postmodernbible

Dr Disappointing and Sci-Fi Spirituality

Well, I must say that I was pretty disappointed with tonight's episode of Dr Who.  I was worried about the Slitheens already - who can take an alien seriously if they have eyes like that?  I mean - the whole shape!  And could you really believe that these guys were cosmic scrap metal merchants!  With finger nails like that!  Come on! 

There had been some interesting tension in the episodes to date what with scary sceances and the end of the world with tree-people (although the exploding human skin thing was rather 'thin' characterisation!) - but the screaming pig alien thing was a bit of a dopey moment.  Tonight's slitheen episode from Calcium-based lifeforms being exploded by pickled onions to that stupid chase through Downing Street...sorry, it was a bit too much like slapstick.

I was speaking with Mark Goodacre (see links) last week about this and other things as part of my search for some reviews/theological reflection on the TV Series Second Coming (we decided that there is precious little out there!).  We then moved onto sci-fi and spirituality. 

Now, some sci-fi has some great spirituality in it - Dune is my favourite with all its Samaritan and Qumran and Arabic allusions; but there is also Arthur C Clarke and all the other great stuff.  But there is also a whole host of sci-fi where there seems to be a deathly absence of any form of spirituality or organised religion as such - I mean look at this series of Doctor Who or I Robot or...it's strange that it simply doesn't get a look in at all - where does Christianity and Islam and Hinduism and all that go?  I mean I Robot is set in 2037 and there is nothing left within the culture which speaks at all of organised religion.  And Star Trek - where is the spirituality there?

I was comparing this to Doug Coupland's futuristic adventure in Girlfriend in a Coma where the spirituality is all over the place.  And then, of course, there is the Left Behind Series...!!!

I just wonder what a Gospel according to Dr Who would look like - apparently Damaris already have a study guide at the printers, so no doubt the answer is spinning off the press already.  I am not convinced, however, that they will actually get there.  It is interesting, isn't it, that Russell Davies has among his list of hits - Second Coming (Chris Eccleston as Steve Baxter) and Doctor Who (Chris Eccleston as Doctor) and Queer as Folk.

Here's the comments I made to Mark:

> Yes.  I hear the little rave about Doctor Who.  I am also an addict - along
> with 10m others, I hear.  My kids love it, which helps!  Although a
> theological reflection would be interesting.  I was thinking this through
> the episode about the end of the world - there were some interesting
> theological issues about the development of the tree species and the
> interbreeding of humanity and other races.  Moreover, the whole concept of
> humanity spending all their time worrying about what might happen rather
> then getting on with life in the event that nothing does happen.
>
> The thing with all these scifi programmes is that they tend to completely
> erase spirituality.  Dr Who has little space for it.  Of course, there is
> that wonderful moment in I Robot where the hero's mother is reciting a psalm
> when 'salvation' comes.  But that is almost a re-assertion that religion and
> spirituality is non-existent anymore - some thing of the past.  Anderson's
> novel - Feed - is another example of a spiritual-less future - or at least
> one where public representation of spirituality is nowhere to be seen.  Even
> if the Lord delays - I cannot see that spirituality will not be part of the
> future.  In fact, so many of these scifi things end up with a privatised,
> individualist spirituality.  Then, of course, there is the other end of the
> spectrum and Doug Coupland who retains the normal elements of postmodern
> exploration but with spirituality at the centre...
>
> Whatever the issues, sometimes I think it is all so much more real than Tim
> LaHaye's version of the future...

Comments anyone?

Pete

Eco Iser Holland Indeterminacy

OK...don't know where this is going but...

I've been reading Umberto Eco's latest volume of essays called "On Literature" and also Wolfgang Iser's "Prospecting" - and a whole host of other things too like Linda Hutcheon's "Poetics of Postmodernism" - and Yaz gave me a seminar to scan through which links in with this whole subject and the brain is churning it around.   

I keep coming across this reservation in the non-biblical theorists about applying literary criteria to non-literary texts.  Iser is very strong on this - he has to be since part of his theory is that a text is literary if it seeks to engage the reader in the process of meaning discovery - such engagement ensures that the text can transcend its own chronological and geographical context and so take on some of the ethos of great literature.  On the other hand, banal, contemporary, ephemeral texts do not engage the reader in such a process and therefore do not stand up as literature.  You don't read "The Sun" as you would "Hamlet"  - "The Sun" doesn't make as many demands or provide as many opportunities for gap filling resolution as "Hamlet" does.  Moreover, indeterminacy is really a modern phenomenon ( - not sure Iser is right here - Hamlet? Odyssey? Apuleius?).  Since it has grown up over the last couple of centuries with Joyce and co., it is not appropriate to transport it back and impose it on older texts which did not make use of this technique.  I think Iser is just being myopic here...but you can see what he means about the postmodernising of literature and the more conscious playing with genre-types and so on.  You get what I mean...and hopefully what Iser means...

Part of me agrees with this...I can see where he is coming from - Eco makes the same point in a few of his essays - like the ones on Borges, Intertextualty and wilde's Aphorisms.  It is also a commonplace argument in Biblical Studies' anti-literary theory rhetoric - especially from the evangelical wing.  If Iser says that you should only apply (his) literary theory to modern literary texts, then ancient non-literary texts (are the gospels and Paul's letters really literature - a debate in itself - perhaps John is getting there with his conscious indeterminacy...but surely it is there in all the works even if it is not supposed to be!) should dealt with differently.  So Norman Holland criticises Iser's whole concept by going back to a experiential model of reader-response.  I need to look into that more.

Eco seems to be, like me, in confusion.  At times he wants to uphold the intention of the text (note that, not the author's intention) and at times the reader's intention.  But throughout Iser and Eco there is a sense that the text has to provide the raw materials for the reader or else the reader would have nothing to gather together into some form of meaning.  Like Ready, Steady, Cook - the ingredients provided shape the final meal.  So the engagement between reader and text forms the meaning of the text.  Some texts (merging Iser with Eco) promote this engagement while others simply direct the reader how to read.  Of course, because each reader is different and brings different ingredients of their own to the table...the outcome is going to be different too.  And this applies to every form of communication - not just literature.  Eco's theories tend to focus on a general semiotics rather than a specialised literary semiotics.  But he still makes a plea for various levels of engagement and a kind of Iserian concept of plain meaning for non-literary texts - I saw this in Riffaterre's "La Production du Text" as well...mmm...

One of the fascinating things about all this is that at the end of his essay on it Iser adds a footnote suggesting that he may have misled the reader and given too much control to the reader of a text...well, why let the essay stand then?  Why let the reader read if only then to undermine?  Doesn't that reinforce the error because it focuses the reader back on the error? 

I need to read more...but if any brave soul wants to offer some insights, I'd be very happy to add your ingredients to my musings...

And yes I do know of Todorov's picnic saying or whoever else said it before or after Todorov...

Pete

Musings

Did you notice the picture - my friend Ian White took it on the Via Dolorosa on Good Friday?  It is quite funny to think that only a few days earlier I had been exploring Life of Brian with the students on my Imaging Jesus module.  Brought back hilarious memories of "Follow the Gourd!".  Excellent.  I wonder what is really happening?

I've also tried to get the Make Poverty History banner across the website...but this rather tacky way of doing it is the best I can get Typepad to do!  Apparently, if I sign up for the Professional blog then I can tinker to my heart's content.  But I reckon that is just for the serious bloggers like Jonny Baker and Maggi Dawn and TallSkinnyKiwi and ...

The books are piling up around me as I get this thesis updated.  It's the first time I've prepared anything for publication at this level and the formatting took longer than I thought.  I am now going through the text with some considerable care.  I have a confession to make - I was appalled at how many typos there were in the thesis which I hadn't noticed before!  I checked it over thousands of times and the external and internal gave me a list of corrections which have already been put in...and I found more when I did those.  But now I've found some more...help!  I suppose that when you have read something so many times it just slips by in the subconscious and you read what you want to read.  Something deep there about reading processes but I'll let it go by.

Gonna post something on Indeterminacy...

Pete

OK...

I was off preaching this weekend - we came back from Spring Harvest and had a few days catching up here - Sam was in a Cello competition (his septet won!!!), it was Emily's 13th birthday (hurrah! a teenager!!!) and then we spent a couple of days down in Cornwall. I flew the kite the kids gave me for Father's Day and it broke in the wind - after me and Sam and Emily and Edward all had hilarious fun with it - it almost pulled us all off our feet - poor Edward almost lost his arms! We had a nice time down there.

Came home on Saturday and off to Mansfield to preach on Sunday. I don't do enough preaching - I have to say that I really enjoy preaching and it was great to 'open the text' and encourage people to see what the Bible can do. I wish I had more opportunity to preach round the place...I always enjoy it - although I get so nervous beforehand!

Preached on Daniel 5 - Belshazzar's feast - after SH it has remained on my mind - the whole concept of assimilation and resistance. What does it mean to sell out so much of your identity but to maintain just enough to be seen to be different - as one upon whom the spirit of the gods rests? What does that mean? What does it mean to be that person in our society today? What would that kind of church experience be like? Emergent? Traditional? Non-existent.

JP II went out well. I saw his coffin and had to say that I was mightily impressed. Ratzinger's address was good and there was so much dignity. I did have to wonder whether post-Christendom was a reality - what with what was going on in Rome, with Charles and Camilla repenting on the BBC and the Daily Mirror and everything else. Is our society so far gone??? I think not.

Back to the book - pulling together the last strands and doing some amendments and so on. Lots to do yet and everything has to be done by 1 May. Got to get the permissions done without delay.

Gotta go home and spend an evening with the kids and then the book...

God bless to you all...be a Daniel!

Wrote this for the College mag...comments? Download daring_to_be_a_daniel.doc

Pete

Returned!

OK...I've got back from Spring Harvest.

I had a great time there and had some good coffee chats with a number of people and met some great new friends as well.  I even managed to have a couple of major discussions/pointers about the future and who I am and all that with God.  Let's see what comes out of that...

I did a week's bible studies on Daniel 1-7 which were interactive but held in the Big Top at Skegness.  I know that many of those who came to these studies found them to be very helpful - one lady talked of how I had opened doors into the text and into her experience with God...others talked of the liberation of not being told how they had to interpret but being allowed to think for themselves.  Clearly, though, the evangelical mainstream much prefer someone to stand behind the lecturn on a huge stage and lecture them for 75 minutes on what Daniel really means.  I'd love to do that and got into a huge angst towards the end of the week about whether I really should be doing that since there was so much of the text that I just couln't cover at all - by doing it interactively I only really tickled some of the issues in this fantastic text and couldn't deal with so much more that really should have been addressed.  I would have loved to go into the literary dynamics of chapter 5 (Belshazzar's Feast - one of the Bible's literary masterpieces) or the pyschology of the kings in 3 and 6 and so on - not to mention the vision imagery in chapter 7.  The academic in me was screaming to exegete the text more systematically and look at the wider issues related to it and to analyse what we were thinking we were doing in any case.  I wanted to see the different levels of reader response expected by the text and explored by the text...and why!

Interactivity encourages the listeners to do the work themselves or to interact with the text and that is what half of me says is so much better...but the other half of me says that people should actually be able to jump deep into the text and explore it and swim in it and stretch in it and...interactive bible study in such a huge venue with 500 plus people just cannot do the job well enough...or perhaps this interactive bible teacher cannot do the job well enough.  I dunno!

In the smaller settings, I did seminars on Post-Christendom and Distinctive but Diplomatic.  I've enclosed the Post-Christendom powerpoint - it's heavily based on Stuart Murray's book.  But I am not totally convinced that Post-Christendom is really that much of a reality - I think something is happening...but how wedded was the church and state in any case?  We got to thinking about the prime ministers - how many have been noted for their Christian faith?  Are things so much different now than they were even in tudor times?  Was the country ant more Christian then than now? I think there is too much nostalgia and not enough cold analysis.  People have always been moaning about how unChristian the country is...and anyway it is SO euro-centric!!!

Download Post-Christendom.ppt

Have a read of the powerpoint and send in any comments, please!!!  You never know I might write this up at some time...

Anyway, better get back to the mountain of work I've come back to...

God bless, and happy Easter.  He is risen!  Hallelujah!

Pete