Author Archives: James

Courageous

I was fortunate to see an early screening of the movie Courageous which the rest of you will have to wait until September to watch:

This is from the Kendrick brothers of Albany, GA (Sherwood films)  that also produced Flywheel, Facing the Giants and Fireproof.  As some of you may know, the films produced by the group fill a niche market of hard-core radical traditional Christian values. Perhaps some of you may also know that the actors and actresses are ordinary parishioners of the Sherwood church, that the films are done on a shoestring budget and gross about 20x what they cost to make.  The acting can range from pretty-amazing-good-for-free (Kurt Cameron in Fireproof) to you-get-what-you-pay-for meh. In any case the films always rest on a solid and soul-plumbing story that evokes a deep spiritual emotion Hollywood films can only dream about.

Courageous is no exception and the issue the Kendricks take on this time is fatherhood. The story centers around a group of men, most of them policemen, evaluating their role as father in many of it’s modern forms: divorced, dead beat, so-so, to great. A life changing event in the main character has him re-evaluating his performance and what it means for his family, community, nation and world.

Critics will likely blast the movie not only because of the implementation but because they generally do not share the neo-traditional values represented in the work.  Such low marks might be merited if there were similar movies to compare it to but that’s just the problem. There aren’t any!  And that’s the other problem–the major studios don’t make these kinds of films. If Hollywood had their act together, they could make a financial killing featuring similar themed movies because there is such a hunger for them.  Don’t believe me? The Passion of the Christ was a major hit, grossing in excess of $600 million despite the fact that no one would finance it. Fireproof was the highest-grossing independent film of 2008, making $33M but only costing $500k to make.  But no, Hollywood would rather squander their money on uninspired plots and re-makes of old ones because they are totally out of ideas.

 

 

 

Ecclesiastes

How true this verse from Ecclesiastes 7:2  is to me today:

“Better to go to the house of mourning
Than to go to the house of feasting,
For that is the end of all men;
And the living will take it to heart.”

 

Namesake

The film  “Namesake” is a powerful illustration of neotraditionalism. As a foreign film, “Namesake” will not follow the usual Hollywood formula of hero, nemesis and romantic interest—refreshingly. The movie follows the entire life of a Bengali couple who make their home in and around New York City.

In America, the couple starts a family with a son, who they name Nikolai Gogol (the namesake of the famous Russian writer of Dead Souls, The Overcoat) and, later, a daughter. As usual, the children become the vapid and culturally void automatons of selfishness and pleasure that is the hallmark of modern American society.  Forsaking his roots, Nikolai lives with his cosmopolitan rich white liberal girlfriend who flits from one shallow moment to the next, each filled with romance, entertainment, parties and retreats to her parents New England estate. Nikolai has been distancing himself more and more from his own parents and their old fashioned (progressive?) ideas—that is, until his father dies and Nikolai wakes up.  The event is transformational. His grief is manifested according to custom, with public mourning, traditional garb and shaved head. Nikolai, along with the Bengali community, descend upon his mothers home where the community’s grief is corporately and publicly expressed.

Then the girlfriend appears who looks upon the event as quaint. Her lack of sympathy and her inability to understand the value of tradition is remarkable. A pivotal point in the movie is where she suggests getting away from the house of no-fun-at-all to which he responds sharply and  negatively. Nikolai begins to see that even with the moments of tears and unsophistication, the traditions of his family and culture are exceedingly more valuable than the carefree life of upscale New York society. Nikolai ends up marrying a Bengali girl but that too is plagued by the contagion of backward American culture. Ironically, the great marriage in the movie is the arranged (gasp) one shared by his parents.

I obviously recommend this movie for the thinking members of my audience, particularly, the friends of tradition.

The tradition of having time

It’s strange that the things we don’t have time for are probably the things that matter the most. Yesterday I visited a sick friend who was too weak to communicate or engage me. I sat there in the chair at the hospital and decided that it was really OK not to say or do anything for an hour or so. I would just be there.

I studied his sleeping face. I prayed. I read the Bible some. I meditated. I chided myself for being fidgety and anxious. Like many of you, I had a heap of things TO DO!  And so does he. But now things have a new perspective and tried to place myself, once again, in those shoes.

A pathology of society is not having time. I insulate myself from real relationship in the cocoon of business. I lie to myself that quality time can substitute for quantity time, that awareness is as good as involvement, that the internet is as good as community, that career is identity.

Time to go.

P.S. The friend that I was visiting last weekend has passed away.

 

O’Reilly’s old animal

O’Reilly Books is known for a variety of technical publications on computer administration,  computer programming and other technical topics. In the community, they are affectionately known as “animal books” since many of their texts feature an animal on the cover:

Unfortunately, for the keepers of tradition, O’Reilly has a policy of socially engineering their readership. In one publication on agile methods, the engineering was so blatant and overbearing that I stopped reading the book  altogether, as it kept breaking the required concentration. I followed up by rating the book as poorly as their feedback scale would allow.

I was recently treated to another case of this irksome policy, albeit small. Here is an example from their “Embedded Linux” publication.

Despite a growth in both the availability of Linux distributions targeted at embedded use, and their use in embedded Linux devices, your friend’s development team may well have custom built their own system from scratch (for reasons explained later in this book). Conversely, when an end user says she runs Linux on the desktop, she most likely means that she installed one of the various  distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), Ubuntu Linux, or Debian GNU/Linux.

The traditions of good scholarship require that the neutral pronoun form be the masculine, in this case “he”, not “she”. O’Reilly’s use of the feminine pronoun can only serve a few purposes outside of annoying its male dominated consumer base. One purpose might be the fashionable promotion of the stereotype in our heretical society that men, particularly husbands and fathers, are irrelevant at best and buffoons at any rate. Already the portrayal of these roles is common in the entertainment industry along with deliberate single motherhood and loss of patronymic traditions. Why not in the fabric of our language as well?

This use of the feminine pronoun in a field highly populated by male nerds makes the attempt at social engineering extremely cartoonish.  I am not the only one that thinks so. The following link on O’Reilly’s website outlines the issue extant for ten years: Ask Tim.  Although I like the publications in general, I can  no longer purchase them simply based on this policy. Fortunately, there are cheaper and less intrusive ways of getting spun up on a technical topic.

 

Lost traditions, lost reality

I was delighted to hear a TED Talk recently by anthropologist Elizabeth Lindsey, presenting an appeal about the lost traditions of our world. The title of the link article on CNN.com is called “Wisdom is found in our heritage, not our cell phones.” A worthy quotation from that article and talk:

We are living an illusion that calls itself reality. We track the every move of city dwellers in New York as if it’s breaking news while forsaking those with valuable insight. An African elder said, “You worship the jester, while the king stands in plain clothes.”

You can watch the lecture here: Curating Humanities Traditions

 

Tradition – the new radicalism

An audio lecture by Peter Kreeft, a professor of philosophy at Boston College was catching my attention as I was driving home from work one day. One of many statements he was firing off made a permanent impression on me. The statement went something like this:

When we have embraced a hundred heresies as the orthodoxy of the future, the only possible radicalism left is tradition

As I pondered this statement it dawned on me that through nothing more than cultural attrition I had become radicalized. I am now a progressive because the traditions, the so-called “guns and religion” that I tenaciously cling to in a mindset caricatured as bigotry and ignorance have been abandoned by the mainstream.  It made me smile to think that, after the reclassification of societal norms, I was relegated to punk status.

Tradition – the new radicalism.  Let me introduce you to this alternative lifestyle marked by the preservation and practice of our spiritual and cultural traditions. These are important because they build on the collective wisdom of the past.  As is often said, if we do not learn from history we are doomed to repeat it and in the same way traditions – of a family, of a culture or of a nation—preserve the cumulative wisdom and knowledge of our ancestors and forward it to future generations that will benefit from, and incrementally influence, it. But today’s traditional thinking is much more than that.

Neo-traditionalism understands the value of tradition in a society that carelessly abandons it and does so almost as a religious exercise. Tradition provides culture, community, spirituality and identity—all items that modern American life attempts to outsource if not eradicate.  One may make the case that many social ills — crime, drug abuse, suicide, promiscuity, indebtedness and even environmental destruction can be linked to the erosion of tradition mostly because the loss of its provisions (community, identity, etc) leave a void that is invariably filled with destructive counterfeits.

There’s a potent National Geographic documentary I encourage others to watch called “God Grew Tired of Us” about the lost boys of the Sudan and their immigration to America.  In many ways it is also a mirror on our own society and when I watch it I can only feel shame for our empty and bankrupt culture.  In one scene the tall and stately dark Africans are sitting at a table in their pathetically small apartment in Syracuse eating dinner. They’ve opted to eat the macaroni and cheese in the Dinka way—with their hands. Why? One of them explains that to do so maintains their identity and purpose, saying “…because as you know, a person without culture is like a human being without land. So it is good to keep our tradition.” Despite the tragedies of their boyhood, the men are smiling, happy and excited about the new life afforded them in the U.S. feeling somewhat guilty that their relatives and friends back in Africa continue to wait in a refugee camp. But as the film progresses, our culture of work, isolation, stupefying entertainment and frivolity presses in and manifest as the wasteland that it is.  We are the proverbial rich country of Western civilization where everyone has an expensive watch on their wrist—-but no time!  And we pass this form of death on to our children daily.

But the man or woman of our new radicalism tries to reclaim the lost heirlooms of tradition, and to do so means charging against the grain of a society gone mad with celebrity worship, materialism and a thousand other forms of idolatry. Granted, some traditions need to be abandoned or re-evaluated; but I would argue that the bulk of tradition has served us well and we do ourselves, especially our progeny, a disservice (to put it mildly) when we abandon it.

What are these traditions and how do we reclaim them? The answer to this question requires a series of essays each targeting a specific aspect of life where essential traditions are being abandoned. I will look at the traditions of the past, why they were of benefit then and what to do about it now.