I have many Christian brothers and sisters whom I love, and I agree with their dedication to helping those who are less fortunate than ourselves.

However, I cannot agree with their politics, particularly with the policy of 'distributionism' which increasingly is beginning to be upheld as an end of itself. The so called "Gospel to the Poor" should be more about lifting up people and helping them find their way economically and spiritually, and less about any abstract notion of creating a more socially just society here on earth.

One of the failures of western progressives is their refusal to adapt their policies or ideologies to the changing demographics in their countries (i.e., lifespan, education levels, lifestyles, etc.) or account for our current technological innovations. Their refusal to adapt their beliefs and their clinging to their old ideas about distributionism is the surest driver of Western financial instability and insolvency.

 If only we could have a real conversation about this...and we could if we were a true community of faith as we claim. However, I fear we have long lost our way. Too many (though hardly all) of the Sandinista branch of Christianity are steeped in their prejudice and they are unwilling to adjust their ideology. Otherwise, they would be open to at least considering this question:

What if our large-scaled distributive policies are actually making the poor poorer and breaking them spiritually so that they are no longer merely poor (which is no shame or judgment against them, as Jesus shows us) but that they give up and let later generations become hopeless and deviant?

Case in point: I live and work in Mississippi, which ranks at the bottom of almost every national statistic (though I expect parts of the old Rust Belt will join us soon). If you take one region out of Mississippi, the Mississippi Delta, the state ranks about in the middle nationally in most categories. I'm not from that region of the state, but my wife comes from a small city just on the edge of it, and I know Episcopal ministries that work there.

The Delta is a place that is (except a few islands in a sea of dependence) almost totally hooked on federal aid. I haven't seen the most recent numbers, but it is probably around 95%. That would be close to the normal numbers I've seen previously.

What happened to the Delta?

Well, that's a complicated answer that I can't do total justice to here, but here is a brief commentary:

The Delta is very fertile farm land (rich black soil) and its adjacent proximity to the Mississippi River makes it easy (and cheap!) to ship farm products on barges down the river to the port of New Orleans where it can be transported anywhere. For maybe 150 years, the Delta (like much of the south) was a one-crop economy...cotton. Indeed, the Delta stayed that way long after much of the Deep South had moved on to a more diverse agriculture.

As we should know from history, cotton (unlike wheat, corn, etc) is a very labor-intensive crop and requires a lot of attention and care both to grow it and prepare it for market. (That's the reason why slavery appeared in places like the Deep South and West Indies...it had nothing to do with the moral superiority of the people living in Northern States prior to 1860.)

For generations, that's how most of the population of the Delta (mostly African-American) made their living: there was a need for low-skilled agriculture laborers, and there was plenty of work to go around. Well, that has all changed. One reason is automation: machines do much (though not all) of the work that was once done by hundreds of hands. Second reason is that the Delta is no longer a single-crop economy: cattle, catfish, soy, corn, and other products are as important as cotton (much of which is bought in Egypt and India where it is cheaper). This was not a new change. King Cotton has been retired since the 1960s, and so the economic/labor crisis in the Delta has been a long-existing one.

I am not anti-government per se. What needed to happen in the Delta once the economy changed was that the labor in the region needed to change with it. We should have encouraged people to move to the cities (there is no major city in the region that anchors it, so this could have changed that). We should have encouraged the people to be retrained, and then we needed to lobby for new industries to come to the region that produce the types of things the new agro-economy needed. Government could have (and should have, if it is the panacea that the Brotherhood of Obama claim it to be) played a part in such a transformation, partnering with local governments, businesses, farmers, charities, and religious institutions to make this come about. As we all know, this did not happen.

What did happen was almost Egyptian...the mummification of the Mississippi Delta.

In effect, what the federal government has actually done is hold in place a way of life that has been dead for 50 years. These people need new skills, training, and education so that they can make a living for themselves and raise their children out of poverty and into new opportunities like our parents and grandparents did for us.

Sadly, people seem to live a life in stasis in the Delta, and I don't think that poverty (as the progressive chorus in academia, activist circles, and on MSNBC would have us believe) is the only reason.

Labor is one thing God intended men to do...to tend the garden, etc. Now I don't fault anyone for taking government assistance who needs it, but generational dependency is quite another thing. As far as I can tell, whether we're talking about the Delta or the USSR, the results are always negative.

In the Delta, the damage has been multi-generational as children and grandchildren who have never seen a parent leave and come home from a job now place no value on work or labor...in fact, it becomes something to sneer it and treat with contempt. My brother is a police officer, and he worked in a Delta community for awhile, and some of the stories he told me would shock anyone. Indeed, no one would think that rural communities and small towns could be the places where all sorts of gangs and criminal activity could be happening, but the murder rates in some of these tiny Delta communities is higher than Chicago, and crime and disrespect for the law or private property (with the exception of a few islands or eddies that I previously discussed) is common.

It seems to me that our government assistance programs where thought out by middle-class Ivy League types for people like myself (skilled, professional, third generation university educated, etc) who might fall on hard times but could eventually find a job within at least 6 months, etc. However, federal assistance seems ill-equipped to work out the problems I described that plague the Mississippi Delta...indeed, the problems of the Delta in 2013 are far, far, far, far different than the problems of 1963, and I think poorly thought out federal policy played a big part in transforming the Delta into what it is today.

Frankly, I don't see how the service the federal government did to the citizens of the Mississippi Delta squares with any "Gospel to the Poor." While it is true that some of our most respected voices within Christendom (like G.K. Chesterton) have argued for a unique Christian Socialism that included distributionism as a means for larged-scaled charity, most of them lived in a different time and had no access to the scenes and data we now have.

Furthermore, for these earlier more socialist brethren, distribution was only a means to helping others, not the end in itself. I think if G.K. Chesterton saw the Mississippi Delta, he, being the objective and fair-minded voice he usually was, would have rethought the means of achieving Christ's mission to the poor of spirit.

Sadly, many of those who followed him and do works in his name, cannot and will not. And the misery will continue.

Must have Flying House, and Dogs

Got any favorite movies you'd like me to discuss? We should discuss them! Movies are another great way of growing in faith and exploring how it applies to our own lives. I think I want to go back to a film I reviewed some time ago because I think if offers some insight to many things concerning our spiritual walk.

Up (2009) is an animated film centered around the character Carl Fredrickson, a widower and retired balloon salesman, who escapes his fate of losing his house and being forced to live in a retirement home by turning his house into an airship: the image of the house at the moment of escape (juxtaposed with one of the best musical scores) floating on thousands of bright-colored balloons might prove to be one of the most aesthetically-pleasing images in cinematic history.

In the movie, Carl decides to take his house to Paradise Falls, a remote and exotic location in the South American mountains, and he is joined by Russell, a boy scout from a broken family, Dug, a Golden Retriever who can talk with the aid of an interpretive collar, and Kevin, a giant flightless bird who is actually female and searching for food for her offspring while protecting Carl and Russell. Carl’s inspiration for his adventure to Paradise Falls comes from a dream his wife, Ellie, had for them when they were children and avid fans of the adventurer Charles Muntz. Ironically, the adventurers come across Muntz himself, and Carl must defeat his childhood hero in order to save Kevin from being abducted from her habitat.

Carl must also choose how to honor Ellie’s memory: to keep their past sterile, or to draw strength from it to begin new friendships with Russell, Dug, and Kevin. Carl’s house is a metaphor for his personal past, which poses a question for us viewers: how should we deal with periods of our lives that we cannot return to, yet remain inseparable from who we are? Should we preserve these moments (as we would a museum or shrine) so they remain static and unchanged, or should our pasts be the materials and tools for constructing our current relationships and confronting our present situations? Both choices have risks, such as the alienation Carl feels when he lives alone in the shadow of the life he and Ellie lived in a neighborhood that no longer wants him, or later when Carl chooses to use his floating house to retrieve Russell and Kevin and must sacrifice it in order to rescue his new friends. However, the difference between the two paths is that when Carl chooses to risk his house to save Russell and Kevin, he gains new companions and (more importantly) a new life that is worth living. Carl’s previous mausoleum life, the film suggests, was not worth living and had long deviated from the spirit of the life he had lived with Ellie.

However, what the producers of Up do best is to create within the film a small world with its own rules and ethos so that the audience can enter and vicariously experience everything to the same degree as Carl. This point might seem redundant to some, but this is the greatest quality of Up, and I would argue this is something which often separates the classics from the movies that are merely ‘entertaining.’ Tolkien felt authorial creation of another world was not a miniscule detail, and he profusely wrote about this creation in his celebrated essay “On Fairy Stories”: What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “subcreator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken: the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside (Tolkien, 132).

To put Tolkien’s argument in another way, a literary text must (to paraphrase Aristotle in Rhetoric) persuade the reader to decide to accept this Secondary World as (at least momentarily) true. The author can only succeed, Tolkien and Aristotle imply, if the author can anticipate the expectations of the audience. In this way, a balance in Up is maintained by a fusion of (1) fantastic elements that appeal to our senses and (2) a detailed portrayal of human devotion and courage that appeals to our emotions and our sense of character. All of these essentials make it easy—even desirable—for us forget that we are even watching a film and accept our invitation to share this world with Carl, Russell, Dug, and Kevin.

The producers at Pixar Animation Studios seem to have a knack for creating films that appeal to families—movies that children can love and parents can more than just endure, but actually enjoy. However, Up might be their best film so far. Directed and co-written by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, Up grossed $731,338,164 globally and won the 2009 Academy Awards for Best Animated Picture and for Best Original Score: the musical themes of the movie are character-based and are associated mainly with Muntz or Ellie. Up was also nominated for Best Picture, becoming the first computer animated film to be nominated, but lost the award to The Hurt Locker (2009).

These honors are well and good for Up, and its nomination beside Peter Jackson’s rendering of Tolkien’s The Return of the King (2003)—which was the first and remains the only fantasy film to win Best Picture—shows that fantasy adaptations at least have a better chance at the Academy Awards these days. However, I doubt anyone was stunned that a film about an Iraq War veteran who defuses explosives trumped an animated film about an elderly man and a boy who lift a house off the ground using thousands of colorful balloons to fly to a place where giant birds eat chocolate and dogs use special collars to talk. But the unusual situation that put these two films, Up and The Hurt Locker, against each other is an opportunity to ask a couple of questions: when we view a film, what is more realistic, and what is more real? Often people (many of them critics) assume that these two things are the same, but in film and literature this is a specious claim.

First, what is realism and why isn’t Up realistic? Here we have to move beyond the obvious (floating houses, dogs flying airplanes, Carl’s mega-agility in the airship scene) and into the realm of what our culture takes for granted as ‘real.’ Fantasy scholars such as Michael D.C. Drout differentiate between the fantastic and conventional in fiction by saying “fantasy and science fiction are about things that physically cannot happen.” While I am unsure what research is available to tell us how many birthday balloons are needed to make a house float to South America (though the National Geographic Channel's "How Hard Can it Be" did an amazing experiment that gives us some indication), it is safe to conclude that the amount of balloons that move Carl’s house violates the laws of physics, and is thus not ‘realistic.’ However, as C.S. Lewis argues in his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” often the stories where “children have adventures and successes which are possible, in the sense that they do not break the laws of nature, but almost infinitely improbable, are in more danger than the fairy tales of raising false expectations” (Lewis 29). In other words, the ‘realism’ that is depicted and even marketed in films is far more of a rhetorical appeal than the representative objectivism that we in the audience assume it to be.

For example, in The Hurt Locker, the idea of a soldier who can only love the thrill and rush that war provides feels authentic, but it is probably not something most Iraqi War veterans would view as ‘real’ or ‘realistic,’ and this occurs because often the films that are called ‘realistic’ deal with an ethos that is peculiar rather than universal in experience. We see evidence of this from the various criticisms of The Hurt Locker from Iraq War veterans such as Brandon Friedman who said “if you know anything about the Army, or about operations or life in Iraq, you’ll be so distracted by the nonsensical sequences and plot twists that it will ruin the movie for you. It certainly did for me” (par 2). To top it all off, while most film critics praised the film’s realistic depictions of the battlefield, Friedman went on to scathe them caustically, saying that “in real life, EOD techs don’t conduct dangerous missions as autonomous three-man teams without communications gear” and “you’ll rarely hear in combat…an EOD E-7 suggesting to two or three of his guys that they leave the scene of an explosion in an Iraqi city by saying: ‘C’mon, let’s split up. We can cover more ground that way’” (par 9).

This begs another question: if the battlefield scenes and psychological conditions in The Hurt Locker are not believable to the very veterans that the film supposedly depicts, then what makes this film more real than Up?

When discussing fiction, Drout takes issue with the contrasts that are often made between fantasy and ‘realism,’ which he sees as ‘problematic’ because “literary scholars have shown that almost everything about realism is actually convention rather than any specific fidelity to any one kind of language,” and therefore “Works are realistic because we think they are realistic” (6-8). What Drout says about literature also applies to film, not to mention that fantasy in fiction and film can, as Drout reminds us, use “very realistic physical descriptions (often of landscape),” it “can examine deep psychological motivation in the same way that realistic novels do,” and as a final parting shot, fantasy “sometimes bears a closer relationship to the realities of physics and biology than do contemporary realist novels” (6-7). Indeed, I can recall a plethora of films with romantic storylines, conspiracy narratives, cinematic representations of violence and sex that only the most puerile imagination could believe to be realistic, and are usually understood by the people who enjoy them (unconsciously or not) as a form of ‘wish fulfillment.

’ Fantasy, however, can remain more true to reality in these respects because it fulfills a different sort of wish, or a deeper, more transcendent ‘longing’ as Lewis calls it, which is what we have in Up. Fantasy manages to externalize our deepest anxieties, hopes, and joys in the form of narration, images, and characters. Therefore, even at its most exotic, fantasy always draws on what is most familiar and real. In the end, the fantastic elements in Up might not make the film more ‘realistic,’ but the confluence of fantastic elements and human experience makes Up one of the most ‘real’ films I have seen in a long time. Up should be a delight for adults and children, to the minds and the hearts of all.

The Inklings of Oxford

When my wife and I arrived in Oxford, England in September of 2007, I was probably unconsciously expecting it to be more similar to Oxford, Mississippi—all sorts of landmarks indicating where the celebrated writers lived, ate, and slept, as well as a surplus of local people with an abounding knowledge of the literary giants that drew a slew of worldwide tourists to their city. Of course, what I found was not the romanticized university village but a sizable city that is busy, modern, and multifarious in its interests: many of the people had some knowledge of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, but few of them could tell me anything. I spent much of that trip frustrated, trying to find Magdalen College, the Eagle and Child pub, and other places for myself. Finally, I had to catch a bus for Salisbury, so I never made it to the Lewis’ home, The Kilns, about which I’m still shooting myself in the foot.

Still brooding about it all when we were walking around Old Sarum, I told my wife that what we needed was a picture/travel book of Oxford from the point of view of The Inklings—the literary group that included Lewis, his brother Warnie, Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and other writers—to help time-strained travelers find the places they want, as well as the places they haven’t considered, but ought to. As I later learned, Lewis scholar Harry Lee Poe and photographer James Ray Veneman had been in Oxford one month before us working on such a book. After a couple of years, they completed their book The Inklings of Oxford (Zondervan, 2009), which completes all (or most all) of the goals of tourist cartography that I could hope for. Page after page is copiously illustrated with nostalgic images of Oxford as Lewis and Tolkien would have known it. Aside from the photographs and captions of Magdalen, Merton College, the Divinity School, there are also views of the surrounding countryside and scenic walks that the Lewis brothers used when walking from Headington to Oxford, as well as their local restaurants such as The Trout and the Mitre help to recreate this matchless time in the book. The index of the book also has several useful maps and talking tours, which are very practical and easy to follow. Therefore, the tourist who enters this modern metropolis wishing to follow those waning footprints of The Inklings (and in doing so, perhaps find what is best in Oxford) will be able to do so with more ease (if not with less sweat and muscle aches).

Finally, as valuable as Poe’s and Veneman’s book is as a map and a concise history for travelers, it is also a much needed piece of popular scholarship not only on certain historical and biographical issues, but Poe also is able to translate some of the most complex ideas behind The Inkling’s epistemology into terms that are accessible to most readers. For example, in Chapter One, Poe discusses the role of imagination that was so paramount for Lewis’ and Barfield’s theory of knowledge:

"Where philosophy and reason could not take him, Lewis discovered that imagination and language easily could. Imagination goes beyond the mere concrete and analytical world of philosophy, no matter how speculative the philosophy may be. Philosophy is tied to the physical world even when it ponders the world of ideas. Imagination, on the other hand, journeys beyond the physical world and comes back again. Every great scientific breakthrough has come not from building on old, established understandings of science and reasoning, from there to something radically different. Instead, people like Einstein take flight through imagination, which takes them somewhere else and returns them with a new understanding of the world (46)."

While I will not further discuss this view of knowledge, Poe’s ability to take this complicated epistemic proposition and put it into the scope of all readers takes an incredible amount of scholarly elasticity in itself. Indeed, while there is little information in The Inklings of Oxford that is new in the way of scholarship, Poe envisions for his book a larger audience—travelers as well as normal interested readers—and his pedagogical considerations are what make this book effective. Furthermore, such a book could only be written by such a scholar as Poe who has devoted much of his time to Lewis and The Inklings.

I have heard too many academics snub (sometimes politely, sometimes not) popular scholarship as not worthy of their attention, implying a sort of ‘us and them’ dichotomy. However, the popular scholarship of authors such as George Orwell has been beneficial in drawing interested persons into their respective fields (and thus furnishing their paycheck and continued tenure). Therefore, while the need for high scholarship is paramount, popular scholarship is needed just as much for its pedagogical—as well as its inspirational—value, which is what ultimately draws many of us to scholarship in the first place.