contra smiley Christianity...
It is good to see Margaret from Edinburgh back to blogging again. She is a gem within Orthoblogdom.
Her most recent post touches upon aesthetic issues raised here of late. Her prose is a delight to read. And she captures the problem, generally speaking, with superb poise and insight.
She begins:
It was a real bookshop. A real bookshop is one that only sells books and apart from some Sunday school materials and the church magazine this one only did sell books. It was not what you’d call decorated, painted yes, and clean (apart from some dust around the secondhand seventeenth century divines) but lacking in nice veneers and soothing magnolia tints. But it sold books and plenty of them. It had a tea-room too which was very unusual for these days with tapioca pudding on the menu on Monday and Wednesday and crowded with old ladies in serviceable hats and sensible shoes lured by cheapness and churchiness. I am sure the old ladies never bought any books, perhaps a copy of ‘Life and Work’ on their way out but the shelves of William Barclay (the man who never had an unpublished thought), John Owen, Robert Lewis Dabney, J C Ryle, John Bunyan and collections of cloth-bound sermons by A W Pink were undisturbed. Then it changed. It became brighter, breezier and pastel-hued. The number of books went down and the number of non-Presbyterian/protestant books went up, videos and cassettes appeared in quantity as did magazines and a good proportion of the books that were left were soft theology, comfy reads, self-help and Christianity-lite. Or as my friend Jean used to say, “lo-alcohol religion with nothing to gladden the heart” just more world-weary tripe about how to be successful. The craggy, dour, dog-collared old chaps who had once graced journal covers (frightening you off sin for a month) and whose lectures and sermons were advertised disappeared to be replaced by cheerful young men and women with carefully coiffed casualness back in the day when an unbuttoned shirt collar was heart-flutteringly trendy and occasionally in those oh-so daring blue jeans. I got tired of those faces very quickly with their perfect skin and de rigueur cheerfulness, that certain sort of girl-next-door, wholesome Christian cheerfulness that makes me feel jaded and avoidant. I started going to the Catholic bookshop....
Read the rest here.
Her most recent post touches upon aesthetic issues raised here of late. Her prose is a delight to read. And she captures the problem, generally speaking, with superb poise and insight.
She begins:
It was a real bookshop. A real bookshop is one that only sells books and apart from some Sunday school materials and the church magazine this one only did sell books. It was not what you’d call decorated, painted yes, and clean (apart from some dust around the secondhand seventeenth century divines) but lacking in nice veneers and soothing magnolia tints. But it sold books and plenty of them. It had a tea-room too which was very unusual for these days with tapioca pudding on the menu on Monday and Wednesday and crowded with old ladies in serviceable hats and sensible shoes lured by cheapness and churchiness. I am sure the old ladies never bought any books, perhaps a copy of ‘Life and Work’ on their way out but the shelves of William Barclay (the man who never had an unpublished thought), John Owen, Robert Lewis Dabney, J C Ryle, John Bunyan and collections of cloth-bound sermons by A W Pink were undisturbed. Then it changed. It became brighter, breezier and pastel-hued. The number of books went down and the number of non-Presbyterian/protestant books went up, videos and cassettes appeared in quantity as did magazines and a good proportion of the books that were left were soft theology, comfy reads, self-help and Christianity-lite. Or as my friend Jean used to say, “lo-alcohol religion with nothing to gladden the heart” just more world-weary tripe about how to be successful. The craggy, dour, dog-collared old chaps who had once graced journal covers (frightening you off sin for a month) and whose lectures and sermons were advertised disappeared to be replaced by cheerful young men and women with carefully coiffed casualness back in the day when an unbuttoned shirt collar was heart-flutteringly trendy and occasionally in those oh-so daring blue jeans. I got tired of those faces very quickly with their perfect skin and de rigueur cheerfulness, that certain sort of girl-next-door, wholesome Christian cheerfulness that makes me feel jaded and avoidant. I started going to the Catholic bookshop....
Read the rest here.
Her beginning lines warmly remind me of the mantra of my former employer Dr. Thomas Loome, who for many years ran a real bookshop.
posted by The Ochlophobist at 6:14 AM
16 Comments:
What was Dr. Loome's mantra?
I had to carefully plan and space my trips to Stillwater as a college student, or I would no have pennies left to buy groceries. Better books than food!
That was a long time ago, and yes - I read my way to Orthodoxy. Thanks be to God.
And thank you Dr. Loome.
Also, I keep trying to find a polite way to say this - and I hunted for an e-mail link - but boy, I have a hard time reading the tiny print against the white background.
My eyes are not so young as they used to be - when I could hunt up titles on the bottom shelves of an old, dimly lit, Swedish Church converted to a bookstore. Please forgive me for saying so, but I do like to read your posts very much.
Liza Gay,
That's easily remedied on a Windows computer. Holding down the CTRL button while pushing the + button makes print bigger (holding CTRL and pushing the - button makes it small again). I do it so much my computer just does it automatically whenever I visit this site.
I'm on a mac - I'll ask my husband. He'll probably have a simple remedy I know nothing about...thank you for the kind reply.
I've been experimenting. It seems to be command +.
I feel silly, but I'm glad to know it.
Thank you.
Liza, I'd also recommend this tool– http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ –which works very well with blogger and Safari, both.
Wow, thank you. I'll check it out.
But I feel like I've high-jacked the blog - and though I'm very grateful for the help - I would feel no offense if the conversation was removed and folks concentrated on the posting..it was a good post.
I love AFR for the prayers and reflections, and the music. I live a 100 miles from my parish. I think we have a total of 3 practicing Orthodox families in my small town. It is a great gift to us - but I admit the slick promos, in between offerings of very fine material, make me cringe.
Just the practiced cadence of the announcer makes cringe. It makes me think that what is coming next is snake oil - though I know rationally that is not the case.
Mr. Maddex spend years on Evangelical radio. His somewhat smarmy diction is a product of years of experience, and surely is a matter of taste, not principle. He's managed to build up an important project.
The music is not easily available anywhere else, and I pick and choose the podcasts. We are not a Revolution, and need not devour our own children.
Grumpy,
Would you then say that the diction used when reading the scriptures or reading, say, from the Lenten Triodion, to a public audience, in a public setting that calls itself Orthodox, is a matter of taste and not a matter of principle?
Is the diction used when reading the Gospel from the ambo a matter of taste and not a matter of principle?
The thing is, I can understand how it can seem that a concern about diction is the making of a mountain out of a mole hill. But I also know that had I regularly heard the affected diction normally used on AFR readings when I entered Orthodox churches as an inquirer, I would have left and probably not come back, having given too much of my life already to religious forms the aesthetic of which is meant to manipulate emotions and bring about specific, immature, affects that correspond to the sorts of enthusiasms which keep the movement rolling on and keep morale high among the ranks. Most of the folks I knew during my years of inquiry were, apparently, cut of a similar cloth (grant you, this was in MN, not an evangelical hotbed). In my opinion these aesthetic forms (such as the choice of this specific diction) mean something. They mean something in our culture, insofar as they are associated by most people with something like snake oil sales and/or religious hucksterism, but they also mean something on their own, as religious acts (insofar as the aesthetic choice of a specific diction is a particular religious act) which do not at all correspond to the meaning of the texts being read.
That the readers are good people who do not intend this is neither here nor there with regard to whether or not the considerations here are true, or false. A well intentioned person could sing kontakion to the tune of Shine Jesus Shine or 100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall or an old Hank Williams tune. They might have the best intentions. They might bring in converts. They might encourage the troops. Matters like diction when reading scripture or writings of the saints, or even when speaking about Orthodox things in a public setting, are important, just as important as the tune we decide to sing the Theotokion to. When this is not the case, aside from just adding more drops to the sea of modern religious kitsch, we fall into choose-your-own-adventure play Byzantinism, in which we decide which aspects of the tradition we want to do, well, traditionally, and which ones we want to do in a manner that is more "relevant" or seeker sensitive or utilitarian, etc.
Maddex is a good man, but I think it perfectly natural that folks who are converting or did convert to Orthodoxy, who have some experience with the various and sundry mechanisms of snake oil sales in American religion, would point out that a given diction does not fit with a given text and/or context.
I have good friends, former Evangelical missionaries, who are inquirers and some months ago went around to various Orthodox churches in their area. They went to one OCA and one Antiochian parish, among others, and found in these two parishes a style and affect across the boards that they immediately deemed a mimicry of Evangelical style and affect. [I had at that point never discussed this matter of what I call Byzantine Rite Evangelicalism or any matter akin to it with them.] They said to me, "why bother to convert to an Orthodoxy that affects old Evangelical forms?" I agreed. I suppose that one could say that for some former Evangelicals those affects result in the comfort required for the negotiation to be settled in a Chrismation. But for others, those I think looking at the matter correctly, it makes no sense whatsoever. And this is not simply coming from the disaffected side of Evangelicals. My friend’s practice for some years before looking into Orthodoxy was to go to the (it had to be reasonably Evangelicalish) Protestant church closest to his home, and he was someone who shrugged off everybody's religious criticisms of every other group. He hates apologetics, and has no more gripe about normative Evangelicalism than he does any other form of selling Jesus. But, perhaps because he has lived in other cultures and studied under a great linguist (we went to missions training Bible college together), he knows that things such as established patterns of inflection and diction mean something, and in the cases he witnessed, that meaning did not fit the context whatsoever. They ended up at the ROCOR parish.
There is a straining after contemporaniety that can surely be offensive. One thinks of the crappy soft rock that passes for "praise music." There is also fake archaism, as when new translations are made into a bad imitation of King James English.
When what violates the canons of good taste becomes something worse is hard to say. Surely Hallowe'en and puppet masses cross this line. Do organs and pews?
In addition to imports of Evangelical smarminess, and superficial efforts to make things American (think clerical collars), we also find in some Orthodox circles a strain of pseudo-archaism. Keep things musty, and they're sure to seem holy.
Having pointed to errors in both directions, the conventional thing would be for me to finish up espousing the middle path. Truth be told, however, I have no idea.
Thank you, Owen, for the link. Snake oil is an excellent phrase, Liza, but we don't use it much in the UK - it certainly works in the context though. I'm not good enough with American accents or familiar enough with evangelicalism to parse the diction but an advert or two for holy snake oil could slip in under my radar for sure. It would sound so right.
Dear Margaret,
This is what a traditional American snake oil salesman sounds like-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di9-PebV634
Politicians also use this voice when speaking directly to the little people as do kindergarden teachers who at least have an appropriate audience.
Can I beg for a font increase on posts? On the blog and using RSS readers the font is tiny.
It has the same packaged, saccharine feeling to me as what I've seen for instance in the Antiochian diocesan magazine with its secular stock photos, etc. I found it as big a turn off as anything that seeks to be the purveyor of the eternal convert experience. Ditto for stuff like the Coming Home Network. Blech.
Well, I may sound a little gosh-golly-gee-whiz with these comments - but I'll speak up anyway.
Truly, I have to travel nearly two hours north, east, south or west, to reach an Orthodox church. I try not to complain to the Lord about our present residence in an Orthodox wasteland -but it does take some lip-biting.
AFR really does decrease some of that isolation - just to be reminded that there are other Orthodox in the world can give a woman heart!
More than this - I can't afford CDs of all that gorgeous chanting...And my children would never hear the variety of liturgical expression of world Orthodoxy without AFR.
The smarmy bits of AFR are the same things that bother me about my own culture - I don't fit very well in this culture anymore - if I ever did.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, it's ourselves we take along on this path - all the wobbly and warty bits, and 3-dimensional, incarnate smarm.
I'll forgive them the smarm if they'll forgive me my wobbly bits? May the Lord help us all.
Well, I may sound a little gosh-golly-gee-whiz with these comments - but I'll speak up anyway.
Truly, I have to travel nearly two hours north, east, south or west, to reach an Orthodox church. I try not to complain to the Lord about our present residence in an Orthodox wasteland -but it does take some lip-biting.
AFR really does decrease some of that isolation - just to be reminded that there are other Orthodox in the world can give a woman heart!
More than this - I can't afford CDs of all that gorgeous chanting...And my children would never hear the variety of liturgical expression of world Orthodoxy without AFR.
The smarmy bits of AFR are the same things that bother me about my own culture - I don't fit very well in this culture anymore - if I ever did.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, it's ourselves we take along on this path - all the wobbly and warty bits, and 3-dimensional, incarnate smarm.
I'll forgive them the smarm if they'll forgive me my wobbly bits? May the Lord help us all.
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