Monthly Archives: March 2004

Stonehenge and the English on the Passion

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As often as I’ve been to England, I’d never been to Stonehenge before. I drove my brother and his family the some 90 miles from Exeter to the famed stone circle today; it was worth the trip. Today was a lovely, crisp, sunny spring-like day, and we were able to climb some fine barrow mounds near Stonehenge as well.

The Passion has opened in England to almost universally hostile reviews. The other night, the BBC aired a perfectly awful program on Mel Gibson, entitled “Mel Gibson: God’s Lethal Weapon”. Here is a link to the Guardian’s summary of British newspaper reviews:

After all the fuss and controversy, what a “terrible disappointment” The Passion of the Christ turned out
to be for Cosmo Landesman in the Sunday Times. The director, Mel Gibson, is only interested in Jesus’s suffering. “Where is Jesus the inspiring teacher? Gibson literally gives us the body of Christ and not much else … The violence is visceral. Raw. Relentless. You squirm in your seat.” The devout might be inspired by all this, Landesman said, but for most it is “violence overkill”. Any “thematic richness” had been washed away “in the rivers of blood” and the film ended up with “nothing to say”.

The direction was “oddly bogus”, thought Jenny McCartney in the Sunday Telegraph. And the film was let down by its “fundamental crudity of vision”, which “surges energetically into every scene, blotting out much of the pathos and humanity of the passion story”.

In the Mail on Sunday, Matthew Bond agreed with those critics who found the film anti-semitic, “given that it portrays a blood-hungry Jewish mob baying for … Christ to be crucified”. But Gibson also “goes out of his way to heap as much blame as possible on the Romans, who, the spineless Pilate apart, are all portrayed as violent psychopaths”.

In the Independent on Sunday, however, Jonathan Romney argued that the film clearly identified the Jews as “the master criminals”.

Yikes. I don’t think I saw the same film. Or I just saw it perhaps through radically different eyes — through the eyes, perhaps, of the devout whom Landesman treats so typically dismissively.

Why I am Glad I’m not English

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One of the reasons I am happiest in L.A. is that I absolutely don’t understand the fascination that so many of my fellow academics (especially English ones) have with the practice of “ironic detachment”. I talked with my brother about this today at some length. Forced to choose, I’d rather have vulgar sincerity than witty cynicism; I’d rather be surrounded by folks possessed by ineloquent but genuine passions than by those who are models of articulate and affected restraint. No wonder I’ve got a soft spot for certain southerners and pentecostals. Thank God I live where I do…

Still, any culture that consumes Cadbury Cream Eggs year ’round is fine by me… I am devouring the aforementioned, a most dubious form of carbo-loading before my flight back to LAX on Thursday, and my 50K ultra in the San Gabriels on Saturday…

The UK moves ahead

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This morning’s Observer reports that gay marriages will be legalized within Britain shortly:

The first laws giving gay people the right to ‘marry’ are to be unveiled this week in one of the most significant changes to Britain’s social make-up since the passing of equal opportunities legislation in the 1960s.

Attempting to show it still has a radical edge, the Government will say that all couples who sign up to a committed relationship should have the same rights, regardless of sexual orientation.

‘It is about equality,’ said a Whitehall source. ‘It is not about special favours – they will have the right to commit to one another and the responsibilities that brings.’

Under the Civil Partnerships Bill to be published on Wednesday, same-sex couples will be able to sign a register held by the register office in a procedure similar to a marriage. Although the Government will insist it is not officially a ‘marriage’ but rather a contract between two people, the fact that couples will have to announce their intentions beforehand in a similar way to the reading of the banns before a wedding reveals its true effect.

Couples will have rights to pensions similar to married couples, will not have to pay inheritance tax on property passed between them when one dies and will have access to hospital records similar to that allowed for a spouse.

Progress marches on.

Brief blogging from Exeter

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I am safely arrived in Exeter, having survived both a sleepless flight and a breakneck drive from London down to Devon. I am blogging on my brother’s Macintosh (as a devoted PC user, I find it agonizingly difficult to understand.) The B&B in which I am lodged is tiny and comfortable and expensive; I’ve never traveled to England with the exchange rate so poor.

Tomorrow, my brother and his family will take me to their small parish church of St. Michael’s and All
Angels (small enough that it lacks a website to which I might otherwise link.) It’s very high church, complete with all sorts of smells and bells, and is so Anglo-Catholic that Hail Marys are regularly uttered. If there are Mennonites in the southwest of England, they are not accessible on the web, and so I will be a cheerful Anglican in the morning.

More when I can find a computer that actually makes sense to me.

Well, I’m off…

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I feel sorry for the poor soul who will be sitting next to me on my flight tonight from LAX to Heathrow. I am sniffling and sneezing and coughing away, even as I pump a fine mix of homeopathic and mainstream remedies into my bloodstream. I didn’t get much sleep last night, and will be up for the next 24 hours at the minimum. One thing I am accustomed to doing is renting a car in England and going for a long drive immediately after getting off a transatlantic flight. The first time I did it was on August 31, 1997 — the day Princess Diana died. She had been alive and well when my flight left the States (from JFK), but when I landed (at Manchester), the news had just broken that she was dead. I remember listening to the stunned BBC coverage on the car radio as I tried to teach myself to drive on the wrong side of the road (with a stick shift) all the way from Manchester to Durham. (I was going to a conference). I survived it in the rain and fog, no less. ‘Twas a strange day. Tomorrow’s drive from London to Exeter should be much easier.

Here is the weather in Exeter. Here is the weather in Pasadena. I must be mad.

I’ll try and post from an internet cafe in England next week…

Christianity Today goes way over the line

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I like Christianity Today. I read it weekly online; I love their Books and Culture section (the evangelical answer to the New York Review). But I am furious at the tone and tenor of this piece posted today by a James Berkley, entitled “A Methodist Mob Mugging.” Referring to the Karen Dammann trial (which I posted about here, and about which fellow blogger Jay Voorhees has had much goodness to post), Berkley spews:

A deceptively docile mob mugged United Methodist Church law last week in Bothell, Washington, near Seattle. The mob was passing as a United Methodist jury in the Rev. Karen Dammann case, but it definitely was a mob nevertheless, dispensing mob justice. It broke into Methodist jurisprudence, spoke utter inanities, freed a properly charged defendant, and trampled on the rule of law, leaving a host of victims in its wake.

So a mainline denomination’s court fudged on its clearly written polity. Okay. You call that news? Wouldn’t it be news if a mainline denomination actually followed its written doctrine and polity these days?

You got me there, but this instance just has to be one of the most egregious denominational examples of the breakdown of law and reason. It could hardly be more clear-cut and dramatic, more ridiculous and disgusting.

Look, good folks can disagree about homosexuality; good folks can disagree about the logic behind the Dammann decision. But good folks also know their history. Gays and lesbians (like Dammann) have been the real victims of “mobs” and “muggings” in American history. In this country’s recent history, Methodists have no history of being physically attacked merely for being Methodists! Gays and lesbians have been assaulted, mugged, and murdered on countless occasions. Evangelical Christians — in the USA — haven’t been. I am sick and tired of having disappointing court decisions compared to “muggings”! Only those who have never endured real beatings and real intimidation would ever appropriate the language of physical violence for such nakedly political purposes.

The Supreme Court may have been wrong in its ruling on Lawrence v. Texas (though I think not), and it may well rule the wrong way on the current (and ridiculous) Newdow case. Christians do live in a culture that is, at times, openly hostile to people of faith. But that hostility is generally expressed through a series of non-violent measures that seek to redefine traditional morality — not through actual physical assault. Traditional evangelicals like James Berkley have a right to feel offended and disappointed, and they have a right to criticize the recent successes that gay and lesbian Americans have enjoyed in our culture. But those who have not truly suffered do not have the right to claim for themselves the language of victimhood; they do not have the moral right to claim that they are the victims of violence. To do so — even rhetorically – is to diminish the reality of the suffering of those who have actually been raped, mugged, and beaten. With all due respect, brother James, you owe your readers an apology.

Lancaster Conference and Gay Mennonites

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The Mennonite Church USA is a new thing indeed; it was formed in 2001 out of two smaller groups, the General Conference Mennonite Church and the Mennonite Church (I know, a tough semantic distinction). The MCUSA is organized into various regional conferences (my home church is part of Pacific Southwest Mennonite Conference).

But one regional conference has had only provisional membership since 2001: Lancaster Conference of Pennsylvania, which has the single largest membership of any group of Mennonites in this country. Now, the bishops of Lancaster (it would be a long post to explain the huge difference between an Anabaptist bishop and a Catholic or Anglican bishop) are urging their conference to move from provisional to full membership status.

Why is this of interest? The Lancaster Conference represents the most politically conservative region of American Anabaptism. (For most denominations, the most conservative region is the southeast; for Mennonites, it is the northeast, thanks to the historic presence of groups like the Amish). In many ways, Pennsylvania Mennonites (of whom it can be safely said that most inherited their faith from their parents) are suspicious of Mennonites in other parts of the country, especially out here on the West Coast (where most Mennonites are converts from other backgrounds). What led the Lancaster Conference to hold on to provisional rather than full membership was the perceived willingness of MCUSA to be flexible on the issue of homosexuality. MCUSA has the following official statement on sexuality:

We believe that God intends marriage to be a covenant between one man and one woman for life. Christian marriage is a mutual relationship in Christ, a covenant made in the context of the church. According to Scripture, right sexual union takes place only within the marriage relationship.

But to its credit, MCUSA has also encouraged the voices of those who disagree. The Brethren Mennonite Council for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Interests has been permitted to work within various conferences, and to address national gatherings. The willingness of the MCUSA to dialogue with and fellowship with LGBT Mennonites deeply troubled some folks in the Lancaster Conference. Now, at last, it seems as if Lancaster is willing to come to the table and wrestle through these difficult issues with the rest of us. The fact that the most conservative conference in America is now willing to take part in discussions in which traditional Mennonite teachings on sexuality are open to debate (and, deo volente, to change) is most encouraging to the very small number of Anabaptists who really, really care about this issue.