Rowan Williams has a brief piece in Newsweek this week on "God and Wall Street." The nefarious Trinity of Marx, Darwin and Freud (or "Freudian Fundamentalists") comes in for a very mild drubbing here, as each is responsible for narrowing the scope of significance in human relationships. But it's not quite Marx he has in view. Wall Street is the real economic bad guy now. And he's right about the way economic language has infiltrated "even education and health care." How many of you are sick of hearing about your, our, their brand? Obama's "brand." My university's "brand." And, curiously, Williams' critique of Wall Street is sort of Marxist, in a way. "Money is a metaphor," he says; "our monetary dealings shed light on aspects of our human condition that, rightly understood, tell us something about how we might relate to God." Replace God here with some version of the social, "each other," and you've got a kind of Marxism. The Archbishop has, on other occasions, also offered Marx some highly circumscribed praise.
One other thing. Money's a metaphor. But so, it seems, is religion. "Our job as human beings is to imagine ourselves—using all the raw materials that science, psychoanalysis, and economics provide us—in the hope that the images we discover and shape will have resonance and harmony with the rhythms of what Christians, and others, call the will and purpose of Almighty God." Images, shapes, resonance, harmony, rhythm. The will of God as a multi-media performance? I could almost go for that.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
Remembering Salinger
Holden Caulfield, in Catcher in the Rye, speaking about the New Testament:
"In the first place, I'm sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down. I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples. If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the Disciples, that poor bastard."
"In the first place, I'm sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down. I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples. If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the Disciples, that poor bastard."
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