Mumford & Sons: a montage

A selection, plucked from context, from their new album, Sigh no more.  They’re a poetic bunch.  But I am not interpreting these… you are:

It seems that all my bridges have been burnt.  But you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works. It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart.  But the welcome I receive with the restart.

Lead me to the truth and I will follow you with my whole life

But I can’t move the mountains for you

Plant your hope with good seeds. Don’t cover yourself with thistle and weeds. Rain down, rain down on me.

In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die. Where you invest your love, you invest your life.

Oh man is a giddy thing.

 

 

Filed under: quotations , lyrics, Mumford & Sons, music, Sigh no more

The provocative family

For someone who is about to, as the saying goes, “start a family”, I found the following to be very thought provoking:

“Formerly the strength of the family has been its social, economic, and political significance.  The fact that the economic and political significance of the family is now secondary has the ironic effect of making an idealized account of the family too important in our lives. In a world of strangers, we cling to the family as the one place that supplies us with relationships that we have not chosen.  As a set of relationships that are “given” rather than the ones we choose to opt into or out of, family relationships at least seem to promise to give our lives, if not purpose, at least an “anchor”.  The problem, however, is that the family is generally unable to bear the burden of such intense psychological and moral expectations.”

The italics are mine, at the points where I thought the point was made most incisively.

Stanley Hauerwas, “The Radical Hope in the Annunciation: Why both single and married Christians welcome children” , in The Haauerwas Reader, p.510

Filed under: Family, ethics, quotations , ethics, Family, political significance of the family, relationships, Stanley Hauerwas, theological ethics

Going postal

Have you ever wondered why, today, we can only ever be post?  It’s always post this or post that; post modernity, post capitalism (yeah, right), post secular — we can never actually be something, we can only ever be after something.

The reason is that we more often than not see things as (mere) products of an historical evolution.  There is no objective order that anchors us, only an impatience to be something other than what we are.  Today’s institutions are the baggage of the past, and yet we have not reached the future (obviously), because they are still hanging around.  So we can only ever be post, because, like, we’re so over it.

Oliver O’Donovan puts it like this:  This way of thinking – which is called ‘historicism’ (ie. everything is historical), “makes all created goods appear putatively outmoded. So that if there are currents of dissatisfaction evident in a society’s practice of [for example] marriage, such as might be indicated by a high divorce rate or a prominent homosexual culture, they will treated with great seriousness as signs of the evolution for which the institution is destined.”  Substitute churches, or democracy, or whatever for marriage, and you can see how pervasive this way of seeing the world is. Oh, except that democracy is nearly always seen as the end of the line.  But that’s a topic for another post.

But of course, we never actually become anything different, do we?  We are only ever posted, on the way, but never there.  We’re ghosts, stuck in between.  Thus we can never be content, only ever dissatisfied.

Filed under: history, observations, quotations , contentment, cultural politics, dissatisfaction, historicism, institutions, Oliver O'Donovan, postmodernism