Author Archives: StephenRCase

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About StephenRCase

I write and teach about the history of astronomy. My research has appeared in Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, Mercury, and is forthcoming in Endeavour. My dissertation examines the stellar astronomy of the 19c British astronomer Sir John Herschel. I also write fiction, which has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lore, Shimmer, Andromeda Spaceways, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, and more. My first collection of short stories, Trees & Other Wonders is available on Amazon. For more on my research, see my Academia page. You can also visit my website @ www.stephenrcase.com.

Fill These Hearts

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Fill These Hearts: God, Sex, and the Universal LongingFill These Hearts: God, Sex, and the Universal Longing by Christopher West

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What do a bunch of celibate men have to tell the world about marriage, love, and sex? Apparently quite a bit if those celibates are men like Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Christopher West’s slender text, Fill These Hearts: God, Sex, and the Universal Longing is an attempt to unpack the Catholic Church’s richly developed and under-appreciated theology of the body, though his desire to make this theology accessible to the widest audience possible at times makes it feel an exposition writ in crayon.

Plus, he starts off very much on the wrong foot from an astronomical point of view. So, pardon a astronomer’s annoyance, but first a short rant:

The opening sentence in West’s book states that “In 1977 NASA launched Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to explore the galaxy.”

Ack.

There’s so much wrong here. Granted, this isn’t a book about science and West only makes this comment in passing to talk about how the music samples carried by these spacecraft testify to humanity’s universal longing. But it is the opening line of his book . . .

The Voyager missions were launched to explore the outer planets of our own solar system, not the galaxy. But more than that, that there’s a staggering problem of scale here. Imagine tossing an Oreo cookie into the center of a football field. That cookie is roughly the radius of our solar system. (The Sun would be a candy sprinkle at Oreo’s center, and Neptune would be a microscopic dot skimming around the cookie’s edge.) On this scale, the nearest planetary system is another cookie two football fields away. The galaxy is about 200 billion of these cookies spread over an area about the size of North America. And where are the Voyagers on this scale? In the decades they’ve been in space, they’ve drifted less than a yard away from our own cookie– er, solar system.

Saying that we sent them out to explore the galaxy is a bit like imagining sending a paramecium to explore New York City.

End rant.

Okay, so it’s not a book about science. It’s a book about theology. West’s major point is that we as humans are built with certain longings and desires and that this isn’t a bad thing. We have these desires for a reason, but we have three possible responses to this reality, two bad and one good. We can either ignore and suppress those desires (what he calls the “starvation diet”) or we can indulge them (what he calls the “fast food diet”). Though Christianity is often portrayed as leaning toward the first option, West says this is as wrong as the improper indulgence of desires. (And to be clear, throughout the book he’s mainly talking about romantic and sexual desires.)

The proper response, West says, is to recognize these desires as pointing toward something beyond themselves, as indicative of an eternal banquet to come, to realize the things of this world cannot satisfy our desires, and to see romantic and sexual desires as a way of stretching our hearts so God can satisfy us. There’s weirdness here and mysticism and even some discomfort. But there’s also quite a bit of solid theology and biblical exposition. Song of Solomon, for instance, is in the Bible for a reason.

West’s alliterative thesis is that our desires— when understood correctly– point toward God, our design shows we’re meant to exist in relationship, and our destiny is that God wants to expand our desires and longings toward infinity where they can be filled with His love.

Along the way we’re treated to passages from Scripture and Catholic theology interspersed with painful analogies from Spider-Man 2 and lyrics from U2 (see the comment above about being writ in crayon). The most compelling portions for me were the final chapters where West provides an outline of the Catholic view of chastity and sexual ethics. In West’s interpretation, chastity is a promise of immortality. It’s a way of rightly ordering desire here on Earth, of keeping human nature free of the addictive aspects of sexual desire and oriented toward eternity. (If it seems like a futile and desperate hope, it kind of is.)

There are lots of issues here, primarily related to the point that West seems to think humans all have more or less the same sort of desires and takes this as the starting point for his exposition. This is in keeping with what I understand of Catholic theology often beginning from a “natural laws” treatment of the world, something that I’m not sure remains tenable.

If nothing else though, besides bringing a taste of some of the deeper aspects of Catholic theology, West does call attention to the undeniable fact that many of the central themes and symbols in the Bible have to do with sex and marriage– and wine. Sex and alcohol, often shunned in puritanical circles, are central to a Biblical view of desire and satisfaction. Christ’s first miracle, as West points out, was at a wedding feast, and it was to provide that feast with a fine vintage. This is West’s central claim: that God isn’t interested in starving us or in seeing us waste ourselves seeking after pleasures that can’t satisfy. Rather, He wants to provide a real, eternal banquet and (though the analogy becomes strained, at least to me) a real, eternal marriage relationship.

Christ, Our Way and Our Life

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Christ, Our Way and Our Life: A Presentation of the Theology of Archimandrite SophronyChrist, Our Way and Our Life: A Presentation of the Theology of Archimandrite Sophrony by Archimandrite Zacharias
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

We are persuaded that man’s vocation is incomprehensibly wonderful and great. (99)

What do we do with this idea of holiness, the ideal of saintliness? The belief that in this life one can become like God in humility and love and empathy and prayer is one of the things that holds me in hope to Christianity.

Yet different traditions understand the concept of holiness in different ways. In many traditions, holiness and salvation are an either/or, on/off, you have it or you don’t, sort of thing: you’ve either been granted salvation and subsequent holiness by the grace of God and your faith therein, or not. In Orthodoxy, however, the process of theosis– of becoming like God– is not a thrown switch. It is certainly possible, by the grace of God, but it is claimed by few (likely no one, least of all those who approach it) and seen only as the fruit of a long process of ascetic practice and discipline.

That’s not to say holiness is only for monks. But it is to say that Orthodoxy recognizes holiness as a gradual process, an organic and often painful growth, a “ladder of divine ascent.” It doesn’t mean the only people going to heaven are the Mother Teresas of the world, but it does mean there are degrees of holiness and there are those who have advanced much farther along that road than others. And sometimes it’s good to take a long look at the abyss that separates someone like us (me) from someone like that.

For a time I used to regularly read the blog of Father Stephen Freeman, an Orthodox priest living and working in Tennessee. In his excellent posts he would consistently make reference to the works of Archimandrite Sophrony, an Orthodox monk whose life spanned much of the twentieth century. In particular, Father Stephen would quote from a study of Sophrony’s life entitled Christ, Our Way and Our Life, written by another monk, Archimandrite Zacharias, originally as a PhD dissertation and translated into English in 2003.

Sophrony and his mentor, St. Silouan, spent their lives in the pursuit of holiness. They devoted themselves to prayer and contemplation, and they said things like, “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not” and “Stay on the verge of despair, but when you see that you are going to fall over, draw back and have a cup of tea.” They lived in chastity and obedience, poverty and humility, and they attempt to forsake the priorities of this world completely. What’s the point of such endeavors? If salvation is by faith alone, are they missing the point of Christianity? Or are they of the handful of faithful few on whom the salvation of the world rests?

These are deep waters, and I waded out onto them with some trepidation. I’m no mystic, but I tried to wrap my mind around the themes of their theology. Those themes included utter humility and self-loathing to the point of despair to reach the point at which one can truly pray for the entire world. Sophrony believes this is what Christ did and that the ultimate goal of a Christian is to be able to truly pray on behalf of all (something embodied in the liturgy we celebrate each week).

No one besides monks are much into self-loathing or humility today. Yet Sophrony and Silouan maintain that a form of self-loathing is necessary to gain true repentance, that we need to see ourselves as we actually are in comparison to the love and purity of God, and that only by living through the pain of this self-knowledge (which led the publican to beat his chest and cry, “Lord, have mercy”) can we know the extent of redemption and love of God.

Most of us, I think, would prefer repentance and salvation be quick and painless. But for the Orthodox ascetics, it’s painful. It’s a burning. It’s something that’s achieved with rivers of tears. The more we know who we truly are, the more we know the extent of our own sin, the more we understand the love of God.

If they left it there though, it wouldn’t be much in the way of good news. For Sophrony and Silouan, despair over our own condition– and then beyond that, despair over the condition of the human race itself– is necessary to be like Christ. They understand the entire life of Christ as a descent– from the right hand of God to a lowly place on Earth, and then from Earth to Hell itself. Christ sits at the bottom of an inverted pyramid of creation, occupying the most lowly, painful, humble position, and from that position bearing the sins and weight of the world. When we embrace the painful humility of our own brokenness and start to feel the weight and pain of the world itself in our prayers, we are following the path of Christ. Salvation is not upward toward heaven and redemption– or at least not initially; it is downward toward the pain and humiliation of Christ.

“Keep your mind in hell,” are the words reported to have come to St. Siluoan from Christ Himself, meaning we must live in that struggle and that pain, that in taking up the suffering of our own sins and the sins of humanity, we are with Christ. “Keep your mind in hell,” he was told, “and despair not.” Despair not, because Christ did not remain in Hell, and by taking on the sins of the world He was able to redeem the world and conquer death. But, Siluoan and Sophrony would say, we focus too much on this second part alone, but we neglect that Christ only ascended by first descending and that we must follow the same path.

Christ did not descend so that a switch could be flipped and we could live the rest of our lives in redeemed comfort. He came so that we could emulate Him in taking on the burdens of the world and offering them up to God. Generally speaking, man bears witness to his kinship with God when, in every aspect of his life, he thinks, feels, and acts with the consciousness that God has placed all of creation into his care. (63) For them, this is a very real, ontological act centered in prayer, not simply in a role of stewardship of nature or talents (though that’s certainly a part of it).

If this repels, reflect on the saints. Who are the saints, in whatever tradition you find yourself? What makes them saintly? Is it simply that they’ve been saved and sanctified, or is it that they recognize this salvation as a means of taking up the pain and the burdens of others and by doing so sanctifying them to God? And how are they able to do this? By recognizing their own brokenness, by living at the edge of despair and not yielding to it, and by constantly orienting themselves toward humility, patience, and descent.

That seems pretty difficult. And right.

For those who have not been given such a state, copying his way of fulfilling St. Silouan’s word may prove unbearable. A lighter form of this teaching may, however, be realized by anyone, if he gives thanks to God at all times for all He bestows upon him, acknowledging always his own unworthiness. Continual thanksgiving makes up for what is lacking in us. (273)

Transformers: More than Meets the Eye Volume 8

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mtmte7Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye, Volume 8 by James Roberts
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

With great excellence comes great expectations. If you’ve followed my book reviews for long, you know that I’m a huge fan of the work of James Roberts and Alex Milne on the ongoing IDW Transformers: More than Meets the Eye series. The release of each trade paperback is a Pretty Big Deal in my world, a world that is usually more or less cut off from What’s Cool Right Now. (I still haven’t seen either Interstellar or The Martian, for example, and I have no idea how many superheroes are currently appearing on network television series.) I’ve had huge expectations for each of these installments, which have consistently been setting the bar higher and higher. Great art, fantastic story-telling, compelling science fiction, and giant transforming robots. What’s not to love?

I say all that to say that the expectations were ratcheted up (no pun intended regarding the cover) pretty high for Volume 8, and it was the first volume that disappointed. I usually read each volume twice before posting a review. With Roberts’ writing this is important, as the narrative flow can at times be very dense. This one though only merited a quick re-skim to see if my initial dissatisfaction was justified. I think it was.

So here’s my list of tongue-in-cheek suggestions as to why this volume for the very first time in the run of TF:MTMTE trades left a bad taste in my mouth. And I say tongue-in-cheek because I realize it’s easy to criticize. So while I stand by these complaints, I still say Roberts is doing great work and can keep doing whatever he wants. I’ll be reading Volume 9, no worries. These are also tongue-in-cheek because they’re also to some extent an acknowledgement of what Roberts is doing continually, which is turning some common expectations on their heads.

But anyway, here they are:

1. Don’t humanize the sociopaths. The Decepticon Justice Division since nearly the very beginning of the series have been the bogeymen, the horror, the real Bad Guys now that the Decepticons themselves are ambiguous. (I’m not sure who the Bad Guys are in the other IDW Transformer title.) They were the worst of the worst of what the Decepticon cause could become. So don’t humanize them now. Don’t pull their teeth. We’ve already had sociopaths getting humanized: Megatron. So please keep Tarn and company easy to hate. Don’t introduce us to the humor and social dynamics of their crew. Don’t confuse our loyalties. And please, please don’t give the DJD a Tailgate. We don’t need another cute sidekick to show us the softer side of our mechanical killing machines.

2. Don’t dial back the body count. This series immediately found its legs by introducing us to the second-stringers of the Transformers universe and not being afraid to kill them. We learned that the secondary characters were themselves heroes, and then we learned that heroes died. The early issues– especially those with Overlord– were gritty and felt real. Things have lightened up significantly in this volume, which is fine, but now we’ve got another wave of second-second-stringers to keep track of. We’ve got a second replacement medic. We’ve got a bunch of new faces. Fine, but remind us why this all matters. I’m with Rodimus on this one: please let Thunderclash die, for goodness’ sake. I guess I’m as twisted as the DJD: I want dead Autobots or the game just stops feeling real.

3. Don’t get sappy. I get it, and I appreciate it: we’re playing with romantic relationships among non-biologically gendered robots. That’s pretty cool, and it was pretty effective when it was Rewind and Chromedome. But I feel like this volume has a lot of drama, a lot of weird tensions, and a lot of goofy crushing. Please, please, please don’t give me an Autobot love triangle (unless Dominus Ambus turns about to be Tarn). And please don’t give me any more pictures of Rewind and Chromedome on a flowered backdrop with the words “my love” written anywhere, ever.

4. Don’t get cute. Besides the two-issue throwaway story arch about the charisma parasites (which I think was a low point for the series so far), this is my major complaint about this volume. It felt too cute. Ten is cute. He draws cute pictures and makes cute toys. Swerve is very meta and cute, creating an entire sitcom planet in which our heroes can cut cute figures and be cute and snarky. I’ve already complained about the DJD’s cute sidekick. Even Megatron’s cuteness in this volume, as he bickers with both Rodimus and Magnus, shows perhaps more than anything else his integration into the Lost Light crew. One or two issues of heavy cuteness I think I could have taken, but the whole volume was full of it. (A major theme of this volume was Autobot dance parties, for Cybertron’s sake.)

Again though, it’s quite likely that Roberts knows exactly what he’s doing. He probably has some of this series’ darkest developments up his sleeve, and he knows we need some time sit back and relax, project our holomatter avatars and just be silly for a while. Or perhaps he’ll explain away the whole thing in another few issues with a wonderfully detailed explanation involving metabombs, time loops, and quantum cuteness paradoxes. Maybe while all this was happening in our universe, another crew of the Lost Light completed their quest only to realize Cyberutopia was long ago consumed by the Chaos-Bringer, Overlord returned, and Pharma had an epic battle over a smelting pool with Ratchet (as opposed to our universe, where Ratchet gets a Drift action figure).

But to tell the truth (Primus help me), I would have rather read a comic about that universe.

Waiting for Godot

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Waiting for GodotWaiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The danger with teaching honors students is that you might learn something from them. In my astronomy class this year I created a new assignment where instead of writing a research paper I had the students write a dialogue between a geocentrist and a heliocentrist. One of my honors students wrote her dialogue using the characters and setting of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, assuming I’d understand the literary references. I’m used to student using pop culture or sports references that are lost on me, but I couldn’t have a student using literary references I wasn’t familiar with, so I immediately grabbed the two-act play from the campus library and got to work.

We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

The back cover of my edition tells me two important things and one utterly opaque thing. I learn that the play was written in French in 1948, so I can assume things about the shattered cultural backdrop against which Beckett was writing. I also learn from a reviewer that the play is “the quintessence of ‘existentialism’”, a interpretation one can agree with pretty quickly once one has gotten into the play. Finally though, there’s the quote by Norman Mailer that “consciously or unconsciously Beckett is restating the moral and sexual basis of Christianity which was lost with Christ.” There’s a lot I don’t understand about this play, but I don’t understand that quote about the play the most of all.

The play itself: two men, Estragon and Vladimir, spend two acts/days in an interminable twilight at a non-specific location (with a tree) waiting for Godot to come. They’re both tired, hungry, depressed, forlorn, and irritable, and they spend the time in often circular conversations trying to stave off depression and reassuring themselves that Godot will indeed come. Godot represents hope for a better situation, but he also represents imprisonment to their current condition: they would move on, away from such a depressing place, except that Godot has promised to meet them there.

In both acts they meet Pozzo and Lucky, a master with his slave. In both acts a young boy comes to bring a message from Godot. The exchanges between the two men and Pozzo and Lucky provide some of the most pathetic and humorous exchanges in the play. Pozzo’s bombastic pronouncements and domineering persona in the first act and his pathetic feebleness in the second say something about the trajectory of a man’s life. Lucky’s bizarre situation and his impassioned monologue– which, as my student pointed out, we want so badly to make sense– also represent something, I’m sure. Exactly what though is much less clear.

Waiting for Godot is obviously a classic because it’s full of symbols that are hauntingly familiar and yet unclear. There’s an abundance of meaning. But the play itself, for all its existential trappings, is surprisingly accessible. It’s easy to read, and the dialogue between the characters is sharp, poignant, and sometimes quite piercing. It’s a rounded bit of absurdity that points at a deeper, more tragic absurdity– that of life itself. But for all that, it goes down as easily and hauntingly as the darkening twilight in which Estragon and Vladimir continue to linger.

At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.

November Skywatch

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Cass

This month starts with us relaxing our clocks back into a more natural rhythm with the Earth’s diurnal cycle, as we conclude Daily Saving Time the first Sunday of November and fall back one hour to Standard Time. This means our evenings get darker sooner, and the stars come out earlier for sky-watchers. It also means clock noon and solar noon once again roughly coincide. With evening arriving earlier, this month we’ll continue our series of looking more closely at sky objects that can be seen through sidewalk telescopes even from the streets and backyards of Kankakee.

The bright planets are still mostly grouped in the pre-dawn sky, but evening begins with the constellation Cassiopeia high in the northern sky. This recognizable, easy-to-find constellation hosts a pair of impressive multiple-star systems. Nearby are some lovely clusters and the famous Andromeda Galaxy (often unfortunately washed out by the light pollution in the skies above town).

Cassiopeia is shaped by turns as a 3, a W, an E, or an M depending on its orientation in the northern skies. In the early evening skies of November, it looks like an angular number 3, its bottom pointed down toward the northeast, with five bright stars marking the ends and each angle of its zig-zag shape.

To find our first double star, η (eta) Cassiopeiae, look for a fairly bright star halfway down the second “zag” of the zig-zag number three. This star is one of the most famous binary stars of the night sky. Though it looks like a single star, through a telescope it’s revealed as two stars—a bright yellowish star with a dimmer, reddish companion nearby. Measures of the relative positions of these stars over decades have revealed that this system is actually gravitationally bound, with an orbital period of about five hundred years. The system itself is about 20 light years away, but the two component stars are separated from each other by a distance of only 70 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun,

Once you’ve tried your hand at finding and viewing η Cassiopeiae, the next target in Cassiopeia is ι (iota) Cassiopeiae, a moderately bright star just below the constellation’s southernmost “zag.” Drawing a line through the southernmost two stars of Cassiopeia’s zig-zag, extending again about as far as the distance between the stars, will get you there. Through a telescope, ι Cassiopeiae will look like a smaller version of η Cassiopeiae. In fact though, it’s not a double but a triple system, with the brighter component actually itself a very close double star. Under high magnification and clear viewing, you may be able to just barely spot a small blue companion close to the yellow primary star. This entire triple system is about 160 light years from Earth.

If we go east from the bottom of Cassiopeia, toward the constellation Perseus, we’ll run into the Double Cluster (NGC 869 and 884). Visible with the naked eye in dark skies, these have to be “felt out” in brighter city skies. Once spotted though, they’re still an impressive sight. They are best viewed at lowest magnification in the telescope (or even with a pair of binoculars) and are examples of open or galactic clusters, composed of hundreds of young (six to twelve million years old) stars seven thousand to eight thousand light years away. In the telescope eyepiece they fill the view with dozens of bright, crowded stars.

Now, leaving the best for last (and omitting the fabulous Andromeda Galaxy which is nearby but washed out in city skies), we move to Almach, also known as γ (gamma) Andromedae, to the southeast of Cassiopeia, marking one of the feet of the constellation Andromeda. Almach is one of the most impressive double stars in the sky. Its component stars are a bit closer together than those of η Cassiopeiae but they have a brilliant, sharp color contrast between the yellow/gold primary and the dimmer blue companion star. Like ι Cassiopeiae though, one of the components of Almach (the dimmer blue star) is itself a close double as well, though I have not been able to separate these components in my backyard telescope. It doesn’t stop there though: one of those stars is in addition an even closer binary star with a period of only three days, making the whole system actually a quadruple star system.

I occasionally hear that the early evenings of autumn make people feel winter is finally here and sometimes even lead to seasonal doldrums. I maintain though that darker, earlier evenings are a fantastic opportunity to get out and learn about the dynamic, tangled lives of those bright stars above us. Hopefully these objects give you a place to start!

This column appeared first in the Kankakee Daily Journal.