ASGW Sleepy Hollow (ep 9)

Sleepy Hollow episode 10 airs tonight.  Only 3 more left!  I wonder if I'll manage to watch season 2.  This is the first season of TV since... I dunno, TNG that I have managed to watch a show every week.  I think it has something to do with the fact that the episodes are online, so I can watch them even when I'm away or forgetful.

Episode 9 was mostly about developing the various charactes' backstories.  For one, I so called it: Ichabod and Katrina had a baby.  A son, specifically, which will probably be important later on.  There was also some slight development in Abbie's story too, but not a whole lot.  Surprisingly, the captain got his fair share as well; we met his ex-wife and daughter for the first time, and his daughter was given some significant screen time.

This, if I may digress a bit, is why Sleepy Hollow rocks and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D doesn't.  Sleepy Hollow takes the time to put a kid on screen and give her her own monologue to establish her voice and backstory.  And she's just a supporting character, with no promise she'll ever even come back. Agents is so caught up in explaining the McGuffin of the week that we still don't know who the 6 top-billed characters are, and since we don't know, we don't care.  The only episode of Agents that really did any character-building was the one where Simmons got the alien flu.  Even Coulson explaining how Melinda May got the nickname "the cavalry" doesn't give us any insight into her character.  She's still a cipher, like everyone else on the show.

Anyway, nothing really objectionable in ep 9 for Sleepy Hollow except for the main antagonist.  Why does an Ancient Near Eastern god whose main characteristic is worship involving child sacrifice have a servant made of tree roots from deciduous North America?  I'm waiting to see if there is ever a connection between Molech's worship and Ichabod's and Katrina's child, but I'm not holding my breath.  There was no indication of it in the episode.

Ok, maybe, maybe you could draw something from Abbie's line, "As soon as your son was born, the creature attacked," but that sounds more like the baby is some kind of mystic key (hey, he's the child of a witch, right?), not that Molech needs more child sacrifice.

Speaking of Katrina, one nitpicky bit:  Why is the letter Ichabod wrote to her in case he was killed on the battlefield folded up and hidden in a book when she was right there when he died to cast the spell that kept him alive? preserved? in some kind of magical stasis? for 200+ years?

Also, after the first episode where Ichabod met her, Katrina has looked and dressed nothing like an 18th century Quaker.  I think I already addressed that as Katrina Van Tassel, a Dutch woman in rural New York, she shouldn't be a Quaker at all.  Oh I didn't?  Well, she shouldn't. Quakers were British and largely centered around Philadelphia.  They could have made her Mennonite, which would have fit better, actually.  Mennonites were/are pacifists, like the Quakers, and the Plain Mennonites grew out of the German immigrants, not the Dutch.  So it wouldn't have been out of place for her to wear those fancy dresses and jewelry.  Also, Quakers were disowned if they married non-Quakers, and Abraham was obviously not a Quaker. 

See?  I should be hired as a TV/movie research assistant.

ASGW Sleepy Hollow (episodes 7 & 8)

blogablogablog.

So yeah, I took a break from blogging Sleepy Hollow for 2 reasons:  1) I was trying to finish my Ph.D. applications (done!) and 2) Thanksgiving in Arizona.

And in retrospect 3) these two episodes are basically a two-parter, with ep 8 picking right up on the cliffhanger ending of ep 7 and finishing out the story.

These episodes were great.  I got the feeling that they were setting up for what would have been the ending if the show hadn't been renewed for a second season, but it was, so they ended up just being a really tightly written adventure.

However, since this blog series is all about the problems with the show, let's get to criticizing!

UV lights can substitute for the sun in magic.  What?  It's magic.  There's something special about the sun, daylight, and good and evil.  While it was awesome to see the headless horseman start to smoke from the lights, replacing magic with science and technology is always uncertain ground to walk on, and I wasn't convinced that GE can project anti-evil.

Also, those are totally not Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

One thing they got very right, although I don't know if it was on purpose, was Captain Irving's emphasis on the word "scientifically" when explaining to Ichabod that DNA evidence had established that there are descendants of Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson.  An educated man from the 18th century Enlightenment would definitely respect anything backed up by "science."  But then, our own culture is so heavily influenced by the Enlightenment, it's hard to know if the writers had to even take Ichabod's cultural moment into consideration.

On the other hand, it was so awesome seeing Abbie teach Ichabod about what a fist-bump means :)

And watching Ichabod try not to be seduced by an internet porn popup is characteristic of why I love this show!  To say nothing of his voicemail to Abbie.

staying connected.

i graduated in may, ended my internship at a church, and i haven't been back to a church, any church building or local community, since.

This is not really a good thing.  i do realize this.

Not precisely as defense, but as explanation, the church i was a member, employee, and leader of before i left to go to seminary full-time and work at my internship was somewhat abusive.  Because of the senior pastor's insecurities and ambition, the community i had been a part of was dissolved by the leadership.  This happened 2 weeks after i had gone to a new church to intern.

Part of the problem is also that i went from being a leader in a community to being a seminarian-intern, another leadership position.  i've been teaching in churches for the last 4 years, and i've been a resource for church leaders for even longer than that.

The prospect of finding a new community to worship with is exhausting.

Also the problem is that i have some strong theological and ecclesiological commitments these days, and part of what i would be looking for in a church is either closely shared ideological stances, or openness to them.  i'm really not willing to compromise on women being in ministry, the church adopting missional ecclesiology, following and supporting social justice, or a belief in the inspiration of the Scriptures and the supernatural.  This puts me in a very awkward position, half liberal, half evangelical.  both sides have things that irritate me.

i want a church that believes in the resurrection, that believes that Jesus' followers are empowered by the Spirit sent by the Father, that believes that "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world" (James 1:27 NRSV).

And i've been hurt.  A few weeks ago, we were staying with my parents, and i couldn't go to church with them.  the prospect of stepping inside that building stressed me out and upset me so much.

But see, this is where things like the lectionary come in.  For the last couple years, i've been buying these devotionals that follow the lectionary with ancient christian commentary.  Paleo-orthodoxy has its own problems, but i'm a historian, and reading what my brothers and sisters left behind as relics from their spiritual journeys makes me feel connected to them.  Also, reading with the lectionary allows me to follow the church year and the same scripture readings along with the huge numbers of other christians who do the same.  So i just bought myself the volume for the "A" year, as well as the Episcopal Church's book "Holy Men, Holy Women," which is something like a calendar of saints, but a little more contemporary, yes, liberal, and Protestantized.

It's not real community, but it's the best i can do for now.  Sort of my Advent longing.

ASGW Sleepy Hollow (episode 6)

wah. so i was out of town last week and didn't get to post onthe last episode of Sleepy Hollow.  Am doing it now quickly before tonight's!

Ok, so continuing biblical problems: which horseman are they running from?  Seriously, people.  Just go back and read Revelation 6 again and decide what the hell you're doing.  Because the Headless Horseman is death, but he's the last horseman to emerge in chapter 6, not the first.  *sigh*

However, their definition of sin got really weird.  First thing you notice from the Sin Eater's sanctifying scene is that you define what's sin for you.  So if another redcoat had gone out and shot Arthur Bernard but didn't feel guilty about it, it wouldn't be sin?

And then, wait, what is Ichabod feeling all guilty about?  That he couldn't save the man from getting shot by a demon?  But it was totally ok for him to torture the guy?  No regret at all about torturing a man for days, but he fails at saving him from a demon and this is what connects him with "sin incarnate"?  I don't know if this is just callousness at torture's current position in American society or if the dialogue was handled/cut/edited badly, but it seems really weird to me that Ichabod would be totally ok with torturing a guy but then would flagellate himself over failing to save him in the woods, at night, from a demon.

On the other side,  I totally loved that Katrina can contact Abbie as well.  And was there a hint that Katrina and Ichabod had a baby?  In her vision, Abbie sees this baby carriage (and also note the toy in the bed) and hears a baby crying.  But of course it all turns creepy.  More to come, hopefully...

ASGW Sleepy Hollow (episode 5 - now with screenshots!)

so i was really looking forward to watching sleepy hollow last night and letting my brain turn to mush after a second PhD open house in less than a week.  but it was a rerun of the pilot, bah.

on the other hand, this gives me the chance to catch the blog up since i missed episode 5 last week.

there wasn't really any theology in ep 5, but there was a ton of awful history.  so here we go!

well, ok, first up: the horseman of pestilence.  also conquest because that actually follows the text of Revelation 6.  but why is he dressed as a samurai?

But, the major problem in this episode was historical:  a kid from the colony of Roanoke speaks Middle English. 

um.  no.

as wikipedia helpfully points out, Roanoke was a colony in North Carolina, founded in 1585 and disappeared sometime after the first recorded birth in the colony in 1587.

Middle English started to fade away in 1470.  it was replaced (again, wikipedia) by a dialect from London.  so the colony of Roanoke was founded slightly over 100 years after Middle English started to die out.  Also, let's please note that most of the colonists came from London or the south of England and so were closer to the linguistic shift and even less likely to still speak Middle English.  not only that, but the 1580s were well into the Great Vowel Shift, especially in the south, making Middle English even less likely.

further, Ichabod Crane is an Oxford history professor in this telling (in the original, he's just a schoolmaster).  the chances of a history professor being fluent in Middle English by the late 18th century are slim to none.

a seminary grad watches "sleepy hollow" (ep 1 & 4)

i am watching and loving the new tv show "sleepy hollow," but they are getting just about everything wrong about christianity and a lot wrong about history too.  so since fact-checking is all the rage, i think it's going to be fun to blog through the season (already renewed for a second, woo!) noting all the silliness.  potential spoilers, be warned.

unfortunately, i don't know a whole lot about native american religion, so i'm just assuming they got the Iroquois sandman-dream demon in episode 3 as wrong as they got everything else :)

i posted my initial reaction to the pilot already, but let's flesh it out a bit more. 

the apparently Roman Catholic priest who gets beheaded in the pilot is dressed as a cardinal.  what?

Ichabod reads Rev 6:1 and 6:7 as both referring to the headless horseman, who is identified as "death" (the other 3 are war, pestilence, and famine).  problem #1: 6:1 is talking about war, and 6:7 is talking about death.  problem #2: the series has death as the first horseman, but in Revelation, death is the last (hence 6:7).**

then he appears to keep reading and refers to 2 witnesses.  in Rev 6, there is a multitude, not 2.  so what the heck is going on?

that answer comes out a bit better in ep 4.  Jenny and Abbie were conveniently dragged to bible study as kids and forced to memorize scripture passages.  helpfully, they both memorized Revelation, apparently.  the two witnesses come from Rev 11:3, although the show leaves out the "in sackcloth" part of the quote.

more problems in episode 4:  the final demon summoning takes place in what apparently is a Dutch Reformed church, except the first shot of the church's interior shows a statue of a female saint or the virgin Mary.  not only is the Dutch Reformed tradition exceedingly Protestant so there would definitely be no statue of a saint or Mary, but it's also part of the Prot tradition that removed all art from churches, so there shouldn't be any statue at all (the same goes for the stained glass windows).  another problem is that as far as i could tell, they put the book on what appears to be not a lectern, but a portable baptismal font.  which is fine, except that the demons also come out of a font in the  middle of the room.  what church would have 2 fonts?

the book, referred to as "the lesser key of Solomon" was supposedly written by king Solomon and found during the crusades by the Knights Templar.  problem here:  they say "twelve centuries later" except that Solomon lived closer to 900 BCE, so it should be twenty two centuries later.  and there were no such things a books in 900 BCE; it should be a scroll.  assuming it's the actual parchment that Solomon wrote on, which since it's a book of black magic, i'm willing to suspend disbelief on that one :)  (Solomon gets the tradition of being a magician and sorcerer eventually, so i'm not going to criticize them for picking up on that).  fun thought: if this is the "lesser key of Solomon" is there a greater key out there somewhere?

i just laughed when Ichabod referred to Milton's "Paradise Lost" as a "theological text."  if you want to know who Moloch/Molech is, go read Leviticus, and I and II Kings.  and i'm pretty sure the last shot of the illustration in the book is William Blake (who is my most favourite crazy poet ever).

**in keeping with the series context, i'm giving all links to Bible passages in KJV.

intervention

i have been thinking about this whole Syria thing, and wondering what a good Christian, Christ-like,  response is.  i do believe that God calls God's people to intervene and offer relief to the suffering innocent, and that relief is real, physical, this-world relief, not just a promise of some kind of vague spiritual paradise.  but i also believe that Jesus taught a non-violent way.  and quite honestly, we've seen the results of violent intervention all over the middle east, and there's no reason to believe that Syria would be any different.

so this is the conundrum.  how do you intervene in the suffering of the innocent but without violence?

and it kind of hit me, well, isn't that what the cross is?  in becoming a victim of violence, Jesus conquered violence.  in receiving the ultimate judicial punishment that humans can devise, the cross stands as a rebuke against violence and death.  but even more so, by God becoming human and dying, God conquers death.  the way of Jesus, the way of the cross, is to offer oneself to suffer with the innocent and to gain power precisely in the abdication of violent, judicial power.

so i think the Christian response to what's going on in Syria ought to be to line up like the Freedom Riders and the lunch counter protesters of the civil rights movement and take the violence on us.  take the bombs and the gas and bullets and stand there in defiance of that violence.

it won't happen, of course.  for one, i can already think of hundreds of logistical objections, and Christians really aren't used to working in partnership globally.  we're more used to fighting each other.  and it's incredibly rare to hear Christian preaching that says, hey, give up your life.  no, really.  give it up like Jesus did.  we hear more about how to steward our finances and improve our relationships and do good, practical things to work for social justice (and these sermons, btw, have nothing to do with liberal or conservative).

Christianity has become so wedded to political, judicial power that we don't really take the "give up everything" call of Jesus seriously.  this is true both in western state and culture as well as in the middle east.  we can't answer that call anymore because we don't know how.  we are too used to having that kind of power that we've forgotten to look for solutions that don't use it.  but we've seen the results of intervening in a society nonviolently too, with the civil rights movement here, and India's independence movement, and the path that took Christianity from an illegal, persecuted sect to precisely that political power that it is today.

and as strongly as i feel this conviction, i know i won't go myself because this kind of widespread, systemic violence is precisely why we have the body of Christ.  i could go over there, and die, and maybe my husband or parents would publicize the story, but it wouldn't cause mass change in the Church Universal.  so i'm blogging instead, and learning a lesson and looking for somewhere here in my local life to intervene nonviolently.

but also, i believe that the local, Syrian Christians have a responsibility to their neighbours, and i'm not saying they're not hearing God or whatever and they're terrible Christians.  they show us in the west everything that is wrong about Christian power wedded to state power.  they are our mirror, not our scapegoat.  it's our fault too.  but Christians are in a place and a location and a culture, and the success stories are largely the stories of Christians acting from within their own culture, not from outsiders.

but imagine if Christians globally flooded Syria and stood between the innocent Muslim children and the violence of soldiers on both sides.  imagine what could be the result of that.  that, i propose, would be a picture of God's throne in heaven.

identity and terms.

Last Sunday, CNN.com published this post by Rachel Held Evans.

While I sympathize with her sentiments, there are some problems with the post.  I don't know how much of it was due to her and how much of it was due to the CNN editors, so don't take everything I say as criticism of Ms. Evans.

The first problem with the post is the title.  "The Church" it says.  Except in her post, she remarks that millennials are leaving the "evangelical" church and joining the more liturgical and high-church traditions like "Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Episcopal Church, etc."  So millennials aren't leaving "the church," at least not the Church as the body of Christ.  They are simply leaving one expression of that church and moving to others.

However, the main problem is that Evans apparently doesn't recognize that the reason evangelical pastors don't "get it" when she talks to them is because she is fundamentally asking them to stop being evangelical, or at least to radically re-define what "evangelical" means.  She ends her post with a list of things that "we want" (full disclosure, I'm about 2 years older than Evans, consider myself more Gen X than millennial, and have left the "evangelical" tradition for the Episcopal Church) without realizing that the things she wants are the very things that evangelicalism has (as she points out unconsciously) spent its time defining itself against.  Evangelical Christianity has the same problem as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: both are movements of religious conservatives that cannot back down from their current, historically held positions without at a minimum a severe identity crisis, and essentially a paradigmatic shift as to how they deal with society, culture, and theology.

On one hand, Evans is right.  It's not about music, coffee, lighting... style, basically.  It's about the substance of the Christianity being taught and lived out in churches.  But to ask an evangelical pastor to moderate his (and it is almost always a he) stance on the LGBT community, science and evolution, and gender roles, to say nothing of completely redeveloping his ecclesiology so the church is something you don't "go to on Sunday" is to ask him to read the Bible differently, with different eyes and different philosophical assumptions.  It is, essentially to ask him to stop being an evangelical and become something else, something different.  Something, unfortunately for those of us trying to effect this change, that we don't have a name for yet.

In the early 2000s, there was a brief uprush of books being published about "the younger evangelicals" or the "post-evangelicals" or "the emergent church."  They were mostly written by older men, confused about the demands of Gen X at the time, demands which, 10 years ago, were basically identical to Evans' in her post.  The fact that 10 years later, people are asking for the same things ought to at least point out that the evangelical church failed to figure this out.  But the approach is almost the same. In these books (and I read a lot of them as part of a research project for my pastor at the time) generally Gen X and the leading edge of the millennials were treated as anomalies, as strange species to be studied, but not people to be taken seriously.  There was a sense that changing language about community and whatnot, but not changing the core of evangelical belief, would mollify these people and bring them back into the fold.  In a couple years, these men promised anxious pastors, these steps would no longer be needed.

The "evangelical" church is not dying, but for those of us who are tired of asking, we need to sit up and recognize that for some reason, we are asking to wear the "evangelical" label with only being tangentially related to what has been defined as "evangelicalism" culturally.  I am aware the definition is contested, but that is precisely the point.  People older than Gen X who want to expand it, make it a "big tent" are fighting not only their own colleagues, but popular culture in general.

I can't call myself "evangelical" anymore.  According to a friend and former colleague of mine, I never really could :)  This might explain why I am comfortable giving up on that tradition and label and looking for something new.  But I suggest to Evans and her cohort that they should take a critical look at what they are asking and ask themselves if they really want the label "evangelical" or if it isn't, in fact, time to find something new. 

Maybe no label at all, so we can stop this in-grouping and out-grouping and indeed live as the body of Christ.

a historical perspective.

for some reason, i've done a fair amount of academic work on gender and sexuality.  and through that study, i've become convinced of a couple things.  the first and main point is that these two abstract concepts are heavily, heavily influenced by the social context a human being finds themself in.  how you conceive of your identity based on gender and sexual attraction and sexual object choice is inseperable from your larger cultural context.  obviously (like my weasel word there? :) these things originate in one's bodily, physical existence, but there is no consistency or universal across human cultures or history.

you're just going to have to take my word for it since this is a blog and not a thesis.

so today, SCOTUS has, in a deeply divided opinion, struck down the major provision of the federal defence of marriage act (DOMA), stating that DOMA's main purpose was to discriminate unconstitutionally and deprive a subset of state-recognized marriages equal protection under the law.

as predicted, this has caused both an uproar and a celebration.

in my opinion, SCOTUS was completely right.  our constitution indeed guarantees people equal protection, and the federal government breaks that guarantee when it treats one set of government-recognized marriages differently from a different set.  and the main point here is government.

here's a quick crash course:  marriage is a wealth-management strategy.  in the earliest human civilizations that we have record of, the purpose of recognizing a marriage is to determine which children legitimately inherit the family's wealth and name, and which children don't.  because having children are necessary to have someone to inherit your property and name, the gods get invoked in the recognition, in prayers for fertility and childbearing.  marriage is all about sex and babies.  it is not a religious institution.  it is a civil one, with religious additions, because until the 18th century or so, no human culture ever recognized a difference between civic life and religious life.

we've inherited (ha) this setup, with the odd wrinkle that in an exception to the establishment clause in the first amendment, religious figures that perform marriage ceremonies are actually deputized to act as agents of the state for the purpose of officially recognizing a marriage.  in countries that have state religions, this is not an odd wrinkle, because in that context, religious officials are always also officials of the state.  in other countries, it's the opposite.  my brother and sister-in-law have 2 wedding dates: the date their union was registered with the Japanese government and the date their religious wedding took place (a few days later). 

therefore, a statement like this is entirely wrong, legally speaking:

“Obviously it’s a loss to say that the federal government has no right to define marriage as it’s always understood,” he said. “It is just legal chicanery. It’s untrue. It’s a bad decision.”

the only thing the federal government should be concerned with is how society and the state governments define marriage.  if we as a culture have changed to recognize two people of the same gender pledging lifelong commitment to each other as marraige, then how marriage is understood has in fact changed.  what was "always understood" is not important.  how people are managing their wealth today is.  and don't forget, the DOMA case was about inheritance and taxes.

our individualistic age has made one's choice of marriage partner about love, since we know love and sex are closely intertwined.  people of the same gender have always loved each other.  in patriarchal cultures where children were necessary for inheritance and keeping the wealth in the family, exclusive same-gender relationships were socially impossible.  today, we're in a vastly different situation.  and love is love.

obstacles.

i need a job.

the problem is, i have no job-searching skills.  the only jobs i've ever gotten have been because i knew people, or it was an artificial environment like my internships.

in fact, the last time i was in this position (newly graduated, looking for employment), my dad got me a job at the company he worked for.

it's not (or at least, i tell myself it's not) that i'm unemployable with no skills.  i have a lot of skills.  i have a ton of things i can do, and i've had a pretty eclectic employment history. i just don't know how to explain that to people.

also, i am sick to death of office assistant jobs.  i don't have the personality to answer phones or sit at a front desk, and i get bored to tears doing data entry.

when i started seminary, i had the confidence that this was my next step, and that God was going to work things out somehow in the end.  but here i am, at the end, with no job, no phd acceptance, in a new city with no network, sending out resume after resume with no response.

now i don't know what to do.