When Art History class finally pays off

There has been a little stinky-face going on about Third Day's last CD cover, which, btw, began back in May when Chicago's ArtBlog noticed that the CD art looked something like the CD art from Radiohead's "Hail to the Thief". Which, you know, yeah: it does.

What several sources are doing, however, is knocking Third Day for "thou shalt not steal" and other such jejune attempts at accusing Christians of being hypocrites.

My problem with this is not that CCM can be very derivative -- because it can; it is. I like Third Day and they have some good tunes and some bad albums, and if we want to sort those out at a future date, well, whatever. My problem is with the historically-blank idea that somehow Stanley Donwood's cover for "Hail to the Thief" is itself wholly-original and not derivative of anything.

Here's the piece for those of you who have never seen it:



Now, in the early 20th century, there was this Swiss guy named Paul Klee who was an expressionistic artist, and he made all kinds of paintings which, today, people are still puzzling over. He's consider a great artist, and his work influences many people today -- that means they do stuff because his work has helped them see a way of expressing their craft which they didn't see before, or maybe they are trying to pay homage to Klee's work.

I bring it up because when I saw Donwood's CD cover, I had this flashback to 1988 when I was in Art History class and I saw this painting called "Castle and Sun". The painting is landscape-sized, but I have cropped it for comparison:



Listen: it seems transparent that Donwood was influenced by Klee -- and by other things as well, such as pop art and minimalism. That doesn't make him a thief, does it? Let me suggest that the person(s) who were influenced by Donwood to make the Third Day CD sleeve weren't thieves, either: they are graphic designers, and they simply adopted one design paradigm and used it for the CD cover.

That's how art works. That's how art works especially in our culture where art generally sells product. People who are in the business of doing that should know at least that much, especially when they are seeking to be allegedly "missional".

Crisis, therefore action

Because the actual data indicates that so-called "global warming" is mostly over, the advocates for global warming have got to get more shrill and desperate to make their point.

However, this is my favorite part of this article:

To see how far this process could go, look 55.5m years to the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when a global temperature increase of 6C coincided with the release of about 5,000 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, both as CO2 and as methane from bogs and seabed sediments. Lush subtropical forests grew in polar regions, and sea levels rose to 100m higher than today. It appears that an initial warming pulse triggered other warming processes. Many scientists warn that this historical event may be analogous to the present: the warming caused by human emissions could propel us towards a similar hothouse Earth.

I just want to point out that there were no humans, in the secular view, 55.5 million years ago -- so whatever caused the temperature spike then wasn't because of cars or campfires. And it seems to me that if what happened then is happening now, maybe we should think about what caused it then to understand what is allegedly causing it now.

Because shrill accusations that burning fossil fuels will cause a 4C global temperature spike when something prior to the formation of the fossil fuels we use today caused a 6C spike doesn't seem more reaonable: it seems desperate.

The Golden Tables

First of all, let me heap my unadulterated scorn on Office 2007. I used to be productive with Office, and now I spend half my life trying to find things in the “ribbon”. Hey Redmond: thanks for wasting July 2008 for me, you coneheads.

OK – with that off my chest, I have mentioned this before, but I really loathe study bibles. On the one hand, they are way too much for the average person to grasp – I mean, what do I read first? Do I read the notes at the bottom of the page first, or read the page, then the notes? And what are all these little letters in the text – they’re not verse numbers? And is that map inspired or merely helpful?

And on the other hand, a study bible is usually not even enough to get after real study of the actual text. The closest thing to serviceable I have ever encountered in that respect are the billion notes included with the NET Bible – and even those have the problem of not really being consistent in content or intent. If you want scholarly emendations, you ought to go grab a book about your question and get the actual answer and not the headline of the actual answer.

And really, those complaints are actually symptoms of my larger concern here, which is the actual reading of the actual Bible. You know: people have a hard enough time getting past the book of Exodus as it is. When Exodus becomes an archeological conundrum or geographic puzzle or sociological interpretations of cross-cultural baloney, the average guy will give up and go listen to Joel Osteen or something because at least Joel has a wife who’s tough enough to punch a flight attendant when she doesn’t get her way in first class.

I mean: we want people to read God’s word, right? We’re Protestants after all, and if we make the Scripture into something which requires a Scribe or a Pharisee or academic magisterium just to get past the introduction, our man Wycliffe may be rolling in his grave.

So I say all that to say this: at some point, I’m going to post a review of the new evangelical translation of the Golden Tables (also known as the ESV Study Bible), and I come at the job with a pretty obvious and unashamed bias against the genre. I read the “Literary Study Bible” and found it “helpful”, but frankly I wouldn’t hand it to a new Christian. He needs to read the actual book of Hebrews and not the high-falootin’ grad-school spin about genre and style those of us with too much time on our hands might enjoy with a cigar and a glass of brandy.

Stay tuned for that.

You won't believe it

iMonk asks very real, serious questions and publishes the sober, sound, pastoral advice of a level-headed traditionalist.

I think I just heard a shout and a trumpet. The end has come -- see you on the other side.

Praise. God.

Art Monk.

Are most blogs boring?

I said over at JT's blog today that most blogs are boring. Is that a slam, or if that a mere fact?

Judge for yourself. There are more than 112.8 million blogs in existence today (in English, per Technorati; there are allegedly 72 million blogs in addition to that in Chinese, but most of you don't read Chinese, so that's not a relevant fact)

112.8 million blogs. Now, seriously: my blog has a faithful following of about 300 readers and 100 linkers -- and that puts me in the top 5% of all blogs. If you do all the math there, that means that if I am at the very bottom of the top 5%, 107,160,000 blogs have fewer readers than I do.

With that point in mind, consider a second point: how many blogs do you actually read? I glance at all the blogs in my blogroll about twice a month, but on a daily basis I read about 6 blogs -- two of which I write (unless you count the meta). Anybody actually read more than a dozen blogs a day?

The question "why?" then has to be answered, and the obvious first "why?" is that you only have so much time. Right? I have 15 minutes a day to catch up on things, and that means I can only read so much. But the other ridiculously-obvious answer is, "and these are the only blogs I can stomach or that can hold my attention."

If there were more blogs which you found interesting, you'd get them on your RSS or something. Subscribe to updates and read later. But you don't -- because most blogs are -boring-. YAWN!

That said, the take-away here is not, "stir up more controversy to get more readers" -- because that approach to blogging is, in fact, disreputable. Michelle Malkin blogs like that; the watchblogging community blogs like that (gut check: when was the last time any of them blogged about something positive they enjoyed?); don't you go and blog like that. But what you can do is learn to write better prose. You could write better prose, you know: you just have to read a little and write a little more.

I was on the phone with somebody yesterday, and he said something I think the rest of you should think about. He said that he's always surprised to meet most bloggers because they are -nothing- like the blog they write. His meaning was that most bloggers are a lot more interesting in person than they are on their blog.

Isn't that a shame? Well, shame on us, people. Blog better -- it is actually in you to do so.

'nuff said

Over at the vacationing Justin Taylor's blog, an essay by Tim Keller and David Powlison has been posted, and in the meta over there I posted this response:

So is this a bad report on the bringers of a bad report?

I respect the vision here -- a Biblical vision of turning a brother away from his sin. I reject the idea that every "bad report" is inherently sinful. The book of Galatians is, itself, a public "bad report" from Paul against those in Galatia who were defacing the Gospel -- and Paul didn't go to these guys first and say, "listen, I didn't want to say anything in front of the whole church, and I certainly am not suggesting that you are bad guys, but is your paradigm for the inclusivity of Christ's work excessively biased to Old-Covenant mores and boundary markers?" I think Paul's language is markedly more aggressive and pointed than that.

I'm fairly on-record against the excesses of watch-blogging, and if that's what this brief essay is trying to get at, so be it. But it is one thing to repudiate hyperbolic accusations for matters of secondary (or tertiary) importance, and another entirely to say that all disagreements are inherently private disagreements which need to be settled over a cup of coffee, face to face, without any regard to the public scope of the point in contention.

The proof of this lies simply in answering the question, "How does one refute or repudiate the excesses of watch-bloggers?" The way that engagement would have to unfold -- as a mixture of public exposition and private mediation -- seems to me to look a lot more like the multiform method of engaging error in the NT than the (if I can be forgiven for saying so) simplistic view being advanced here.

Coupla other things occured to me after I posted that, so let me spill those out for you and then dac or anyone else who thinks that this is just a matter of being nicer people can say their peace.

First off, I prefer open and honest discourse. Really. I'd much rather put all the cards on the table -- especially when something has been said or done in public -- than clam up and hope that later someone will, because they are so very concerned and grieved and troubled, ask me what I think. And I think most often, the dialog itself is instructive and therefore useful to other people -- when it is a dialog.

You know: when it's not actually a give-and-take, it's not even worth engaging at all.

But that said, there are also some things you have to do someplace other than the center ring of the 3-ring circus or the main podium at the U.N. And church discipline is one of those things.

So someplace between the right-mind application of church discipline and the rght-minded application of public dispute lies the answer to the question Dr. Keller and Dr. Powlison have asked. And the test case for whatever solution you think you have for this question is, in fact, dealing with watch-bloggers.

On the one hand, we have events like the ones I accidentally found out about yesterday in which Ken Sliva got shut down by his ISP because Richard Abanes was going to "contact his lawyers" over a somewhat-older post Ken had made about Abanes -- and it seems to me that this particular situation demonstrates everything that is wrong with watchblogging. Could Ken have been a little more charitable? I think yes. Could Abanes have been -- and still be -- a little more transparent about what his intention were/are? Yes, I think so. His explanation that the phrase "contact my attorney" (or words to that effect) could mean anything in the context he provided is a little coy. So rather than have an open and public discussion -- even across blogs -- about the matter at hand, what we have instead winds up looking more like the problem in 1 Cor 6 where we let non-believers judge our disputes than like James 5.

The truth is that watchblogging tends to be a mixed bag -- because it is generally a very serious hobby in which very serious people are very concerned about things with eternal value. And to that end, Amen. We should be serious about the eternal question and value of the Gospel. But it is not just seriousness we need to have in this matter: we need to have a little bit of joy and a little bit of humility towards truth, too.

Of course, I am the perfect example of what I'm talking about, and if everyone was just like me the blogosphere would be a lot more informative and funny and edifying. So go back and read my whole blog from the beginning, including the Santa debacle, and learn from my mistakes God-inspired wisdom so that you can engage people without having to beat them to a bloody pulp.


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What are you laughing at?

Not from the Bible

But useful: 10 Ways to Reduce Your Divorce Risk.

The 2-year courtship thing seems like a bit much to me, and this list omits advice I would deem indispensable like "do hard things together" (she says just "do things together", which I think is less than the minimum), and "plan your family's future".

However, for someone who's not marriage at all, this list is a good place to start thinking about what it means to be married and not just in a relationship.

Really

After coming back from vacation, Doug Wilson said:

It would be far better to say that Jesus came to solve all our worldly problems. The difference is that He does not do it the same way we do, which is to say, ineffectively. He really will save the world, and all our tinpot messiahs won't. Salvation is only through Jesus, but it really is salvation that will be manifested in this world. Related to this, salvation from our worldly problems won't come from conservative armies or from liberal nannies.

Which, of course, is exactly right.

1505

This morning Facebook informed me that I have 19 fans and Dan Phillips only has 13 fans. It seems a little incongruous that I have almost 50% more fans than Dan, but yeah, OK: facts are facts.