Hitchens and the Dead Russians
Christopher Hutchins is after religion, in more or less the same self-congratulatory manner that atheists have been going at it for the past 200 years. Aside from the general gist of his arguments, I found this fascinating quote:
[We] find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.
Ahem. Is Hitchens somehow unaware of the fact that Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were both devout Orthodox Christians? I don’t see how anyone could possibly read The Brothers Karamazov and not realize that it is a work of a religious mind, and that its ethical vision is inextricable from its religious setting. Likewise for Anna Karenina. Now, it may be that Hitchens appreciates these books despite their religious content, but that would contradict the subtitle of his book: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Except, I suppose, for the great religious writers that Hitchens admires.
The End of History
| Învierea ta Hristoase Mântuitorule Îngerii din ceruri o laudă Şi pe noi pe pământ ne învredniceşte Cu inimă curată să te mărim |
Your resurrection, O Christ Savior Is praised by the angels in heaven And make us on earth worthy, With a pure heart to magnify you! |
Today God hits reset.
Today is the end of history and the beginning of eternity.
Death is turned inside-out and runs backwards on itself.
No more hiding in your sins.
Come out, come out wherever you are.
The Bridegroom
Last night I went to the Presanctified Liturgy at St. Paul’s Orthodox Church, the last one before Easter. Or Pascha, as the Orthodox are prone to say, even though I prefer to use the normal English name. Anyway, it was wonderful and striking and all of the things that the liturgy usually is, but a few things stood out to me:
The Bridegroom icon. The juxtaposition of theme and name is a theological treatise of its own: Christ in his passion, wearing the crown of thorns, dressed in the red that the soldiers mocked him with. This is the Bridegroom, and this is His wedding garment. I found the piety associated with this particular icon to be profound as well: the icon was placed on a table in the middle of the room with thorn branches on either side of it, and the people prostrated twice before venerating it and once afterwards.
The Psalms. We sang fourteen psalms in their entirety. That was a lot of psalms. Despite having never heard the particular chant melody before, I found it simple to follow and was quickly able to sing along with the rest of the congregation.
The antidoron. All of the antidoron I’ve ever taken was chewy and tasteless. St. Paul’s, for some reason, used a spiced, slightly sweet artisan bread. It was delicious.
And best of all, they anointed everyone with oil at the end, including me.
It’s Done
120,000 words.
413 pages.
32 chapters.
The first draft of my novel is done!
English Toponyms
Yesterday I pondered the nation Turkey, and wondered why it had to be so hilariously homophonous with the Thanksgiving bird. I reasoned that there is another English toponym -ia that is also available, so *Turkia is a reasonable name for the country that avoids any such problems.
But Turkia seemed anomalous to me. To try to figure out why, I rummaged through my mental list of toponyms to examine the distribution of -y vs. -ia in place names.
| -y | -ia |
|---|---|
| Hungary Germany Italy Saxony duchy county vichy |
Pennsylvania Bulgaria Romania Croatia Bavaria Wallachia Bohemia |
Obviously this is a pretty short list, but I observed the following: Toponyms with Germanic-style initial stress take the ending -y. Conversely, all of the toponyms ending in -ia have Latinate antepenult stress. This appears to hold even when the root to which the toponym is applied is monosyllabic, in which case the resulting toponym can only end in -y.
There are some exceptions (e.g. Parthia), but they tend to be learned words that seem to be internalized as foreign terms, and so not subject to normal English morphemic rules. For toponyms that have been completely nativized, it seems to hold that -y and -ia are allomorphs whose realization depends on the stress pattern of the word.
This in turn explains why Turkey is Turkey and not Turkia: since the stem is monosyllabic, only the -y pattern can apply. The spelling “-ey” appears to be a fluke, perhaps influenced by the unfortunate homophony that got me thinking about this in the first place.
The Word of the Lord
Today the Gospel reading was the story of the prodigal son from Luke. It’s such a familiar story that it sometimes seems to have lost most of its impact. However, today the Holy Spirit chose to make the reading alive to us. As Fr. John was reading the story began to weigh on my heart, and I closed my eyes. Then Fr. John began to weep as he read the words of the father at the end of the story: “This brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”
This is the Word of the Lord.
Not everything is understood
Larisa’s father grew up in an orphanage in Romania. He swears that during his time there, there was a boy there who would crawl on the walls and the ceilings in his sleep. If you called out to him or otherwise woke him up while he was doing this, he would fall to the ground, and he was never able to repeat the trick while awake. Her father says that the boy was well-known in the orphanage and that he was seen by dozens of people during his nocturnal crawls.
I was reminded of this reading the following story:
With the high ranking position I had as a teacher of this oriental magico-mystical science, I felt that my supernatural power was greater than that of anyone else. Through my years of training, I could even knock a person out and he would fall to the ground without a single touch, only by striking the empty air so that the energy of the air did the rest. I also had the ability from my training that no weapon could easily harm me, because my skin, by virtue of my magical power, became as hard as iron. In addition, another supernatural power I achieved through training and the use of talismans and mantras was that I could make my body so light that I could jump in the air as though I were flying, as long as my feet could touch something, such as on a flying leaf or on the leaves on the trees. I felt that I was invincible.
But this was the most impressive section:
I stood up in front of the icon-screen, which was made from simple plaited-bamboo material. Actually, it was easy for me to knock it down by simply stomping my feet on the ground and hitting my fist in the air toward the icon-screen, but what happened then was shocking to me. Instead of knocking the icon-screen down, the power of the energy of the air that I sent to the icon-screen bounced back to me, and hit me so hard that I fell on the floor. I went out from the Church, but I still could not believe what had happened. Next, I tried my supernatural power against an electric bulb outside the Church, and it broke into pieces, which meant the power was still there. I entered the Church again, and tried again to knock the icon-screen down, but the same thing happened. Repeatedly I tried, and over and over I was knocked down to the ground.
The man later converted, was exorcised and baptized, and became a priest. I strongly urge you to read the entire article.
A Waste of Time
Evidently there exists a site called Conservapedia. As of this moment the site appears to be down, probably because some leading bloggers linked to it. To mock it. Which it so richly deserves. Language Log has a post fisking some language-related entries, which are appallingly
The about page begins with the phrase, “Tired of the LIBERAL BIAS every time you search on Google and a Wikipedia page appears? Now it’s time for the Conservatives to get our voice out on the internet!” This is bizarre. First, I’ve never detected any liberal bias on Wikipedia. Second, anybody can edit Wikipedia. If you think that an article displays liberal bias, edit the article to remove that bias. Wikipedia even has a special mechanism for disputing articles that aren’t deemed neutral. Why do you need a separate source for articles with conservative bias no bias at all?
I ask because in several political dimensions I still am a conservative, and this sort of thing just embarasses me.
Seth asks, “What is truth?”
Or something like that. He made a valuable comment about the nature of Truth and the way in which we proclaim it. (By the way: Hi, Seth! Still hanging out in Ft. Collins? Or did you move down to the Springs, as mentioned in your comment?) This isn’t so much a rebuttal, as further rumination.
The comment I wrote was prompted by discussion of Hounddog, a controversial film in which 12-year-old Dakota Fanning’s character is raped. My intention isn’t to discuss the film, which was panned at Sundance and which doesn’t deserve any more attention than it’s already gotten. What got me thinking, though, was the boilerplate “free speech” defense that was trotted out, and it occurred to me that the purpose of free speech is to be able to say important things–not to be able to make exploitative movies. By talking “the purpose of free speech” here, I’m not attempting to divine the minds of the Founding Fathers who wrote the First Amendment. Instead, I’m looking at the right of free speech from a moral perspective: as Christians, we are obliged to speak truth, or more importantly speak of the Man who is Truth. The Christian argument for free speech begins with the imperative to speak Truth, and from there defends all speech just to ensure that Truth cannot be silenced.
Which brings us to one of Seth’s questions:
Doesn’t the problem come around to what ‘truth’ is in relation to what is deemed ‘vulgar’ or ‘obscene’?
Yep. In my last post I pointed out that vulgarity and obscenity weren’t true. I admit that I’m using the word “vulgar” in an idiosyncratic way, to refer to vulgarity for its own sake, or vulgarity that doesn’t say anything useful. I don’t mean that we can’t ever use “strong language” when it’s warranted: when we see bullshit, we should call it bullshit. Not doing so would be a kind of lie, which is worse. (Biblical authors use this strategy often: see Peter Leithart’s excellent discussion of vulgarity.) Nonetheless, it’s not hard to find examples of vulgarity that isn’t warranted; I think that most people my age, myself included, swear too much.
But the real problem is that vulgarity and obscenity don’t represent the Truth, i.e. they don’t represent Christ. Once, again, I’m not saying that everything we say has to be sweet and inoffensive, but what’s bitter should be the bitterness of the Cross, and what’s offensive should be the offensiveness of the Gospel. To make that high-sounding language practical: what matters is not precisely our word choice or the or whether or not we show naked boobs, but rather whether by showing these things we communicate the Gospel. That’s why real vulgarity and obscenity are lies, because they communicate something other than Christ.
I also do not claim that we need to have a ‘neutral ground’ to speak of these things in the public sphere, that we need to shirk ‘religious’ talk and meet the secular society with reasoning that is somehow more universal. Yet, I would like very much to see those claiming they are in close contact with the Truth speaking and acting like the Truth…
With this I entirely agree.