We Are What We Listen To

Just a random thought I've had stuck in my head for awhile now: We become what we listen to. Every piece of music has a philosophy attached to it. If you listen to rap and listen to country music, the philosophy of life and of humanity couldn't be more different. Similarly, traditional Irish music or Gregorian chant creates a different type of spirit than heavy metal. I bet changing the music kids listen to would affect school performance (anyone know of any studies about this?). With that said, it's kindof scary how much power music executives have in shaping our culture.

I think as Catholics, if we want to win the culture wars we need to seize control of the media in a way that we are currently not doing. While it is good that Catholic radio has great apologetics explaining the faith, what we need is to feature music and create a music industry that reflects beauty and stirs the soul. Unfortunately, I don't think that is happening. Through music, we need to make the fullness of truth beautiful so that a secular person may stumble across it on the radio dial and feel their soul uplifted and drawn in to a deeper reality. That should be the vision for Catholic radio.

State of Marriage

Perhaps one of the scariest things for me in the culture wars is the redefinition of the word "marriage" by the State, and the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws by the Police to punish all those who disagree with this redefinition. Even the conservatives in government seem embarrassed and shamed to fight for an ontologically accurate definition of marriage. Part of it I feel is a lack of understanding of philosophy and the history of ideas. They just don't have the language to confront the misuse of words like "rights", "choice", and "freedom." So tolerance becomes the new intolerance and religious liberty is thrown out the window.

This article is a pretty good commentary on the use of language in this political battle, and the call for Christians to go to work like we did in the days of the old pagan Roman empire.
http://www.catholic.org/politics/story.php?id=28225&page=1

Heretics as Theology Professors at a Catholic Universities?

Christopher and I have been arguing about this for the past hour so I thought I'd open it up for discussion on the blog: Should a Catholic university have heretics as teaching faculty in its theology department?

In your response please indicate what you believe the mission of a Catholic university is and how the answer to this question best addresses this mission. My response will come when I have a bit more time to write.

Oh, and Ana Maria, great post about the common denominator discussion.

LCD, Pluralism, and the Media

I think Christopher and Alberto make excellent point in their posts. First, Christopher is right in that the common denominator of our humanity is really the longing for the truth and for Christ. In this sense, I don't think Oprah's attempt to form a new age religious movement is a deliberate attempt to mislead people. Rather, it's probably a genuine search for a meaning in life that is beyond the superficialness of the Hollywood world. Yet, in that Christoper is referring to the deepest part of our common denominator, I would make distinguish this "highest common denominator" from the "lowest common denominator"referred to in Alberto's post.

Alberto makes a great point in saying that the enjoyment of superficial things is not necessarily a bad thing. If anything, it can bring us together. I agree with this on many fronts. For myself, because I enjoy all the major sports, I find it much easier to talk to guys. If I meet a completely random guy, I can strike up a conversation about a game or a team and we can get along. Similarly, someone told me about the philosophy about talking about the weather. No matter how different you are from someone, no matter how little it appears you have in common, you are both share the weather outside and that's not a bad starting point for conversation.

In that sense, I don't know if lowest common denominator is the right term for what I'm trying to describe, so maybe you all can help me find another term. What I'm referring to is the "it's not polite to talk about politics or religion at the dinner table" kindof attitude. It's a not talking about the things that matter most because it raises tension, people don't budge in their beliefs, and we don't move forward as a society. It's not bad to talk about the weather or superficial things like sports, TomKat, or Shakira. But if that is all you are talking about, if as a society we can't or won't talk about the things that matter most in a meaningful way, what does that mean for our intellectual and political life?

I do think the superficialness has something to do with the sloth of materialism, but I also think it's related to a relativism that's manifested in a politically correct pluralism. If I have a friend who is an atheist, our religious conversations would focus on whether or not there is a God. We couldn't reach the truth about the Eucharist without the foundational piece of agreeing there is a God. Apply that to multiple perspectives on the meaning of life, and given that our media likes to challenge and question the very foundational things that we consider a basic part of our humanity and the natural law, and it's easy to see why it's so hard for popular culture to dive with any depth into truth.

As a result of not diving into truth, the media tries to be "neutral." However, I don't think there is such a thing as an unbiased, neutral media. In merely picking what they choose to be news and what they choose not to report, what they choose to make the headline and what they don't, they are making decisions on what's important by a set of values. I think our contemporary media uses Enlightenment values, underlying in relativism. But that's not being neutral.

Media should report things with an understanding of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Can such a media be a successful mainstream outlet in modern America? What would it like? Is this part of the key to saving Western Civilization?

Lowest Common Denominator and Oprah

Switching gears completely, I think much of America's cultural struggles has to do with how we're trying to reconcile our cultural and religious diversity into a singular and unifying popular culture. In an age of consumerism, pop culture attempts to attract the widest audience possible. The way popular music, television, print media, etc. tries to do this is to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Love and sex is an example of this lowest common denominator, and this is the reason television and radio are dominated by these themes. Having parts of humanity that we hold in common with our fellow man is not a bad thing. What is bad is when popular culture reduces the vision of our humanity to nothing more than live-for-the-moment sensual pleasures.
I bring this all up because I think this is what Oprah is trying to do in promoting and offering web seminars on Ethan Tolle's book A New Earth. Through the promotion of this book, Oprah is promoting a religion based on New Age philosophy that teaches there are multiple, equally valid ways to get to God, (and Jesus is only one of these ways as Oprah explains here to this Catholic woman) and God is "a feeling experience and not a believing experience." This is a brilliant use of the lowest common denominator strategy. If you're going to sell something like religion in pluralistic, pop culture America, it doesn't get much lower than "there is no one way". Nevermind that Jesus himself said, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6) and nevermind that the claim that "there's no one way" is itself a one way narrow minded view of religion. Somewhat related to this topic is this clip of Oprah getting called out on this point by an audience member in the middle of Oprah's show.

Now, this all relates to our conversation on the best way to influence/change Western civilization. Just as St. Benedict had a method, so does Oprah. Use mass media to have a show that focuses on feel good lowest common denominator subjects. As people can relate their own experience and humanity to the topics of the show (since it is lowest common denominator stuff, it's easy to relate to the subject matter), you earn the people's trust. Then you slowly lead them to a new philosophy and a new religion. As a billionaire, and one of the most powerful and successful people in the very influential mass media, who would dare speak out against Oprah's version of the meaning of life?

Ironically, it's the democratization of the Internet that is leading the charge in calling out Oprah. I first read about this issue a little over a month ago from this article posted by LifeSiteNews.com. Apparently, this wasn't the only site as blogs and YouTube have generated a buzz about this and put it on the radar of the mass media. At the center of it, apparently is this YouTube video that makes the claim that Oprah is starting a cult, which has over 5 million hits. Then Fox News ran this story, asking the question "Is Oprah starting her own cult?" CNN put their finest intellectual and theological experts on this question in this completely unbiased reporting clip. I wonder if CNN's coverage of this topic has anything to do with the fact that Oprah.com is linked to CNN's frontpage.

I view this as a modern day David vs. Goliath. Here you have a billionaire that is the queen of mass media trying to start a religion based on the media values of the lowest common denominator against a handful of unfiltered bloggers and amateur YouTube video producers, who wouldn't have even had a voice but a few years ago. I am real curious how this will all shake out.

Pope Benedict on St. Benedict

Thank you Kraft for posting the full text of Pope Benedict XVI speech on St. Benedict. A few exerts from the speech that stuck out to me in relation to my original post.

1) The context of the times of St. Benedict:

Between the fifth and sixth centuries the world suffered a terrible crisis in
values and institutions, caused by the collapse of the Roman Empire, the
invasion of new people and the decline of customs. By presenting St. Benedict as
a "shining light," Gregory wanted to show the way out of “this dark night of
history” (cfr. John Paul II, Teachings, II/1, 1979, p. 1158), the terrible
situation here in the city of Rome.

Compare to the Pope's description of the context of contemporary Europe:

Today, Europe -- deeply wounded during the last century by two world wars and
the collapse of great ideologies now revealed as tragic utopias -- is searching
for it's own identity. A strong political, economic and legal framework is
undoubtedly important in creating a new, unified and lasting state, but we also
need to renew ethical and spiritual values that draw on the Christian roots of
the Continent, otherwise we cannot construct a new Europe.Without this vital
lifeblood, man remains exposed to the ancient temptation of self-redemption -- a
utopia, which caused in various ways in 20th-century Europe, as pointed out by
Pope John Paul II, “an unprecedented regression in the tormented history of
humanity” (Teachings, XIII/1, 1990, p. 58).

One thing that is awesome about the Catholic Church is that it sees history through a much longer perspective than other institutions. This is especially true compared to political institutions in which politicians have such a narrow time frame to "demonstrate results" to the electorate in order to ensure their survival. While the Holy Father has great concern for a Europe that has lost its identity, he is not afraid. Rather, his attitude demonstrates a confidence in how God works in history and a confidence in Jesus promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church. Instead of being frantic, the attitude of the Pope is more like, yes the times are troubling, but we've seen this before and we know how we came out of it before, and with God's grace and the model of St. Benedict, we can come out of this again.

2) Benedict starts with the renewal of himself first:

Benedict firmly believed that only after conquering these temptations would he
be able to say anything useful to others in need. And so, having pacified his
soul, he was fully able to control the drive to put oneself first, and so became
a creator of peace. Only then did he decide to found his first monasteries in
the valley of Anio, near Subiaco.

This reminds me of my favorite quote from the Tao Te Ching, which goes something like this: "A man who attempts to change the world without first changing himself, is like a man who tries to cover the whole world with leather in order to avoid stepping on sticks and stones. It's much easier to wear shoes." Authentic comes best when we become, we personify, the change we want to see in the world.

3) The monastery and the relationship between isolation and public life:

According to Gregory the Great his exodus from the remote valley of Anio to
Mount Cassio -- which dominates the vast planes around it -- is symbolic of his
character. A monastic life of isolation has it's place, but a monastery also has
a public aim in the life of the Church and society as a whole. It must serve to
make faith visible as a force of life. In fact, when Benedict died on March 21,
547, through his Rule and the Benedictine order that he founded, he left us a
legacy that bore fruit all over the world in the subsequent centuries, and
continues to do so today.

So this shows that to be set apart is not mutually exclusive from playing a part in public life. We can both be isolated in a privacy to cultivate our values, and at the same time be a visible shining light for those that might be in the fog of confusion of public life and values. I think Anamaria brings up a very good point in asking how to do this concretely. While I have yet to formulate a response to this, I think it is an important discussion for those on this blog to take up.

American Pop Culture and the Catholic Church's Role in Saving Beauty

In reading John Murphy's article "Beauty Goes Underground" (referenced in Christopher's post on beauty), I was struck by a couple of paragraphs in particular:

Beauty as a mysterious, transcendent force is conspicuous by its absence in
American culture. If we divide culture into high and low, or intellectual and
popular, then we are forced to admit that pop culture has no authentic beauty
and high culture has divorced whatever beauty remains from truth and goodness.

Pop culture’s assault on beauty is too wide-ranging to elucidate here.
“Pop” may be “popular” abbreviated, but it also calls to mind brands like Coke
and Pepsi—producers of something fizzy, sweet, briefly stimulating, and rotten
in the long-term. Pop culture is junk culture. Its invitation is not to “savor
life” but rather to exploit it for the sake of instant gratification. It is
designed, manufactured and marketed to be consumed and thrown away.

When it comes to American pop culture, Beauty faces an uphill battle. If
you’re addicted to crack it’s difficult to appreciate a bottle of vintage
Bordeaux. Moral ugliness is given a surface-level spit-and-polish and the
results include: The Da Vinci Code, soap operas, E! television, daytime
television, crass commercials, American Idol, infomercials, Sex and the City
(okay, with a few exceptions let’s say “TV” in general and have done),
mass-market paperbacks, shallow self-help books, glossy magazines lining
checkout counters with covers featuring either airbrushed supermodels or
Photoshopped aliens (who can tell the difference?), summer movies with big
explosions, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and their paparazzi photo-ops,
cookie-cutter sequels, lowest-common-denominator plot formulas, on and on ad
infinitum. In the superficial realm of popular culture, “beauty” is a concept
co-opted by Cosmopolitan to sell more magazines. In the prophetic words of Hans
Urs von Balthasar, pop culture makes of beauty “a mere appearance in order the
more easily to dispose of it.”

And then he follows that up with the Catholic Church's role in saving beauty:

The Catholic Church, perceived by many as the bulwark of conservative, outmoded,
antiquated values, will only survive by being counter-cultural. We are no longer
part of an epoch that produced Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael as a matter
of state and Church policy. As soon as the Church kowtows to pop culture in the
guise of groovy services or to high culture in the guise of ghastly-looking
modern churches then there is trouble in paradise.

I've always thought of the Church's role in the world as preserving the good and the true, I've never considered its role in preserving beauty from a pop culture that has a limited view of our humanity. This thought is intriguing , until the author makes fun of the song "Eagle's Wings" and the folk mass. I, for one, really like that song and I enjoy folk masses. I don't think my enjoyment of that form of music makes me barbarically uncultured.

This illustrates that the difficulty of tasking the Catholic Church with the role of preserving artistic beauty from pop culture is that the Church does not have a clear standard to distinguish between what is beautiful and what is not. With faith and morals, the Church can point to the reality that God became flesh and taught us truth and objective morality, and that the Church has been tasked with safeguarding these truths throughout time. I don't think the Church has that same claim on its ability to judge beauty. I think the best the Church can do is teach truth and morality so man can flourish in his humanity and use his free will to create beauty.

Thoughts?

Recognition of Beauty and Living in the Present

A quick thought about Christopher's post on beauty and the story about children wanting to hear the violinist. I think in order to appreciate beauty one has to be truly present to the present moment. Adults, with life experiences and responsibilities that transcend the time and space of the moment, have a tendency to live life thinking about either the past or the future rather than being truly present. But kids, without these extensive experiences and responsibilities, seem really good at living life in the present moment. Even when they have no attention span and are easily distracted (think of kids fidgeting at mass), notice that they get distracted by something right then and there in that present moment. So while adults and children may share time and space of a given moment, how they experience and live in that moment in relationship to time is completely different. Therefore, because children experience the present moment with greater attention, it would make more sense for them to notice and be affected more by beauty. Attentiveness to the present moment, one of thousands that we can learn from children.

Cultural Transformation: Time and Place for Each Model

In response to Christopher's Post on Culture Transformation, several of the points he makes are excellent, but I disagree with the implication that the only acceptable model for Christian culture is the "Christ transforming culture" model. While I have not read H. Richard Neibuhr's Christ and Culture and am merely writing off of Chrisopher's post, I want to make the case that there is a proper time and place for the "Christ against culture" and "Christ of culture" model of Christian society.

I'm willing to concede to Christopher that for the average Catholic layman in contemporary America, to adopt the "Christ transforming culture" model makes the most sense. Our society and culture is based largely on Christian values, and for the most part, things shown in movies and in the media are a mixed bag of virtue and vice in which a properly trained Christian can distinguish between the two and choose to take what is good.

Yet, the very phrase "Christ transforming culture" is a transitional one. Christ has to be transforming culture from something (what it is) to something else (what it is meant to be). So in this model, what is Christ transforming culture to? Probably a culture more Christ-like, a culture that embraces and fosters the good, the true, and the beautiful. The French peasant philosopher Peter Maurin, who inspired Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker Movement, said that the definition of a good a society is one that makes it easy to be good. Think about that for a moment. A good society is one that if one were to get caught up and swept up in the culture, one would become a better, more virtuous person. That's awesome.

So if those adopting the "Christ transforming culture" model were really successful in creating a Christ-like culture that reflects the good, the true, and the beautiful, then the next generation would be fortunate enough to grow up in this society. In their case, adopting the "Christ of culture" model would make a lot more sense than it does now, for that culture would be a reflection of Christ. Places like the University of Notre Dame and Franciscan University of Steubenville, to a certain extent have this "Christ of culture" model of society. In those places, to get swept up in the culture is to become a more virtuous human being. That's what makes those places distinct and special.

On the opposite extreme, there's a proper time and place to withdraw from the world as St. Benedict did, though for the average Catholic layman, that time and place is probably not contemporary America. Yet, if things got much worse, if Catholic schools were outlawed and the only choices were public schools that taught all sorts of lies to our children about our humanity and our history, if Catholic professionals were being forced to violate their conscience as a litmus test for professional certification or speaking in the public square, if people were thrown in jail and sentenced to death for being and living out the Catholic lifestyle, then yes, it's very important, in that society for faithful Catholics to go underground. In fact, in the darkest periods of human history, that's what the martyrs of the early Church did, that's what the Desert Fathers and that's what St. Benedict did. The ironic thing is that from those persecutions, which led to the passionately intense small Christian communities, time and time again, our Church and our faith have been renewed and came out stronger than ever. My point in my original post was that if it got to the point where we had to go underground again, 1) could we and 2)would we have what it takes to be as successful in renewing our Church and our society. Is our contemporary Catholic sub-culture strong enough?

Peter Kreeft: How to Win the Culture War

Audio lecture by Peter Kreeft on how to win The Culture War. Very Good.

St. Benedict: Model for Revolution

Alasdair MacIntyre ends his book After Virtue with the following paragraph:

"It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another - doubtless very different - St. Benedict."

There are several different theories about how changing the world happens. Some say to enter into politics and fully engage in the conversations and power struggles that take place in the world. This might be effective for some, but this approach appears to have disillusioned many in our modern world. The average person seems intimidated by "the system" that seems too big, too complicated, and too overwhelming for them to be effective in the change they are trying to make.

I think it's fascinating that St. Benedict was actually effective in changing the course of Western Civilization by taking the exact opposite approach. Rather than engaging the politics of decadent Rome and try to convince Rome of the error of its ways, he retreated from it. He spent three years in virtual solitude in Italy, as a hermit working on his relationship with God and working on his internal struggles. When he emerged from his solitude, one couldn't help but notice the holiness of this man. Like the density of a planet creates gravity that attracts its moons, so the intensity of Benedict's holiness created a gravitational field that couldn't help but attract a community of people hungry for holiness. Through these small communities, followers of Benedict lived a powerful "alternative lifestyle" and this attracted many others, creating the foundation of Western Monasticism. Ironically, the world from which Benedict retreated from came to him.

As we enter into what MacIntyre describes as a moral Dark Age in which modern man seems to have forgotten that it has purpose, let alone having a concrete understanding of what that purpose is, I think those wishing to live the moral life will have to seriously consider what it is to retreat from the world so that the world may come to us. There are certainly modern challenges, such as in the age of the Internet and mass communication, is it even possible to retreat to the mountains like Benedict did? Yet, these are merely challenges that can be worked out, not insurmountable road blocks.

Ultimately, the power of the Christian witness is that the human heart is naturally attracted to truth and beauty, and Christ literally is that Truth that makes everything beautiful. If we can provide that witness to Christ as purely as possible, without diluting it, Benedict has shown us that we really can be effective in changing the world.