Because I love Roy Keane!

Roald Dahl- "Mike Teavee.."

The most important thing we’ve learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, NEVER, NEVER let
Them near your television set —
Or better still, just don’t install
The idiotic thing at all.
In almost every house we’ve been,
We’ve watched them gaping at the screen.
They loll and slop and lounge about,
And stare until their eyes pop out.
(Last week in someone’s place we saw
A dozen eyeballs on the floor.)
They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they’re hypnotised by it,
Until they’re absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.
Oh yes, we know it keeps them still,
They don’t climb out the window sill,
They never fight or kick or punch,
They leave you free to cook the lunch
And wash the dishes in the sink —
But did you ever stop to think,
To wonder just exactly what
This does to your beloved tot?
IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND
HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND
A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!
HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!
HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!
HE CANNOT THINK — HE ONLY SEES!
‘All right!’ you’ll cry. ‘All right!’ you’ll say,
‘But if we take the set away,
What shall we do to entertain
Our darling children? Please explain!’
We’ll answer this by asking you,
‘What used the darling ones to do?
‘How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?’
Have you forgotten? Don’t you know?
We’ll say it very loud and slow:
THEY … USED … TO … READ! They’d READ and READ,
AND READ and READ, and then proceed
To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!
The nursery shelves held books galore!
Books cluttered up the nursery floor!
And in the bedroom, by the bed,
More books were waiting to be read!
Such wondrous, fine, fantastic tales
Of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales
And treasure isles, and distant shores
Where smugglers rowed with muffled oars,
And pirates wearing purple pants,
And sailing ships and elephants,
And cannibals crouching ’round the pot,
Stirring away at something hot.
(It smells so good, what can it be?
Good gracious, it’s Penelope.)
The younger ones had Beatrix Potter
With Mr. Tod, the dirty rotter,
And Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland,
And Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and-
Just How The Camel Got His Hump,
And How the Monkey Lost His Rump,
And Mr. Toad, and bless my soul,
There’s Mr. Rat and Mr. Mole-
Oh, books, what books they used to know,
Those children living long ago!
So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books,
Ignoring all the dirty looks,
The screams and yells, the bites and kicks,
And children hitting you with sticks-
Fear not, because we promise you
That, in about a week or two
Of having nothing else to do,
They’ll now begin to feel the need
Of having something to read.
And once they start — oh boy, oh boy!
You watch the slowly growing joy
That fills their hearts. They’ll grow so keen
They’ll wonder what they’d ever seen
In that ridiculous machine,
That nauseating, foul, unclean,
Repulsive television screen!
And later, each and every kid
Will love you more for what you did.

Iran is next

Guardian Article

Paul Tillich - The Dynamics of Faith - Symbols of Faith: Symbols and Myths

"The resistance against demythologization expresses itself in literalism. The symbols and myths are understood in their immediate meaning. The material, taken from nature and history, is used in its proper sense. The character of the symbol to point beyond itself to something else is disregarded. Creation is taken as a magic act which happened once upon a time. The fall of Adam is localized on a special geographical point and attributed to a human individual. The virgin birth of the Messiah is understood in biological terms, resurrection and ascension as physical events, the second coming of Christ as a telluric, or cosmic, catastrophe. The presupposition of such literalism is that God is a being, acting in time and space, dwelling in a special place, affecting the course of events and being affected by them like any other being in the universe. Literalism deprives God of his ultimacy and, religiously speaking, of his majesty. It draws him down to the level of that which is not ultimate, the finite and conditional."

It's quite a conundrum, what Tillich says here about literalism depriving God of majesty and ultimacy. On one hand we have Tillich's idea that the character of the symbol must point beyond itself to something else, but on the other hand symbols ground us in the present--they relate the divine to the human. Each of these myths; creation, the fall of Adam, the virgin birth and so on, relate an event of cosmic consequence to the natural and the local. To see the creativity of a creator in a literal seven-day creation, or a big bang - to understand the virgin birth as a virgin birth, the resurrection and ascension as physical fact or to see these as symbols and descriptive devices of divine love of and concern with man-- are all ways of looking at a symbol.

Tillich is writing (here, at least) against the myth that all religions contain -- the myth that is a part of all lives religious or not. I tend to disagree though. Myth is powerful -- Myth is so important to the human mind and I don't think of it as depriving God of majesty or ultimacy. I think what Tillich is doing here is using his personal myth -- which is a much less literal myth than that of say, Karl Barth -- and making it his starting point. His myth may allow to deny the virgin birth, see the scientific relevance of modernity and deny creation, resurrection and ascension -- but that it just his myth? Isn't his wholly symbolic way of looking at religion just the opposite pole of the literalism he speaks against? I would hope for some sort of hybrid way of being symbolically literal.

Best Contemporary Theology Meme

While I'm pretty new to theology, but I still wanted to add to Patrik's Meme . These books are my personal favorites in the realm of theology-(so far at least, I'm starting to really enjoy Tillich and I'll be reading Barth's God Here and Now shortly). The first two are probably more popular and might even be mentioned by some other people. Sittler's small book, The Care of the Earth, is probably a little less popular but it may be my favorite of all.

"Name three (or more) theological works from the last 25 years (1981-2006) that you consider important and worthy to be included on a list of the most important works of theology of that last 25 years (in no particular order)."

1. Jürgen Moltmann: The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and
Criticism of Christian Theology.
2. Miroslav Wolf : Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation.
3. Joseph Sittler: The Care of the Earth.

An overwhelming question

Artist Bryce Marden, whose work is featured at the MOMA and has recently been at the Guggenheim, was interviewed yesterday on PBS' The News Hour. Marden is a abstract painter and his work is intricate. The interview was great, but one of the questions the interviewer asked really struck me. He asked Marden, "Why, in the 21st century is art important?"

And it made me wonder, why are the things we do important? In the world we live in, are literature, philosophy, theology, etc important? And why are they? What do they do?

Gibbons Ruark - Postscript to an Elegy

What I forgot to mention was the desultory
Unremarkable tremor of the phone ringing
Late in the day, to say you were stopping by,
The door slung open on your breezy arrival,
Muffled car horns jamming in the neighborhood,

Our talk of nothing particular, nothing of note,
The flare of laughter in a tilted wineglass.
Or we would be watching a tavern softball game
And you would come short-cutting by, your last hard mile

Dissolving in chatter and beer on the sidelines.
How did that Yankee third baseman put it, tossing
His empty glove in the air, his old friend
Sheared off halfway home in an air crash? "I thought
I'd be talking to him for the rest of my life."

Talk as I may of quickness and charm, easy laughter,
The forms of love, the sudden glint off silverware
At midnight will get in my eyes again,
And when it goes the air will be redolent still

With garlic, a high note from Armstrong, little shards
That will not gather into anything,
Those nearly invisible flecks of marble
Stinging the bare soles of the curious
Long after the statue is polished and crated away.