“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of news, stories, resources, and media on the intersection of faith and culture for you to explore through your weekend. Wander through these links however you like and in any order you like. Disclaimer: I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed within these articles but have found them thought-provoking.
“Advent is for Singing Not-Christmas Songs” – W. David O. Taylor at his blog: “Advent is for singing not-Christmas songs, not Christmas songs. This is, of course, easier said than done. Hymnals fail to supply a decent list of options and congregants often clamor for the ‘traditional’ carols, the songs of triumphant appearance and glorious coming. Yet this insistence fights against the dominant concern of the gospels. Luke especially spends the bulk of his story anticipating Christ’s birth rather than narrating his arrival. The dramatic tension lies in what’s to come—not in what’s happened already. The fulfillment of prophecies, the promises of angels, the poetic utterances of unlikely protagonists who imagine the unimaginable? All of these elements feature prominently in the nativity tales. And singing such things together is arguably one of the important tasks of the church. Singing is the way that we remember who God really is. He is the God who takes his time.“
“How a 4th-century poem combating heresies became a Christmas carol” – In America: The Jesuit Review: “If you’re in search of an ancient, theologically rich carol this season, look no further than ‘Of the Father’s Love Begotten.’ Long before it became a Christmas carol in the 19th century, this hymn was first penned as a poem in the 4th century by Aurelius Clemens Prudentius. As Brian Flanagan, theologian and church historian, explains, this was a time of significant turmoil in church history, with Christian doctrine being defined and refined through heated debates and councils. Prudentius’ poetry appears to have been a creative way of conveying some of the core teachings that emerged from the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. to the faithful.”
“Of Dragons and Other Creatures” – Sr. Carino Hodder in Comment: “‘She beckoned to me with a wreath of gold,’ cries Kristin Lavransdatter to her father, Lavrans, in Sigrid Undset’s novel The Wreath. Alone among the trees on an unfamiliar mountainside, the child Kristin has stumbled across an elf-maiden—dream, vision, fairy, or demon; Undset leaves the reader to decide, or anxiously speculate—and only when her father answers her screams for help is she saved. But the terror is not over. Danger has breached the fragile, developing boundaries of the young girl’s world for the first time, and now threatens to alter it forever. The elf-maiden remains a frightening and imposing figure in her inner life, appearing without warning in her thoughts and prayers for weeks afterward. Later, the old monk Edvin takes Kristin into the parish church and shows her the painting of her heavenly patron, Saint Kristina, beside a dragon. ‘It seems to me the dragon is awfully small,’ says Kristin. ‘Dragons and all other creatures that serve the Devil only seem big as long as we harbor fear within ourselves,’ Brother Edvin responds. ‘But if a person seeks God with such earnestness and desire that he enters into His power, then the power of the Devil at once suffers such a great defeat that his instruments become small and impotent.'”
“The Enclosure of the Human Psyche” – L. M. Sacasas at The Convivial Society: “If you were to ask me something like ‘What’s the most urgent task before us?’ or ‘What counsel do you have to offer in this cultural moment?’ I would say this: Resist the enclosure of the human psyche. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m sure there are other necessary and urgent tasks. But this would be my contribution to the conversation. I would be offering not only an imperative to pursue, but also, and perhaps more importantly, an analogy to clarify and interpret the techno-economic forces at play in a digitized society. Such analogies or concepts can be useful. They can crystalize a certain understanding of the world and catalyze action and resolve. They can be a rallying cry. In any case, I’ll say it again: resist the enclosure of the human psyche. Some of you may immediately intuit the force of the analogy, but I suspect it needs a little unpacking. Here’s the short version…”
“Family Matters” – Alan Jacobs at The Homebound Symphony: “When Christopher Lasch’s Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged appeared in 1977, some critics on the Right denounced it as Marxist, while other critics on the Left denounced it as reactionary. On both sides there was, I think, a failure to understand what Lasch was primarily trying to do, which was to demonstrate the woeful inadequacy of then-current social-scientific thinking about the family — and to indicate some of the dire consequences of that inadequacy….In his preface to the paperback edition of his book, Lasch asks his critics, especially his feminist critics, to consider two major points. First, that ‘indifference to the needs of the young has become one of the distinguishing characteristics of a society that lives for the moment, defines the consumption of commodities as the highest form of personal satisfaction, and exploits existing resources with criminal disregard of the future.’ And second, that ‘the problem of women’s work and women’s equality needs to be examined from a perspective more radical than any that has emerged from the feminist movement. It has to be seen as a special case of the general rule that work takes precedence over the family.'”
“Martin Scorsese Wants to Adapt Marilynne Robinson’s Novel ‘Home’ as His Next Film” – Samantha Bergeson in IndieWire “Martin Scorsese may have put some previously announced projects like ‘The Wager’ and his long-rumored Frank Sinatra biopic on the back burner, but the prolific auteur has teased another adaptation in the works: bringing Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home to the screen. Scorsese told AP that while his A Life of Jesus film has been optioned, he is working around the “scheduling issue” of adapting Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robinson’s book. ‘It’s an option but I’m still working on it,’ Scorsese said of A Life of Jesus, adding, ‘There’s a very strong possibility of me doing a film version of Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Home,’ but that’s a scheduling issue.'”
Music: “Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” as performed by the Ely Cathedral Choir
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Matthew Erickson 