I just saw a great movie: Moon. It’s the last two weeks of Sam Rockwell’s three-year contract with Lunar industries, the sole employee at a largely mechanized helium mine, and things suddenly go very wrong.

Stylistically, Moon follows 2001: A Space Odyssey, down to the music by Mozart. But while Kubrick’s 1960s classic thinks about the limits of the human mind (including its expression in computers), Moon is also a child of its times, asking questions about capitalism’s control over life.

Most importantly, Moon has an awesome plot twist which can’t be spoiled.

Anyway, here’s the trailer:

In the absence of any positively unifying stories toward a Belarusian identity, and suffering under Europe’s only dictatorship, Belarus is embracing the Orthodox hierarchy.

Writing in Arche, Rashed Chowdury, who identifies himself as a Muslim, says embracing Christianity might be good for Belarus, but only at the level of popular conviction; not at the level of state-sponsorship.

Furthermore, the foundations of fascism are present when the church cynically aligns itself with the state, and, more significantly, when youth movements insist on an alignment of the culture with the faith:

President Alaksandr Lukashenka has been widening the role of the Orthodox Church in society, while the Church, in its turn, has been legitimising the regime, at times quite cynically. Belarusian TV news recently showed a spokesman for the Belarusian Orthodox Church, who, with an empty expression in his eyes, said that Belarus has the best legal structure in Europe. At the same time, one of the pro-opposition Belarusian youth organisations active in the United States, whose website is linked to by the sites of several independent Belarusian organisations and publications, as well as those of opposition parties, claims that every nation has its religion, that the religion of the Belarusians is Christianity, and that it is impossible to be a good Belarusian without being a Christian.

A brilliant lecture I heard recently by Brian Stanley of the University of Edinburgh's Centre for the Study of World Christianity detailed evolving missionary thought from the Victorian period to the Modernist period: during this time a shift in emphasis emerged from Christian universalism, with its attendant focus on the “brotherhood of man” to a multi-ethnic focus on cultural diversity.

In the first case, the motive of mission was to embrace those outside the faith with the blessings of Christian community, which was usually and unfortunately understood as coterminous with contemporary European culture, including modes of dress and etiquette.

In the second case, a Christian was assigned a “cultural mandate” to diversify. Theorists started putting a lot of weight on verses such as those of Revelation 21:24-26 where, speaking of the New Jerusalem, it reads:

24The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. 25On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. 26The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.

Both emphases are faithful to the bible and point to an inherent tension in the Christian faith—that of a scattering localism on the one hand, and of a center-focused universalism on the other. While it’s hard to live without either force, because extremism rapidly emerges—whether fascism and racism on the one hand, or insistent conformity on the other—the two forces are in constant tension in our minds. It’s a fact of life.

Stanley’s point was this: that at first glance the Victorian civilizing missionary is greatly embarrassing to today's sensitivities, and yet: we today need to listen to them, because they had thought long and hard about creating a global family. We needn’t follow them to the conclusion of conformity to Western cultural standards, but neither should we reject their universalism out of hand.

Today’s insistent multi-culturalism, Stanley concludes, uses nearly the same compassionate language as the civilizing mission of the 1880s, and needs to be brought back into the tension of local vs. global. If local is the only acceptable incarnation of faith, correction from the global community becomes less likely, and locally-birthed bad ideas and practices can blossom unchecked.

As one example, we need only consider the religious justifications for slavery in antebellum America (south and north alike). As Mark Noll demonstrates in God and Race in American Politics,  so important a book that I’ll need to write about it separately, the sheer volume of pro-slavery sermons can only point to a widespread fear that slavery was somehow unchristian.

In the end, Noll suggests, the white church of the American south convinced itself that faithfulness to scripture demanded a political separation from the north; the civil war can thus be partially conceived as the last great Western religious war.

hich leads to the question Brian Stanley was asking: what if local faith is wrong? What if, in the interest of creating a grass-roots Christianity we also make a Christianity deaf to correction from the outside?

This is a really disturbing question to me, who have dedicated a lot of thought to the multi-ethnic aspects of my faith.

I’ve always loved poring over maps. It’s better recreation for me than watching a movie—it’s pure escapism. So when I was reading Across This Land: A Regional Geography of the United States and Canada recently, I was delighted and astonished by this statement by author John Hudson:

Regional geography begins with the premise that it is possible to gain the sense of a place by reading about it.

 Surely that is true! But if so, that would mean that it’s possible to imagine life in those places, and further: to empathize with people one might find there.

Hudson is certainly not suggesting reading as a replacement for immersion, but I believe he’s on to something profound about the human condition: we are simultaneously anchored in space and have the capacity to reach beyond this space, with our minds and hearts, at least.

Narnia, along with similar fantasies, including Tolkien's Middle Earth and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, occupied a lot of my imagination when I was a teenager, and again this year, as I've been re-reading the stories.

The stories are fine, but would not have nearly the power without the maps. I remember one time in high school drawing a map of Narnia in pencil on my desk.

A really strange moment yesterday: I was listening to a local rock music station, and they dusted off a song from two decades ago, from shortly before I started listening to such music.

It was a sexual suggestion song, a variety that only existed for a few years in the 80s and early 90s, in the period between the Beatles’ I want to hold your hand and R. Kelly’s I want to [fill in the blank for the entire album]

For some time, hair metal from 1990 has felt dated to me, but this time, it felt downright quaint. And that was what was disturbing. It was Poison, a band I’ve never liked. The song was Talk Dirty to Me, not exactly a great start. And even now, as I look up the lyrics, I don’t feel like reprinting them here.

Still, Talk Dirty to Me was supposed to be raunchy (and it was), yet it’s almost polite in today’s scene. Considering that even the Onion found R Kelly pitifully filthy, we’re in a painful spot.

Actually, it’s a misogynistic spot. I’ve had an untested hypothesis over the last few years, that sexual anarchy, at the cultural level, will ultimately favor the sexually aggressive. On aggregate that means men, but not just any men: those who tolerate no limits to their freedom.

Quaint, in this sense, means innocent and just a little ignorant. It's a word of condescension. In hindsight, Poison probably deserve condescension, because the logic of their song--the logic of lust--cannot be resolved except by raising the stakes, which is exactly what the passage of time has done. That's what it means to be a slave to one's passions.

We are not doomed to follow. We can develop sustainable tastes. How that's done I don't know, other than that it involves healing, which usually points to an external source to our own will.

In the latest numbers from the US Dept. of Education, Wisconsin has the worst reading scores in the United States for African American 4th and 8th-graders, the Capital Times reports.

This in a state generally recognized for the quality of its public schools. What's going on is the largest racial gap in the country. Wisconsin also has the largest racial gap in incarceration rates.

Lots of smart people have opinions toward solutions here, and I can't evaluate them, out of sheer ignorance. But this much I know: the sum total of people's non-racist actions can at times result in racial discrepancies.

This is important because addressing racial discrepancies is without fail politically charged, and usually involves name-calling. So people of good will stay away from the problem.

Yesterday I made a throwaway comment that one of the important gifts evangelicals can bring to environmentalism is the mental skill of holding global and local in tension. That probably needs some clarification.

On a daily basis, Christians do a mental gymnastics in reconciling opposite forces in the faith they hold: Christians belong to this world and to another at once. They belong to their local village and to each other on other sides of the globe; and at a profound level, they belong to each other even across enemy lines more than they belong to their next-door neighbors.

More importantly, Christians believe that the present world is irreplaceably important precisely because it is a fallen world that can be partially redeemed in the here and now, and that this world can be redeemed in the here and now because it is connected to the eternal.

The present world, ecological problems included, is connected to the eternal one not by magic or by fairy tunnels, but by relationships—by a God’s love. That’s the point of John’s description of Jesus as the Word made Flesh.

It is an unnatural (of sorts) way of thinking to claim to both belong to the world and to be alien from it. But everyone who is, as Jesus put it, again in John, born again, is born again into this tension, a tension with no chance of resolution in this life.

This is why Christians can, and have been, accused of both otherworldliness and profanity. The truth is both and neither.

Back to the environmental problem. The problem consumes our entire physical world, yet in certain respects is a spiritual problem: it relates to our souls.

Deep Ecology is a radical environmental philosophy I’ve done some reading on, most importantly in Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology. Contributors to the volume at several places make use of the concept of bioregionalism, which generally can be understood as resolute belonging to one’s biological-geographical place, in the food one eats, to the company one keeps.

Bioregionalism can be benign or dangerous. It can range from an insistence on eating food grown locally, to an aggressive resistance to foreign life and ideas.

If bioregionalism is the practical political philosophy of Deep Ecology, then Deep Ecology is entirely irreconcilable with Christianity, because of Christianity’s simultaneous insistence on the global and local. Bioregionalism can thus lead to a particular problem: ecofascism. In his contributing chapter, Possible Political Problems of Earth-Based Religiosity, Michael Zimmerman, now of the University of Colorado, writes:

Affirming that humanity is but one strand in the great web of life, Nazi ideologues trumpeted the now infamous slogan Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil), which may be understood as a racist version of bioregionalism. The Nazis condemned Judaism and Christianity for being nature-hating, life-despising, and otherworldly.

Among the growing body of evangelical eco-literature, Matthew Sleeth’s Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action is one of the best. But that’s a pretty tough qualification: most Evangelical contributions are less than great.

Sleeth, it is clear, is a true leader and deep thinker constrained by the genre. He has studied broadly, and has original thoughts on everything ranging from consumer society to pollution to global warming.

I’d love to see him unbridled; if freed from the constraints of evangelical anti-liberal paranoia, he might be today’s best shot at bringing new life and unity to the many fragmented threads of the environmental movement, Christian and otherwise.

As long as editors force evangelical environmentalists to continually assert their conservative credentials, Evangelicals will not have much of a role to play in solving the complex problems of today.

Our current political climate is toxic for evangelical reformers. And yet, if we’re really honest, which few corporations or politicians is showing themselves to be at this time, the environmental crisis will only be solved by sacrifice—the sacrifice of the unsustainable American Dream.

We will not solve global warming by changing light bulbs. We will not solve smog by driving hybrids. The only real solution is the hard, slow, unsexy work of downsizing our lifestyles, as they’re currently articulated.

That’s where Matthew Sleeth comes in. His story itself—of a wealthy surgeon who, with his family, stepped off the career ladder for a slower-paced, less remunerative but fuller life—is a role model for the kind of sacrifice we’re talking about. And more: he’s emerged on the other side intact enough to enjoy the fruit. His teenagers, liberated from slavery to media, have learned to love each other and their parents and neighbors. It’s real. I’ve seen others like the Sleeths, but so far from everyday experience as to be prophetic and a little incredible.

If evangelicals are going to make a world-changing impact on the environment, it will be through the unique gifts they bring:

1.    Faith in the apparently impossible; and the associated
2.    Willingness to embark on the impossible;
3.    Belief in right and wrong, especially the s-word, sin;

And perhaps most importantly,

4.  The mental skill of holding the global and the local in tension.

Moving easily from topic to topic, Sleeth demonstrates mastery of all these. Discussing cancer deriving from exposure to dioxins, for example, he notes what dioxins have in common with sin: there’s no safe dose. Statements like this are not hokey bones to the believers: they are expressions of a deep engagement with the morality of poison. They may ruffle the feathers of the eco-establishment, but the same are usually won over with right actions. So if sin-believing evangelicals can be mobilized to get carcinogens out of our homes and food, that’s worth the embarrassment of tolerating Christians.

Sleeth’s strongest appeals come when he discusses affluence, particularly his screed against Santa Claus. The reckless pursuit of stuff, he argues, harms more than the environment: it harms our moral centers, and stunts the emotional growth of our families and communities.

I’d love to see more here. It’s a shame that evangelicals are still in need of hand-holding. Sleeth is capable of leading a trek, but has to continually slow down to tend to doubters and babies. But this is a success story of a book.

In the United States, hearings are underway for a nominee for the Supreme Court. What's your opinion?

[photo: credit sxc.hu member davidlat]