi c is stopped be-cause of rambunctious bears. The great outdoors

is not a cute notion, but a reality there. And I loved the people: the ones who

played Xbox and watched MTV on the week-ends and the ones who were ten times more ad-venturous than I ever will be. I did not have to look far to fi nd those with whom I could relate,

9

Yes, there was a McDonalds at a trail head, and yes, I was invited to play “Halo”

more often than hike, but the spirit of

Alaska is real.

12 In the spirit of optimism, I must point out that I, also, wasn’t dead in a broken down bus.

[narrative]

10

and I also did not have to look far to fi nd people from whom I could not wait to get away. Alaska is a real place, and Krakauer captured that re-ality, but just a part of it. I do not know if it is truly possible for anyone to do much more than

that, and I do not know if this deems violence against him.

But then again, maybe I would just slap him (and run like a girl) if nothing else to be able to say that I did.13

13 Because really, who can say that they’ve really slapped Jon Krakauer?

Bryn Clark is a senior English writing major from Mason, OH. While in Alaska, Bryn played a game of truth or dare that resulted in him taking a naked plunge into a glacier run off. Now, Bryn just tells the truth. Bryn.Clark@my.wheaton.edu

the pub

Octave legs jointed on the airPluck and climb, pantomime forth a Cartesian planeBetween axes of the grass and the low tree.Metabolic juices river translucent through the soundless machinery,Eight legs fi nd crevices in the surface of the air.

Three dimensions suffer me Shift Vantage angle,And the lamppost Catches its rays copper on Silkmasonry —Infant infrastructure with the width of a Cutting edge. Technology

Preordained in genetics, known among the nucleic acids!Standard issue, the spinnerets are nonetheless profound and beauty.With eight legs attuned to the vibrato of the tripwire.

I wondered Is this a nightly setting up shop — routine, you know?I mean, have you ever really watched it?

Eight years into the millennium, now old enough to vote —I’d often stared at eight semesters,Felt equippedWith only half the required appendages.But he’s been telling me“Rest assured my eye is on their kind too.And even Solomon in all his splendor could notBuild himself a palace with timbers Of comparable tensile-strength-to-density ratio …

11

Eight to Infi nity Subaas Gurung

[poem]

“ …And have you not more than they —More than genetics to guide you? More than instinct? Remember.”

I’ve an affi nity to pull numbers out of the air.But overthrow the fi gure-eight to its side,

And behold.

Subaas Gurung is a junior English literature major from Kathmandu, Nepal. He is becoming increasingly profi cient at spittin' mad verses on the microphone. Subaas.Gurung@my.wheaton.edu

12

the pub

Perhaps no argument against theism is more daunting today than the evidential argument from evil. It is not clear why a world created by an all-powerful, wholly good being should con-tain the instances of horrifi c suffering that have become almost routine in ours. Late in life St. Augus-tine was still wrestling with this question: “Whence comes all this evil?”1 In previous years, he had tried to interpret these events as good, preaching forcefully about the spiritual growth that could arise from his congregants’ suffering.2 But later he confronted the question directly, con-cluding in his dispute with the Pelagians that the only possible explanation of human suffering was that sinful humanity had incurred God’s wrath. He states his position memorably in The City of God: “For God’s anger is this mortal life, in which man is made like to vanity, and his days pass as a shadow.”3

This position was not accepted without contest. Julian of Eclanum, the leading Pelagian

of Augustine’s day and his predominant critic, fi ercely opposed Augustine on this point, insist-ing that any good God must be “utterly divorced from all cruelty”4 — that a good God would not providentially ordain evil to befall his creation. But Julian was wrong and Augustine was right; human suffering occurs at the hand of God, a manifestation of his holy wrath against human sin. Moreover, this account alone can provide any hope or comfort in the midst of suffering; only if our sufferings are the outpouring of God’s wrath can any hope be found in them. While in previous years it sometimes felt impos-sible to me to live meaningfully in light of loom-ing divine wrath, I now believe that acknowl-

edging the wrath of God has served as a necessary precursor to understand-ing how great the love of God truly is.

The Nature of Wrath

Wrath is far from the most popular theodicy on the philosophical mar-ket today. Few churches teach and preach a God of wrath, popularizing the idea that he would ipso fac-to not be omni-benevolent. They follow such as C.H.

Dodd, whose interpretation of Romans 1:18ff. relies on a history in which Old Testament writ-ers project their fear of the numinous (particu-larly natural disasters) onto the person of God.5

The wrath of God, then, would signify only the inevitable results of sin manifested in creation, not any aspect of the divine nature.6

13

“Leave Room for God’s Wrath:” St. Augustine’s Defense of an Unpopular TheodicyGriffi n Klemick

Wrath is far from the most popular theodicy

on the philosophical market today. Few

churches teach and preach a God of

wrath, popularizing the idea that he would

ipso facto not be omni-benevolent.

[essay]

14

Dodd never provides warrant for his as-sumption that creation’s brokenness is an inevi-table result of sin (and vis-à-vis an omnipotent God, could it be inevitable?).7 His project is taint-ed from the beginning by his key theological presupposition:

“The idea of an angry God is a fi rst at-tempt to rationalize [the feeling of awe at disaster] …but it is an attempt which breaks down as the rational element in religion advances. In the long run we cannot think with full consistency of God in terms of the highest human ideals of personality and yet attribute to Him the irrational passion of anger.”8

Here Dodd gives the two most common objec-tions to conceiving of God as wrathful. Some see wrath as necessarily capricious, an arbitrary stain on a being purported to be perfectly ra-tional. Others maintain that it is contradictory to speak of a God as both loving and wrathful, claiming that the two are incommensurate as aspects of the divine nature. Furthermore, underlying Dodd’s explicit objections is an even more vexing one: that an omni-benevolent God must in the end manifest his love not only to humanity in general but to each individual person, and that this is irrec-oncilable with God eventually sending some persons to hell to face his wrath for eternity. I venture to claim that none of these objections carries signifi cant weight in a careful consideration of God and wrath rooted in Scripture.

First, we must understand that in divine wrath “there is the complete absence of that caprice and unethical quality so prominent in [human anger].”9 God’s wrath is “the natural expression of the Divine nature, which is abso-lute holiness, manifesting itself against the …iniquity of mankind.”10 Scripture passages such as 2 Thessalonians. 1:6 (“It is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you”) illustrate that it is in God’s na-ture to judge and therefore also to punish; this is not God’s mere whim.11

Second, God’s wrath, rather than being opposed to his love, is more accurately seen as the effect of his love for fallen humanity. His an-ger is often a response to corporate apostasy and the breaking of his commandments by his cov-enant people.12 Wrath serves to restore the elect to their intended status as creatures in postures of loving worship toward him. Augustine recog-nizes this in his own life: “But see how close on our backs you were as we fl ed you, you the pun-ishing God and the fountain of pity, who twist us around toward you in surprising ways.”13 God’s

wrath thus serves as the im-petus for drawing people back into his love. Scripture indicates that God typi-cally draws us to himself by teaching us to number our days through experience of his anger,14 which leads us to look for satisfaction in his love rather than in our own pursuits and ends.15 Finally,

Psalm 78 tells us that concerning the Israelites, “[God], being compassionate ...restrained his anger often and did not stir up all his wrath;”16

Scripture here indicates that even God’s wrath

Wrath serves to restore the elect to their intended

status as creatures in postures of loving worship toward him.

15

at his people’s sin is restrained and tempered by his mercy.

As to the argument that an omni-benev-olent God must love all persons, and that God could not love a person while subjecting him to the divine wrath in hell, Scripture denies the ar-gument’s conclusion, viz. that no one ultimately faces God’s eternal wrath. Romans 9:22 makes clear that God has in fact painstakingly created certain humans as “objects of wrath.”17 It is un-certain, however, which of the two premises of the argument Scripture would deny.18 Neverthe-less, so long as we regard Scripture as infallible, we must maintain that one or both premises are indeed false. Yet, our inability to fi nd easily the answer to this argument is deeply troubling. It seems to leave us with instances of God’s wrath that do not bring about good for people in the end. I have little trouble believing that hell is just, given the deep sinfulness I perceive in myself. But I fi nd it nigh impossible to discover any goodthat is achieved by hell compared to the good that would be achieved in God electing all to salvation.

We must, then, start with experience. A Biblical answer to the problem of suffering must not start with any specifi c claim to good achieved by an instance of God’s wrath but with the awareness that we all routinely commit wrong actions, and that punishment of wrongdoing is an intrinsic good.19 This awareness ought to be-come evident to each individual based on her own experiential knowledge that she is a sinner who deserves eternal punishment. While we cannot know the hearts of other individuals or delve into the mind of God concerning the ul-timate goals of any specifi c instances of suffer-ing, we can be certain that his judgment is just, maintaining faith in his love on the basis of the

astonishing love demonstrated in the person of Christ and in his death on our behalf.

Why Wrath is a Better Answer

We have seen that divine wrath does not contradict the revealed nature of the Christian God. Augustine would claim even that it is the only coherent answer to the problem of suffer-ing.20 Even so, that does not give much reason for celebration. What is comforting about being suffering sinners in the hands of an angry God?

An alternative answer has been proposed: God generally allows suffering (without ordaining,it seems, any specifi c instances of it) because it is necessary to facilitate spiritual growth.21 Julian gives an answer close to this one in Ad Florum 6.17: “For already [fear and pain] …are instead accomplished teachers of those who have not only done no evil whatsoever, but are born with the key-bolt of a good will, helpers and execu-tors of justice.”22 Suffering thus acts as the cata-lyst for latent human potential to be actualized. In years before the Pelagian controversy, Augus-tine himself had an affi nity toward this view.23

It is worth noting fi rst that this soul-making theodicy seems to necessitate universalism, as it only works for people who actually come to God.24 Whether this position is consonant with ‘good old-fashioned’ Evangelical exegesis is un-certain. But Augustine’s account of God’s wrath proves better than Julian’s account in one other signifi cant way. It is not clear that Julian actually affi rms God’s omnipotence, which, for Augus-tine, is the opening declaration of Christianity.25

Julian would rather preserve God’s innocence at cost to his power, creating a God Augustine calls “cruelly weak.”26 Augustine is not merely being pithy here; in an effort to free God from

the pubthe pub

16

[essay]

any complicity in suffering, Julian has “cruelly” taken away any hope for those who suffer.

Rabbi Harold S. Kushner is the author of perhaps the most famous book on theodicy for the problem of evil, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. In a recent interview with NPR,27

Kushner said that following the death of his son, he reevaluated his belief in an omnipotent God, ultimately deciding that if his son’s death were part of God’s plan, “[it was] a bad bargain. I don’t want to have to deal with a God like that.” So he circumscribed God’s power in order to maintain his full omni-benevolence. He disavowed his for-mer belief that spe-cifi c tragedies serve divine purposes. When asked whether his relationship with God had changed as he grew older, Kush-ner replied, “My sense is no. My sense is God and I came to an accommoda-tion with each other a couple of decades ago, where he’s got-ten used to the things that I’m not capable of and I’ve come to terms with things he’s not capable of, and we still care very much about each other.”28

This is an excellent example of how at-tempts to limit God in an effort to make him palatable to our limited perspective ultimately disappoint. Kushner’s God feels sorry for the

sufferer, but illuminates no purpose of suffering; this God does not work all things together for the good of those called according to his pur-pose. No actual hope then exists for those suf-fering nor any meaning (beyond constructed psychological crutches) discovered in suffering. It therefore comes as no surprise that Kushner’s relationship with God has not changed over the decades; his God is no longer really active in the world to be known or worshiped. Conversely, the God who punishes sins in wrath is the God

who uses suffering to bring about not only justice but also the re-pentance of sinners, a fact which becomes increasingly acute as I walk with him through the years.

The wrath of God has been a source of spiritual anguish for me since middle school; my arguments here are perhaps more the result of this intu-ition than vice-versa. And I do not pretend that my relationship with God fl ourished upon acknowledging his wrath; I spent years

in high school pleading with God to give me just a little longer to live like a Christian, imagin-ing myself standing before judge and perhaps teacher but neither friend nor father. But fresh-man year on a retreat with Youth Hostel Minis-try, I had a profound encounter with the love of God, recognizing that even in Christ, I remain

Julian would rather preserve God’s

innocence at cost to his power, creating a God Augustine calls “cruelly weak.” Augustine is not merely being pithy here; in an effort to free God

from any complicity in suffering, Julian has

“cruelly” taken away any hope for those who suffer.

17

far from the person that I am intended to be (and one day will be), and that for this reason Christ took upon himself not only the punish-ment, the wrath of God that I deserved, but that he also took upon himself the dread, the despair, the distance from God that I had felt all those

years I had lived in my realization trying to earn my way back. The sacrifi ce of Christ was great-er still than that. The wrath of God thus gives us hope in the midst of suffering because the one who bore it in full for us emerged victorious over it and thus became the only hope that we have.29

the pubthe pub

Endnotes1 Op. Imp. V, 16.2 e.g., The Literal Meaning of Genesis XI, 35, xlviii, in which Augustine describes all the world’s affl ictions as the

grace by which God teaches humans not to trust in themselves.3 The City of God XXI, 24. Trans. Dods.4 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 397.5 C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1932), 22.6 Ibid. 23.7 I think defensible the claim that the curses of Genesis 3 are not inevitable results of sin but deliberate

responses by God, but I will not defend it here.8 Dodd 24.9 Geoffrey W. Bromiley, ed., International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, c1988),

3113.10 Ibid.11 Furthermore, Francis Turretin argues convincingly that if God’s wrath occurred only at his pleasure and

he could have refrained from punishing without compromising his nature, then surely he would simply have so refrained, making the sacrifi ce of Christ as a propitiation for sin moot (Institutes of Elenctic Theology, v. I, 28).

12 Cf. Colin Brown, gen. ed., The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, c1978), 108-9. This is exemplifi ed in Psalm 78: The Lord’s wrath comes upon Israel because they reject him despite all the miracles he has done for them. We see that God actually kills some of the Israelites in order that the people as a whole will return to him, which they in fact do. See verses 32-35.

13 Confessions IV, 4. Trans. Garry Wills.14 Psalm 90:12, NIV.15 Psalm 90:7-11, 14, NIV.16 Psalm 78:38, ESV.17 What is more, here the word cannot intelligibly refer to inevitable results of sin, as Dodd wants to claim.18 I lack space to adequately explore this point. No persuasive challenge to the second occurs to me, but I

admit I am very uncomfortable challenging the fi rst.19 I would posit that these are universal awarenesses, as Lewis is at pains to prove in Part I of Mere Christianity.20 e.g., Contra Julian IV, 83. In fact, many of his arguments against Julian hinge upon the fact that there is evil

18

[essay]

which an omnipotent God could prevent, and that if God does not, it can only be explained through an appeal to God’s vindictive justice.

21 A notable contemporary version is presented by John Hick in his work Evil and the God of Love.22 As cited in Josef Lössl’s very helpful “Julian of Aeclanum on Pain.”23 Cf. The Literal Meaning of Genesis XI, 35, in which the purpose of the world’s affl ictions is to teach sinners

humility. This is perhaps a “Christianized” version of Augustine’s Manichean views, which were sharply dualistic; the forces of good and evil are completely separate, with neither responsible for the other. Augustine was arguably departing from these views even by the time he wrote the Confessions, since in Bk. VII, ch. 13 he writes, “[In] the separate parts of your creation there are some things which we think of as evil because they are at variance with other things …in themselves, they too are good” (trans. Pine-Coffi n). Here, Augustine claims that many things we call evil are created by God, and, in fact, are not sharply separated from the good at all, if only we see them from beyond a fi nite, human perspective.

24 It is correct that, with respect to those who are in Christ, they are indeed no longer under God’s wrath but, when they suffer, are being chastised as God’s beloved children, for the sake of their spiritual growth. Cf. Turretin, 527-533. But if universalism isn’t true, “for those who are not the elect . . . suffering [is] merely ‘torture infl icted as a punishment,’ a visible reminder of the future penalties of Hell, a horrible overture to the terror of the Last Judgement” (Brown, 399).

25 Op. Imp. I, 49.26 Op. Imp. I, 120.27 NPR, The Long View. “Rabbi Kushner: An ‘Accommodation’ With God” <http://www.npr.org/

templates/story/story.php?storyId=124582959>.28 Ibid.29 This paper is an abridged version of my Spring 2010 fi nal paper for Mark R. Talbot’s class on the

Confessions. Not every detail of the arguments was present in the original, and even more subtleties have doubtless slipped through the cracks in this version. As noted several times in this paper, Augustine’s views on the subject of God and suffering changed signifi cantly over the course of his life. In The Literal Meaning of Genesis (see footnote 23) and his notable work On Free Choice of the Will, Augustine will not emphasize God’s sovereignty to the degree he does later in life. The arguments in this paper are taken primarily from The City of God XXI, Contra Julian (particularly Bks. III and IV), and his unfi nished book against Julian, typically designated Op. Imp. (particularly Bk. I). For a reliable account of the development of Augustine’s thought, see Peter Brown’s excellent Augustine of Hippo, Part V of which was crucial to my understanding of Augustine’s responses to Julian. Unfortunately, none of Julian’s own works survive, and thus our understanding of his positions comes mostly from Augustine, which is problematic for obvious reasons. The Lössl article cited in footnote 22 is a more charitable account of aspects of Julian’s thought. I am grateful to numerous editors and readers for helpful comments, but I am particularly indebted to Tim Lau for his encouragement, fl exibility, and insight.

Griffi n Klemick is a junior philosophy and Bible theology major from Pittsburgh, PA. He has recently been named Wheaton College's biggest hot mess of 2010 by senior Stephen Kusmer. Griffi n.Klemick@my.wheaton.edu

On a rocky crest half way between the earth and sky, Jim’s knees and forearms rested on the ground and his head hung over psychotropic vomit. Tips of long locks of hair dangled in the acidic pool — his stomach’s rejection of the white fl ower’s tea. The words of the last Nagual, Carlos Castaneda, echoed in the wind running through those clay mountains: “When a man embarks on the path of sorcery, he becomes aware in a gradual manner that ordinary life has been forever left behind.” He no longer felt his arms planted in the earth. Dirt clung to his sobbing pores; they had given themselves to the solitary journey following the shaman. His mind could not shut out the monotonous drone of or-dinary life despite the number of times that he proved its nonexistence. This world was not his own. He did not belong to it any longer. He had no home. Jim leaned back, his butt on his ankles, his numb ankles against the earth. Slumping his shoulders back and hanging his numb arms with palms turned toward the sun in resignation, he stared into the sky. He saw no eagle but the fl u-idity of the shining clouds beckoned. He closed his eyes and raked the ground with his fi ngertips until they connected with solid wood. Grasping it with both hands, he rested his chin on the cold metal tip of the gun.

He howled and as he did, the entire val-ley held its breath while the tormented echo slipped through the hills. He bolted to his feet and screamed as he stomped on the shrubs and

sage and wild red buckwheat. He fl ung himself into a sumac bush. It tore into his bare back and gashed the soft tissue underneath his eye. Then with tears seeping into and burning the cut on his cheek, he scrambled toward the edge. Knees bent, he hung over the puddle of his vomit and pressed the barrel against his stomach. Then Castaneda’s words cried again in the wind along with the crack of the shotgun’s chamber. Jim collapsed and his hot blood poured into the dirt.

I walked down the stone path along the moseying river through the antique city of Lju-bljana. The town that seemed to inherit the properties of the river enchanted me. Slowly gliding through the day, unpolluted and pure of fi xation on business, naturally blue waters fl owed from the mountains of Slovenia hum-ming the lullaby that set the townspeople into motion.

I strolled down that stone road with café tables lining the river’s edge when I noticed a brown cardboard box lying on the ground in front of a used bookshop. I glanced down into the box and my eyes were instantly drawn to the Aztec style word in the title of a beat up paper-back. I pulled it out and was struck with a wave of familiarity with the cover of The Journey to Ixt-lan. A black and white spotted hawk soared over a rocky mountainous landscape dotted with cac-tus, yucca, and other desert brush. In the bot-tom corner of the page, two men walked along a dusty trail. In that picture, I saw myself and my brothers hiking through the hills across our dirt road which runs clear to the Mexican bor-der, where the trickling Tecate River serves as a sorry natural border.

I paid a 1€ coin for the book and scanned

19

Beyond the Brush Painted BorderCaleb Cardenas

the pubthe pub [narrative]

20

the introduction as I walked out the door. It de-scribed the tale of Carlos Castaneda’s appren-ticeship under the Yaqui Indian Don Juan Ma-tus, and the philosophies he learned from that old shaman. I remembered my grandmother’s prejudice against the Yaqui tribe. “They’re a mean-spirited people,” she would claim when groaning about Mr. Martinez’s angry wife. I have secretly laughed at my Nani’s preju-dices but wondered which of her tribal memories I have in-herited.

The plants list-ed in the soft pages of this book grow natu-rally alongside my road and in groves beside Highway 94. They have large dark green leaves and beautiful white fl ow-ers like psychedelic martini glasses. The cacti identifi ed grow in the front yards of sub-urban families, unaware of their natural hallu-cinogenic properties. I slipped the book into my camelback and continued down the road.

My big brother, Dominic, and his friend, Beto, scraped the earth with square shovels while I sprayed the bike jumps with a hose. We had to string together fi ve or six long garden hoses just to reach that corner of the property where they built the track.

“Why don’t you dig for a while?” Dominic asked, but they were his jumps, and I told him

so. He said that digging would make me strong, but I spent Saturdays digging with my dad to lay a foundation under our old house. “Maybe you just need some of this to get strong.” He lifted up his elbow high into the air revealing a fresh patch of armpit hair. Laughing, he went back to forming his track. The sun went down and the coyotes began to bark.

“Maybe we should fi nish up soon,” I suggested.

“Escared of cai-yoats, eh?” crazy Beto hummed casting a sideways glance in my direction.

“Coyotes won’t attack people, stupid,” reminded my brother, “especially if we’re in a group.”

“Still, I think we should head back.”

The coyotes grew quiet for a mo-

ment as I surveyed the property. Bushes and boulder patches that grew out of the gulley and covered the hillside stood between the house and me. The coyotes began their chorus again.

“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” my brother replied.

Chills poured down my spine, turned about in my legs, then climbed right back up into my stomach, leaping for my throat. I heard the rustling of bushes and spun around only to see the muddy soles of their feet shoot into the bushes. They popped out sprinting on the other side. I threw the hose and tried to run, but the chills were still trapped in my knees and I

I remembered my grandmother’s prejudice against the Yaqui tribe.

“They’re a mean-spirited people,” she would claim when groaning about Mr.

Martinez’s angry wife. I have secretly laughed at my Nani’s prejudices but

wondered which of her tribal memories I have inherited.

tripped. I landed fl at on my chest. It knocked the wind out of me and I choked on the air grown thick with the laughter of coyotes. It was all I could hear. I did not even notice my own whim-per as I bolted for the house. It was not until the streams of tears blurred my vision that I tried to control my crying, but the tears continued to cut through the dirt cakes on my face and I rubbed them into mud with the back of my hand. Snif-fl ing, I arrived at the house.

If there was any way that I could get to my room without being seen choking down wim-pers, I would have, but by this time in the eve-ning most of my family was watching TV and waiting for a turn to use the shower as I passed through the living room with snot running from my nose. They all discovered my plight. That night the boys hid in the bushes until my mom stopped hollering and the stars came out.

I shared a bunk bed with my older brother while my sis-ter and little brother also shared one that my dad built one Saturday afternoon while migrating clouds danced with the sun, periodically casting crawling shadows over the land. Crammed into that tiny room, each of us had a dresser to hold our things. On mine a tasseled Mexican blanket held my books, Huckleberry Finn, Peter Pan, and Narnia wedged between a red wrist-rocket slingshot and a wooden box that reminded me of a pirate chest.

Although I slept above Dominic in this small room, I had my own place out in the yard as well. In the gulley grew a giant sumac with a

small opening like the mouth of a cave. One day, I took a hatchet and hacked away and hollowed out a space inside. I trampled down the weeds at the entrance, but left the patch of spiny caster beanstalks so that those on the outside could not ‘spy in.’ I carried old chairs to the fort from the dinner table, and wheel-barrowed down a row of blue suede seats from the old blue van that sat dead in the yard. I tied rope for guests to climb up among the higher branches, but the best seats were the branches themselves that ran low and horizontal over the gravel fl oor. This was a place of my own where I could take my friends. A place where my little brother would not try to watch me play Pokémon and my older brother

would not beat me up. A place I discovered for myself and crafted into my dwelling.

“Be careful though,” Matt, the hostel owner, warned when he offered me the job, “You might end up staying the whole summer. That’s what I did, 14 years ago.” I was sit-

ting on the porch of Chalet Martin, an adven-turers’ hostel high up in the Swiss Alps. I had spent the last couple days hiking and bouldering all over those peaks. I accepted Matt’s job offer to work the next day, laying cement and rock and doing other sorts of manual labor.

My fi rst night there, I slipped into the room underneath the porch. It was smoky and clearly customized by the group of guys who now occupied it. The room was furnished with tree stumps and discarded armchairs. A mural of South Park characters, big-wave surfers, and promiscuous cartoon vixens covered the walls

21

I landed fl at on my chest. It knocked

the wind out of me and I choked on

the air grown thick with the laughter

of coyotes.

the pubthe pub [narrative]

along with Afroman lyrics adapted to the hos-tel — which explained why they could not leave Chalet Martin. They were an international pot-pourri of drifters: Australian, Scottish, English, Portuguese, and Brazilian. They all lived in the hostel, working in tourism during the winter months when jobs are plentiful, but at this time during the summer, they broke their backs for Matt or worked at the only restaurant still open. On off days, they hiked and climbed high in the moun-tains where the only other human lives belonged to dairy farmers whose fami-lies have lived on those green slopes for hundreds of years.

That night, I had fi n-ished skateboarding down the winding mountain road and poked my head into this locals-only room. The Aus-sie, whose name was Chris invited me inside, wanting to see my board. It turned out that he had messed up his ankle in Amsterdam and decided to use his board to make the bench for the lounge by fastening the deck onto a log. I offered to let him borrow mine while I stayed at the hostel. I told him that while I had been hitchhiking to the top of the mountain in Vil-lars and riding back down until the road fl at-tened out below the hostel. “You’re not afraid of those nutty blokes that live on this mountain then, huh?” asked Tom. “It puts the lotion on its skin,” he added, and they all roared with laugh-ter. We talked late into the night about our ad-

ventures and hobbies and the different jobs we have had until the fog came up and engulfed our little hostel on the hillside. I later found out that it was Chris who suggested that Matt offer me the job.

After a week in the Alps, I came back from a long day of weed-whacking and fencing steep hillsides. I walked up toward Chalet Martin.

Matt came out of his house and greeted me. He gave me the money that he owed and offered another day of work. I declined. The group with which I was traveling would soon be leaving those steep, rocky, green peaks, and I wanted one more day to climb before moving on to Bern. “Bern!? Bern’s just another city mate. Catch up with those guys in the next one.” I leaned against the split rail fence think-ing about the offer. It had been the fi rst warm week of the Swiss summer, and every day I witnessed the giant patches of snow on

the surrounding peaks shrivel into jagged and bare gray rocky crowns. He told me to go on up to the hostel and think about it, “The guys are probably wondering where you’re at.”

On the night before I was supposed to leave, I lay in my bed and thought about the scene from Almost Famous when William Miller tells the infamous Penny Lane that he needs to go home. She waves her hands and whispers, “Poof, you are home.”

I left the next day.

22

On the night before I was supposed to leave, I lay in my bed and thought

about the scene from Almost Famous when

William Miller tells the infamous Penny Lane that he needs

to go home. She waves her hands and whispers, “Poof, you

are home.”

The fl ick of a deadbolt snapped through the noises in the house, and my father stepped out of the bathroom, fresh from the shower in an old holey t-shirt and plaid pajama pants. He tilted his head to the side and wheedled a Q-tip in his ear. Glancing down at the desk, he low-ered his eyebrows. My father is a quiet man and opens his mouth usu-ally only to breathe a swift joke or to tell a wild story. Matter-of-factly he would tell us about roll-ing a dune buggy that he made in shop class down the hillside across from Monte Vista High School. It was a week before graduation, and he pulled himself from the vehicle to see the en-tire school lined along the front watching. Or, about offroading on Sunday afternoons in the bed of uncle Archie’s truck who drank whiskey to fuel his spirit of adventure.

“Is this your book?” he asked.“I found it in Slovenia. Do you know it?”“My friend Jim was a follower of Carlos

Castaneda. He blew his guts out.”

With the summer coming to an end, the return fl ight to college in the Midwest loomed

in my near future and the onset of senior year stalked my little brother’s. We grabbed water, sleeping bags, and a hatchet and set out across dusty Marron Valley Road hiking into the hills. We climbed over the mountains until we could see down into the valley at our destination. Nes-tled deep in the valley, eucalyptus, sumac, and scrub oak trees grew all around an old stone

ranch house; a giant shade palm decorated what might be called the patio. It was an oa-sis of Southern Cali-fornia plant life. The house was over a hun-dred years old and no longer had a roof, but it was easy to imag-ine the ancient home in the days when my family raised cattle there on the border. The two of us sat on the crumbling stone wall with our backs

pressed against the chimney. Our heads tilted back and we stared into the star-fi lled sky; my little brother sighed and broke the peaceful si-lence.

“It might sound weird, and it’s not like I believe in the ancestral spirits or anything like that, but I feel very connected to this land.”

“I know.”A pack of coyotes passed in the night and

the breeze painted the sky with clouds.I will buy my ticket in the morning.

23

The house was over a hundred years old and no

longer had a roof, but it was easy to imagine the ancient home in the days

when my family raised cattle there on the border.

The two of us sat on the crumbling stone wall with our backs pressed against

the chimney.

24

St. Francis of Assisi, rejecter of money, possessions, and human knowledge, appears to the contemporary conscience as a haunting, ir-repressible memory of a life now impossible. To reject the world as St. Francis did is unthinkable and almost unimaginable, as our fragmented, mediated lives separate us from all sorts of ex-perience that St. Francis enjoyed daily. We vac-cinate against solitude with recorded music, television, and books, feeling only loneliness. Mediation saturates our daily experience in these and countless other ways, a fact of which we are conscious at times, though not at oth-ers. St. Francis refused to touch money, dispar-aged books, walked barefoot, and for all this, the Catholic Church venerates him as a saint. The disparity between our mediated experience and Francis’ simple acceptance of the natural order is unsettling. Why is it that St. Francis’ life is un-imaginable in contemporary society?

The reasons are clearly numerous, owing to the near-thousand year gap between Francis and us. A helpful tool for exploring these rea-sons is provided by 1960’s media theorist Mar-shall McLuhan’s understanding of the medium as the message: “the message of any ‘medium’ or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”1

This will help us see how institutionalized edu-cation — founded on the media of the phonetic

alphabet and printing press — propagates and instills in its subjects the ideals of individualism and conformity, producing capitalistically mind-ed individuals with a sense of self dependence on possession (of objects, commodities, ideolo-gies, and the like). In this way, the modern dis-parity between Francis and us is maintained and strengthened.

“The school system,” McLuhan says, is “the custodian of print culture.”2 Print and al-phabet technology are closely linked in their ef-fects and in their contribution to education. In-herent in each of these technologies is individu-alism, a key part of print culture and the school, resulting as a function of abstraction. Abstrac-tion is at the basis of human language — what writer and semiotician Walker Percy calls triadic behavior — and it distinguishes human interac-tion from dyadic (stimulus-response) interaction through the use of the signifi er.3 With the refer-ent and sign-giver, the signifi er makes the triad of human language. The signifi er distinguishes hu-man language, and this realization reminds us “a word is not the object it represents.”4 That is, words are merely abstractions of their referent. This practice of abstract thought in human lan-guage has led to many technological advance-ments.

This increased abstraction of the phonetic alphabet is central to its infl uence and cultural signifi cance. McLuhan describes its infl uence as giving to man “an eye for an ear.”5 This is a two-fold process: fi rst a spoken word is seman-tically dismembered into phonemes or sounds; then those syllables are represented with seman-tically meaningless signs, the alphabet.6 The translation of experience into uniform letters (as on this page) reveals the power of uniformity and serves as the conceptual source of Western

Of Sainthood and Scholarship: A Study in ParadoxBen Robertson

Caleb Cardenas is a junior English writing major from Dulzura, CA. His last meal will be barbeque pork ribs and cactus apples. Caleb.Cardenas@my.wheaton.edu

the pub [essay]

25

power — the fi rst interchangeable part — but it is not until the printing press that the concept manifests itself in mechanization.7 The uni-formity and repeatability made possible by the mass production of print technology completed the translation of oral language into a com-pletely uniform, visual language.8 The powerful effects of this translation are clearly seen in the history of education.

Before the printing press, education was a vastly different process than it is today. In fact, “even ‘book’ learning was governed by reli-ance on the spoken word.”9 The scarcity of books gave edu-cation two goals: to educate students and to produce books.10 A medieval classroom relied heavily on the process of dictation, whereby the teacher dictated the text to his students while the students copied down the words. Through dictation, the student both obtained and learned the text, in addition to gaining practice with his writing and pronun-ciation.11 In this process, the student was simul-taneously the consumer and producer of the works he studied. Through producing the works he was learning, the student participated in an integrative process of learning that depended on the presence of others and the professors’ willingness to dictate the text. The manuscript served simply as a tool for education, as the learning process depended largely on the lec-

turer’s dictation and the student’s attention to writing.

The introduction of mass production of books radically transformed this method. Over-coming the problem of scarcity, students no lon-ger needed to produce their own books. Print shattered the unity of both reading and writing, and consumption and production.12 Further, while the manuscript was a teaching tool, requir-ing oral, aural, and tactile skills and participa-tion by the lecturer and student, the book was

a teaching machine, cheaply available to all and requiring only the visual skill of lit-eracy.13 This visual translation of percep-tion allows for a de-tached point of view and creates the idea of words and books as “independent and un-contaminated by hu-man agency.”14 Un-der these conditions, the learning process is transformed, as the printed book allows

for the translation of shared discourse into pre-packaged information, “a portable commod-ity.”15

With this new teaching machine in hand, the school’s function is redefi ned. No longer con-cerned with producing books or serving as the custodian of ideas (the printing press allows the cheap dissemination of both); the school, refash-ioned in the image of print, becomes concerned with producing individuals. McLuhan calls the school system “the homogenizing hopper into

the pub [essay]

26

which we toss our integral tots for processing,” referring to the process wherein extreme stress is placed on the visual sense, giving students an eye for an ear and creating individuals who think and act in a uniform manner.16 The print-based schools reinforced reading and learning as “an antisocial act,” separating the reader from a social context.17 Accordingly, the previously integrated process of learning becomes divided into separate acts of consumption and produc-tion. Much of the print-student’s time is spent in the act of consumption, either during lectures or in reading alone. His role as a consumer is reinforced, and any production is seen only as a response to consumption. Consuming books, ideas, and ideologies commoditized by the print medium forms the basis of the transformed edu-cational process.

This transformation of the school certain-ly transformed the role of the student, and these changes are key to the way in which we fi nd ourselves different from St. Francis, as they have shaped our sense of identity. Twentieth century theologian Adolf Holl claims that St. Francis’ earnest searching after God was motivated not by excessive piety, but by something we have in common with him: “the consciousness of indi-vidual identity,” the development of which coin-cided with the introduction of coined money.18

Holl shows the bourgeois ego to be character-ized by many of the same traits McLuhan iden-tifi es with the alphabet and printing press: self-consciousness, rational thinking, abstract calcu-lation, and goal-oriented sense of time, though all in relation to the acquisition of money.19

Moreover, similarities are present between McLuhan’s individualism and what early twen-tieth century Italian economist Amintore Fan-fani calls the “capitalist spirit,” characterized by

the rejection of extra-economic limitations as well as an individual (as opposed to a social) and utilitarian conception of wealth.20 The similar-ity between Fanfani’s capitalist spirit and McLu-han’s individualist spirit exists in their relation to the organizing structures of society. Both existed before they became infl uential social forces, but were held in check by certain institutions: capi-talism by the power of the Church, individu-alism by the conditions of scribal culture.21,22

Today, these old forms have given way, allow-ing for the transformative process wherein the capitalist and individualist spirits have become social forces rather than individual passions, the norms rather than the exceptions.23

McLuhan and Fanfani’s histories differ in their specifi city; nevertheless, we can see clear overlap between the individualist and capitalist tendencies. The capitalist in a capitalist society is freed from social pressures and limitations on the means of obtaining and creating wealth, and the individual is free “to dissociate himself from clan and family.”24 Both shifts are charac-terized by a new, radical sense of individuality and freedom from previously suffocating social forces. The ideas of capitalism and individual-ism seem to overlap even in relation to the ef-fects of the printing press, its product being the printed book: “the fi rst uniform and repeatable commodity.”25 Further, print split apart the roles of writing and reading and production and con-sumption, leading to Europe’s fi rst consumer phase.26 The introduction of print had a large infl uence in creating certain conditions condu-cive to both a capitalist and consumer society.

Today, the individualist and capitalist ten-dencies instilled by the school combine with the newer electric technology to extend certain qualities inherent in the print technology, name-

McLuhan calls the school system “the homogenizing

hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing,”

referring to the process wherein extreme stress is

placed on the visual sense, giving students an eye for an ear and creating individuals

who think and act in a uniform manner.

27

ly, the split between producer and consumer. With the introduction of electric technology, we can observe the resurgence of the patterns of high participation and low organization McLu-han identifi es in pre-print cultures.27 Identity, in the age of print, centered on the mass me-dium of the vernacular language, which pro-duced nationalism. In the electronic age, the new mass media has a decentralizing effect in eliminating space and time while increasing involvement.28 The transformation of the structures of human association requires a new source of identity, one, which is by na-ture, less organized and more involving.

In the twentieth century the individual is completely respon-sible for his own “self-construction.”29 A clear example is in the well-known phenom-enon of consumerism, wherein we grant items of daily purchase value by nature of their sym-bolic, rather than utilitarian purpose. The Nike Swoosh, the Coca-Cola script, and the Obama “O” all have descriptive value in telling others about self. The consumerist-individual learns to fi nd meaning in the possession of consumer goods, which become “the very building blocks of our self-understanding as human beings.”30

Through this process, we are fooled into think-ing that we are expressing ourselves, perhaps

even imaginatively. The reality is that brands create and shape the individual’s idea of what creativity and expression really is, and people learn to defi ne themselves in terms of what they consume. They do not create identity, but con-sume it. Moreover, this process is not limited to consumer goods. Anything, as long as it can

be possessed in some way, grants identity: products, political can-didates, bands, movies, and even ideas.

Educational in-stitutions reinforce this sense of identity based on possession, especially in the realm of ideas. Students and teach-ers alike often adopt a tribe-like allegiance to their specifi c areas of study and certain theories, books, and au-thors. This tendency is strengthened not only by the cultural norms that seem to dictate such identity formation,

but also by the individualist and consumerist narratives embraced by the school. Addition-ally, the school system transformed by print pro-motes the ideals of individualism and consum-erism, which are reinforced by certain cultural trends and the modern sense of identity. The current educational system teaches students to treat ideas as objects that are either rejected or possessed, a tendency arising from print tech-nology. Thus, in the twenty-some year process of schooling, individuals learn to succeed and

Students and teachers alike often adopt a tribe-

like allegiance to their specifi c areas of study and

certain theories, books, and authors. This tendency

is strengthened not only by the cultural norms that

seem to dictate such identity formation, but also

by the individualist and consumerist narratives

embraced by the school.

the pubthe pub [essay]

28

defi ne themselves by the possession or rejection of certain ideas.

In objection, one may say that these ‘skills’ are necessary for success in a modern, techno-logical society. This critique is fair, and but also evidences the degradation of the dialogic char-acteristic of “the word” that troubles French so-ciologist and theologian Jacques Ellul in modern technological societies.31 Ellul defi nes “the word” as something that is inherently dialogic, and in his dualism between technology and truth, sees its humiliation as the result of the dominance of technology and effi ciency over truth. As the custodian of print culture, the school functions as the institutionalized hu-miliation of the word. In-stitutionalized education based on print is the most serious form of humiliation because it pretends that it functions otherwise. While supposing that it concerns itself with the word, the school often ignores the qualities Ellul associates with the word.32 Yet, none of these concepts characterizes the educational process. If edu-cation were truly to be word-based, it would transform the learner, as the word would not be something merely viewed as an object, but something that “deserves to be remembered,” something that has been “lived deeply.”33 The word, in becoming an object that is to be pos-sessed and mastered, loses its most signifi cant qualities. Currently, teaching is a task that is done to students, not a relational process where all parties can exercise freedom or experience something that deserves to be remembered. That is not to say that this never occurs; yet the

exceptions prove the rule, awakening us to the nature of institutionalized education.

We must not give up hope, but Ellul is particularly incisive when he says “nothing ever constrains us to face what is dying when we see it so alive in our images.”34 The word dies in our classrooms every day when thoughts and ideas are held out at arm’s length to see if they are worth “buying into.” The word dies when a course consists merely of lectures and read-ings to which the students may respond only on the margins or through their own printed word. The word is not resurrected by writing a book (or even a paper) revealing its humiliation.

Something must be lived differently and lived deeply.

Perhaps St. Francis understood this very fact, and sought to live differ-ently and deeply a life char-acterized by freedom and joy in his Creator. Perhaps, in his rejection of books, St. Francis understood more than he is given credit. But

why is it that St. Francis’ life is unimaginable in contemporary society?

It seems possible, if we take seriously Holl’s notion that we share with Francis the bourgeois ego — the consciousness of individual identity — that Francis understood the danger in such identity.35 Motivated by his bourgeois loneli-ness, St. Francis saw possessions (shoes, money, books, etc.) as obstacles to seeking God and re-jected them. In the 800 years since St. Francis, we have accumulated more possessions than he would have dreamed one person could own and have come to defi ne ourselves by these posses-sions. Sadly, they can separate us not only from

The word dies in our classrooms every

day when thoughts and ideas are held

out at arm’s length to see if they are worth

“buying into.”

29

God, as St. Francis was aware, but from each other as well. Paradoxically, true solitude disap-pears from our lives, and we lose the ability to be alone.36 In reality, we are often alone, though we mitigate this situation with our possessions and with recorded music, television, and other forms of media. We trade solitude and communion for loneliness and mediated, trite interaction in an attempt to overcome our own bourgeois loneli-ness.

Were he here, St. Francis would show us the humor in our situation. The form of the linear argument in a paper printed with repeat-able, uniform text epitomizes the product of print education. The tendencies toward indi-vidualism, capitalism and consumerism may be inherent in the print-based educational process, St. Francis’ life inspires us to overcome these in-fl uences. The words he wrote 800 years ago ring true even today:

They are killed by the letter who seek only to know the words that they may be esteemed more learned among others and that they may acquire great riches to leave to their relations and friends. And those religious are killed by the letter who will not follow the spirit of the Holy Scriptures, but who seek rather to know the words only and to interpret them to others.37

St. Francis knew that his brothers could easily teach the Word while ignoring its spirit, and we are no different. The disparity between our me-diated experience and St. Francis’ simple unity of word and life should prompt us to embrace the transformative power of the word in our education. We can answer St. Francis’ challenge by honestly seeking the unity of sainthood and scholarship.

the pubthe pub [essay]

30

15 Ibid. p. 164.16 Ibid. p. 215.17 Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood, New York: Vintage Books, 1994, p. 27.18 Adolf Holl, The Last Christian, New York: Doubleday, 1980, p. 5, 21.19 Ibid. p. 20.20 Amintore Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, Norfolk, VA: IHS Press, 2003, p. 59-60.21 Ibid. p. 65-66.22 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1979, p. 232.23 Fanfani, Catholicism, p. 55.24 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 124.25 McLuhan, Gutenberg, p. 125.26 Ibid. p. 138.27 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 136.28 Ibid. p. 21.29 Tyler Wigg Stevenson, Brand Jesus, New York: Seabury Books, 2007, p. 14.30 Ibid. p. 15.31 Jacques Ellul, Humiliation of the Word, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1985.32 Ibid. p. 15, 24.33 Ibid. p. 123.34 Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word, p. 208.35 Holl, The Last Christian, p. 5.36 William Deresiewicz, “The End of Solitude,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2009, 1 May 2009

<http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i21/21b00601.htm>.37 The Writings of St. Francis of Assisi, tr. by Paschal Robinson, Philadelphia, The Dolphin Press, 1905, p. 11.

Endnotes1 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1994, p. 20.2 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962, p. 215.3 Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, New York: The Noonday Press, 1983, p. 95.4 Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, Englewood: The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing

Company, 1973, p. 58.5 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 27.6 Ibid. p. 104.7 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 201.8 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 54.9 Ibid. p. 11.10 Hajnal, quoted in Gutenberg, p. 95.11 Ibid. p. 97.12 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1953, p. 328.13 McLuhan, Gutenberg, p. 145.14 Ibid. p. 144.

Ben Robertson is a senior media studies major from Bethel, CT. Back in his childhood modeling days, Ben aspired to be a sumo wrestler. Ben.Robertson@my.wheaton.edu

31

Sufjan Stevens is a difficult man to stalk. But the authors have certainly given it a try these past several years by attending live perfor-mances, staking out music blogs, and sonically cohabitating with his oeuvre. He has, they ad-mit, had quite an effect on their lives. So, when the authors first heard that Stevens was work-ing on the long-awaited follow-up to Illinoise,they were not only excited, but wanted it to be a

smashing success. When they heard that it was an electronic album, they found their feelings of affection somewhat tested. Three things in par-ticular caused them some anxiety:

1. Their paradigm for Stevens’ electronic work was Enjoy Your Rabbit — an album which, despite the title’s imperative, few could say they really enjoyed.

2. At a show Stevens gave last fall in Madi-son, he previewed much of the material he was developing for Adz. The songs he played were grating, unfocused, and tediously long.

3. In an interview with Paste Magazine last November, Mr. Stevens commented that “I no longer really have faith in the album anymore. I no longer have faith in the song.” This comment from Stevens was like Freud avoiding the whole sex issue because it was taking things too far.It was with some trepidation that the authors first listened to Age of Adz.

Despite the authors’ fears of dissonance or a career killing flop, Age of Adz seems strik-ingly familiar to those who know Stevens’ previ-ous work. Adz's clipped, loop-like use of wind instruments, airy lyrics, and its high-concept fo-cus are all major components of prior albums. On first listen, Adz is certainly a departure from Stevens’ softer folksy sound, but underneath, it layers orchestration around a central lyrical thread (typically carried by Stevens’ voice) in the same way that allowed past projects like Come on Feel the Illinoise and Michigan to seem at once epic and intimate. The title track, which begins with dissonant fanfare, resolves into an acoustic bal-lad. Underneath the bleeps, bloops, and spastic drum fills, Age of Adz is immanently a Sufjan Ste-vens album — albeit one that finds him choos-ing a Casio over his beloved banjo.

Adz is certainly a concept album — it is

Age of Adz, or, How the Authors Found Themselves Dancing and Rediscovered Their Love for Electro-pop, or, How the Authors Couldn’t Help Using the Word Oeuvre and Betraying Their Desire for an Album about North Dakota, or, How the Authors Learned to Stop Worrying About Artistic Disintegration and Just Enjoyed the AlbumElise Bremer and Nick Tomlin

the pub

32

deeply marked by the apocalyptic visions in the work of outsider artist Royal Robertson (for more details see the article at http://sufjanste-vens.bandcamp.com/). But unlike its predeces-sors Adz eschews mammoth titles and historical conceits to dive straight into the personal sphere of its author. Love and loss have always featured prominently in Stevens’ work, but they have al-ways been on the periphery of his focus on sto-rytelling. The opening track, “Futile Devices,” initiates this new approach with an account of the troubled lover. The instrumental minimal-ism reminds listeners of classic Stevens (think Seven Swans), but the lyrics are uncharacteristical-ly artless, a fact which the song’s final line attempts to excuse — “Words are futile devices.” With this pronouncement (a pur-pose statement, of sorts), Stevens bids goodbye to 53-word song titles and mellow picking-patterns, as 24 seconds of elec-tronic noise usher in the Age of Adz.

And there is plenty to enjoy about this new epoch. Choosing album “highlights” proved a dif-ficult task for the authors. Tracks like “Too Much” and “Get Real or Get Right,” shock with their almost danceable beats. And for those who prefer Stevens’ more contemplative side, “Ve-suvius” proves to be a thrilling combination of Stevens’ transparent writing and mesmerizing arrangement. “Bad Communication” packages an earnest complaint about relational drama in

two and a half minutes of mournful brass and electro ‘bloops;’ Adz has stronger tracks, but none that manage to be so open, entertaining, and succinct.

Not all is well, however. There are mis-steps: the airy, disappointing “Now That I’m Older” and the last 40 seconds of “All for My-self ” bore with their sedate tour of Stevens’ in-nerscape; the rest of the album could easily have fallen prey to the same myopia, if it were not so well put together. Sections where Adz drags prompt the authors to wonder what would have happened if Stevens had not marshaled his faith in the album; perhaps Adz would have been a

rawer gem that harnessed the force of Stevens’ em-phatic profanity in “I Want to Be Well” (yes kids, Sufjan set us up the F-Bomb).

Thankfully, Adz does not leave much room for these musings about what could have been. More than the sum of its parts, Adz feels both wild and well-timed, which is sur-prising for an album that includes a twenty-five minute track and aver-ages six minutes per song. Stevens’ commitment to

transparency is what makes Adz a step forward for him. The concluding track, “Impossible Soul,” tells a familiar story — the turmoil of a relationship leaves a lover feeling guilty and in-secure. If Stevens had left it at that, he would be in good company, but the song takes an op-timistic turn around the half-way mark, and a

The instrumental minimalism reminds listeners of classic

Stevens (think Seven Swans), but the lyrics

are uncharacteristically artless, a fact which the song’s fi nal line attempts to excuse — “Words are futile

devices.”

[review]

chorus declares “It’s a good life” and “It’s not so impossible!”

All in all, this epic conclusion showcases all that makes Adz just different enough to keep fans interested: electronic loops, lyrical simplic-ity, an intense internal focus. It manages to side-step the irrational fears and perhaps even more irrational hopes that surrounded its release and deliver the lyrical honesty that so endeared Ste-

vens to listeners when he started making albums. Stevens allows his listeners into his “impossible soul” and confesses “I’m nothing but a selfish man.” But rather than wallow in self-depre-cation, he resolves things with maturity: “I’m nothing but a privileged brother.” And that ad-mission alone makes Age of Adz worth the listen, because, after all, in our best behavior, we are really just like him.

33

Elise Bremer ’09 was an English literature major from Lisbon, Portugal. She can handle anything as long as she’s wearing her intrepid all-weather slippers. Elise.Bremer@my.wheaton.edu

Nick Tomlin ’10 was an English writing major from Geneva, IL. He is proving that you can truly do anything with an English major. Nick.Tomlin@my.wheaton.edu

the pub

34

Entering a new place is like folding myself gingerly into an envelope. The contents of my days are letters slid inside the white corners, to be read tomorrow. The fl ap folds over, seals, and not even the air of another place seeps in.

The air here is a continual drag of incense in a hot calm. The smell has been smoothed into the inside skin of the Balinese’s nostrils. It is the scent of offerings on uneven sidewalks — green leaves, pink fl owers, orange and golden fruit, and a brown stick of incense — it permeates the sugary twang of the tea and the rice alike. I tread carefully around the folded leaves on the way to the park, until the whisping trail of smoke has died. Then the colours are scattered under heels and fl attened into the grey of the street.

This green is one I haven’t met before. It is a dry green in the middle of the day, browning and crinkling at the edges like the hem of sun-dried clothes, cracking like fi ssures in the pavement. The green clumps together in palm branches as large as my body, branches that could cover me tightly like a caterpillar in a cocoon.

At night, lying in hammocks made of parachute silk — we listen to the swish and creak of the ropes as bodies rotate on the porch. In the morning when I look toward the gate, a seventy, go-ing on eighty, year-old man, molds his feet fl at to the rivets at the top of the coconut tree. His wrinkled head buries beneath the elephant ear branches of the palm tree; his hands are left free to twist the orange coconuts into his newspaper bag.

Life moves in the way the road snakes from Singaraja up the mountain to the mother temple. Motorbikes curve down the road in a line, like the ants across our kitchen wall. The air gathers in clouds that touch the mountaintops: a sagging canopy over a bed.

Life here is Riri leaving an offering on the seat of her motorbike as she enters our house — a mother bird carefully building her nest. In the same day, it is Kembar being laid down in the ocean’s waves; she is raised up with a splash and claps. I hold the dry towel on the shore — be-lieving that all of life is as simple as wrapping a towel around the wet, laughing shoulders of a newborn believer. As if when we walk back from the beach, we won’t step across the dried pink petals of yesterday’s offering.

Bali Meredith Moench

[poem]

Meredith Moench is a junior English writing major from Kandern, Germany. She plans on moving to achalet in the Swiss Alps as soon as she masters a Swiss-German accent. Meredith.Moench@my.wheaton.edu

the pub

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Dr. Eric McLuhan is a Canadian me-dia scholar and professor of English and communications who is renowned for enlarging theories of media ecology in conjunction with his father, Herbert Marshall McLuhan. Raised by English literature enthusiasts, he swore off a ca-reer in academia before spending over 30 years as an author and lecturer. While hired to survey summer falls at his fi rst job, he felt lured by the word to recon-sider his vow where he spent much of his time reading poetry beneath a tent. His interdisciplinary interests are refl ected in his lectures, which map new ground in media studies through inclusion of subjects such as space, myth, sensory ef-fects, technique, and semiotics.

Caroline Graves: Dr. McLuhan, the scores books you have authored, includ-ing fi ve in conjunction with your father, thoroughly analyze media structures, their implications and affects in culture through the study of the environment, metaphysics, and the senses, which have altered the fi elds of communication, English and media studies immeasur-ably.

Briefl y, explain your defi nition of tech-nology and of media as culture has evolved from oral to print to electronic to our current state, that of convergence.

Eric McLuhan: I quote almost verbatim from Understanding Media: A medium is an environ-ment of services and disservices and side effects that any new gadget or technology brings with it. And that includes all psychic changes and all social changes and all cultural modifi cations and so on, that you make in order to accommodate this new thing in your lives. One good way to study media is to look for breakdowns. If you have a big transportation strike in Chicago, and all the bus drivers and streetcar drivers go on strike, you can study that medium. Every tech-nology, every new little gadget or invention has a whole pile of these little changes that you don’t notice when they are going on. But if you add them up, then you wind realizing that the com-puter doesn’t just add itself to what was there. It brings with it a new culture, a new way of life. And so does the radio, so does television, so do clocks, and so does the internet, and so on and so on. That’s media studies.

CG: In your opinion, where has media ecology evolved in universities as a study and where do you think it will be going in the future?

EM: Well, it’s hardly begun. There are maybe half a dozen places that talk about it. One or two of them are actually giving courses and starting to think ecologically about media. The ecological idea was to begin to take responsibili-ty for what you were doing to your environment. Ecos means household; media ecology is house-

35

The Thing Itself: A Dialogue with Dr. Eric McLuhanCaroline Graves

[interview]

36

keeping: the idea of keeping your house tidy and ordered. Logos, or the study of, ecology, or housekeeping. Media ecology means doing that.

These are the very early days in this par-ticular fi eld. It’s not even a fi eld yet. So, where is it going to go? It’s got everywhere to go. It’s just getting started. I think it’s a wonderful place to go work because you’ve got lots of horizons. Nothing is nailed down. Nobody can tell you “No, that’s not media ecology.” I wouldn’t let it get too politicized which is almost impossible to avoid.

CG: As an authority in academia, do you consider it your responsibility to speak as an advocate? In other words, Dr. McLuhan, due to the coercive and se-ductive powers of technology, have you identifi ed injustices that are invisible to Christians in today’s media eco-system?

EM: I hardly know where to begin. The effects of new media are not particularly congenial to Christianity. They undermine our whole sense of private or individual identity and private re-sponsibility. Yet, Christianity is built on, among other things, the idea of individual salvation and individual responsibility and individual sin and redemption. There is real confl ict. I’m not talking about the messages or the content of the media, but the way they restructure our sense of ourselves in their nature. The idea of a private self or private ego came with the alphabet, and that was no accident. The alphabet entered the scene about 500 years before Christ entered the scene, and that paved the way. I really don’t think that it was a coincidence. But, now, we have a new kind of challenge. If we are serious about individualism and private responsibility, then

we’re holding out against the fl ow and dynamics of the new culture. We are now counter-culture, in a way that’s much more than we’ve ever been. Christianity has always been something against the fl ow or the trend; it’s uncomfortable. But now we’re really embattled because everything is pushing against us. I have to ask the question: Are we committed to alphabetic literacy?

CG: Because of the internet, pornogra-phy is viral. What now? Can our culture become any more pornographic? Can we withstand the cultural ravage?

EM: Every time somebody says we can’t go any further, something new comes along. Pornogra-phy is very seductive, and it’s also very destruc-tive. You gather only so much before you go numb. But a large part of you dies. Not just in this one area. It takes a whole lot of your being with it. It is a poison, of course, and everybody realizes that. Here’s a good place for ecology to come in: Manage the poison. Counteract it.

CG: Counteract it with what?

EM: I’m thinking, now, in terms of ecology. If there’s poison in your water or in your air, what do you do? If there’s poison in your intellectual or moral environment, you need to take action, and, in a similar way, to counteract it. Just say-ing, “No — no, don’t do this,” isn’t enough.

CG: Considering you and your father’s refl ections on religion, The Medium and the Light, why does this dialogue matter for thoughtful Christians — philosophi-cally, morally, spiritually?

37

EM: I’ve been talking about this in relation to individualism and a sense of private identity, which is an ecological matter entirely. It isn’t the idea of having a private identity. Or, simply hav-ing one. It doesn’t come from what you write about it. It comes from using the alphabet, using your mind and your faculties in that way.

Maybe a bad analogy would be a fi sh swim-ming around in the water that suddenly spies a worm hanging in the mid-ocean. He swims over and snaps up the worm. He doesn’t realize there is a hook involved. The hook is invisible. This is like the media, and the content are the worms. Next, the fi sh hold a conference on good worms and bad worms. They are ignoring the fact that the hook is what killed them. We tend to ignore the ecological truth about the mediums them-selves as having very deep and lasting effects on each of us and on us as a group, as a culture, as a society.

T.S. Eliot wrote a book years ago called The Idea of a Christian Society, one of the reviewers wrote in response: “It would be a good idea.” It hadn’t been tried. Do we live in a Christian society?

CG: No.

EM: Right. No, it’s not

CG: When the incarnation of Jesus Christ, Son of God, and the incarnate man are studied under the premise that the ‘medium is the message’, how do you believe this unconventional perspective should transform the perspective and depth to which Christians approach God and humanity?

EM: That is the incarnation has been looked at, studied and thought about immensely. But the fact that we have pulled the rug out on our own incarnate existence hasn’t received any atten-tion. Last year, I came across a series of lectures given by Pope John Paul II, collected under the title “The Theology of the Body,” and I started to read it and I found it absolutely compelling. Nobody had ever said these things about the im-portance of the body to our existence and to our eternal identity. St. Thomas pointed out that the principle of individualization is the intersection of matter, the body, and spirit, the soul. If you take one of them away, you don’t have private identity. You cannot. There is nothing on which to base it. One of the messages of Christianity is private salvation and private responsibility. This is fundamental. It’s quite different from the ap-proach of the Jews, which is that the Jews are a chosen people. Their redemption is, as a people, not as individuals. Their whole ethos is totally different. Their whole approach and thinking of the matter is different.

We begin there with the Old Testament as part of our own teaching, but the New Testa-ment brings this new angle, this new dimension, to matters of individualism. I think because of the effect of electricity, we need to start paying very close attention to this and to start thinking about the theology of the discarnate. When you go on the phone, you leave your body behind. I pick up the phone there and call my wife. I’m there. And she’s here. We can have a conver-sation. The fact that I had, or have a body, is no longer the constraint: I am having an out-of-body experience. But that changes all of the ground rules. I think that the Father of Lies is quite happy to take advantage of that. The fact that we’re confused and disoriented gives him

the pubthe pub

38

a big opening. We need to pay attention to this and start thinking about it: What is the theol-ogy of the body-less. We aren’t angels. Angels are created spirits without bodies, but each an-gel has an individual soul. We don’t understand that very well. It’s a very big and very important and very necessary subject for study and under-standing.

CG: How has your father’s PhD thesis entitled “The Classic Trivium” in its discussion of empirical New Science and philosophical Old Science shaded your approach to cultural analysis? And how is Formal Cause interrelated to this concept, especially in the framing of the four laws outlined in Laws of Media?

EM: Do we have a couple days? Let me just deal with the matter of the trivium and the clas-sical trivium, the, where to start. [chuckles]

The trivium is constituted of three roads towards wisdom or understanding called trivia, trivium. Trivial therefore means something very profound as well as something very superfi cial. When the trivium was constituted, it was the Ancients’ theory of communication. There is the written word, and the spoken word, and, also, the word in the mind. This abstract word in the mind was a new experience when writing came along. Before that, there was the spoken word; there wasn’t writing.

The word in the mind gave rise to a whole constellation of disciplines that we group under the term Dialectic. Today it includes epistemol-ogy, philosophy, logic, and so on. In the ancient world, it was just logic and philosophy — ab-stract thinking, the science of thinking right, not the right things, but thinking in a proper and

correct manner. Rigorous thinking was dialectic. Rhetoric was the science of transforming audi-ences through the spoken word. There’s an aw-ful lot of that in both the Old and the New Tes-tament. The third one, Grammar, takes its name from the Greek word gramma, which means let-ters, and the Latin word is littera. Grammar is literature. And gramma, grammar, or literature, had two main activities: one is etymology — the roots of words. Words always have their roots in experience, and if you dig down through a real word, you’ll end up with human experience and knowledge and understanding with the mean-ings sitting on the top. Where the word comes from is another word in another language that means something else, and somehow there’s a relation between the experience in that lan-guage and the experience in our language. After etymology, the other handle in grammar is in-terpretation of text.

You’ve heard about the scribes and the Pharisees: the scribes were largely literary men. They knew how to read, when most people didn’t. They were media experts. They knew how to in-terpret because words were very slippery things and words will often mean many things. They had to know not only how to interpret words but how to take that phrase in the context of other phrases, all the uses, as we do with the Bible, and fi nd a way that’s harmonious. In the Bible, one text won’t contradict another, but if they don’t agree, they may simply be different ways of looking at something, a third thing. Inter-pretation is really a kind of deep study. Gram-mar called for extensive knowledge — to be the master of languages. He didn’t just specialize in poetry or literature or in philosophy. He had to be able to read and interpret every text ever written by anybody anywhere. That calls for a

[interview]

39

lot of judgment, knowledge, experience, and not only that, in the Christian tradition, there are two kinds of text.

Both of them have as their author God. One is the written text, the Bible — Old and New Testament, and the other is God’s mag-nifi cent speech, which we call The Creation — “and God said.” The saying and creating of it were one, one act. He opened His mouth and uttered Light. Which isn’t exactly the word “light” or the label that we put on this thing; it was the thing itself. The grammarian’s other job is to read what they call the Book of Nature and to take the two texts, the Written Book and the Book of Nature, and reconcile them. Because one would not contradict the other, right here, you can see glimmerings. Maybe there’s a way of reconciling Science and Creationism. Of course, there is! Because science deals with the Book of Nature.

The study of the trivium gives you a handle on some of what we are up to, some of what our responsibilities are in reading and understand-ing what God has revealed to us. Rhetoric is use-

ful because rhetoric is the science of speech and using rhetoric you can take a speech and work your way back from the speech to the speaker. So, you can look at either the Book of Nature or the Written Book and using rhetorical tech-niques, you can discover things about the writer, the speaker, the author.

Rhetoric and grammar were natural co-horts, a kind of Siamese twins. Dialectic was always odd man out, and there’s been a rivalry in that little family of three over the centuries. Sometimes one is in charge and sometimes an-other. In our age, the balance is changing, again, and rhetoric and grammar are coming back to the fore. Dialectic, which has been on top since the Middle Ages, is subsiding a bit. So, I think a knowledge of the trivium helps us understand that a lot of what we see on the surface is chaos in intellectual affairs, but also in spiritual affairs. It’s a useful set of tools.

For further reading, consider borrowing a copy of The Laws of Media: The New Science by Marshall and Eric McLuhan (University of Toronto Press, 1988) from your local library.

Caroline Graves is a junior rhetoric major from Kent Islands, MD. She favors a good pickle. Caroline.Graves@my.wheaton.edu

40

the pubthe pub

Cover Photo: Black River Water by Laurel JohnsonRecommendations Background Photo: The Path to Gore Creek by Laurel JohnsonLaurel Johnson is a sophmore international relations major from Medina, MN. She wants a pair of Mukluks for Christmas. Laurel.Johnson@my.wheaton.edu

[recommendation][album] Meredith – Sea Sew by Lisa Hannigan – Nice, Nice, Very Nice by Dan Mangan Tim M. – London Calling by The Clash Will – Hadestown by Anaïs Mitchell Caroline – Brother, Sister by mewithoutYou

[poem] Will – Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins ed. W.H. Gardner – Burning Wyclif by Thom Satterlee Brian – Sinners Welcome by Mary Karr

[novel] Ten – Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel Ian – Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee Joel – Infi nite Jest by David Foster Wallace Brian – Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe – Chameleon Days by Tim Bascom

[other] Tim L. – City Life from Jakarta to Dakar by Abdoumaliq Simone [non–fi ction] Ian – The Economist [magazine] Jessie – Son of Hammas by Mosab Hassan Yousef [memoir]

[recommendation]

Who grew your coffee?

Growers First

You brewed it.Who grew it?

We know.You can too.

www.GrowersFirst.org

PRESIDENT VIDEOPRESIDENT VIDEOOPEN

 7 DAYS

10am-10pm

Rentals:DVD•Blue RayXBox 360•WiiPlaystation 3

at Roosevelt& PresidentWHEATON

(630)668-964

Rent OneMovie, GetOne Movie

FREEFree movie must be of equal orlessor value. Expires 6-30-11

Rent OneMovie, GetOne Movie

FREEFree movie must be of equal orlessor value. Expires 6-30-11

Rent OneMovie, GetOne Movie

FREEFree movie must be of equal orlessor value. Expires 6-30-11

Rent OneMovie, GetOne Movie

FREEFree movie must be of equal orlessor value. Expires 6-30-11

Bring in this issue of The Pub to redeem these coupons.

Submit your writing.Join our staff.Inquire at:www.wheatonpub.org