Calvin comes to Sydney

If you’re in Sydney later this month, you might like to come along to our Calvin quincentenary conference: Calvin500: Calvin Goes Public. You can see the conference flyer here, and the registration details here.

Speakers will include Randall Zachman, Ian Breward, Peter Matheson, Val Webb, Graham Hughes, Clive Pearson, William Emilsen, Damian Palmer, and me. There will be papers on Calvin and the natural sciences, Calvin and materiality, Calvin and the public, Calvin and education, Calvin and women, Calvin in Korea, Calvin in Australasia, Calvin and Islam – and my own paper will be on Calvin and political theology. It will be especially exciting to hear from the leading Calvin scholar, Randall Zachman (who was also featured in a recent radio interview, discussing Calvin and aesthetics).

And speaking of Calvin and politics, be sure to check out the latest issue of Political Theology, which includes an excellent series of articles on Calvin and politics, with an editorial by Marilynne Robinson. And prolific Aussie scholar Roland Boer also has a new book, Political Grace: The Revolutionary Theology of John Calvin (WJKP 2009).

There’s more to come next in Sydney month as well: Moore Theological College is also holding a Calvin conference, featuring Oliver Crisp, Paul Helm and others.

As you reflect for a moment on Calvin’s political significance, I leave you with this picture of two of our decisive political thinkers, Calvin and Hobbes:

Butterflyfish: songs for children

As a parent of young children, I often gripe about the abysmal quality of products made for kids – especially that dismal cacophony of books and music that is marketed each year to young children. Bright sparkly sticker-infested books, bursting at the seams with bad grammar, colourless characters, incoherent plots, hackneyed illustrations, and all those endlessly repeated psycho-spiritual-gender banalities which have come to constitute The Disney Worldview (a worldview that is infinitely more malignant and more destructive than anything Lars von Trier could ever dream up).

Similarly, where children’s music is concerned (I won’t even mention television shows), the ruling principle seems to be: Any old crap will do; after all, they’re only kids. No need for lyrical imagination; no need for creativity; no need for musical talent or versatility. Just rhyme a few words, grunt out a few lines, bang out a couple of chords on your cheap electric keyboard – it’s good enough for the kids.

If you have young children in your home, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Which is why it’s so refreshing when occasionally you come across a piece of real music for children. That was how we felt when Roger Flyer (a regular friend here at F&T) sent me a copy of one of his wonderful CDs for children: a CD that I know very well indeed, since my kids have been listening to it almost every night for the past 18 months!

Anyway, while I was in Princeton last month, one of the highlights was getting to know the brilliant young Harvard theologian, Matthew Myer Boulton. Not only is he the author of a superb book on Barth and worship, but he’s also the singer-songwriter for a sweet and groovy children’s band, Butterflyfish. He gave me a copy of their brand new debut CD, Ladybug – and after listening to it dozens (hundreds?) of times now, I’m pleased to report that this is the real deal: an album that kids adore, and that grownup folks will also continue to enjoy after countless hours of repeat listening.

The album is musically vibrant, surprising and exciting: it blends styles as diverse as bluegrass, country, jazz and gospel, in a way that brings out that characteristic joy and lilt and humour of American folk music. And the lyrics (all written by Matt Boulton) are quite wonderful: linguistically inventive, poetically playful, and at times also theologically serious and reflective. Where so many kids’ CDs are characterised by attitudes of patronising banality, it’s a tremendous pleasure to hear music like this: music that takes children seriously, music that respects its audience, music premised on the assumption that young children are capable of lively joy, honest reflection, and exuberant aesthetic delight.

The songs range from the light-hearted jollity of “Ladybug” to the fast-paced rollicking bluegrass adventure of “What Jonah Learned Inside the Whale” (“He learned that whales have no teeth, but they do have great big tongues; / God is underneath everything and everyone”), to the delicate and imaginative “Noah’s Lullaby”, the jubilant a cappella celebration “Deep Down in My Heart”, and the rich smoky-jazz-bar groove of “There Is a Love”.

But the real highlight is the extraordinary track, “All Sad Songs.” I’ve never heard a children’s song quite like this – and without getting too carried away in autobiographical pathos, I might also admit that it’s probably the only song from a children’s CD that has ever made me cry. Here are the lyrics:

It’s been all sad songs since you’ve left
I’ve cried and I’ve kept my sorrow so deep inside
And I’ve swept up all of my pride
Sad songs since you died

It’s been all sad songs since you went away
I’ve been lost, and sleeping right through the day
This has cost me all that I had
Now the songs are all sad

Something deep inside of me
So wanted to believe
But that cost me all that I had
Now the songs are all sad

(Male voice: La la la…)

But then Mary came to our house of shame
To proclaim that you were alive again
And the grave was as empty and dark
As my broken heart

Something deep inside of me
So wanted to believe
That the grave is as empty and dark
As my broken heart

(Female voice: La la la…)

I know all sad songs have another verse
It’s the one the heavenly choirs rehearse
For that day when the broken will mend
And the sad songs will end

Not that we’ll forget, we’ll sing those songs yet
In a different key, we’ll sing differently
In the music God has arranged
All the sad songs will change

(Both voices: La la la…)

God will wipe away all our tears
Banish the fears we’ve collected for all these years
On that day when the broken will mend
The sad songs will end

Something deep inside of me
Can’t help it but believe
In that day when the broken will mend
The sad songs will end
In the music God has arranged
All the sad songs will change

A remarkably poignant and sensitive meditation on death, grief, and the triumph of resurrection. The song reflects on music itself as an eschatological metaphor: God is writing another verse for our sad songs, and arranging the score in a different key. In the day of redemption, we will still sing our sad songs – nothing will be lost or forgotten – but these same songs will be translated into something new, utterly sublated so that they become songs of grace and redemption.

This metaphor is evoked very vividly in the song’s own arrangement. After describing his grief in the first verse and chorus, the lead voice sings a melancholy wordless tune, singing only the syllable “la la la…” But then after Mary’s announcement of the empty grave, a female voice enters the song. Again, she sings a wordless tune to the same music, but the melody has subtly changed so that those syllables now convey hope and light and sweetness. Then finally, after the verse describing the eschatological sublation of grief, the male and female voice join their wordless tunes together. Now the two distinct voices and melodies combine to produce a single harmony of redemption: the sad grieving voice is overlaid with a voice of hope and healing; or rather, the sad voice is lifted up into a harmony which fully includes the sad tune, yet utterly transforms it.

The female voice slips into the song so gently, so unobtrusively. The voice alights like a dove, then rises again, leading the male voice upwards. I’m reminded of George Herbert’s poem, “Easter Wings”, where God is depicted as a bird in flight, helping us to fly when our own wings are broken, so that we are raised up together and “combined” in one harmonious song. (As you can see in the picture below, the poem is itself shaped like two birds together in flight.) “With thee / Oh let me rise / As larks, harmoniously… With thee / Let me combine / And feel this day thy victorie: / For, if I imp my wing on thine / Affliction shall advance the flight in me.”


The harmony of the two voices in “All Sad Songs” is like the movement of two birds in flight. The song’s whole theology of resurrection and hope is conveyed most powerfully here, in this simple monosyllabic harmony. My sadness has not fled, but another voice now sings with me, bearing me up, supporting my broken wing, lifting my mournful melody and translating it into a hymn of redemption. The same song – but how different now!

Not that we’ll forget, we’ll sing those songs yet
In a different key, we’ll sing differently
In the music God has arranged
All the sad songs will change.

My wife and I love this album just as much as our kids do. If you’re looking for some good music for your children, then why not grab a copy of Ladybug. And while you’re there, be sure to download the Butterflyfish colouring pages: because everything’s better in crayon.

Lars von Trier's Antichrist

“For what flood of eloquence can suffice to detail the miseries of this life?” —Augustine, City of God, 19.4.

Anthony points to a gripping and eloquent reflection on Lars von Trier’s controversial new film, Antichrist. “Antichrist is very obviously the product of a serious and prolonged depression of frankly theological proportions…. Nature has revealed itself as the relentlessly cruel, profoundly disgusting indifferent monster it always was; human nature is even worse, and women are as disturbed and disturbing as anything a malevolent deity could create in its worst dreams.”

As one of the film’s characters says: “Nature is Satan's church.” I haven’t seen Antichrist yet, but a friend who saw it at Cannes gave it this glowing recommendation: “My God, it’s absolutely brilliant! Pure evil.” You can take that either as a recommendation or a warning...

And speaking of the ambiguities of nature, David Bentley Hart has a new post on the Gnostic turn: “In a sense, a certain ‘Gnostic turn’ is inevitable for us today when we attempt to find our way towards the transcendent, inasmuch as we begin all our spiritual journeys now in a world from which the transcendent has been forcibly expelled, and not as a result of mere cultural prejudice…. We simply cannot now (if we are paying attention) imagine a universe whose grandeurs and mysteries unambiguously lead the reflective mind beyond themselves towards a transcendent order both benign and provident.”

The things that make for peace

I’ll be in Canberra tonight, launching a new book on justice and peacemaking: Heather Thomson, The Things That Make for Peace (Barton Books 2009). Here’s a brief excerpt from the talk I'll be giving about the book:

The book’s whole argument is grounded in an analogy between divine justice and transitional justice – where an unstable and turbulent political order mobilises new instruments, such as judicial mechanisms, amnesties and truth commissions, in order to move into the peace and justice of a new regime. God’s own justice is like this, Thomson argues. Divine justice establishes a new constitution and a new political order, and issues amnesties so that we may enter into the new regime with a clean slate. In this way, we are enabled to make the transition from the regimes that govern this world into the reign of God.

This vision of divine justice, Thomson observes, is something we see in Jesus, the one whose entire life was an argument – to the death – about ‘what God is like, what God requires of us, what God’s justice is like’. The atonement is not about satisfying divine justice, but about establishing a new reign that differs fundamentally from ‘the authoritarian, violent and repressive rule that belongs to this world’. The atonement ‘mediates a regime change’, so that we are led out ‘from the power and kingdoms of this world’ into the kingdom of God. As part of this transition, God forgives our sins – just as a new regime may issue amnesties so that citizens can leave behind their former political allegiances and enter guiltless into the collective project of a new common life. The death of Jesus thus opens up a space of metanoia, a change of mind in which we renounce our former allegiance to the violent powers of this world, and enter into the new reign of the Prince of Peace.

Introducing Giorgio Agamben: what is an apparatus?

I recently mentioned Leland de la Durantaye’s new critical introduction to Giorgio Agamben – a book which I’ve found extremely valuable and insightful. But if you’re not already familiar with Agamben’s works, you might find Durantaye’s 463-page volume a little intimidating. If you’re looking for the quickest, easiest, most accessible introduction to Agamben’s thought – an introduction that you can get through in a single hour – then there’s no better guide than Agamben’s own latest book (a tiny but potent 56 pages), What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford UP 2009).

This first essay, “What Is an Apparatus?”, provides a wonderfully concise snapshot of Agamben’s entire recent project, his “theological genealogy of economy” (8). In this little essay, Agamben uses Foucault’s concept of the apparatus to classify all beings in two groups: “living beings”, and “apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured”. In theological terminology, these two classes denote an ontology of creatures on the one hand, and on the other hand the oikonomia of apparatuses that seek to govern these creatures (13). Between these two classes lies a third class: subjects. Agamben understands a subject as that which results from the relation between living beings and apparatuses.

This concept of the apparatus reflects Foucault’s understanding of the formation of subjectivity. Apparatuses are not a mere accident; they are “rooted in the very process of ‘humanization’ that made ‘humans’ out of … Homo sapiens” (16). They are not instruments of violence, but of governance and subjectification. The apparatus is thus always something that produces its own subject. But the current phase of capitalism has witnessed a proliferation of new apparatuses to capture every moment and facet of life; and these capitalist apparatuses subjectify only by desubjectifying (just as, for Foucault, the penitential subject is constituted through its own negation). In any case, our formation as subjects is always a process of interruption by which the apparatus separates us from our immediate relation to our environment.

Fundamentally, such separation is religion. Religion takes things from the domain of common use and places them in a separate sphere; religion consecrates. The situation of our time demands a new politics of profanation, where that which has been separated/consecrated is restored to common use. In this way, “profanation is the counter-apparatus” (19). Our capitalist world has become “a sort of colossal parody of theological oikonomia”, in which apparatuses “assume the legacy of the providential governance of the world” (23). These apparatuses can be resisted – we can intervene in their process of subjectification – only through profanation. It is profanation which brings to light “the Ungovernable, which is the beginning and, at the same time, the vanishing point of every politics” (24).

It’s a splendid little essay (the volume also includes essays on “the friend” and “the contemporary”). I’ve never come across such a concise, lucid, programmatic statement of Agamben’s project.

This essay also makes it very clear that all Agamben’s recent work on theological economy is structured at its deepest level by Foucault’s understanding of power and subjectivity (not to mention Foucauldian concepts like archaeology, genealogy, biopolitics, etc) – even though figures like Benjamin and Schmitt sometimes linger nearer the surface of Agamben’s texts. As Agamben himself remarked in a recent interview: “I see my work as closer to no one than to Foucault” (cited in Durantaye, 209).

Interested in William Stringfellow?

Anthony Dancer (who edited this book) and Myles Werntz are planning to draw together a consortium of people interested in the work of William Stringfellow. They will be compiling an email list in the next few days, to create a discussion about bringing together theologians working with or on Stringfellow. If you're interested in joining this discussion, feel free to email Myles.