Sewell’s speech (you can’t call it a prayer) included numerous phrases that are direct copies of Martin Luther King’s 1963 speech¹. He is doing his utmost to imitate, emulate, his role model. His ‘act’ even elicits an approving smile from the new president. The new king is entertained by his jester.

The original parts of Sewell’s speech are few: the opening prayer (with the “millimeter miracle”, implying, that Trumps is saved to become a saviour) and the call for applause at the end. All the rest is sheer plagiarism. Direct quotes from Martin Luther King’s 1963 speech. But there is a catch: A few small but clever changes in the syntax allow Sewell to use MLK’s words to proclaim Trump ‘an instrument in God’s hand.’ (in the text below I highlighted these words).

Fact-check it yourself.

Télérama (nr. 3178, 2010), interview with Marcel Gauchet, one of France’s leading intellectuals, who as a secularist (‘laïc’) says pertinent things about Christianity/religion:

Christianity is, after all, the cultural matrix of the world we live in, and if we don’t have this memory, I don’t really see what we can understand about it’.

Le christianisme est quand même la matrice culturelle du monde dans lequel nous sommes, et si l’on n’a pas cette mémoire, je ne vois pas bien ce que l’on peut y (sc. notre monde) comprendre…

Het christendom is per slot van rekening de ‘culturele matrix’ (moederschoot) van de wereld waarin wij leven, en als we ons daarvan geen rekenschap geven, zie ik niet goed in hoe we onze wereld kunnen begrijpen…

Further reading: Jean-Luc Nancy about the same topic : The deconstruction of Christianity (two quotes in Dutch)

Trois psaumes (1940-41), nr. 3: Il faut que de tous mes esprits.
Superb Psalm poem by Clément Marot (1543), joyful tune by Guillaume France (1543), and captivating composition by Arthur Honegger (1940/1). Dedicated to Eliette Schenneberg (contre-alto / mezzo) . But this performance with Jean-François Gardeil is my favorite.

Score (All three psalms) – from IMSLP. Enjoy.

Text (Fr-Eng)

God is back, and with a vengeance. Only sociologists of religion were surprised by his return, ordinary people always have known that God never left the building. ‘Secularization’ was the code word for scholars: Religion was losing its relevance, the impact of faith and faith organizations on society would decline. Max Weber: rationalization and a ‘disenchantment of the world’.  Nothing to be done about it. Or to pay tribute to the most famous sociologist of religion of the second half of the last century, Peter Berger: The sacred canopy that had sheltered us from external threats for centuries is broken, gone. Now, we must survive under the open sky, on our own, whether we like it or not. In 1968, Berger had predicted that by the year 2000 religion would be completely marginalized in society. Only in the form of small sectarian groups, which would come together to protect themselves against the evil effects of secularization, it would survive (NY Times, Sunday, February 25, 1968, ‘A Bleak Outlook is Seen for Religion’). Well, scientists can be wrong. Berger freely admitted it, long before the year 2000. Quote: “If I look back on my earlier work, I would say that I was wrong about secularization, but right about pluralism. I misunderstood the relation between the two: the latter does not necessarily lead to the former (vide the American case). What pluralism does (and there I was right) is to undermine all taken-for-granted certainties, in religion as in all other spheres of life. But it is possible to hold beliefs and to live by them even if they no longer hold the status of taken-for-granted verities. In other words, I would now say that pluralism affects the how of religious belief, but not necessarily the what.” ² The secularization theory was common among scholars looking at things from the outside (sociologists) but also within the church. There, too, ‘secularization’ was the main theme.

Continue reading…

church operating systems (COS) – helpdesk

On TV (23 september 2023) the Bishop of Antwerp, Johan Bonny, admitted that the never-ending story of sexual abuses in Belgium (and other anomalies) were symptoms (signals) of a ‘systemic error‘ in the Church. What he didn’t realize, however, was the gravity of the situation. He still believes a ‘restart’ (albeit in ‘safe mode’) is still possible. But the ‘error’ does not originate in isolated programs (bugs, software), which can be repaired, but in the ‘church operating system’ itself, called ‘the Roman-Catholic Church’: Some critical elements

• The dichotomy of the members in ‘clerics’ (priests) and ‘laity’, the latter being totally dependent on the first for access to Gods grace.
• The ‘hierarchical’ power-structure (priests>bishops), on the top of which resides the pope, ‘who has to answer to no one’ (canon-law).
• Who controls the judges? Answer: the judges. No divide between lawmakers and lawinforcers.

A prefiguration of Easter (chapter 3)

Preparing an Easter sermon about Mary Magdalene wandering about in the garden early in the morning, desperately searching for the Lord, a scene from the Song of Solomon came to mind, in which the bride (the maiden) at night is looking for her beloved. She can’t find him, and – wandering through the city – she addresses the guards, and then – suddenly – she finds him, grabs him and does not want to let go of him anymore… 1600 years ago Cyril of Alexandria saw the same connections as I did (and you, reader). Hypertext. The text in question is Song of Solomon ch. 3:1-4 (translation below). The story of Mary in the garden can be read in John 20:1, 11b-18. I wondered: Did the evangelist use the story from the Song of Solomon as a matrix to tell his story of Mary? A kind of literary device?

Commentary of Cyril of Alexandria

Commentary of Cyril on Canticum canticorum ch. 3, 1: On my bed, during the night, I looked for my beloved… Below the original Greek with latin translation and below that a translation of Cyril’s remarks in English, turning Ch 3, 1-4 into a allegoric description of the meeting between Mary of Magdala and her Lord. NB: koitè (cubicule, lectum) denotes not only the bed, but also the room (bedroom, resting place); mnèma (monumentum – both use the same root: “mnm” = rememberance), memorial, tomb.

Three classic typologies you need to know to understand the opening Chorus of the SMP, and the role of the dramatis personae in the Passion. All three typologies are neatly presented to the listener in the Opening Chorus. They all refer to Christ and suggest an interpretation of the events that will be told in the ‘Passion’:
– The Lamb
– the Groom (+ Bride[smaids], the daughters of Sion)
– Isaac, Abraham’s son.

1. The Lamb is the Paschal Lamb, a sacrificial animal slaughtered at Pesach. Its blood – so the story (‘haggadah’) tells us – rescues the Israelites from the Angel of Death who roamed through Egypt, ushering in the Exodus. In Christian theology this meaning (“salvation throuhg the blood of the lamb”) including the imagery is transferred to Christ when he is called the Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi (German choral: “O Lamm Gottes unschuldig…”).
2. Jesus as the Bridegroom, whose fate is bemoaned by the women along the road (Gospel of Matthew). These women are addressed by Jesus as the Daughters of Sion/Jerusalem. They are invited to help telling the story of Jesus’ passion correctly. It’s a reference to the friends of the girl/Bride, the bridesmaids from the Song of Songs. The allegorical reading of this Bible Book was quintessential to the Spirituality of the (Lutheran) Church. There is also a reference to the parables of the bridesmaids waiting for the Groom to arrive. The Bride has a twofold reference:
   A. Community of Believers (collectivum), the Church;
   B. The Soul of the believer (individual)
3. Isaac, Abraham’s son, carrying the ‘wood’ for his own sacrifice (typos of Christ carrying his cross), also quoted for his willingness to comply with his F(f)ather’s command, to be sacrificed.

A song for Christmas and Easter by Samuel Scheidt

Samuel Scheidt must have thought: why not publish a simple ‘Hallelujah’ that can be used for the two main celebrations of Christianity, Easter and Christmas, alike. Above the Easter version ‘Surrexit Christus hodie – Humano pro consolamine’ (‘Christ is risen to comfort human kind’). The Christmas version sings ‘Puer natus in Bethlehem’ – ‘Unde gaudet Jerusalem’. When you teach/learn this by heart, you kill two birds with one stone: a festive opening chorus for both feasts.

Here you can download the PDF: https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Surrexit_Christus_hodie_(Samuel_Scheidt)

Chapter 4.2.4 from Umberto Eco, How to write a thesis (1977, 1985, obsolete as a technical guide, but still relevant with regard to the attitude of a scholar). In this subchapter he recounts the ‘story of the Abbot Vallet’, to which he returns in the foreword of the second edition. There it becomes even more wonderful.

Chapter 4.2.4 Academic Humility

Do not let this subsection’s title frighten you. It is not an ethical disquisition. It concerns reading and filing methods.
You may have noticed that on one of the cards, as a young scholar, I teased the author Biondolillo by dismissing him in a few words. I am still convinced that I was justified in doing so, because the author attempted to explain the important topic of the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas in only 18 lines. This case was extreme, but I filed the card on the book, and I noted the author’s opinion anyway. I did this not only because we must record all the opinions expressed on our topic, but also because the best ideas may not come from the major authors. And now, to prove this, I will tell you the story of the abbot Vallet.
To fully understand this story, I should explain the question that my thesis posed, and the interpretive stumbling block that obstructed my work for about a year. Since this problem is not of general interest, let us say succinctly that for contemporary aesthetics, the moment of the perception of beauty is generally an intuitive moment, but for St. Thomas the category of intuition did not exist. Many contemporary interpreters have striven to demonstrate that he had somehow talked about intuition, and in the process they did violence to his work. On the other hand, St. Thomas’s moment of the perception of objects was so rapid and instantaneous that it did not explain the enjoyment of complex aesthetic qualities, such as the contrast of proportions, the relationship between the essence of a thing and the way in which this essence organizes matter, etc. The solution was (and I arrived at it only a month before completing my thesis) in the discovery that aesthetic contemplation lay in the much more complex act of judgment. But St. Thomas did not explicitly say this. Nevertheless, the way in which he spoke of the contemplation of beauty could only lead to this conclusion. Often this is precisely the scope of interpretive research: to bring an author to say explicitly what he did not say, but that he could not have avoided saying had the question been posed to him. In other words, to show how, by comparing the various statements, that answer must emerge, in the terms of the author’s scrutinized thought. Maybe the author did not give the answer because he thought it obvious, or because—as in the case of St. Thomas—he had never organically treated the question of aesthetics, but always discussed it incidentally, taking the matter for granted.
Therefore, I had a problem, and none of the authors I was reading helped me solve it (although if there was anything original in my thesis, it was precisely this question, with the answer that was to come out of it). And one day, while I was wandering disconsolate and looking for texts to aid me, I found at a stand in Paris a little book that attracted me at first for its beautiful binding. I opened it and found that it was a book by a certain abbot Vallet, titled L’idée du Beau dans la philosophie de Saint Thomas d’Aquin (The idea of beauty in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas) (Louvain, 1887). I had not found it in any bibliography. It was the work of a minor nineteenth-century author. Naturally I purchased it (and it was even inexpensive). I began to read it, and I realized that the abbot Vallet was a poor fellow who repeated preconceived ideas and did not discover anything new. If I continued to read him, it was not for “academic humility,” but for pure stubbornness, and to recoup the money I had spent. (I did not know such humility yet, and in fact I learned it reading that book. The abbot Vallet was to become my great mentor.) I continued reading, and at a certain point—almost in parentheses, said probably unintentionally, the abbot not realizing his statement’s significance—I found a reference to the theory of judgment linked to that of beauty. Eureka!
I had found the key, provided by the poor abbot Vallet, who had died a hundred years before, who was long since forgotten, and yet who still had something to teach to someone willing to listen.
This is academic humility: the knowledge that anyone can teach us something. Perhaps this is because we are so clever that we succeed in having someone less skilled than us teach us something; or because even someone who does not seem very clever to us has some hidden skills; or also because someone who inspires us may not inspire others. The reasons are many. The point is that we must listen with respect to anyone, without this exempting us from pronouncing our value judgments; or from the knowledge that an author’s opinion is very different from ours, and that he is ideologically very distant from us. But even the sternest opponent can suggest some ideas to us. It may depend on the weather, the season, and the hour of the day. Perhaps, had I read the abbot Vallet a year before, I would not have caught the hint. And who knows how many people more capable than I had read him without finding anything interesting. But I learned from that episode that if I wanted to do research, as a matter of principle I should not exclude any source. This is what I call academic humility. Maybe this is hypocritical because it actually requires pride rather than humility, but do not linger on moral questions: whether pride or humility, practice it.