The Occluded Eyes, Sinister Postures And Such Are No Longer Symbols At All – They Are Elements Of Surface Style

As YouTube videos and blog sites continue to query Lady Gaga’s connection to the Illuminati, Jeremy Biles tries to unlock what has become another of the Internet’s many celebrity-gazing diversions.

Lady Gaga is no puppet for the Illuminati. She is a highly charismatic and multitalented figure whose symbol-laden presentations are evidence not of occult involvements, but of a strategic, effective, and very canny self-display centering obsessively on one concern: fame and the mechanisms that produce and support it.

That’s It? Cardiac Arrest In Exchange For Roofing Shingles?

Andy Whitman wonders what it all means for Image through the ever-dependable lens of Walker Percy’s classic novel, The Moviegoer:

I play the game well for months, sometimes years at a time. I’m a happy little American consumer, which is my purpose in life, and I go to work and earn a paycheck, and then I spend the paycheck on things like roofing shingles, and I keep the American economy humming. It’s not humming all that well, and it seems to have lost the tune, but I do what I can.

The Argument Is The Reality, And The Absence Of Certainty, The Certainty

One final item from this week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik sets out to find the historical Jesus by sifting through several recent books by skeptics, scholars and believers alike, beginning with the first book ever written about Jesus — the Gospel of Mark.

Belief remains a bounce, faith a leap. Still, the appetite for historical study of the New Testament remains a publishing constant and a popular craze. Book after book—this year, ten in one month alone—appears, seeking the Truth.

Witnesses Now Take A Less Specific Approach To The End Of The World

Joel Meares writes about The Watchtower, the flagship publication of the Jehovah’s Witness faith, for the New York Review of Magazines. He begins by documenting a day spent Jehovah’s Witnessing, and discusses the evolution of what claims to be “The Most Widely Read Magazine in the World”:

Basted in the Suspended-Animation Subjectivity of 1980s Hiccuped Grandiosity

Through an intertextual analysis of films such as Greenberg and Hot Tub Time Machine, and novels such as Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, A.O. Scott examines the apparent midlife crisis facing the generation christened by Douglas Coupland as “Generation X” in his 1991 novel.

Note the sudden swerve from world-historical grandiosity to consumerist banality; the attempt to camouflage sincere confusion with winking insouciance; the obsession with generalizing a personal experience.

Click here to read the essay over at The New York Times.

For America, Tom Beaudoin, author of Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X, reflects on Scott’s conclusions as reinforcing some of his own observations:

For what it’s worth, what strikes me as most “true” about Scott’s analysis is the surprising permanence of the deep sense of the absurdities of adult livelihood; I think that I mean the sense of objective craziness about the system registered in shows like “The Office,” except that “The Office” becomes the type for mainstream adult work, including in church and academy, of almost all shades.

Click here to read Beaudoin’s essay.

It Is Now One of My Great Regrets That We Didn’t Get to Correspond

From the Utne Reader archives comes a pair of letters — one is a self-described “fan letter” from Walker Percy to Bruce Springsteen in 1989 and the other is from Springsteen to Percy’s widow several years after Percy’s death.

Click here to read the letters.

Click here to read a 1995 interview between Springsteen and Percy’s son, Will, transcribed for DoubleTake magazine.

Percy Was Writing for the Human Conscience, Not to Raise Direct-Mail Money From the Outraged

Twenty years ago today, we lost a luminary. McSorley’s remembers Walker Percy, author of The Moviegoer and proponent of the search.

“The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life … To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be on to something. Not to be on to something is to be in despair.” - Walker Percy

Russell Moore remembers Percy on the anniversary of his death not only for his life, but for how he did not die.

Percy’s apocalyptic writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, sounds so much different than the faux-apocalypticism of so much contemporary Christian “culture war” rhetoric. It’s direct, yes, about human sin and human guilt. He wasn’t writing to raise money from those who would love to have a “your future is bright” imprimatur for the way things are.

Click here for the essay.

The Interminability of Mourning

Jessica Helfand takes us on a tour of Rome’s Cimitero Acattolico, one of the largest concentration of well-known graves in the world, in “Every Poem an Epitaph: The Protestant Cemetery in Rome”.

Click here for the photo essay.

That Desperate Desire For Safe Miracles

Jennifer Fulwiler reflects on the recent news regarding the Catholic sexual abuse scandal from the perspective of a convert to the faith:

If the same priest who abused disabled children also once had the power to make Jesus Christ’s own flesh fully present in the form of bread, if the bishops who have mishandled or covered up these cases of abuse really are the direct descendants of the original men upon whom Jesus conferred his power, then we’re standing in the face of the most unnerving truth of all.

Click here to read the essay.

I Believe It Means Everything

Several news stories have appeared in recent weeks concerning sexual abuse by Catholic priests. With the Easter season about to begin, Elizabeth Scalia writes at NPR about how she has maintained her Catholic faith despite learning more about the dark places that exist within the Church.

Click here for the essay.