Monthly Archives: January 2012

Changing Scripture to Suit

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This news item disturbs me greatly, if it’s true. It seems that Wycliffe Bible Translators, who we supported for many years, has been producing Arabic and Turkish translations of the Bible with the words “Father” and “Son” replaced with “Allah” and “his Messiah”, so as not to offend Muslim readers.

I understand the need to reach Muslims with the Christian faith. But in my reading of history, changing the words of scripture in this way is always a bad sign. If this is true, and if we still supported WBT financially, we would certainly stop doing so.

Update: Per Wycliffe’s web site, the story isn’t true. This is a relief, as I did not enjoy thinking poorly of them.

Update: Looking deeper, there seems to be more to this story. If the organization Biblical Missiology is to be believed, they have had considerable dialog with Wycliffe about this, and they have what appears to be a record of it. If this record is accurate, WBT is maintaining that they are translating the terms accurately into various languages while avoiding connotations that would be weird to speakers of those languages, and Biblical Missiology is maintaining that they are going too far, so as to lose the original meaning—and in some cases unnecessarily. In this light, WBT’s statement, linked above, could simply mean, “No, we aren’t going too far.” There are a few examples in Biblical Missiology’s record; check it for yourself.

Audition, by Michael Shurtleff

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My sons are both in drama class, and the elder of the two recently auditioned for the high school’s production of Sweeney Todd (he was not chosen). Jane happened to notice a book on doing auditions that was one of Amazon’s monthly $3.99 or less books: Audition, by Michael Shurtleff. Written in 1978, the book is subtitled “Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part”; and Shurtleff certainly seems to be the guy who knows. I had never heard of him before, but during the 1960’s and 1970’s, he was an important and influential casting director in New York. He discovered young actors like Barbra Streisand, Gene Hackman, and Bette Midler; he cast the unknown Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate; he worked with David Merrick and with Bob Fosse. This is a guy who saw eight or nine plays a week, every week, and sat through thousands of auditions.

So Jane suggested we get a copy for my son to read; and since we had it, I read it too. (I say “too”, but I don’t think my son has even looked at it.) And I have to say, it’s fascinating.

The theater is one of those things we all think we know about. We make jokes about actors—oh, he’s an actor? What restaurant is he appearing at? We’ve seen oodles of actors on the big and little screens. We’ve seen movies about stage shows. We read about them in the newspaper and on weblogs. We thing we get it. And deep inside, I think most of us say to ourselves, “You know, it can’t be that hard, what they do. I could do that.” Turns out, there’s a lot more to it than you might think. And one of those things is that what you need to do to audition well is significantly different than what you need to do in a normal performance.

When go to audition—when you do what’s called a “reading”—you’re given a script, often for a part you’ve never seen before. If you ask politely, and if the auditors are so inclined, you might get ten minutes to look at it. You simply do not have time to work up a character, as you would in rehearsals for a play. On the other hand, you have to invest your performance with strong, significant emotion (and humor) or you won’t be noticed. You cannot work up a character; but you have to play a character with real needs and real emotions. And so, says Shurtleff, you have to play yourself. You have to wake up your own needs and emotions, and use them.

Here’s the first thing I hadn’t realized: acting is all about the emotion. The playwright provided the words; the actor has to deliver them convincingly and compellingly. And it doesn’t matter whether the actor understands the words; what matters is whether he gets the emotional content right. (I remember hearing that when Debra Winger and Anthony Hopkins performed in Shadowlands, Winger read up on C.S. Lewis and Joy Gresham; she did all kinds of research to make her performance more convincing. Anthony Hopkins didn’t do any of that; he simply came and did what he does. And of course, it worked.)

The other thing I hadn’t realized is that in an audition, none of the auditors cares whether you perform the role the way they will want it to on stage. They know you haven’t worked up the part; heck, they probably aren’t quite sure how they will want it done. What they are looking for is someone interesting. And the book is full of extremely pragmatic advice on how to be that person.

It also points out that if you aren’t selected (and usually you won’t be) you can’t assume that it’s because you auditioned badly. You might simply be the wrong size, or you might remind the director of his boyhood enemy. You don’t know, and generally you’ll never know, and it’s not worth worrying about. Simply do the best audition you can, and let it go.

So the book was fascinating at that level, as a window into a world of the theater. But it was also interesting on another level, that of culture and world views. To put it bluntly, my view of the world and how it works is extremely different from Shurtleff’s. At one point, while discussing soliloquies, he says

In anothe era people talked to God, lifted up their heads and talked directly at Him up there in heaven, just as we’ve seen Zero Mostel do as Tevya in FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. In this era, where almost everyone is an atheist or an agnostic, we’ve given up talking to God (although occasionally in moments of greatest stress, we may still say, “God, help me!” and make bargains with Him if He will).

I learn from this that religion did not play a significant part in the New York theater world in the ’60’s and ’70’s, and perhaps also that what Shurtleff knew about religious people he knew from the stage rather than from real life.

Later, he talks about using your dreams and fantasies to drive your emotions in your auditions:

Do you see now, Laura, that we don’t live for the realities but for the fantasies, the dreams of what might be. If we lived for reality, we’d be dead, every last one of us. Only dreams keep us going.

And later, he says,

We have lots of truth all day long, ground into us endlessly, usually someone else’s truth, which they insist we know whether we want to or not. We have our own truths to face all the time, unattractive and unappealing, so that it takes every ounce of imagination to create some sort of dream to hold on to, however foolish, however unlikely, however hidden. People live for their dreams, not for the oppressiveness of truths.

This statement took my breath away. It’s as striking a description of the human condition absent the Christian hope as I’ve ever seen: truth is too hard, too difficult to live with, so find a comforting fantasy to give you something to live for. And yet, the Truth is out there, and He loves us. It’s simply too tragic for words.

Philosophy and Me, Part VI: Aristotle and the Every Day

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This is the sixth in a series of posts on my own philosophical journey; the first post is here.

Toward the beginning of Aristotle’s Physics he discusses the theories of his predecessors, and makes what seems to me a radical and ingenious move with almost no fanfare.

His predecessors were interested in two related problems: the One vs. the Many, and Change vs. Stability. Some, like Parmenides, thought that everything there is, is One. There is only the One. And since there’s only the One, it cannot change, so change is an illusion. Others took the opposite point of view. Everything is change. You can’t step in the same river twice. Stability is an illusion. Reality is Many.

The thing about these arguments is that they were all about reality as a whole. And reality as a whole is really hard to get a handle on. Aristotle took their concerns and their arguments and brought it all down to human scale: instead of the cosmos as a whole, what about this house, this dog, this tree, this man?

This house is one thing, a house, but it has many parts. It is one and many at the same time. This tree was planted some years ago; it constantly gets bigger, but it remains the same tree. This man has many parts; but if you remove an arm, or a leg, it doesn’t remain an arm or leg for long; and quite possibly the man doesn’t remain a man for long either, depending on how you do it. A dog eats a piece of meat, and somehow the piece of meat becomes part of the dog–or, at least, some of it does.

Change exists. Stability exists. Things can be one in one way, and many in another. We know these things; we live with them every day. What does it all mean? How does it all work?

Aristotle went looking for the answers—but he never forgot to ground everything he did in the every day world.

The world is bigger, richer, more complex than we can possibly imagine. Any set of first principles we might care to define cannot help but leave things out. Have principles, axioms, and postulates, by all means! We cannot think without them. But never forget the world around us, because truth is what is.

Part VII

I’m Puzzled

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So tonight Jane and I went out on a date, and parked our car in this one particular parking garage downtown. It’s your basic simple multi-level parking garage: a spiral from bottom to top with two-way traffic going up and down in the middle and a row of parking places on either side. Because you have to go out exactly the reverse of how you came in, all of the parking places are perpendicular rather than oblique.

Usually this particular garage is fairly quiet, especially since the movie theater next door closed. Tonight it was quite busy, and we were stuck in a line of cars going up. Usually this means that some joker is waiting for a car to pull out and blocking traffic in the meantime. This time it was something different, something I’d never seen before in this kind of garage: the cars were waiting for some joker to finish backing into his parking space.

And then, once that car was settled and we could all move further in and further up, we noticed that there were lots of cars that had backed into their spots. I’d never noticed any before, and now, tonight, there were lots of them. (I counted eight just walking down one aisle.)

I’ve often seen cars parked facing out in lots where there are multiple rows of perpendicular parking on one level, especially when you can head in to a spot and then continue across the line so that you’re facing out in the next aisle over. But I can’t recall ever having seen it before in this kind of garage. Jane agrees; we’d never noticed anyone doing this before, and suddenly tonight a whole lot of people were doing it.

Is this like the new cool thing? Does somebody on a popular TV show make a habit of parking facing out?

I’m puzzled.

Has anybody else noticed anything like this? Or have we simply been unobservant?

The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas

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It’s nicely coincident to my current series of posts that today is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. In addition to being one of the greatest thinkers in the history of the world, he is also my elder brother in the Dominican order, and my patron saint.

Recently I got a little book by Josef Pieper called The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas: A Breviary of Philosophy. I say that it’s by Josef Pieper, by that’s misleading—except for a brief forward, all of the text comes from St. Thomas’ own writings. Pieper has simply selected them and arranged them in an interesting and useful way.

Although St. Thomas is one of the great philosophers, he was primarily a theologian, and philosophy, the “handmaiden of theology”, was simply one of the tools he used to illuminate the glory of God. Thus, his philosophy is apparent throughout his writings…but he never attempted to write down his philosophy all in one place. It makes it hard to study.

What Pieper has done is pull brief quotations from across the vast expanse of Thomas’ work, and arrange them by topic…and then arrange them within each topic so that they almost form a continuous thread. His desire for this book was that the would-be Thomist would read a bit of it every day, so that Thomas’ principles and conclusions would sink in.

As an example of the style, the third section is titled (in Thomas’ own words),

There can be good without evil, but there cannot be evil without good.

The quotes in this section all build on this theme. Partway down the first page, for example, we see these three related thoughts:

No essence is in itself evil. Evil has no essence.

Evil consists entirely of not-being.

Nothing can be called evil insofar as it has being, but only insofar as it is deprived of part of its being.

Thus, a man who does evil is one who turns from that which would perfect him to that which diminishes him, makes him less a man. And yet, what remains of him is still good.

Pieper does provide a detailed set of citations at the end of the book; thus, I know that the four quotes I listed here are from the Summa Theologiae, the Summa Contra Gentiles, and from one of the “disputed questions”. Pieper also pulls quotes from the Compendium Theologiae, the commentaries on scripture, the commentaries on Aristotle, and a number of other short works.

In short, the whole book is remarkably pithy, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in St. Thomas and his thought. The joy of philosophy is the wonder at and contemplation of the richness of the world than it engenders, and the briefly stated ideas in this book are an outstanding place to get started with the wondering and the contemplating.

Philosophy and Me, Part V: From Chesterton to Aristotle, via Thomas Aquinas

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This is the fifth in a series of posts on my own philosophical journey; the first post is here.

Time passed, and eventually I made the acquaintance of G.K. Chesterton. These were the days before Amazon was around, and when it came to buying books the thrill of the chase was everything. Where ever we went, we went to bookstores; and in every bookstore I looked to see if they had anything by Chesterton I hadn’t seen before. And eventually I acquired a copy of St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, Chesterton’s biography of St. Thomas Aquinas. I read it, and enjoyed it, but didn’t retain much of it, and put it away. Mostly what I remembered was Chesterton’s conjecture that there was something eminently sane about Thomas, something that couldn’t be said about Descartes and his successors. Then I put the book away, and it stayed put away until just a few years ago, when God’s grace led me back to Thomas and Thomas led me back to the Catholic Church (with the help of many others).

I’ve told that story before, at probably rather excessive length, so I won’t repeat it here. It suffices to say that I grew interested in Thomas and his philosophy and his theology, and began to start boning up on it. I blogged quite a lot of the early part of that here. But in order to understand Thomas, I discovered that I needed to understand Aristotle, and from the philosophical point of view that’s what I’ve been working on ever since.

And the fascinating thing about Aristotle, a thing that is completely retained by Thomas, is his emphasis on what we know from personal experience. Woohoo! Between the two of them, I felt like I’d come home.

Part VI

Philosophy and Me, Part IV: Gödel, Escher, Bach

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This is the fourth in a series of posts on my own philosophical journey; the first post is here.

At some point during my college years, I began to read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I started reading a copy by a friend, who’d gotten (I think) as required reading for a class on artificial intelligence. Eventually I got my own copy; and it took me years to actually read the whole thing. It’s a playful, whimsical, sprawling book, which I will not try to summarize here; and it’s also a work of philosophy, though I didn’t understand that at the time. The thread that binds the book together is Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, a very startling result.

Early in the 20th century, an effort was started (by Bertrand Russell, among others) to put all of Mathematics on a sound footing. Mathematics is the most certain of all human knowledge, but it wasn’t certain enough. Its foundations were felt to be a bit shaky, starting as they did with our normal, intuitive grasp of number. The goal, consequently, was to define the absolutely minimum number of axioms and postulates and derive all of Mathematics from that, thoroughly and systematically and for all time.

It was a bold plan. That which was true would be proven true; and that which was false would be proven false; and certainty would reign.

And into this bold project strode Kurt Gödel, who knocked it into a cocked hat.

Without going into great detail, and leaving out all sorts of nuances and caveats (not to mention the proof itself), what Gödel proved was that any sufficiently powerful system of axioms and postulates was incomplete: that there were truths expressible in the system that could not be proven within the system.

In short, you’re in a cleft stick. You can make your mathematical system complete, but it will be too simple to be of interested; or you can make it cover everything, but it won’t be complete. Bertrand Russell’s project was fundamentally flawed.

I had left my philosophy class with the conviction that trying to prove the whole range of philosophical truths from a small set of first principles was doomed to failure. It might work in mathematics, but it didn’t work when you expanded your scope to all of reality. Now I discovered that it didn’t really work in mathematics, either.

Please note: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem doesn’t mean that mathematics is useless, or that proceeding by means of axioms, postulates, proofs, and theorems is valueless. It’s an effective tool. But its power, even in the restricted realm of mathematics, is limited.

This was a fascinating result, and not surprisingly it confirmed me in my anti-philosophical prejudices.

Part V

The Desecrator

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“The Desecrator”, by Steven Brust, is a short story available for $0.99 from Amazon as a “Tor Original”. I grabbed it because I’m a Brust fan, and because it’s set in the world of Brust’s Vlad Taltos series, which I like a whole lot.

Bottom line up front: if you’re not familiar with the Vlad Taltos series, this is not the place to start. Instead, go buy a copy of Jhereg and read it. The rest of this post will be inside baseball, and you might as well skip it. If you’re a fan of the series, it’s worth the $0.99.

Some few books ago, Brust introduced a new character, a young Dzurlord that Sethra Lavode is training up as the first of a new corps of Lavodes. (Vlad has a lengthy dinner with him at Valabar’s in Dzur.) Said character wields a Great Weapon, one that Vlad hadn’t previously heard of.

In this story we get to hear how he gets it. Plus we get to find out just what it is that Vlad’s friend Daymar the Hawklord does to keep himself busy.

Fun stuff; I read it to Jane and she was laughing almost continuously. Of course, she’s heard the entire rest of the series as well.

Philosophy and Me, Part III: The End of the Innocence

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This is the third in a series of posts on my own philosophical journey; the first post is here.

My boy Hume had let me down. Contra Descartes he’d brought sense experience back into the realm of philosophy; and then he’d gone and blown it by deciding that we couldn’t really trust our sense experience to give us true knowledge about the world. And then we moved on to Immanuel Kant, and his Prologomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Not shy, our Immanuel.

The Prologomena is a short book, and I read the whole thing. I’m not at all sure I understood any of it at that time, as it was horribly impenetrable. (I’m told the Critique of Pure Reason is much worse.) What I took away from it (combined with what I’ve learned since) is that Kant took that next step on from Hume. There is an objective reality—but our senses don’t give us true knowledge of it. Indeed, if I understand him correctly, he says we can’t know objective reality, and that the image of reality we do have is largely self-constructed.

But surely this is madness?

And so, I came away from my brief flirtation with philosophy with three clear and distinct ideas:

First: Trying to build a complete, correct philosophy of reality from a very few first principles is doomed to failure. The mathematical model simply does not work for philosophy. (I later found this to be truer than I had realized.)

Second: There’s no point in talking with people who deny objective reality. I don’t pretend that my knowledge of objective reality is perfect; clearly, it’s far from that. But it’s stupid to doubt what you can know directly, and I certainly have direct knowledge of objective reality. Further, the great success of science and technology over the last two hundred years shows that I’m not alone. We humans are really good at knowing objective reality when we work at it, and to deny this is to be willfully stupid. And there’s no point in arguing with people who can believe the absurd.

And this leads to the third point: Modern philosophy is bunk. There’s a reason why most people think philosophy is a waste of time: philosophers say dumb things which are obviously wrong. I might have stated that third point as simply, “Philosophy is bunk,” but I was dimly aware that I didn’t have the whole story. Plato had seemed to make sense, so far as I’d read him; and perhaps there had been something of value between Plato and Descartes.

By the end of the class, at the ripe old age of 18, I’d almost completely written off philosophy as a worthwhile field of endeavor.

Part IV