7 Quick Takes

January 29, 2021 by Amy Welborn

— 1 —

Oh good. Another crazy week of me reading about news I really barely understand, breaking by the hour.

Well, I guess that’s not all I did. I worked on some fiction. I rewrote something I had to write for someone. I recorded a couple of things. I did research for a little thing that’s due Monday. I read things.

Watched a couple of movies (click back to read my takes), went out to a new local wine bar with a friend, studied Arizona. Wrote a few blog posts about saints and the Mexico City Policy. That kind of thing.

— 2 —

Last year about this time, I shared an extraordinary video with you of a sermon from evangelical pastor Francis Chan, in which he honestly and courageously explored the issue of the Eucharist, Real Presence and Christian history and unity.

Well, fast forward a year, and one of the featured speakers at the FOCUS mega-conference SEEK21 (which is virtual this year) is…Francis Chan. Good call by the organizers. Very good call!

Here’s an interview with Francis Chan from OSV:

Our Sunday Visitor: What was the spark that led you to begin looking into the practices of the early Church, its unity and its belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist? Were you nervous about how this message would be heard and accepted? And, ultimately, how has your community reacted to what sounded like a very Catholic sermon?
Chan: I had some friends challenge me to study the first 300 years of Church history. They asked me to consider how much time I spent studying theology and history from the past 500 years versus the first 1,500 years. Honestly, I wasn’t that nervous about how the message would be accepted. I was a bit naive. I assumed people would just see me as a godly man, seeking God, seeking truth and being honest with the process. I had no idea that it would create such a stir. The responses have been mixed. Most people seemed to follow the logic, but there have been plenty who immediately reject anything that sounds Catholic.

— 3 —

All of our public library branches around here are open, but most only for brief hours, like 10-2. That’s when we’re doing our Very Important Education, and since letting people sit in libraries at tables would apparently be a super-spreader event, it’s not like we’d go there during our Very Important Education Hours to work. But there’s one branch that actually has normal hours now (although still no seating), so I got down there the other day and checked out a slew of books (lots of Arizona guidebooks, a couple of novels) and some New Yorkers.

Of interest in the one I’ve read so far was a review of book on the early history of animation which sent me on a real rabbit trail through YouTube. I finally did make myself stop.

In “Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries That Inspired the Golden Age of Animation” (Atlantic Monthly Press), Reid Mitenbuler recalls that flood—and points out that the vintage cartoons within it were often censored by later distributors in ways that robbed them of their original spice and sex appeal. Of the kinds of popular books that have proliferated in the past few decades—the little thing that changed everything (cod, longitude, porcelain), the crime or scandal that time forgot (Erik Larson’s specialty)—none are more potent than the tale of the happy band of brothers who came together to redirect the world. The genre runs from Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” through Jenny Uglow’s “The Lunar Men,” and Mitenbuler’s “Wild Minds” is an attempt to do the same for the history of American animation.
“Wild Minds” assembles its history with love and a sense of occasion. The chronicle that results, as Mitenbuler explains in a prefatory note, also appears at a moment when, for the first time in the history of the form, everything is available. Obscurities that in the past one would have waited years to find in a stray moma screening are now online. Even the lewd (though government-sponsored) “Private Snafu” cartoons, made for G.I.s during the Second World War and written by Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, can be found at a touch of the YouTube tab. The act of pulling everyone together in this way is new, and significant. The peculiar excellence of “The Right Stuff” was not that it showed astronauts to the world but that it showed the astronauts as worldly. Wolfe explained that they were far from dim-witted test pilots: they knew what they were doing and what was being done to them. Mitenbuler’s larger aim is similar: to show us that the best cartoonists were not haphazard artisans but self-aware artists, working against the constraints of commerce toward a knowing end of high comic, and sometimes serious, art. The book’s governing idea lies in its heroes’ collective intuition that animated films could be a vehicle for grownup expression—erotic, political, and even scientific—rather than the trailing diminutive form they mostly became. A cartoon tradition that could seem child-bound, sexless, and stereotyped was once vital, satiric, and experimental.
Very early animation has a single theme, the fluidity of form: what’s sometimes called the first fully animated film, the French “Fantasmagorie” (1908), is a two-minute-long study in visual metamorphosis, stick figures caught in a constantly changing two-dimensional world….

Which then somehow led to Wladyslaw Starewicz, the inventor of stop-motion animation….with insects.

There’s much, much more, of course – including a film that is said to have inspired Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.

— 4 —

Via this review in CWReport, I learned of a newly-translated-into-English novel by Shusaku Endo…and promptly ordered it. It’ll arrive tomorrow. (I ordered the paperback, not the $95/hardcover, in case you were wondering.)

Sachiko is the best Catholic novel I have read in a long time. Avoiding a sappy and simplistic depiction of a harsh reality, Endō honestly presents the doubts and dilemmas of Christians – Japanese, American, Polish – amidst hostile surroundings in a world where violation of the Fifth Commandment was the norm. Through the character of Sachiko and his beautiful tribute to St. Maximilian Kolbe, Endō affirms that it is possible to be a Christian witness even in the bloodiest conflict of all time.

— 5 —

A blog post on a true thing that more of us need to be aware of: Enlightenment ideologies warped our understanding of Medieval and Renaissance history – add the Reformation to that and you’ve got a lot of myth-busting on your plate.

The Enlightenment historiography is still the most successful propaganda ever made; it refused to die, because the [anti-Christian] sentiment which these thinkers had promoted seems to be popular ever since. Demonizing the Other is the best way to begin a fight, because it gives you the feeling of the moral superiority. In our case, this has been done by distorting and misinterpreting historical facts, and inventing myths and false villains and heroes. This genius propaganda has affected and influenced most of us, therefore it’s not surprising how our imagination has been constructed. For example, when we think or talk about [the] historical horrors, the vast majority will think of the those ‘dark’ Middle Ages. Ironically, we rarely realize that the most morbid and inhumane crimes were committed during the Enlightenment and Modern era.

— 6 —

I do a lot of archive-org.-ing, and ran across this good collection of vintage Catholic pamphlets from Boston College.

Lots of what you would expect – rosary and other devotional pamphlets, several on the Spanish Civil War, seasonal devotionals, and then, interesting pieces like this: “What Blind Women Can Do!” – by a Father Jean-Marie J. Bauchet. It’s a series of sketches describing the lives of several blind women whom this priest had helped enter religious life, as well as his general reflections.