Disciplines
Science in the Subjunctive
“Today we realize that Earth’s global ocean has not been around forever. Its water – as well as every drop of rain, every gust of humid air and every sip from your cup – is a memory from eons ago, when the seas literally fell from the sky.” This is classic science-speak, the kind of indicative mood certainty every high-schooler expects to read in his science textbook. The language of science is the language of certainty, and this conclusion by David Jewett and Edward D. Young is typical of the genre (“Oceans from the Skies,” Scientific American, March 2015). We are to understand that science is the way to certainty, to truth. Science yields conclusions about the world reached through a disciplined process of observation, hypothesis, testing, and establishing facts which, taken together, can be published in the indicative mood as reliable and true. In fact, this is not the way science works at all, especially not cosmology. Science begins with an assumption, a belief or gaggle of beliefs, which it selects from a wide range of available beliefs. Those dismissed beliefs then become labeled as “myths,” as in, “In certain creation myths, a watery abyss was present before the emergence of land and even light.” Scientists reject such myths which were held by our “ancient ancestors”, preferring their more modern – and God-free – beliefs. From this beginning, certain sciences – especially cosmology – follow the yellow brick road of supposition, choosing data and known facts and observations that can be argued as supporting their conclusion, as they wander a subjunctive course back to their original supposition. In this brief article the subjunctive mood – the mood of possibility, not fact – provides the rungs on the ladder lifting us to the conclusion confidently asserted above. Words like “might have” and “could” or “perhaps” or “may have” or “generally thought” or “consensus” or “almost certainly” and “seems to be” appear nearly 30 times in this article, and provide the next steps to key stages in this argument. Earth’s oceans came from comets. Or maybe asteroids. Perhaps. And yet even the authors are not convinced of their own conclusion: “All these ambiguities leave plenty of room for other, more exotic scenarios of water delivery that, though perhaps (!) unlikely, cannot yet be definitively ruled out.” Unless, of course, God happens to be involved.

Theater and Mental Illness
Beth McLouglin reports on a Brazilian mental hospital that uses theater as therapy to help certain mental patients (“Method and Madness,” Aeon, March 5, 2015). The director of this project, Vitor Pordeus, reports that when patients take roles in a play by Shakespeare, they gain many benefits, including improved communication and relational skills, a better self-image, and a reason to want to keep on getting better. People are given opportunities to watch themselves perform, and thus can observe the improvement they’re making, encouraging them to seek even more. Art has often been used to help treat mental illness, but this use of drama as therapy is particularly interesting for what it suggests about how people grow and change. Learning and playing a role enables one to step outside himself for a while, to try on a new perspective in life or to practice relational skills in ways that can translate back into real life. In the Christian life we might think about how such “role-playing” could help us to work out our salvation. For example, we don’t know how to pray as we should. Could praying the psalms give us the language we need, and guide us into the proper affections for appearing before the throne of grace? And what potential for a richer, deeper, more glory-filled encounter with Christ is to be found in a more careful, prayerful, and sensual experience of the Lord’s Supper (more than a wafer and a swig of grape juice)? The same might be wondered about singing hymns that are rich in melody and lyrics. These, too, can affect our souls and transform our lives, but only if we engage them in more than a merely perfunctory manner. In the Christian community we all suffer from maladies and deficiencies of the soul. The art and drama available to us may be more important to our sanctification, and more potent for transformation, than we generally tend to think.

http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/can-theatre-be-used-to-treat-mental-illness/?

Outcomes
Classical Music
Oliver Rudland longs to see a revival of Christian faith and nationalistic values. But not for the reasons you might think. Writing in the March, 2015, issue of Standpoint, Mr. Rudland explains that the demise of classical music and the pervasive dominance of pop are the result of the rejection of Christianity and its virtues in the 60s (“The Loss of Faith Made Music Mute”). He writes, “there is a profound and inseparable relationship between music and Christianity; in fact, I would go so far as to argue that there is a sense in which Western music is Christian.” What he means is that the music which emerged from within the Christian cultural consensus of pre-modern Europe follows the lead in music composition and themes laid down by church music. But the 60s generation rejected the mores of the Christian worldview in favor of sensuality and free sex. “What really took place was a repositioning of the psychological focus of music from the mature feelings of reflective adults to the more impatient and direct feelings of the young. With its ‘oohs’ and its ‘aahs’, its ‘come-ons’ and its ‘get-downs’, its ‘rock me’ this and its ‘baby’ that, the three-minute pop song homes in on the cheap thrills of recreational sex.” Classical music has not been able to survive without those moral and spiritual underpinnings. Mr. Rudland explains, “Musical modernism is what was left behind after the feelings which motivated the great classical composers had dissipated. What you are hearing in the dysfunctional harmony and unattractive groans of Harrison Birtwistle and his many imitators is a massive God-shaped hole, where once natural authority and faith resided. This is what ‘atonal’ music really is: a loss of faith, and this is why anyone who counteracts its dominance is quickly condemned as ‘naïve’, in just the same manner as those who continue to hold religious convictions in a scientific age. It is what has led composers such as Robin Holloway to confess that ‘all we like sheep have dumbly concurred in the rightness of [Schoenberg’s] stance; against the evidence of our senses and our instincts’.”  We would get better music, Mr. Rudland believes, if only we weren’t so antipathetic to all thing Christian. He may be right. In fact, if previous periods of revival are any barometer, we might get better everything if a revival of Christianity were to occur. 

http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/5932/full

Envoi

Jack-in-the-Box

The pleasure in the thing is, first, the way
it looks. A form that one can recognize,
that captivates, attracts, and holds the eyes,
is much more likely to result in play
than one that’s merely random, shall we say.
There follows then the feel, as one applies
himself to handling it, and as he tries
the crank. The music that ensues should sway
within the soul and make his hand obey
the sweet momentum that each plunge and rise
creates. Anticipation builds, like skies,
with thunder rumbling, on a summer’s day.
  So turn it slowly, hold your breath and wait –
  he’s in there; he won’t tarry or be late.

T. M. Moore