Jesus
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not "perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.” (John 3:16-17)
Martin Buber
“In the relation to God, unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional inclusiveness are one. For those who enter into the absolute relationship, nothing particular retains any importance—neither things nor beings, neither earth nor heaven—but everything is included in the relationship. For entering into the pure relationship does not involve ignoring everything but seeing everything in the You, not renouncing the world but placing it upon its proper ground. Looking away from the world is no help toward God; staring at the world is no help either; but whoever beholds the world in him stands in his presences…” (from
I and Thou)
C.S. Lewis
“When I attempted a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends, or as the landscape loses the celestial light… For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can, no one cares. Now, a scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable Something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us, but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in the universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, the bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret.” (from
The Weight of Glory)
Terrence Malick
Badlands (1972)
Days of Heaven (1978)
The Thin Red Line (1998)
The New World (2005)
Martin Heidegger
“Truth is the truth of Being. Beauty does not occur alongside and apart from this truth. When truth sets itself into the work, it appears. Appearance—as this being of truth in the work and as work—is beauty. Thus the beautiful belongs to the advent of truth, truth’s taking of its place. It does not exist merely relative to pleasure and purely as its object.” (from “The Origin of the Work of Art.”)
Saint Paul
“Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (I Corinthians 13:12)
Marshall McLuhan
“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.” (from
The Medium is the Massage)
Sufjan Stevens
And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid
(from “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“And as I sat there brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s long dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it, He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” (from
The Great Gatsby)
Yasujiro Ozu
Tokyo Story (1953)
George Steiner
“All representations, even the most abstract, infer a rendezvous with intelligibility or, at the least, with a strangeness attenuated, qualified by observance and willed form. Apprehension (the meeting with the other) signifies both fear and perception. The continuum between both, the modulation from one to the other, lie at the source of poetry and the arts.” (from
Real Presences)
Paul Tillich
“What is the nature of a being that is able to produce art? Man is finite. He is, as one could say, mixed of being and nonbeing. Once he was not. Now he is and some time he will not be. He is not by himself, but thrown into existence and he will be thrown out of existence and cease to be for himself. He is delivered to the flux of time which runs from the past to the future through the ever-moving point which is called the present. He is aware of the infinite. He is aware that he belongs to it. But he is also aware that he is excluded from it… Out of the anxiety, and the double awareness that we are finite and that we belong to infinity from which we are excluded, the urge arises to express the essential unity of that which we are in symbols which are religious and artistic.” (from
On Art and Architecture)
Dorothy Sayers
“Poets have, indeed, often communicated in their own mode of expression truths identical with the theologians’ truths; but just because of the difference in the modes of expression, we often fail to see the identity of the statements.” (from
The Mind of the Maker)
Over the Rhine
What a beautiful piece of heartache this has all turned out to be.
Lord knows we've learned the hard way all about healthy apathy.
And I use these words pretty loosely.
There's so much more to life than words.
(from “Latter Days”)
Soren Kierkegaard
“He will grant thee a hiding place within Him, and once hidden in Him he will hide thy sins. For He is the friend of sinners... He does not merely stand still, open His arms and say, 'Come hither'; no, he stands there and waits, as the father of the lost son waited, rather He does not stand and wait, he goes forth to seek, as the shepherd sought the lost sheep, as the woman sought the lost coin. He goes--yet no, he has gone, but infinitely farther than any shepherd or any woman, He went, in sooth, the infinitely long way from being God to becoming man, and that way He went in search of sinners.” (from
Training in Christianity)
Richard Linklater
Before Sunrise (1995)
Waking Life (2001)
Before Sunset (2004)
George MacDonald
“In what belongs to the deeper meanings of nature and her mediation between us and God, the appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries in and concerning them. The show of things is that for which God cares most, for their show is the face of far deeper things than they; we see in them, in a distant way, as in a glass darkly, the face of the unseen. It is through their show, not through their analysis, that we enter into their deepest truths. What they say to the childlike soul is the truest thing to be gathered of them.” (from
The Voice of Job)
Emily Dickinson
The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted opon Earth –
The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity
John Steinbeck
“In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.” (from
East of Eden)
Bob Dylan
He woke up, the room was bare
He didn't see her anywhere.
He told himself he didn't care,
pushed the window open wide,
Felt an emptiness inside
to which he just could not relate
Brought on by a simple twist of fate.
(from “Simple Twist of Fate”)
Walker Percy
“What is the malaise? You ask. The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost.” (from
The Moviegoer)
Sofia Coppola
Virgin Suicides (2000)
Lost in Translation (2003)
Marie Antoinette (2006)
Kathleen Norris
“Church is to be participated in and not consumed. The point is not what one gets out of it, but the worship of God; the service takes place both because of and despite the needs, strengths, and frailties of the people present. How else could it be?” (from
Dakota)
Marilynne Robinson
“Whenever I think of Edward, I think of playing catch in a hot street and that wonderful weariness of the arms. I think of leaping after a high throw and that wonderful collaboration of the whole body with itself and that wonderful certainty and amazement when you know the glove is just where it should be. Oh, I will miss the world!” (from
Gilead)
N.T. Wright
“Preaching the gospel means announcing Jesus as Lord of the world; and, unless we are prepared to contradict ourselves with every breath we take, we cannot make that announcement without seeking to bring that lordship to bear over every aspect of the world.” (from
What Saint Paul Really Said).
David Bazan
It's weird to think of all the things
That have not been keeping up with the times
It's ten o' clock the sun is down
Just begun to set the western hills on fire
I hear that you don't change
How do you expect to keep up with the trends
You won't survive the information age
Unless you plan to change the truth to accommodate the brilliance of man
The brilliance of man
(from “Letter From a Concerned Follower”)
G.K. Chesterton
“Gazing at some detail like a bird or a cloud, we can all ignore its awful blue background; we can neglect the sky; and precisely because it bears down upon us with an annihilating force it is felt as nothing. A thing of this kind can only be an impression and a rather subtle impression; but to me it is a very strong impression made by pagan literature and religion. I repeat that in our special sacramental sense there is, of course, the absence of the presence of God. But there is in a very real sense the presence of the absence of God. We feel it in the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry; for I doubt if there was ever in all the marvelous manhood of antiquity a man who was happy as St. Francis was happy.” (from
The Everlasting Man)
Gus Van Sant
Elephant (2003)
Paranoid Park (2008)
Solomon
"I have seen the task which God has given the sons of men with which to occupy themselves. He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to rejoice and to do good in one's lifetime; moreover, that every man who eats and drinks sees good in all his labor--it is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will remain forever; there is nothing to add to it and there is nothing to take from it, for God has so worked that men should fear Him. That which is has been already and that which will be has already been, for God seeks what has passed by." (Ecclesiastes 3:10-15).
Jack Kerouac
“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” (from
On the Road)
St. Augustine
"Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee..."
Martin Luther
“Unless I am convinced by proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen."
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
The Son (2002)
The Child (2005)
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Interesting discussion on the idea of rights here.
Sorry, Brett, but this is a boring reaction, that displays zero understanding of the transgender experience and a remarkable lack of empathy. Pretty disappointing.
Yesterday in Dr. Film’s class we had a fashion designer and a model come in from your church and discuss “the world of fashion” with us. It’s pretty interesting to hear seminary-trained people talk about a theology of fashion for the first time…basically what I got out of our discussion was that we’re desperate to outwardly project an inwardly sensed beauty or desire for beauty…I wonder how much the decision to have a baby can be an extension of this.
If the central meaningful act in our culture is to buy beautifying change…perhaps buying a partial sex change is just the next logical step in the sequence that starts with purchasing hairspray-if you think spikey hair and your inwardly felt gender are closer to the most beautiful “ideal/real you” than flat hair and your biological sex.
I think Kevin’s comment proves your point. As a society, we have come to the point of rights being a matter of sincerity, non-malfeasance, and scientific possibility…for some this is very freeing, but I wonder if some of us aren’t short-changing ourselves by skipping the process of suffering through the potentially life-long identity formation struggles we have been given. Peace of mind and fulfillment are commodities which can be had, but notions of the value of “the search” seem to have been lost.
Gosh, Will. Putting transgender issues in the same superficial category as buying hairspray? Gosh. I am almost too flabbergasted to be offended. To “profound lack of understanding of gender identity issues” and “lack of empathy” we can now add “pathological uncuriosity” and “bizarrely presumptuous sanctimony.” Regrettably, this typifies the conservative christian response to transgendered people across the board.
That need not be the case. But I wish that people, before offering their punditry on these issues would ask themselves: how many transgendered people do I actually know? How many have I had deep conversations with? Have I made a serious effort to listen to their stories and perspectives and life experiences with compassion and patience? Is my understanding of this situation more than superficial? Or do I need to spend more time educating myself before I attempt to formulate an argument?
Maybe (probably) I’m stupid, but I don’t really see what the problem is with Thomas Beatie, and I don’t see the need for ‘scare quotes’ around any and all pronouns referring to him (nor the condescending usage of ‘him/her’ & ‘(s)he’ tomfoolery).
Kevin, thank you for your challenge to engage people bearing a transgender label as individuals. You may be right to view my questions as indicative of a radical perspective. It’s my hope that we conduct our interpersonal engagements in such a way that we are focused on acknowledgment of shared human similarities rather than assumed differences. Stated more plainly, my suggestion was that we all struggle with notions of identity and appropriate expressions of these identities. Most of us are also very eager to find the quickest and least painful resolutions to these struggles. Afterwards, we sometimes recognize that we achieved more meaningful growth and identity development through the struggles themselves than we did through their resolutions. Yet, it’s rare that we have the eyes to see this value in the midst of our strife as we experience it.
Will, I don’t regard your perspective as radical but as banal and insular. A cursory look at almost any personal narrative written by a transgendered individual would reveal that these folks don’t arrive at that self-identification because it’s quick and easy, or a path of least resistance. It’s a long and difficult process of coming to terms with oneself, one that involves a lot of searching and struggling. To suggest otherwise is, frankly, ignorant and patronizing. Sorry to be so blunt, but you’re making some pretty sweeping claims about a group that includes some close friends, and I would be a coward and a crappy friend if I let those claims go unchallenged.
Tim: OTM re: pronouns.
I feel deeply sorry for the pain and confusion of people who believe themselves to have been born as what they feel is the wrong gender. The fact that their search may take them a long time and a lot of work doesn’t change that the decision they come to is a denial of their identity on a molecular level.
The fact is that Ms. Beatie has functioning ovaries, fallopian tubes and a birth canal. Her genetic code began creating those as soon as cellular division began in her mother’s womb. Surgeries could alter her body so as to mimic the urinary and reproductive organs of a male, but she has the double-X chromosome as a part of every cell in her body. She is, therefore, “she.” Many women undergo mastectomies as a part of their treatment for breast cancer. Women may take testosterone as a part of medical treatments as well. We do not suddenly begin to call either group “men” or say that such changes have somehow removed their identity as women.
Similarly, hermaphrodites should simply be referred to as ‘it’ until they’ve had genetic testing done to reveal what human language should be used to speak of them, rather than assuming they have any feelings or thoughts on the matter.
Brett, I sincerely hope that if you ever have the opportunity to meet Mr. Beatie, you have the wherewithal not to insist upon saying ‘Hello, ma’am.’
Further, as a Christian, you should be one of the first to insist that a person’s identity consists of more than merely the scientific descriptions available of that person. I have lived my entire life as a heterosexual male; imagine my chagrin if a DNA test were to reveal that I have no Y-chromosome, and that merely because of that everyone I knew and loved started referring to me as ‘her.’ It is not the sex change operation that merits Mr. Beatie’s identity as a man, it’s the fact that Mr. Beatie, regardless of plumbing, is male, because gender is a social construct. You simultaneously insist that physical characteristics are all that demarcate male v. female, but that post-mastectomy women are still female (I would agree, of course, but it seems that implicit in your reasoning is the notion that they are, perhaps, less female). But you forget: I am more than merely my body.
Tim, FYI: the “Brett” from a few comments up is not me. Don’t know who that is.
I do agree that we are more than mere bodies, but I heartily disagree that gender is merely a social construct. Sure, there are significant aspects of gender that are culturally variant, you don’t have to convince me of that. But I also think that gender at the base level is deeply ingrained in us on a DNA, bodily level. If it wasn’t, why would it require such artificial activities (purchasing testoterone, removing breasts, etc) to become “fully” male? If the body didn’t matter in our construct of gender, why doesn’t Thomas just say ‘I’m a man’ and be done with it? Why make so much of the process bodily?
Furthermore, when you say “merely my body,” it reveals a strikingly low, disrespectful view of the body. I tend to see the body/DNA/physical presence as a little more important/sacred, as crucial evidence of our incarnational nature.
My apologies to the site host, I should have clarified I am a different “Brett.” That said, I agree with the host about the idea of bodies being in any way “mere.”
Christian teaching doesn’t support a dualist understanding that there is somehow a me that is separate from my physical being. I am of course more than my physical being, but it is a part of me and it is a part of what makes me who I am. If the physical dimension of existence were, pardon the phrase, immaterial to our identities, then what use would the Incarnation be? Why would the Word be made flesh if the flesh had no value in determining who we were?
Social norms play a role in determining some aspects of gender, but they do not construct it ex nihilo.
And I apologize also if I was unclear, so I let me say directly that the assumption I view women as less female if they have undergone mastectomies (or hysterectomies, or other surgical, hormonal or pharmacological treatments that affect their bodies, for different diseases or conditions ) is incorrect.
I think I hear what you’re saying Kevin, but I hope you’re not feeling the need to defend a group of friends against an an attack I haven’t made. Allow me to repeat that we all struggle with identity formation issues, so I dislike the framing of some sort of a debate in which it’s my group vs. their group.
I agree that most individuals describing themselves as transgender have gone through very difficult struggles. If there was any attack in my remarks, it is against all of us, for prematurely disengaging our struggles, however painful these struggles are relative to those of another. My suggestion was not that we all have chosen the path of least resistance, but that we often choose paths of less resistance. As a society, I think we have chosen that it’s a lot easier to say, “Here’s the way out,” and toss a suffering person some literature than to walk with them in that suffering as friends. Empathy comes about not through the labeling of someone’s struggle as wholly other and separate from one’s own experience, but in joining with an individual and conversing with them in awareness of one’s own brokenness.
Genesis 1:27
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
Genesis 2:24
“For this reason a MAN will leave his father and mother and be united to HIS WIFE, and they will become one flesh.”
A man will not be united to another man, God did not create them female and female. God does not make mistakes. Homosexuality is a sin. Transgender and altering your body is a sin. Plain and simple. It’s not about what we “feel” or what we think our “rights” are.
Deuteronomy 22:5
“A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.”
God does not make mistakes. We do.
I do apologize for confusing Brett with Brett (sincerely).
As for your inference that I have a ‘strikingly low, disrespectful view’ of the body, I certainly did not intend to deliver such a notion and hope here to correct it. As the other Brett said above, Christianity doesn’t support a dualistic view of the body, and I don’t adhere to a dualistic view of the body. What I was hoping to get across in my earlier comments is that while dualism is wrong, so too is modernism wrong: There is more to understand about the universe than that which science discloses, and there is more to who any individual is than the chromosomes and cellular structures that make up their physical beings. To attempt, as I believe has been done here, to reduce our understanding of human identity and, further, gender to a sort of Enlightenment-level empiricism based wholly on one’s mere biology is a gross disservice to epistemology and constitutes a dangerously reductionist, rationalist worldview.
This is not mere obscurantism. A being’s sex is biologically determined, but a being’s gender is tangent upon something else (think about your romance languages here). Our use of particular pronouns in reference to one another is not predicated on our knowledge of the other’s genital configuration or chromosomal set-up: If you discovered that, despite all either of us knew about me, I mysteriously have only X-chromosomes, would you henceforth refer to me as female? I suspect that you would not, because this isn’t what we mean when we use such words as ‘he’ and ‘she,’ unless, as in these circumstances, sexual politics is involved.
Tim-
I’d be the first to deride modernism and Enlightenment-level empiricism as being reductionist; I agree that one’s identity and gender cannot be based wholly on biology. In no place do I attempt such an argument in this post.
But I do think that the way that you divorce “gender” from “sex” is an unhelpful and irrational dichotomy. You must admit that gender is crucially, inextricably tied to (if not wholly derived from) biology. I assume that when you talk about gender you mean our conceptions of such things as “femininity” and “masculinity.” Sure, they are reinforced in different ways by different cultures, but where do “feminine” traits such as nurturing or “masculine” traits such as aggressiveness come from in the first instance if not from biological attributes such as the female ability to nurse/breastfeed one’s offspring, and the male’s testosterone, respectively?
I think cultural context can be used to enhance or clarify our understandings of gender, certainly; but to deny that gender is not at the core level derived from and inescapably partnered with biology is to truly and needlessly obfuscate the matter.
You may be dismayed to learn this, but Western cultural norms are less than universal— there are human cultures that consider men the weaker, more sentimental creatures and women the strong, responsible ones. And a simple glance at the animal kingdom should do everything to disavow you of the notion that a Y-chromosome means one is less likely to be the designated nurturer, or more likely to be the designated aggressor.
And I really must insist that someone address my not-at-all-rhetorical question from previously: Would your behavior— even including only pronoun usage— toward me change if genetic testing revealed I have two X-chromosomes?
This is way off of the current discussion, but I just want to say in defense of Mr. Rogers, that I don’t remember his message as being “you can be whoever and whatever you want to be and don’t let anyone stand in your way.”
His message was simply that we are special and lovable just as we are…which is a very simple but profound truth.
I’m a christian and I am tired of all the other “christians” who are so judgmental. Shouldn’t you pause for just a moment and realize that Jesus never once won any ones’ heart through judgment and a pious heart. No he won them by his Love. For god so loved the world… John 3:16-come on guys lets get off the pedastal and humble your selves before the Lord your God. You are yet sinners saved by grace and grace alone! Do not judge lest you yourselves be judged in the same way.
I really like your “No” series. Nicely done!
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