"And Aquaman is His Prophet"

 Readers may recall that some slight but measurable portion of the English population routinely tells census-takers that its religious affiliation is "Jedi Knight."  This is an obvious example of a religion that is, even by its own understanding, invented.  Skeptics, of course, say that all religions are invented, but they miss the point.  The re is a difference between believing that your sacred books are a divine message, your sacred heroes divine messengers, and knowing perfectly well that they are not, and yet choosing to order your life around them anyway.

The Jedi (and Sith, at least in Scotland) are more of a political protest than a anything else; nominal adherents don't actually seem to organize their lives around their invented religion.  But others may -- the Church of the Sub-Genius and the Discordians, for example.  Such, at least, appears to be the premise of Carole M. Cusack's 2010 Invented Religions:  Fact, Fiction and Imagination.  We haven't read it, nor (at $94 for the freaking ebook) are we likely to.

(One wonders, parenthetically, about Scientologists and even Mormons.  Surely they must notice that their very recent faiths have an "invented" feel, and yet adhere to them for other reasons -- community, ethical considerations, or whatever.)

We haven't read Cusack's book, but we did read with interest Fred Folmer's review, at The (newly-redesigned) Revealer.  It's a worthwhile essay, but our favorite part was near the beginning.  Folmer wasn't sure how widespread these "invented religions" really were.  "And so," he writes,

... I did an Internet search for Batman, the first comic book character I could think of (that’s right, my comic book knowledge is terribly deep), and added the word church. Sure enough, there’s a Facebook group for, ahem, the “Westboro Batman Church,” a group that claims to be “a pious church that worships the ONE, TRUE god, Batman!” In addition to a theological statement, in the “description” section we learn that the group’s 10 Commandments were handed down by Aquaman, and that one of the directives is simply “I’m BATMAN!” What’s more, there’s a similar Facebook group for Aquaman, although apparently their theology is still in the developmental stages. The group does, however, identify itself as “the church of our savior, Aquaman.”

Were we at the Egg someday to lose our faith and seek another ... well, never mind.

Space Nazis!

We saw Iron Sky last night.  Capsule review:

• SFX way beyond its tight budget;
• No Producers, but still ... a funny movie about Nazis;
• Slightly hamfisted political satire; 
• Marry me, Renate Richter!

For a more thoughtful take, see the parish soapbox.

So. The Avengers.

The picture has made over a billion dollars so far, several of them our own.  People like it, including -- to our neverending surprise -- folks who don't really dig comics.  What do you people even see in these movies?

For his own part, Fr. Anonymous reckons that a copy of The Avengers was among the first comics he ever bought.  (Probably #85, an alternate-reality yarn featuring the Squadron Supreme).  Must have read that sucker a million times.  Even looking at this picture, our mind's eye adds the spine roll, torn corner, and piece of Scotch tape.

So we were pretty excited about the picture.  And, speaking as a fan, our review of the movie is:  Sure.  Great.  And at the same time:  Ehhh.

Joss Whedon did a fine job of balancing quick characterizations and context-rich action scenes.  Several of the performances were very good, the effects were great.  It was loads of fun to see our childhood fantasies projected onto the silver screen.  But at the same time, the picture was cautious, careful to protect Marvel's insanely valuable intellectual property, and to leave ample room for sequels.  This left it, to our eyes, a little soulless.  Which doesn't mean we won't watch it again, probably more than once; it just means it lacked the kind of reckless we'll-try-anything daring that you can get in a low-stakes medium like pulp magazines or actual printed-on-paper comics.

But the movie's massive success has brought a new focus to the strange, sad story of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.  For those who don't know, those are the guys who invented most of the Marvel Comics characters; they are both legends in the industry.  Lee was and remains a writer and, more successfully, a promoter, both of himself and of his products.  Kirby, who died in the 1990s, was one of the most gifted graphic storytellers of his time.  His drafting skills never approached those of, say, Will Eisner; but his sheer creativity was wondrous.

Lee and Kirby are a legendary team, in their own way even more legendary than Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.  The sadness, of course, is that Lee made (and still makes) quite a bit of money from their creations, and Kirby didn't.  Just how that worked, and whether it was right or just or even legal, is a complicated matter.  It is largely because of this story, along with that of Siegel & Schuster, that "creators' rights" is such a big part of the modern comics industry.

If you're interested, Alex Pappademas offers this relatively balanced introduction in Grantland.  Neil Kirby offers this brief memoir of his father in the LA Times.

Best. Summer. Ever.

Based on the comments we receive for some posts, and the deafening silence for others, Father Anonymous estimates that approximately 0.00% of Egg readers care about his taste in comic books and science fiction.  You all seem to come here for the hymns.

Still, it has to be said:  There is every reason to believe that, at least for the 10-year-old boy inside the cassocked greybeard, 2012 will be the best summer in the history of the universe.  (Or the multiverse, if you're a DC reader.)  And it starts on Friday.

Friday, as you may have heard, is the Romanian release of The Avengers.  It's about a team of superheroes who don't really get along, but still save the world.  To put it in terms our readers may understand more easily, imagine Franklin Clark Fry, Pope John XXIII, and Simone de Beauvoir join forces to stop the National Review from ever being published.  I know -- awesome, right?

On June 8, we get Ridley Scott's Prometheus.  How good will this movie be?  Nobody knows.  But it is a kinda-sorta prequel to Scott's 1979 Alien, which is one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time; and of course, Scott also made Blade Runner, which is the greatest science fiction movie of all time, full stop.  He also made The Duelists and Thelma & Louise, respectively the best fencing movie and Susan Sarandon vehicle of all time.  Come to think of it, I'll bet Ridley Scott's home movies are better than anybody else's, too.

And of course the biggest news comes July 20, when we see The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan's final entry in the Batman trilogy.  Who would have thought, back in the days of Adam West and Burt Ward, that a movie about the Caped Crusader would ever become the medium for a serious reflection on the nature of justice and the the possibility of virtue in a fallen world?  Heck, who would have thought -- in the days of Val Kilmer and Chris O'Donnell -- that anyone would ever, ever make another movie about Batman?  Or watch one if they did.

But while Nolan is the sort of filmmaker who works well with genre fiction and special effects, he is also committed to telling stories about things that matter.  Memento was a noir thriller about the nature of identity, Inception a science-fiction adventure about the nature of reality.  His first two Batman pictures were more of the same.  And they were something else, as well -- something fans of this particular genre have never gotten from anybody else:  an attempt to take our cockamamie fantasy world seriously.  To imagine, for just a moment, what it would be like -- what it would mean -- if comic-book things actually happened.

So, yes, we have our hopes up for Number Three.  Most of you will get a thrill-ride; for a few of us, it may be like Wagnerites sitting down to the premiere of Gotterdammerung.

All that said, we're an easy audience.  For us to consider this a masterpiece, Nolan has only got to provide a single scene that rivals this one:

We're Voting for Newt!

Even typing those words sent a little shiver of guilt-cum-nausea through our body. (Or maybe that was the fish we ate last night. Mmmm -- perch with hazelnuts. But we digress.)

Anyway, Gingrich has promised that, if elected, he would create a permanent inhabited base on the moon. At first glance, and in the present economic climate, that seems shockingly unlikely. On second glance, it looks like a prime target for cries of "Big government run amok," especially within Newt's own party. And on third glance, it looks like just another campaign promise, easily made and easily broken. (Like Gingrich's wedding vows, areweright?)

(And, incidentally, the WaPo description of this discussion sounds like a cleaned-up version of the "presidents on the Titanic" joke: Gingrich claims 1930s science fiction is a Big Idea; Romney says that if an employee brought him this plan, he'd fire him; Paul says the people he'd send to the moon are politicians. Seriously, these guys should do vaudeville.)

Sure, it sounds a little ridiculous. But ... but ... darn it, we want a moonbase.

When we were little tykes, they told us that by The Year 2000, we would have personal jetpacks, commuter flights to Moonbase Alpha, and a pony. (Yeah -- a cloned robot pony.) Needless to say, we waited patiently but expectantly, and needless to say the past eleven years have been a grave disappointment.

Still, we soldier on into the future, only a trembling upper lip revealing the wounded little boy inside us. The Internet and big-budget superhero movies are nice, but they're no jetpacks. And nothing, nothing, can replace a colony on the moon.

So Gingrich says we should have one. That makes him, by a cruel twist of fate, our preferred candidate for the Presidency of these United States. Nor are we alone; the bastion of corporate geekery, i09, has a list of 181 reasons Newt is right ... about the moon. Needless to say, the man is wrong about every other subject on which he has ever offered an opinion, including the time of day and which direction is up.

Mind you, if Newtie No Beauty manages to win the nomination, and then the general election, and yet there is no moonbase within some reasonable period of time -- six weeks should be adequate; we've had 32 years to get ready -- there will be grave repercussions. Like we'll call him even worse names than we already do. How do you like that, Newt in a Suit? Er ... we'll come up with better ones by then -- promise.

Curvature Crowdsourcing Query

Perhaps a friend with access to a proper theological library can assist us here.

If you ask the internet, it will tell you -- over and over -- that Augustine described a sinner as homo curvatus in se (or in se curvatus, or se incurvatus; same diff.). It will not, however, tell you where Augustine might have said that. A search of Augustine's online opera omnia reveals virtually nothing, except a remote possibility that the phrase has its inspiration in Ps. 38:6 (Vg. 37:7). (There, however, Augustine clearly relates miser sum et curvatus to the humility of Christ).

Matt Jenson has written a dissertation-cum-book on the subject of sin-as-curvature in Augustine, Luther and Barth, of which we can skim part at Amazon. (This is a great idea for a book, and we look forward to reading it.) He mentions that Anders Nygren located the image "in two of Augustine's expositions of the psalms and in one of his sermons," and offers a citation to Agape and Eros (Harper & Row: 1969), p. 485 n.6. Since it's under copyright, Google books will only provide us with a snippet of the Nygren book, and it doesn't include the reference.

So. Does a kindly reader have a moment to skim one or the other of these books, and give us an idea of where the late bishop of Hippo used the historically-important phrase in question? Just because questions like this keep us awake at night.

Watch Your Language -- Part 2

Is Superman taking the Lord's name in vain?

It seems unlikely. While some level of cussing has become acceptable in comics over the past few years, there are certain characters for whom it just seems ... out of character. Of these, the most extreme are Superman (whose typical expostulation has historically been "Great guns!"/"Suns of Krypton!"/"By Rao!") and Captain Marvel (who says "Holey Moley" a lot, no doubt in reference to the little-known Coptic hieromonk, Abba Moley of Dendera).

Still, DC is rebooting its entire universe, and strange things may happen. A guy who runs a comics shop in North Carolina thinks that Mrs. Kent's little boy has taken a sudden turn for the profane. Apparently, when being zapped by some sort of ray gun, he doesn't recapitulate his classic observation that it tickles, but instead says, and we quote, "GD." (It's upper case, but comics lettering is almost always upper case).

Based on this, the shop owner has preached a Crusade, and sworn to boycott Action Comics until writer Grant Morrison steps down, or Jerusalem is taken back from the infidel.

Reached for comment by every possible comics-related news outlet, Morrison responded, "it's a grunt."

Which, actually, sounds about right. You get hit by a death ray, you're gonna grunt.

Superman and the Hermeneutics of Continuity

Latin hymnody is nice enough, but what really get Father Anonymous going in the morning are comic books. And not your arty Daniel Clowes-Marjane Satrapi stuff, either. (Well, not only). Here at the Egg, we follow the same Golden and Silver Age superheroes who thrilled us in childhood, and whose lore we are passing on to our offspring. This includes some fairly obscure stuff -- Preschooler A. spent the morning demanding more adventures of Earth 3's Crime Syndicate. But at the heart of the mythology are characters known all over the world: Batman. Captain America. And above all, Superman.

So imagine our concern when DC Comics, one of the two major superhero publishers, announced plans to reboot its entire "universe," the shared imaginary world in which its characters interact. Oh, we understand the need: when you have been telling stories about the same characters for 70 years and counting, there is an inevitable need to freshen things up, not to mention sort out the conflicting versions of a single storyline. This may or may not be an artistic necessity, but it is certainly a commercial one, if new readers are ever going to understand what is going on. And the reconstruction of a universe is by no means the end of the world. DC did another major reboot in the late 1980s, for example, with decent results.

Fans, however, are generally uncomfortable with reboots. We have spent years following the characters, and mastering the obscure details of their imaginary existence. (Yes, it's just like soap operas. But with more robots.) We love these stories -- most of them, anyway -- and the thought of seeing them revised, often revised out of existence, fills us with a sense of loss. Anticipation, sure -- we all want new and better stories, and for that matter we want the ailing comics industry to survive -- but also loss.

The reboot begins today, with the release of a new Justice League of America series. It will reveal, among many other things, Superman's new costume (similar to the one featured in the forthcoming movie). The fanboy internet is in an uproar. For our part, we only wish that the nearest comics shop weren't ... well, soooo far away.

But all this has us thinking about theology, and most especially about Pope Benedict XVI. He is not, despite the red boots, Superman. But he has addressed, in language surprisingly clear for the Vatican, one of the critical challenges faced by any religious community, not least the Roman church: how to reconcile the needs for continuity and reform.

Since the late 1970s, theologians have often talked about an "hermeneutic of suspicion." The term is adapted from Paul Ricoeur, who used it to describe a post-Hegelian philosophical condition, in which all theories of meaning must be confronted with the biases of the theorist. It was borrowed by, for example, feminist Biblical scholars to describe a particular method of reading Scripture (and other Christian documents) with a lively awareness of the male-dominated culture in which they were written. We have since seen the method, or at least the term, applied to other studies as well, including that of Hinduism. And why not? As any historian knows, documents often say as much about their authors (and mises-en-scene) as about their subjects.

To the hermeneutic of suspicion, some writers have proposed radical alternatives: hermeneutics of generosity, of faith, and -- especially in the last few years -- of continuity. These, they propose, are safer ways for Christians to read the Bible, as well as other documents constitutive of our tradition. Rather than assume the authors are somehow deceiving us, they say, let us assume that they are telling us the truth, not between the lines but in the plain sense of them, and as that sense has generally been understood by the Church. And, again, why not? It was Luther himself who argued against speculative interpretations when common-sense grammatical ones were ready to hand. Occam's Razor, yadda-yadda.

Of these Ricuoerian spinoffs, the hermeneutic most adverted on the internet, at least among conservative Roman Catholics, appears to be that of continuity. (Examples here, here, here.) Indeed, one popular blog has adopted this as a title. As a quick Google search reveals, the phrase is commonly associated with Pope Benedict. And -- yet again -- why not? Benedict has continued the task undertaken by his predecessor: to establish a definitive interpretation of the Second Vatican Council which reads the Council as an expression, rather than a disruption, of the Catholic tradition. Of course, the council itself made just this claim. But its most enthusiastic interpreters, in the early years, seem to have seen Vatican II as a license to rewrite history and redefine tradition. (So do its most bitter detractors, which means that the SSPX looks dimly upon the effort to "save" Vatican II for traditionalism.)

It is worth noting that Benedict himself, in his now-famous Christmas 2005 address to the Curia, did not talk about "suspicion" versus "continuity." At least according to the official transcript, he spoke rather of "disruption" versus "reform." The difference is not vast, but stil noteworthy.

Here is Benedict's analysis of the difficulty his church has faced in implementing -- and even understanding -- its most recent council:

On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call "a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture"; it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology. On the other, there is the "hermeneutic of reform", of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.

The hermeneutic of discontinuity risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church. It asserts that the texts of the Council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the Council. It claims that they are the result of compromises in which, to reach unanimity, it was found necessary to keep and reconfirm many old things that are now pointless. However, the true spirit of the Council is not to be found in these compromises but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts.

In contrast, Benedict argues for a literal and minimalistic reading of the conciliar documents. This is what pleases many of his readers, since such a reading presumes a continued celebration of the Latin Mass in its older form, not mention (among many other things) the Daily Office said in Latin, at least by those competent to do so. He wants to assure the faithful that "the Church, both before and after the Council, was and is the same Church, one, holy, catholic and apostolic, journeying on through time ...."

We're all for the general approach. But we are intrigued by the idea that it is a matter of reform, rather than -- mere -- continuity. In that word, there is the explicit admission that the old thing, the ecclesia quo ante, was deformed, in need of judicious reconstruction in order to express its original intention accurately. In a very general way, of course, this has also been the approach taken by some of the Reformation churches, or at least some members within them. From Melanchthon to the Petris to Charles Porterfield Krauth, there have been those who attempted to develop Protestant theology as an expression of Catholic tradition. (Of course, there have also been those -- from Flacius to Schmucker and so many, many more -- who have treated Protestant theology as a replacement for Catholic theology, and indeed of the supposed "Protestant Church" as a replacement for the Catholic one.)

The same impulses which Benedict sees in the appropriation of Vatican II can be seen, by anybody willing to look, in the far longer and more complex effort of Protestants to understand their own Reformation. All of which means that Evangelical Catholics, and Anglo-Catholics, and any remaining adherents of the Mercersburg theology, or even Methodists in the Order of St. Luke, ought to pay close attention to the intellectual leadership that benedict offers to his own community. We suspect strongly that Benedict has learned something from his observation of Anglicans, at the very least, and probably of Lutherans as well. Even if we disagree about the details -- the precise content of the tradition -- we can learn from his approach to it. He is, in this sense, our brother.

All of which brings us back to DC Comics and the big Justice League reboot. We will be curious to see, over the next few months, how these new versions of old stories are accepted by readers, and then modified by the editors and writers. The new Superman -- with his short sleeves, his high collar, and his lack of underpants on the outside -- certainly looks different from the one we have been used to since Granpda was in seminary. But will he be all that different? Is the "new universe" a radically Protestant one? A Bugnini-style liturgical one? Or will it be, after all, something more readily identifiable to the initiates -- one that exists in continuity, however tortured, with the world we have known and loved?

The Truth Is Out

Okay, readers. There's something Fr. A. hasn't been telling you, and it's kind of big. About some stuff he did before seminary.

We'll get to the secret in just a second. First, let's wag the finger at our clerical colleague, Rev. Jim Moats of Christian Bible Fellowship Church in Newville, Pennsylvania. According to his website, Moats "unashamedly preaches 'an old fashioned message' for 'new-fangled people.' " We're guessing that he's doing it with just a bit more shame these days.

See, word got a round in his parish that Moats had been a Navy SEAL in Viet Nam. He never said much about it, but there was this plaque in his office honoring all SEALS for their service, and, well, there you go. Then, in a recent interview, he came out of the, uh, closet: about SEAL training, being slapped around by his instructors, even about the time his wild side got the better of him and he was busted down to company cook. Just like Steven Seagal in Under Siege. And a little GI Jane.

Anyway, it was a lie. The guy was never a SEAL. He spent a few years in the Navy, on a ship in the Mediterranean. Maybe he really was a cook; we have no idea. But he wasn't a SEAL. He was just a wannabee, a regular guy who -- like his father before him and his sons after him -- served his country. But for whom that wasn't enough.

It took a genuine ex-SEAL, Don Shipley, one day to out the guy. Shipley apparently spends a lot of time checking up on guys who claim they were part of his old unit, largely because so many of them are lying. And here's the line that gives us pause:

“We deal with these guys all the time, especially the clergy. It’s amazing how many of the clergy are involved in those lies to build that flock up,” Shipley said.

Ouch. Look, you know how we sometimes wax censorious about preachers who use "true" stories that aren't? Well, just in case you weren't sure, this is worse. We oppose pastors lying about their military service for just the reason we are in favor of letting gay pastors go public about their sexual preference: because a liar in the pulpit will inevitably give people reason to doubt the truth of the Gospel.

So, okay, lecture over. We promised you a juicy tidbit and here it comes.

For years now, there have been rumors about Fr. A's past. They were all started by a piece of art he used to keep in the church office, nothing too conspicuous, but a treasured memento just the same. He never said anything, but people started to talk, and he never told them they were wrong. And why should he? They were right. It's all true.

So there it is. We don't like to talk about it. We aren't proud. But yes, it's true: For a few years, just before seminary, Father Anonymous was a Blade Runner.*

_____________________________________________________________

* Not strictly true, but we'll say anything to build that flock up.

Sctatch That Last Post

Well, maybe not scratch, exactly. But, mere moments after writing about how America will eventually need to rein in military spending along with all the other kinds, which is still true, we stumbled across the video below, courtesy of Danger Room. It reminded us of how much we really love exotic weapons systems. Bottom line: the Navy actually has a laser weapon. A working laser weapon that can burn up a Zodiac.

Hey, Somali pirates. You ready for us to go all Captain Kirk on you?

Omnium Gatherum

It's amazing how, once you have to do some real work instead of sitting around in your jammies eating Cool Whip from a spoon, all the things you used to blog about seem to stop happening.

Or maybe they are happening, but you just don't care so much. Think of Lent as a chance to practice Buddhist non--attachment.

Still, a few things have caught our attention lately. (Apart from Japan, which is too unbelievably serious for a yellow-bloggerism rag like the Egg to deal with. Do we have to say it? Okay, then: Pray. Give. Repeat.) More up our alley are these tidbits:

• Unpopular Bahrain tyrants have requested military assistance from neighboring unpopular Saudi tyrants. Iran, which supports the sure-to-win-eventually protesters, rejoices. Rest of world doesn't know who to hate and fear most.
• Sarah Palin reported to be on outs with FoxNews. Both parties rejoice at immediate uptick in news coverage. Rest of world doesn't know who to hate and fear most.
• Some guy we've never heard of doesn't believe in Hell. This is hardly news; lots of people don't believe in Hell. This guy's a minister, so people get upset. Big freaking whoop. We knew a guy who stood in the pulpit on Easter morning and said he didn't believe in the Resurrection. (We asked him about it once, and he smirked. Yet not only did lightning not strike the guy dead, he retired comfortably -- leaving behind a crippled and dying congregation. So we do believe in Hell, mostly for this lameass. And for Joe "Spiderman Kills His Kids" Quesada.)
• Speaking of Spiderman: Amazingly, nobody has turned out the lights. Officially. Yet.
• A church in Florida has spent several years worshiping inside a balloon. Now they can't pay the rent, so ... that sucking sound has nothing to do with NAFTA.
• Tip of the biretta to Salon's William Wolfrum for this magnificent headline: "God Shoots Himself in Wynnn Las Vegas Hotel Room." We wish the post were as good.

Sexy Religious Geek Love

First, let's confess: when writing about sex, it is difficult to avoid at least the semblance of sexism. We live in an age which has been primed to detect callousness and incivility everywhere, especially when men begin talking about women, and most especially when they begin talking about women's bodies.

Given certain details of his background, Father A. has probably been more completely primed to do this than the average blogger. In those formative college years, he was trained to speak about sex -- not merely the act, but the entire field of gender and sexuality -- with an almost Victorian delicacy. Everything and everyone was to be shown polite respect, but nothing was to be giggled at, whether in mockery or genuine delight.

Age has coarsened him a bit, and if you don't believe it look at all the offensive bits in the Jane Russell post. In his middle years, he giggles more than he should, but there are years to make up for now.

We were thinking about this as we read Max Lindenman's piece at Patheos, "On Dating Nice Catholic Girls." Lindenman, a recent adult convert to Roman Catholicism, begins by admitting that he has only dated two women fitting the description. The essay is brief account of his time with the first, whom he calls Melissa. From this, it builds into a meditation on the ways that sexuality manifests itself among unmarried women whose religious views restrict the act to married life. He starts from the idea that such women give good cuddle. (At least the Catholic ones; he believes -- apparently as a result of spending too much time in the South -- that Protestant girls are just a bunch of teases.)

An essay like this could easily have been churlish, if not simply gross, and Lindenman avoids the worst of it. if anything, her errs more on the side of cloying. The piece is funny, touching and not without substance; we hope you'll give it a read.

We were especially touched, for reasons best left to the imagination, by the way Max and Melissa connected around the twin poles of Catholicism and geek culture:

Like me, she doubted her vocation for religious life. But she was pious enough to kneel before the Blessed Sacrament for an hour without squirming. She was also one of those fangirls who spoke of sci-fi and comic book characters as though they had real Social Security numbers. The second night, we stayed up late in the kitchen, drawing parallels between Catholic saints and X-Men.

"Nightcrawler?" I asked.

"Martin de Porres," she answered, with a teacher's pet's promptness. "Both were healers, both faced discrimination because of their colors. Martin bilocated, and Nightcrawler teleports."

So been there.

And yet, funny and touching though it may be, the essay also left us feeling a little creepy. It's hard to say why. There's nothing that screams "sexist" in any overt way; quite the contrary. At least on the surface, Lindenman shows Melissa a great deal of respect; she is smart, droll, self-knowing, and when she dumps him, we can't help admiring her for it. So what's wrong?

It could be that his admiration rings lightly false, and that this apparent praise of a sweet and chaste young lady masks a deeper passive-aggressive attack. Could he, between the lines, be making fun of her? Exacting, even, a public revenge for keeping her legs crossed? Surely not.

More likely, though, it is the way he describes a pivotal moment in their relationship:

I remember climbing Camelback Mountain on a breezy winter morning, watching in a trance as her strong legs hauled her over the files of boulders just below the summit. When we gained the top, panting, the wind chilling our sweat, I said, "I love you." It was not a voluntary act; the words shot out of my mouth like a ball-bearing from a wrist rocket.

"Oh!" She exclaimed, looking pleasantly surprised. "I love you, too!"

Lindenman calls this "reckless" self-revelation. But "pleasant surprise" is never reckless; it is pleasant more than it is surprising. And this seems to be the tone of the friendship. If they are in love, it is the dullest love imaginable, and when she ends it, by email, neither seems deeply affected. The reader is frankly relieved.

At least part of our discomfort with the essay, then, is the way it dodges the central conundrum. Sex outside of marriage is indeed contrary to the vast bulk of Christian doctrine. And yet, as practical theology has always acknowledged, it is the frequent result of passions which cannot be controlled by a mere act of human will. (It is also, of course, the frequent result of social norms which do not take doctrine seriously; that is another matter entirely. We're talking about sex among thoughtful and committed Christians). But abstaining from sex with somebody for whom you feel no particular passion is morally unremarkable.

Lindenman knows this. During the relationship, trying without much enthusiasm to talk her into the sack, he hints that their snuggling itself is sinful, accuses himself of being "Jesuitical." She answers that it's a sign of comfiness, or something equally trite. But he's on to something, here. If they are guilty of anything much, it is of using one another's bodies for pleasure, not merely outside marriage as defined by canon or civil law, but outside the sort of profound relationship in which even little intimacies have their proper place.

Hmm. That sounds awfully preacher-y. Or, worse yet, parent-y. It's as though we're telling them to leave the door open if they're in a room together. So let's be clear. We're not really concerned that Max and Melissa snuggle outside the bonds of matrimony. We're concerned that, like so many people in the world, they declare that they are in love when they really aren't.

On one hand, relationships like this are sweet and innocent and we certainly hope that our own son enjoys at least a couple when the time comes. But on the other hand, and this is the old Romantic talking rather than either the preacher or the dad, it is relationships like this that give love a bad name.

Why Mrs. Nesmith Got Rich

As we recall, the mother of Michael Nesmith -- one of the Monkees -- invented Liquid Paper. Older readers will no doubt remember it: that white paint that you used to cover up typing mistakes. She made a lot of money, before the typewriter industry up and died.

(Seriously, one of the many cool things about our current TV obsession, Fringe, is that the greatest scientific minds of two universes communicate using an IBM Selectric. Those things were amazing, in their day.)

Anyway, Liquid Paper is hard to come by these days, even if we still owned a typewriter. But we still make mistakes. Even a casual reader will see that the Egg is full of misspellings and unfinished sentences, the inevitable errors that result from writing very fast, squeezing things in between the breviary and confirmation class.

But some errors are bigger than mere typos. Sometimes, and today was one of those times, we spend a significant amount of time writing a post that we think is worthwhile, but which -- upon re-reading it -- turns out to be junk. Or, if not precisely junk, then junkish: rambling, unclear, unfunny, and quite possibly mistaken.

Yeah, we wrote a piece called "Stupid Things," which was up for several hours. It was about religious epistemology, as well as the connections between the Birther movement and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza. It mined our favorite vein these days, the fascination (especially among middle aged clergymen) with spreading falsehoods. And, as you can probably guess from this brief description, it was a mess.

So you know what we did? We deleted it. There's a "delete" button on Blogger, which just lets you make the piece of bad writing disappear forever. It's like the biggest and most effective bottle of Liquid Paper on earth, and it doesn't even dry in little lumps on the page.

Sorry if you read the damned thing. Truly, we are sorry, and wish that we could give you those three minutes back. The only solace we can offer is the assurance that nobody else will ever have to suffer as you did.

Is That a Sex Book?

We mentioned Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 the other day. Now it's confession time: we've never actually read the thing. So much for our geek cred.

But years ago -- in grade school, so pushing forty years ago -- we read another science fiction story, one short passage of which has stuck in our brains ever since, as a sign of the sort of world that right-thinking book-burners will eventually give us.

We forget the details, but some guy wakes up from a long Van Winkle-style sleep, and goes to the library. Why does he go to the library, when he could be checking on his investments? We have no idea. Maybe to look for some old friends. And this scene ensues:

"What was that name again?"
"Edgar Allen Poe."
"There is no such author listed in our files."
"Will you please check?"
She checked. "Oh, yes. There's a red mark on the file card. He was one of the authors in the Great Burning of 2265."
"How ignorant of me."
"That's all right," she said. "Have you heard much of him?"
"He had some interesting barbarian ideas on death," said Lantry.
"Horrible ones," she said, wrinkling her nose. "Ghastly."
"Yes. Ghastly. Abominable, in fact. Good thing he was burned. Unclean. By the way, do you have any of Lovecraft?"
"Is that a sex book?"

Even as a child, we cherished the dark humor of those last two sentences, and over time we longed to read them again. But we had forgotten the rest. Who wrote that scene? In what story? Where could we find it again? We assumed that we would never know. But thanks to the WonderNet of Possibilities, we have found the excerpt posted on this guy's blog.

"Pillar of Fire." By -- we should have guessed -- Ray Bradbury. The man is a prophet.

Merry Christmas from the Deathstar

Christmas Day 2010 was kinda weird.

We've already mentioned the woman in Texas whose house was robbed by her parish pastor. But have you heard about the neighborhood in Colorado that was robbed by Imperial Stormtroopers?

These Are A Few Of My Favorite Kings

Like some of our readers, Father A. is preparing to preach on the celebration of Christ the King. His sermon is nearly complete, and he has even posted a few chunks over at the parish milk-crate. But as so often happens, the sermon prep has left us with a few ideas that don't really belong in the pulpit.

For instance, it seems that Britain's Prince William is going to get married, and this has got people of a certain age waxing nostalgic for the marriage of Charles and Diana. Pardon us while we erupt with derisory laughter. We barely noticed the wedding, and as things developed cared little for the late Princess of Wales. Her saint's-cult appalls us on many levels, not least because it often seems to involve American Anglophiles genuflecting to a Barbie doll.

Generally speaking, we think that the British royals get far too much attention, especially on the left side of the pond. People seem to forget that we busted our butts just to be rid of one of the present queen's ancestors. But that doesn't mean we are anti-royalist! Far from it. While a weird affection for the Stuart clan is properly an Anglo-Catholic affectation, there are a few living monarchs (or would-be monarchs) of whom we are quite fond. Consider, if you will,

King Michael of Romania. Decent guy, from all reports. Had a Lutheran grandfather. Deposed by the Reds. Says he won't come back unless they ask him, which doesn't seem likely. But just in case they change their minds, he asked the Parliament to recognize his daughter's legal right to succession. Just in case.

Queen Margarethe II of Denmark. Lutheran, which is a plus. First female monarch of Denmark since the 14th century! She has formal training as an archaeologist and a political scientist, and is an accomplished painter. What thrills the neeks and gerds at the Egg, though, is that she illustrated the Danish edition of Lord of the Rings.

Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Do they call her Queen Bee for short? Honestly, we just like that she wrote Peter Rabbit. Um, didn't she?

Emperor Akihito of Japan. Not a Lutheran; we checked. Still, the guy's got a throne made out of chrysanthemums, for crying out loud. Don't try to tell us otherwise, because we aren't listening. He's also a trained and published icthyologist, which invites some easy jokes about sashimi. (Have we mentioned that we miss JJ's fusion restaurant in Astoria? Oh, man, do we miss it.)

King Juan Carlos of Spain. Most definitely not a Lutheran, but we like him anyway. Sure, he helped his nation make the difficult transition from fascism and dictatorship to a modern democracy. Sure, he signed a bill legalizing gay marriage, which probably cost him a few points at the Monarch's Conference. But you know what we really like? The guy kills bears for fun. Have we mentioned that bears are not your fuzzy woodland friends, but savage marauders intent on eating your children?

King Jigme Sanhye Walchuk of Butan went Juan Carlos one better. He didn't just help them make the transition from absolute monarchy to parliamentary democracy, he demanded it. Then he abdicated so his son could play. But best of all, he was the guy who came up with the best-ever goal for a nation to pursue. Sure, global hegemony sounds nice; we suppose liberty, equality and brotherhood are okay. But Jigme called for an increase in "gross national happiness." No word on whether he is a Lutheran, but it sounds unlikely.

There are some others -- King Goodwill of the Zulus has a great name, for instance. There are two guys who claim to be King of France, and even though we don't know a thing about them, we will lay odds that they're both snobs. Italy has a handful of dukes and so forth with royal aspirations, and we don't imagine any of them could be worse than Berlusconi. So there's that.

Convivium: The Cartoons

Fr. William of the Beach, friend of the Egg and namesake of a cardinal, has recently created several animated shorts which may amuse readers as much as they did us.

1. "For All the Saints." It is the deadpan alleluias that kill us.

2. "November." A letter from our ordinary, read by a cartoon character who bears as little resemblance to Himself as one can imagine.

3. "The Apostles Creed, Part 1." Sooner or later, for Lutherans, any new technology becomes a medium for the Small Catechism. That's just how we roll.

More Data Points, ET Edition

Last post, we connected some dots in the world of religion. But how about the world of an imminent extraterrestrial invasion?

Consider, if you will, these recent developments:

• Last week, the Times of London wrote about the United Nations' first Ambassador to Extraterrestrials. Oh, the UN denies it. They say she watches the skies ... for asteroids. Right.
• This week, group of retired Air Force personnel spoke to the National Press Club with remarkable frankness about UFO sightings in the 1960s. Apparently, the flying saucers kept buzzing our nukes.
• The Keck Observatory and astronomer Steve Vogt have discovered the first Earth-like planet outside our solar system. It's called Gliese581g, and given the vastness of space, they found it pretty darn quickly, huh? Almost as if they had been ... told where to look.

Hmm. Add it all up, and what do you have?

Now, we're not saying that the secret One World Government, having known about the existence of alien visitors to Earth for decades, has recently been told that these visitors are ready to reveal themselves publicly. We're not saying that, because it would be crazy. But if, let's say, Zork of the Interstellar Abyss had recently sent Ban Kee Moon a memo to that effect, what would Ban have done? Obviously, begged for a few weeks to get Earthlings ready for the greatest shock in human history.

And we're not saying that the OWG (or Trilateral Commission, or Knights Templar, or Skull and Bones) has started a slow release of "new" facts to the media, slowly preparing us to reconsider the very the claims it has spent half a century discrediting. That would make us sound like the sort of paranoid crackpot who holes up for days on end in a cramped basement, talking to himself and running off mimeographed newsletters that he sends to PO boxes without names attached. (Which, come to think of it, is exactly what blogging amounts to).

Nope. We're not saying that. All we're saying is what a wise newscaster has already said:

"I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords."

Batman Joins the Air Force

Many years ago, a recent college graduate then known as Recent Graduate Anonymous attempted to join the United States Army. He had wanted to be a Marine, but his wise old uncles talked him out of it. (The words "just damn cannon fodder" were used freely).

Apart from a genuine streak of patriotism, the then-RGA was probably inspired by his lifelong passion for Army surplus camping equipment. This seemed like a great way to stock up on steel mess kits and canvas tents. More inspiration, though, came from the stories his uncles told -- the first training jump; calling in a napalm strike on the Georgia woodlands; selling your CO that pretty white Benz just after the cylinders seized.

And, okay, there were the comic books and pulp novels. While you didn't need to serve your country in order to become a rugged he-man on the order of Doc Savage or Alan Quatermain, it certainly seemed like a good first step. If you looked closely at a GI's kit, it was all the sort of stuff Batman carried, except much, much bigger. And nobody, but nobody, loomed bigger in the RGA's formative years than Batman.

How did it turn out? Well, the RGA was not an entirely promising specimen. Although trim and flexible after eight semesters of college fencing, he was not then -- nor is he now -- what you would call a large man. Nor average-sized. Not even "a bit on the small side." His intellect had been liberally stimulated with English poetry and German opera; he had a fair grasp of Machiavelli and David Hume and a working knowledge of art history from classical times to about Picasso. On the other hand, he was a bit weak on practical things like mathematics, chemistry, geology, firearms, and taking orders. Oh, and he couldn't drive a car.

Anyway, it was the atopic dermatitis that ended his military career, literally five seconds after it had begun. The doctor signed on the line that said "fit for duty," then paused, flipped back to page 3 of the form, and started asking questions. That was all there was to it. Turns out that American soldiers are required to have excellent skin.

Well, you can never know about the road not traveled. We doubt that our military career would have been long or distinguished. Either a dead first lieutenant in Gulf One or a major who resigned in fury over Gulf Two, most likely. Maybe -- just maybe -- a lieutenant colonel now, popular neither among his troops nor among his peers, who stuck around after retirement age because of stop-loss, an eccentric egghead writing obscure War College documents on things like "the application of Machiavelli's Discorsi to Pasthun tribal politics." We are better off, and so is the world, with things as they actually turned out.

So what, you may wonder, is the point of all this? Nothing, except that nearly every major development in military doctrine or technology creates a brief fantasy, somewhere between wistful regret and spiteful jealousy -- "Damn that Petraeus! I should have written the new counterinsurgency manual. Me, me, me!" That sort of thing.

So imagine our response to the headline above, which we have borrowed whole from the awesome Danger Room article to which it is linked.

Since 2004, the Air Force has worked to reduce the physical load of gear carried by its Special Operations Forces — the superheroes who seize hostile airfields and rescue captured troops behind enemy lines. Those airmen are often weighed down on these missions, lugging as much as 160 pounds worth of stuff. Since much of the bulk comes from their communications gear, the Air Force opted to cut out heavy batteries to power it, fueling the gear through methanol fuel cells that get lighter as the charge dies. That allows elite airmen to essentially wear their gear like a scaffold, a concept the Air Force calls a “Human Chassis.”

Except a human chassis isn’t a cool enough name. So the program, pursued at Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, bears a moniker that strikes fear into the heart of villains everywhere. It’s the Battlefield Air Targeting Man-Aided kNowledge (just go with it). Yes: the BATMAN.

Oh, well. As Mother A. often says, "You still get to put on a black suit and fight evil." But somedays we do wonder what it would have been like.

We Want Our Future Back

Dude, where's my jetpack?

Father Anonymous is among the many Americans of his generation to express frequent consternation that the 21st century is underway, and yet the promises made in the 20th remain unfulfilled. And no, this has nothing to do with peace, equality or the four-day workweek. We're talking technology here: the silver jumpsuits, the tourist jaunts to Moonbase Alpha, the damn flying car.

The disappointments of yesterday's futurism have spawned a number of books, websites and museum shows. But the truth is that most of them focus on a single roughly coherent vision, one circumscribed chronologically by Hugo Gernsback's pulp magazine at one end, and 2001: A Space Odyssey at the other, with ten thousand issues of Popular Mechanics in between. (To be fair, a rival vision, called steampunk, has gained much traction recently. For the uninitiated, steampunk envisions a present designed by Jules Verne -- brass and velvet iPhones, and everybody wearing goggles).

But what about our medieval future, huh? What about that?

In separate and outstanding blog pieces, Hugh of Cluny and Matthew Alderman describe Ralph Adams Cram, the architect of St. John the Divine and St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue -- two of the finest church buildings in New York City -- as a social visionary, whose enthusiasm for the Middle Ages led him to imagine a 21st century filled with Gothic buildings, graduate schools organized like monasteries, and so forth. Such were Cram's mainstream credentials (and such was the prewar culture) that this actually seemed like a feasible alternative not just to Gernsbackian pulp but even Bauhausian Modernism.

As Alderman says,

While [Cram] was defiantly counter-cultural, the fact the culture at large was willing to give him a listen, suggests that the cultural dominance of modernistic thought, art and architecture, was hardly as assured or as easy a progress as we have been led to believe. We often read in books of the Liturgical Movement era of the coming golden age of Gregorian chant and popular participation, with the same inevitable assurance one heard in subsequent decades of Jetsons-style flying cars, neither one of which has come to pass.

But what an age it would have been.