Category Archives: Arts & culture

“My Sweet Lord”

I’ve been trying to sort out the naked-chocolate-Jesus kerfluffle. As you probably know, the Lab Gallery in Manhattan had been planning to show a life-size figure of Jesus, sculpted out of chocolate by Canadian-born artist Cosimo Cavallaro. Cavallaro’s Jesus was to be suspended from the ceiling in a pose of crucifixion. But the U.S.-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights deemed the sculpture offensive, and called for a boycott of the Roger Smith Hotel, which houses and sponsors the Lab Gallery. In a press release dated Thursday, Catholic League president Bill Donohue fumed:

“All those involved are lucky that angry Christians don’t react the way extremist Muslims do when they’re offended — otherwise they may have more than their heads cut off [presumably Mr. Donohue is implying here that extremist Muslims cut off genitalia]. James Knowles, President and CEO of the Roger Smith Hotel (interestingly, he also calls himself Artist-in-Residence), should be especially grateful. And if he tries to spin this as reverential, then he should substitute Muhammad for Jesus and display him during Ramadan…. The boycott is on.” Link

Today, the hotel yielded to pressure and told the gallery to cancel the exhibit. The gallery’s director, Matt Semler, told the press that the Catholic League’s demands amounted to hate speech. Outraged by this, the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue announced yesterday that even though the exhibit was off, the boycott of Roger Smith Hotel is still on. And today, the BBC reports that Semler announced his resignation as gallery director [link].

Yesterday, the U.K.-based religious think tank Ekklesia offered this slightly wry commentary on the kerfluffle:

Christians in the US have been angered by the decision of a New York gallery to exhibit a milk chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ. The six-foot (1.8m) sculpture, entitled “My Sweet Lord”, depicts Jesus Christ naked on the cross. It was a Roman custom to strip naked those being crucified, and the Bible records the Roman soldiers dividing up Jesus’ clothes between them. Many will also note the statue highlights how Easter has lost much of its Christian meaning amidst the giving and receiving of chocolate eggs.

But Catholic League head Bill Donohue called it “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever”…. The Catholic League, which describes itself as the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organisation, also criticised the timing of the exhibition. “The fact that they chose Holy Week shows this is calculated, and the timing is deliberate,” Mr Donohue said….

Mr Semler said the timing of the exhibition was coincidental….

It is not known whether the chocolate is fair trade. Link

So Matt Semler probably should have realized that Holy Week wasn’t the best time of year to mount such an exhibit, but who knows if he even knew what Holy Week is. As for calling this “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever,” that sounds like an overstatement of the facts. Aside from that, I too wonder if the chocolate was fair trade.

Leading up to Palm Sunday

Twenty-odd years ago, I was in the Harvard Bookstore buying a philosophy book when I saw, there on a little stand next to the cash register, a bright red pamphlet with the provocative title “Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy.” Even though I wasn’t in law school (and had no intention of subjecting myself to that experience), I was a young left intellectual trying to make sense of the fast rightward drift of the Reagan years. On an impulse, I bought the pamphlet. I think I paid three dollars for it.

Within a few months, I had given the pamphlet to a friend of mine who was actually in law school. She needed it more than I did. But I remembered the pamphlet’s advice that students should form study groups. Stand up at the end of class, the pamphlet advised, and say that you will be forming a study group at such-and-such a time, at such-and-such a place. When I found myself in graduate school for creative writing, in 1990, I did exactly that. Not that I tried to form a left-leaning study group — by that time, almost no one leaned left in public any more — but I found that participating in any kind of small study group turned out to be a good way to fend off the crushing anonymity of graduate study. (Analogies to small group ministries in congregations would be well-taken.)

As the years went by, I drifted away from left politics, and drifted into religion. I felt that Jesus (and Buddha, and a few other religious geniuses) did a better job of articulating egalitarianism and the essential worth of all persons, than did the Frankfurt School or the New Left.

So there I was yesterday, back in the Harvard Bookstore, when I saw a trade paperback published by New York University Press titled Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic against the System: A Critical Edition:– a critical edition of the little bright red pamphlet I had bought twenty years earlier. I had forgotten how turgid the prose had been, how simplistic the political analysis. But that little red pamphlet still offers good advice:

Because hierarchy is constituted as much through ideology as through physical violence, it is meaningful to oppose it by talking, by joking and refusing to laugh at jokes, through the elaboration of fantasies as well as through the elaboration of concrete plans for struggle.

Let me hasten to affirm, O Reader, that not all resistance is equally heroic, or equally successful, or equally well-conceived, or equally adapted to an overall strategy for turning resistance into something more. I propose in the next chapter that law students and teachers should take relatively minor professional risks. All over the world, workers and peasants and political activists have risked and lost their lives. There is a gulf between these two kinds of action, and I have no desire to minimize it.

But they are nonetheless parts of the same universe, and we possess no grand theory telling us that actions of one kind or the other are bound always and everywhere to be futile, any more than we can no that the most heroic behavior will be always successful.

Tomorrow, those of us who are spiritual followers of Jesus of Nazareth will remember his triumphant entry into Jerusalem. That’s always the occasion for me to wonder whether Jesus’s acts of resistance in Jerusalem were well-conceived and adequately adapted to an overall strategy for turning resistance into something more. It’s also the occasion for me to think about how far I want to go with my own resistance to the inhumanity of hierarchy, with my own personal work to promote egalitarianism.

Not that I have a final answer to that question, but it’s something to think about.

Happy 200th, Henry

I managed to miss the two hundredth birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (27 February 1807 – 24 March 1882). A poet who is perhaps best known for his poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” it also happens that Longfellow was a Unitarian. If you go up to visit First Parish in Portland, Maine, they will show you the pew which he and his family rented.

Longfellow’s reputation has fallen on hard times. Today, the critics dismiss his poetry as too sentimental. And the historians rightly point out the gross inaccuracies in his poems;– when I was a licensed tourist guide in Concord, Massachusetts, I had to constantly explain to people that despite what Longfellow wrote in “Paul Rever’s Ride,” Revere never made it to Concord because His Majesty’s Regulars captured him in the town of Lincoln.

Nevertheless, Longfellow’s straightforward language and imagery helped create the political mythos of the United States. I still get chills as I read the last lines of “Paul Revere’s Ride”:

In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,–
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.
So through the night rode Paul Revere;–
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,–
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

…although, in the context of the current political and military adventures of the United States, it is worth noting that Longfellow was a pacifist.

So happy 200th, Henry. Sorry I missed the actual date. But according to the Web site of the Longfellow Bicentennial, I’ll have plenty of other opportunities to celebrate — including an “evening conversation” at 6:30 tonight, at the Longfellow National Historic Site in Cambridge.

Sunday school teachers can find activity kits here: Link (scroll down and follow the link labeled “Activity Kits,” which brings up a pop-up window).

Works by Longfellow at Project Gutenberg: Link.

Now an unashamed intellectual

It finally hit me today. I was taking a long walk, from North Cambridge down to Lechmere Square, thinking about nothing in particular, when I realized why I have a visceral dislike of the current president of the United States. It’s not because he’s an evangelical Christian, because I get along quite well with other evangelicals. It’s not because I’m a fiscal conservative, because you can make the case that wartime calls for deficits and besides I can understand that the temptation for deficit spending is more than most politicians can resist. It’s not because I’m a pacifist, because I know full well that most politicians do not follow the non-violence teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, my spiritual leader. These are areas where I simply happen to disagree with policies that can be justified.

No, the reason I have a visceral dislike of Mr. Bush is that he is an anti-intellectual. I know, it’s ironic that he’s an anti-intellectual given that he is the product of an elite university that practically oozes intellectualism. Even so, he affects that down-home I’m-really-not-that-smart attitude, and he makes his affectation implicitly condemn anyone who claims to be smart. Not that I blame him for affecting an anti-intellectual attitude. Anti-intellectualism has always been a minor part of the United States mythos, and in the past couple of decades it has become a dominant element in the political life of this country. Mr. Bush is just one of many United States politicians who have decided to affect anti-intellectualism in order to win votes.

This prevalent anti-intellectual attitude has even managed to influence me — I’ve become more and more cautious about claiming to be an intellectual. So I’ve changed the tag-line for this blog to “Adventures of a post-Christian heretic and unashamed intellectual.”

Let’s all go out and remember to be openly smart, OK? No matter what the president says, smart is good.

Splog!

Thanks to a link on Academic Blogs Wiki, I found an online article in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology titled “Splog! or How to stop the rise of a new menace on the Internet.” I was particularly interested because of my own battles with comment spam on this blog. The article starts out with a concise definition of comment spam (which they call “link spam”) and spam blogs, and an overview of the extent of the problem. Then the authors explore the legal ramifications of trying to regulate comment spammers and spam bloggers. They conclude that some regulation would be both constitutionally allowable and realistically enforcable….

…Congress should enact a law proscribing the use of automated software to post to blogs, wikis, and blog comments. Because this approach would not target speech directly, the government can constitutionally attack the incentives of spammers. First, the proscription should codify the Central Hudson test for commercial speech. The government has a substantial interest in protecting the “user efficiency” of bloggers and Internet readers and the vitality of an important new method of speech. Also, this method of furthering the government’s interest is a “reasonable fit.” It directly advances the government’s interests by limiting the quantity of spam blogs and freeing up the blogosphere for productive free speech activity. Furthermore, it is not more extensive or intrusive then it needs to be, since it prevents spam blogs from proliferating in great numbers but does not prevent any particular type of speech from being posted to the Internet. In fact, the law would function much like certain portions of the CAN-SPAM Act, already enacted into law.

A ban on automatically created spam blogs and link spam should withstand constitutional analysis even if some spam is found to be non-commercial speech. The proposed regulation is content-neutral in that it is “justified without reference to the content of the regulated speech” posted to the Internet. Any currently posted spam blog could be re-posted without offending the new law, as long as it is not reposted with automated software. As such, the law is a content-neutral manner restriction on posting material to the Internet. Furthermore, it is an acceptable manner restriction because it is narrowly tailored to the problem being addressed — the large quantity of spam blogs and comment spam — and “leave[s] open ample alternative channels for communication of the information.” As noted, the spammers can still use the same forums and avenues for spamming, just without the benefit of automated programs and open proxies. Indeed, such a regulation would be akin to laws that prevent the use of loudspeakers on city streets or limit decibel levels at concerts. Spammers can still get their “message” across, just at lower “volumes.”

[pp. 483-484, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, vol. 19 no. 2, spring 2006.]

The authors are fairly realistic about the possibility of enforcement — such legislation won’t eliminate comment spam and spam blogs, but at least it provides a minimal level of legal protection. Or I’d say this: at least it would show that Congress is committed to protecting authentic free speech on the Internet, which would in fact mean a lot to me as a blogger.

Right now, the Bad Guys are winning the range war here in Blogger Gulch, and the Good Guys (like me) are feeling like the Marshall in our little town is more interested in catching rustlers in the next county, than catching the rustlers stealing our cattle right under his nose. It almost feels as if the Marshall isn’t really interested in protecting free speech at all, he’s just interested in shooting off his gun (to hopelessly mix metaphors).

The complete article is worth reading for anyone interested in the intersection of free speech and new technology.

Link.

Org theory and b-schools

The blog orgtheory has a good post on the recent history of organizational theory, summarizing a recent paper published in Organizational Studies: link.

What interested me most about this history of organizational studies is that since the 1980’s, most organizational theorists have migrated to the business schools. Which helps explain why the organizational theory I read seems to be permeated by free-market and business attitudes. I’m pretty comfortable with a business approach, but a congregation is not a business, a minister is something different from a chief executive, other program staff are not the same as employees, lay leaders are not the same as volunteers in a non-profit. It’ll never happen, but wouldn’t it be nice if organizational theory developed ties to the theological schools?

Can I just say…

Went to YouTube. Went through laborious sign-up process, with lots of glitches. Tried to upload video to YouTube. Didn’t work, twice. Banner ad showed woman in leopard print bikini. Gave up. Blah.

Went to blip.tv. Easy and fun to sign in. Uploaded video on first try. Got to look at banner ad that read: “Convenient Truths: A green video contest. Wanted: Inspired, pragmatic videos to help get us out of this mess.” Gave me good code to embed video in my blog. Very cool.

Shut down

Pursuant to the previous post, I note with interest that a group has declared 24 March 2007 to be “Shutdown Day“:

Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate! Shutdown your computer on this day and find out! Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?

Not a bad idea. It reminds me of the concept of a “media fast” advocated by Thomas Cooper, professor of media at Emerson College. Cooper described the purpose and results of a media fast in an article titled “You Are What You Watch,” available on the Emerson College Web site in a PDF file (the article appears on the second-to-last page): link.

Since March 24 is a Saturday, a day when I’m not in the office, I’ll be able to participate. No blog entry that day.