Eschatological Entertainment

Apparently, Borders is privy to the end of the world.  In music and movies, at any rate.  They’ve just announced The Top 50 Music and Movies of All Time.  Never mind the questionable grammar of the title, spare a thought for their marketing department.  Where do you go after this?  The five books to read in heaven?  Perhaps we’ll see a return to Egyptian burial rites, with people being burried with their favourites cds, dvds, and books.  Penguin aren’t much better with their return to the genesis of the paperback.  There is something about consumer capitalism that gives you the feeling that you are at the end of the world.  At any rate, booksellers and publishers are in that headspace right now.  Can you not feel the doom gathering?  The black clouds of crisis are hanging over the book industry, and they know it.  They are pulling out all the stops they can – (by the by, how is it that an organ (of all instruments) metaphor is so prominent?) – to stave off the apparently inevitable.

Anywho, here are Borders top 5 in albums and movies:

Albums: Thriller – Michael Jackson; Grace – Jeff Buckley; The Joshua Tree – U2; Darkside of the Moon – Pink Floyd; Rush of Blood to the Head – Coldplay

Movies: Amelie; The Lord of the Rings; Love Actually; Star Wars; Breakfast at Tiffany’s

The album top five is acceptable, (but Coldplay? The Beatles came 6 and 7 with Seargent Pepper’s and Abbey Road).  But the movies…. Love Actually?!?  (There might also be protest over the presence of trilogies being a trifle unfair).

See the two lists here.

Filed under: books, cinema, eschatology, hilarious, literature, madness, marketing , books, Borders, Crisis, Lists, marketing, movies, music, Penguin, Publishing, Stupidity, Top 50 of All Time

Beards of a kind

Apparently, Rowan Williams, the gloriously hirsute Archbishop of Canterbury, has just published a a new book on Dostoyevsky.  Our reading group should be interested to note the parallels he draws here between the novel, or narrative, and eschatology.  I blatantly steal the following quotation and image from Ben, at Faith and Theology:

“In writing fiction in which no formula is allowed unchallengeable victory, Dostoevsky has implicitly developed what might be called a theology of writing, specifically of narrative writing. Every fiction is at its most fictional in its endings, those pretences of closure and settlement. Every morally and religiously serious fiction has to project something beyond that ending or otherwise signal a level of incompletion…. The gratuity of fiction arises from the conviction that no kind of truth can be told if we speak or act as if history is over, as if the description of what contingently is becomes the sole possible account of language…. The novel ought to be a stout defender of the independence of eschatology in its most robust sense – that is, a defender of the apparently obvious but actually quite vulnerable conviction that the present does not possess the future.”

—From Rowan Williams’ extraordinary new book, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008), pp. 46, 60.

These points on narrative sound, to me, very similar to points that Paul Ricoeur – my current reading – makes about narrative, in the course of a philosophical examination of the practice, experience, and subjectivity of history.  But of course, you needn’t worry about that too much.  More pressing is the way that Dosty wins hands down in the beard contest.

Filed under: eschatology, literature, quotations , Dostoyevsky, eschatology, Rowan Williams

Not standing idly by

My heart cries out over Moab;
her fugitives flee as far as Zoar,
as far as Eglath Shelishiyah.
They go up the way to Luhith,
weeping as they go;
on the road to Horonaim
they lament their destruction.

This is a passage from the book of Isaiah. Isaiah foretells the destruction of Moab (by Assyria, I believe), a nation that was once a part of Israel (we’re talking 8th Century BC here). Even as Isaiah, speaking for the Lord at this point, weeps over Moab, it is still him holding out judgement as well, because of their overweening pride. And yet, Judah is also to care for Moab’s refugees:

Let the Moabite fugitives stay with you;
be their shelter from the destroyer.”
The oppressor will come to an end,
and destruction will cease;
the aggressor will vanish from the land.

In love a throne will be established;
in faithfulness a man will sit on it—
one from the house of David—
one who in judging seeks justice
and speeds the cause of righteousness.

Judgements do not come without tears, nor without help and hospitality to those who flee towards the hope of justice and faithfulness. Even as there are small hopes in view of the larger hope – just as refuge for the Moabites conjoins with a messianic hope – there are small disasters in presage of a final conflagration. But this does not mean that we stand idly by, but precisely because of this, we are motivated by that same hope.

A bit of a logical leap, but this makes me think of the UN… and that hoping for guns to be tied in knots is no bad thing. To repeat Byron’s quotation from Jurgen Moltmann, “Christian eschatology is the remembered hope of the raising of the crucified Christ, so it talks about beginning afresh in the deadly end.”

Filed under: Isaiah, eschatology