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7 Quick Takes (1/25/12)

7 Quick Takes (1/25/12)

Last updated on: January 25, 2013 at 4:00 am by Leah Libresco

7 Quick Takes (1/25/12) 2013-01-25T04:00:49-05:00 Leah Libresco

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Via io9, I found this beautiful, unconventionally animated story of a man who set off to kill Death.

(Which naturally also reminded me of Mr. Teatime in Hogfather, which I heartily recommend).

— 2 —

Meanwhile in unconventional theatre news, First Things is reporting that a British theatre company is staging a sold-out production of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice: The Musical. Here’s the synopsis:

In order to draw inspiration for his magnum opus, John Rawls travels back through time to converse (in song) with a selection of political philosophers, including Plato, Locke, Rousseau and Mill. But the journey is not as smooth as he hoped: for as he pursues his love interest, the beautiful student Fairness, through history, he must escape the evil designs of his libertarian arch-nemesis, Robert Nozick, and his objectivist lover, Ayn Rand. Will he achieve his goal of defining Justice as Fairness?

Anyone care to suggest song titles?

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And this next musical adventure was unsurprisingly brought to my attention by Tristyn Bloom. Two songs about Orthodoxy, one of which is to the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”

Heresies are arguments that you might find attractive,
But just remember in this case the Church is quite reactive.
So play it safe and memorize these words we sing together,
‘Cause in the end you’ll find, my friend, that we may live forever.

Superchristological and Homoousiosis
Even though the sound of them is something quite atrocious
You can always count on them to anathemize your Gnosis
Superchristological and Homoousiosis

Now Origen and Arius were quite a clever pair.
Immutable divinity make Logos out of air.
But then one day Saint Nicholas gave Arius a slap–
and told them if they can’t recant, they ought to shut their trap!

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And to pick up the theme of college chums who have ended up at First Things, Helen Rittlemeyer has moved her blog over to their site. In addition to browsing her archives (and learning what The Brothers Karamazov has in common with Arrested Development), you may want to check out “Sex in the Meritocracy” her rejoinder to Nathaniel Hardon’s Sex and God at Yale. Here’s a teaser:

This overachiever’s mentality has also determined campus attitudes toward sex. Few notice the connection, because the end result—sexual permissiveness—is the same as it was in the sixties and seventies, when the theme of campus culture was not overachievement but liberation, and the eighties and early nineties, when it was postmodernism and the overthrow of all value judgments. The notorious Yale institution known as Sex Week—a biennial series of sex toy demonstrations, student lingerie shows, and lectures by pornographers—wouldn’t have been out of place in either of these eras. Consequently, Yale’s sexual culture is often mistaken for mere depravity by outside observers who assume that it is just another byproduct of moral relativism…

Take a look at the Sex Week schedule of events (if you have a strong stomach) and you will see just how much of the itinerary is devoted to instruction—how to give the best this, get the most that, and generally become as accomplished at sex as you are at everything else. “Many of us here have never failed at anything, and we don’t want to start now,” explained a rather frank female attendee of a Sex Week event called “Getting What You Really Want,” quoted in the Yale Daily News in 2010. This attitude toward sex is not nearly as dark as the moral relativists’ savage antinomianism, but in a way it is more disturbing.

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I leaned on Chesterton a bit when reviewing Pullman’s collection of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, so I quite appreciate Max Beerbohm’s parody of his paradoxical style. Here’s an excerpt:

It is always in reference to those things which arouse in us the most human of all our emotions—I mean the emotion of love—that we conceive the deepest of our errors. Suppose we met Euclid on Westminster Bridge, and he took us aside and confessed to us that whilst he regarded parallelograms and rhomboids with an indifference bordering on contempt, for isosceles triangles he cherished a wild romantic devotion. Suppose he asked us to accompany him to the nearest music-shop, and there purchased a guitar in order that he might worthily sing to us the radiant beauty and the radiant goodness of isosceles triangles. As men we should, I hope, respect his enthusiasm, and encourage his enthusiasm, and catch his enthusiasm. But as seekers after truth we should be compelled to regard with a dark suspicion, and to check with the most anxious care, every fact that he told us about isosceles triangles.

For adoration involves a glorious obliquity of vision. It involves more than that. We do not say of Love that he is short-sighted. We do not say of Love that he is myopic. We do not say of Love that he is astigmatic. We say quite simply, Love is blind. We might go further and say, Love is deaf. That would be a profound and obvious truth. We might go further still and say, Love is dumb. But that would be a profound and obvious lie. For love is always an extraordinarily fluent talker. Love is a wind-bag, filled with a gusty wind from Heaven.

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I don’t have any clever segue for The Verge‘s piece on the legality of self-driving cars, but I did quite enjoy it. And I’ve still got two years before my non-driver’s state issued photo identification card expires, so shake a leg, regulators.

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Finally, it’d be a shame to let a week go by without a few more Les Mis related links. Alex Knapp is blogging for Forbes on pacifistic heroes in fiction, and Jean Valjean makes the cut. In the novel, he shoots near the soldiers to repulse them from the barricade, but makes sure not to hit a single one.

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