The Beautiful Idol (or: The Incorporeal Self and the Have It Your Way Gospel)

Cover of My Beautiful Idol

     If you are reading this post right now it's probably because you already have decided that you agree with me in some way. Yes, it is also because you probably already know me. [Thanks friends!] In any case, whoever you are, you may already expect and anticipate a certain set of beliefs that I should espouse. I am just going to go ahead and make that judgement call, for isn't that the truth with a majority of the material we read? Let's be honest for a second. Unless you woke up on the wrong side of the bed and are looking for a fight in the comments section (a redditor perhaps?) or an ironic laugh, you are probably not going to intentionally seek out content that does not fit your social fung shui. for instance, I do not get my christian news from Christwire. Sorry. I am not saying this subconscious filtering is a bad thing. I am not endorsing some sort of intellectual masochism, but I am not saying its a good thing either. It's a thing, nevertheless, and we need to be aware of it because this habit does not contain itself simply within the world of articles, blogs, and podcasts. What we are addressing here is a symptom of something much deeper.
     Look at your personal social networking world. The sentiment extends there as well. In the social networking world we are allowed to manipulate a synthetic social environment, consisting of our choices of sources. There we decide what sort of ideas or people are allowed into our social bubble, and we can (and do) shape that bubble to emphasize the particular things that we find important. We amplify what fits us and filter out what does not, creating for ourselves a controlled universe that can be distorted from the corporeal one that we actually live in- but are living there less and less every day. Even now, in a blatant turn of irony that cannot be ignored, I am contributing to this universe. I am building a version of myself that is significant, important, relevant. In this universe the little things that I care about, are things that everyone cares about- surely they do. In this little world of mine I rule. And so I begin to define myself by my social presence online. I live for the next status update. When something cool happens, I hope someone is around to record it so that people on Facebook will get to see how much fun I am having. I analyze each social situation in order to produce something clever for Twitter.

 Here breathes my beautiful idol.

     Not to be contained, however to the blogosphere, my beautiful idol seizes control of my corporeal sphere as well. In my clothes, my music, my accomplishments. He writes with the penname "Individualism", quaint, and walks with the smug judgement of a cynic. His ideas are more important. His theology. His spirituality. He does not care for the "church" because it does not fit his piety standards, his theological spectrum. His pastors are not up-to-date on recent podcasts. The musicians are still playing songs from "Christian radio". His fellow congregants are not up to par. They do not go to coffee shops, and they are not aware that John Calvin and Jacobus Arminius had a falling out. They don't read pitchfork so, of course, they are never going to understand him. So why stick around?
     My beautiful idol says that I can have the gospel my way. I can have church my way. I can have religion my way.
A little reformed.
A little social justice to show I care.
A little John Mark McMillan because I can be emotional too.
No creamer in your coffee.
ESV only.
      My beautiful idol tells me that God really can fit into my theological preconceptions, my philosophical inclinations. I just need to read this article or this book. I just need to stop talking to that person. No, God does not need me to change. Growing should be comfortable.

Is this a criticism of social networking?
No.
This post was brought to you by social networking.

Just something to prayerfully consider.


Useful Notes:
Philippians 2:4, 2:12-16
Recent survey on College-age Millennials leaving the church
*The memoir pictured above.

Related articles (kinda)

• The Idolatry of Individualism (theresurgence.com)
• Love Your (Theological) Enemies (theresurgence.com)
• Stone Age Social Networks May Have Resembled Ours (wired.com)

Counterculture coffee no. 46.

Steep for 4 minutes. Then press.

And now for mounds of reading. Where to begin? Hume or Philo?

Always Philo.

Thanks to Mr. Urevick for the coffee this morning.

Manifesto

“I only read nautical novels and my own personal manifestos.” – Ron Swanson

My next project is to compose my own personal manifesto. For me it will be a short and simple guide to daily remind me of my values as man of Christ. May my gaze be fixed in trials and hardships. May my eyes not lower in weariness or distraction.

Here's where I got some inspiration: AOM

But before that I still have two other composition projects on the table. The first is a commentary/personal meditation on Colossians. The second is a time sensitive secret.

Liber::Books::THE LIST::Classic::St. John's

The Reading List

The reading list that serves as the core of the St. John's College curriculum had its beginnings at Columbia College, at the University of Chicago, and at the University of Virginia. Since 1937, the list of books has been under continued review at St. John's College. The distribution of the books over the four years is significant. Something over 2,000 years of intellectual history form the background of the first two years; about 300 years of history form the background for almost twice as many authors in the last two years.

The first year is devoted to Greek authors and their pioneering understanding of the liberal arts; the second year contains books from the Roman, medieval, and Renaissance periods; the third year has books of the 17th and 18th centuries, most of which were written in modern languages; the fourth year brings the reading into the 19th and 20th centuries.

The chronological order in which the books are read is primarily a matter of convenience and intelligibility; it does not imply a historical approach to the subject matter. The St. John's curriculum seeks to convey to students an understanding of the fundamental problems that human beings have to face today and at all times. It invites them to reflect both on their continuities and their discontinuities.

FRESHMAN YEAR

• HOMER: Iliad, Odyssey
• AESCHYLUS: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides, Prometheus Bound
• SOPHOCLES: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Philoctetes, Ajax
• THUCYDIDES: Peloponnesian War
• EURIPIDES: Hippolytus, Bacchae
• HERODOTUS: Histories
• ARISTOPHANES: Clouds
• PLATO: Meno, Gorgias, Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Phaedrus
• ARISTOTLE: Poetics, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, On Generation and Corruption, Politics, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals
• EUCLID: Elements
• LUCRETIUS: On the Nature of Things
• PLUTARCH: Lycurgus, Solon
• NICOMACHUS: Arithmetic
• LAVOISIER: Elements of Chemistry
• HARVEY: Motion of the Heart and Blood
• Essays by: Archimedes, Fahrenheit, Avogadro, Dalton, Cannizzaro, Virchow, Mariotte, Driesch, Gay-Lussac, Spemann, Stears, J.J. Thompson, Mendeleyev, Berthollet, J.L. Proust

SOPHOMORE YEAR

• HEBREW BIBLE
• THE BIBLE: New Testament
• ARISTOTLE: De Anima, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Categories
• APOLLONIUS: Conics
• VIRGIL: Aeneid
• PLUTARCH: "Caesar," "Cato the Younger," "Antony," "Brutus"
• EPICTETUS: Discourses, Manual
• TACITUS: Annals
• PTOLEMY: Almagest
• PLOTINUS: The Enneads
• AUGUSTINE: Confessions
• MAIMONIDES: Guide for the Perplexed
• ST. ANSELM: Proslogium
• AQUINAS: Summa Theologica
• DANTE: Divine Comedy
• CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales
• MACHIAVELLI: The Prince, Discourses
• KEPLER: Epitome IV
• RABELAIS: Gargantua and Pantagruel
• PALESTRINA: Missa Papae Marcelli
• MONTAIGNE: Essays
• VIETE: Introduction to the Analytical Art
• BACON: Novum Organum
• SHAKESPEARE: Richard II, Henry IV, The Tempest, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Sonnets
• POEMS BY: Marvell, Donne, and other 16th- and 17th-century poets
• DESCARTES: Geometry, Discourse on Method
• PASCAL: Generation of Conic Sections
• BACH: St. Matthew Passion, Inventions
• HAYDN: Quartets
• MOZART: Operas
• BEETHOVEN: Third Symphony
• SCHUBERT: Songs
• MONTEVERDI: L'Orfeo
• STRAVINSKY: Symphony of Psalms

JUNIOR YEAR

• CERVANTES: Don Quixote
• GALILEO: Two New Sciences
• HOBBES: Leviathan
• DESCARTES: Meditations, Rules for the Direction of the Mind
• MILTON: Paradise Lost
• LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: Maximes
• LA FONTAINE: Fables
• PASCAL: Pensees
• HUYGENS: Treatise on Light, On the Movement of Bodies by Impact
• ELIOT: Middlemarch
• SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise
• LOCKE: Second Treatise of Government
• RACINE: Phaedre
• NEWTON: Principia Mathematica
• KEPLER: Epitome IV
• LEIBNIZ: Monadology, Discourse on Metaphysics, Essay On Dynamics, Philosophical Essays, Principles of Nature and Grace
• SWIFT: Gulliver's Travels
• HUME: Treatise of Human Nature
• ROUSSEAU: Social Contract, The Origin of Inequality
• MOLIERE: Le Misanthrope
• ADAM SMITH: Wealth of Nations
• KANT: Critique of Pure Reason, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
• MOZART: Don Giovanni
• JANE AUSTEN: Pride and Prejudice
• DEDEKIND: "Essay on the Theory of Numbers"
• "Articles of Confederation," "Declaration of Independence," "Constitution of the United States of America"
• HAMILTON, JAY AND MADISON: The Federalist
• TWAIN: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• WORDSWORTH: The Two Part Prelude of 1799
• Essays by: Young, Taylor, Euler, D. Bernoulli, Orsted, Ampere, Faraday, Maxwell

SENIOR YEAR

• Supreme Court opinions
• GOETHE: Faust
• DARWIN: Origin of Species
• HEGEL: Phenomenology of Mind, "Logic" (from the Encyclopedia)
• LOBACHEVSKY: Theory of Parallels
• TOCQUEVILLE: Democracy in America
• LINCOLN: Selected Speeches
• FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Selected Speeches
• KIERKEGAARD: Philosophical Fragments, Fear and Trembling
• WAGNER: Tristan and Isolde
• MARX: Capital, Political and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology
• DOSTOEVSKI: Brothers Karamazov
• TOLSTOY: War and Peace
• MELVILLE: Benito Cereno
• O'CONNOR: Selected Stories
• WILLIAM JAMES; Psychology, Briefer Course
• NIETZSCHE: Beyond Good and Evil
• FREUD: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
• BOOKER T. WASHINGTON: Selected Writings
• DUBOIS: The Souls of Black Folk
• HUSSERL: Crisis of the European Sciences
• HEIDEGGER: Basic Writings
• EINSTEIN: Selected papers
• CONRAD: Heart of Darkness
• FAULKNER: Go Down Moses
• FLAUBERT: Un Coeur Simple
• WOOLF: Mrs. Dalloway
• Poems by: Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Valery, Rimbaud
• Essays by: Faraday, J.J. Thomson, Millikan, Minkowski, Rutherford, Davisson, Schrodinger, Bohr, Maxwell, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Mendel, Boveri, Sutton, Morgan, Beadle & Tatum, Sussman, Watson & Crick, Jacob & Monod, Hardy

Info Glutton

Don't be. Read what you need. Espouse what is necessary. Create what is interesting.

Herodium

Agrippa I also called the Great (10 BC - 44 AD), King of the Jews, was the grandson of Herod the Great, and son of Aristobulus IV and Berenice. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Allow me to collect my thoughts about Herod. You might know him as King Herod. A man. A megalomaniac. He built Antonia on the temple mount. He built a temple to Augustus in Caesarea. This king of the Jews had Roman sensibilities. I can only imagine what kind of distasteful comics could have been published in the Jericho press about that- maybe one of Herod slinking out of a Roman bath house with a toga draped lewdly around his shoulders. And a big head of course.

They say pride comes before the fall, and it does. I wouldn't wish the misfortunes of Herod upon my worst enemy- or the maladies. Oh the worms! But why is this important? Why talk about this filicidal maniac from Idumea at all?

Well, he appears in the Bible but so does Josheb-Basshebeth; and I don't see much ink being spilled for him nowadays.

I am getting there.

In Herod I see a man like any other man, but Herod was born into and given extraordinary circumstances. These circumstances do not completely isolate Herod as a man from other men, I think. These circumstances elicit from history a hyperbole so extravagant that it must be true, and it is. In Herod I see pride like all pride. Like the pride I have. The pride of Herod was just given many more resources than mine. In Herod I see a man who worshiped idols of cultural sensibility, wealth, and power. These are not unfamiliar idols. In Herod I see fear. Herod harbored a paranoia that would probably make a meth-head tweak. This is humanity exposed. Sin in all its glory. Would you disagree?

The question is, put in Herod's place would I not be tempted to do the same? What does the tendencies of my life show? I most often think of myself first and foremost. I struggle to be culturally relevant. I care about trivial things. And I am afraid. Somewhere deep within me there exists a fear of loneliness, of rejection, of myself left to my own devices. What is there that I would not do if wasn't pushed to do it?

This is why I need Jesus.