“We must come to understand incarnational translation, which is to say, understanding translation as interpretation. There are two ways an interpreter can fail. One is through assuming that the languages he works with are like mathematics and that any deviance from that standard should be considered as a failing. This is the way of the …
Dreadlocks at Taco Bell
“But one hardly has to go to a poetry reading to see the countercultural idea acted out. Its frenzied ecstasies have long since become an official aesthetic of consumer society, a monotheme of mass as well as adversarial culture. Turn on the TV and there it is instantly: the unending drama of consumer unbound and …
Different Temple, Same Moneychangers
“In the same way, the critic of Jesus junk stores is assumed to be a critic of Jesus. But of course, scriptural satire assumes that the foremost critic of Jesus junk stores would be Jesus Himself. If Christ were to go to the Christian Booksellers convention (CBA) and see all the crap being hawked with …
Why Do We Park in Driveways and Drive on Parkways?
“This brings us to the relation of logic and reason to the business of human language. The relativist wants to say that there is no relation, and the precisionist wants to say there is a precise and settle relation. But neither fits the situation. The logic of words is not the same as the detached, …
Aboriginal Hip
“The patron saints of the counterculture idea are, of course, the Beats, whose frenzied style and merry alienation still maintain a powerful grip on the American imagination. Even forty years after the publication of On the Road, the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs remain the sine qua non of dissidence, the model for aspiring …
That Wholesome Glow
“The critic of Thomas Kinkade paintings, where all the puddles on the ground have their eerie radioactive glow, and all the bungalows look like the living room has just caught on fire, is assumed to be a critic who is hostile to home, hearth, and wholesome family values. But the actual object of his hostility …
Revolution Through Consumption
“What we thought was really eerie, though, was the way mass culture reflected the high critics’ priorities. While they spoke proudly of their own subversiveness and turned out account after account of the liberating potential of each act of consuming, the culture industry itself grabbed with both hands at the golden promise of rebellion-through-consumption. The …
Adjectives Don’t Exist
“Abstractions like truth, beauty, and green are necessary in order for us to communicate at all. But we must be careful here because our entire problem rests in what we have thought we are allowed to do with abstractions. The lack of ‘existence’ is true of all adjectives, including those adjectives we call numbers. One, …
Modernism and Plato
“But Western culture needed more time in the detox center than was actually spent there, and the temptation to go back to realist assumptions has been constant and unrelenting. This has been particularly the case with mathematics and its cousins — theoretical physics and symbolic logic in particular. Many modern fads and fashions — the …
Honky Tonk Piccolo
“Far more is involved in learning how to do this than just making a list of words that can be used — whether never, occasionally, or all the time. Someone who has a generally pietistic cast of mind cannot just throw a word in here or there — that would be like trying to play …