Flannery O'Connor: Savannah childhood home and the backward-walking chicken

I was in Savannah for a wedding and stopped by Flannery O'Connor's childhood home (photo above). 

Her home was just a block away from the church where the wedding was held--the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist--the church she attended as a child (her school was two blocks away).

My favorite story about her childhood was when she taught a chicken to walk backwards, and she and the chicken were featured in a news reel that was seen around the U.S. Unfortunately, I had to cut the anecdote from the book (because of length), but here is a description of it:

O’Connor was born in a prominent Irish Catholic family in Savannah, Georgia, on March 15, 1925. In the 1930s, O’Connor first gained brief national fame when she taught a chicken to walk backwards. Word of the feat spread, and a New York newsreel company made a short film of O’Connor and her backward-walking chicken that played before the feature film in movie theaters all over the United States (Kirk 2008: 3-4). 

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, that story does not directly help us understand how O'Connor uses the parables in her work. But it is an interesting bit of trivia that can be seen as a "character-revealing" akme (See Gowler, Host, Guest, Enemy, and Friend 1991: 123). It also, as the chapter explains, is connected to the famous O'Connor peacocks.

The section on O'Connor in the book still engages with a lot of fascinating material in O'Connor's work, especially her use of the parable of the Sower in her second and final novel: The Violent Bear it Away (the title is a quote from Matthew 11:12). 

A friend and colleague of mine, Molly McGehee, found the newsreel of O'Connor and her backward-walking chicken and sent it to me.  Enjoy!

On the back cover of this week's Christian Century . . . .

Hint: It's the one at the bottom of the page (with a nice blurb from Chris Rowland, University of Oxford):

Reprise: A Christmas Message from Howard Thurman

The Mood of Christmas, by Howard Thurman

I forgot the blog's third year anniversary! (part 2)

Again, in honor of the third anniversary of this blog (on December 9), I am posting the description and the Table of Contents of The Parables After Jesus as listed on the Baker Academic website:

About

Jesus's enigmatic and compelling parables have fascinated their hearers since he first uttered them, and during the intervening centuries these parables have produced a multitude of interpretations. This accessibly written book explores the varying interpretations of Jesus's parables across two millennia to demonstrate how powerfully they continue to challenge people's hearts, minds, and imaginations.

The Parables after Jesus covers more than fifty imaginative receptions from different eras, perspectives, and media, including visual art, music, literature, science fiction novels, plays, poetry, sermons, politics, theologians, biblical scholars, and other modes of interpretation, including perspectives from other religious traditions. The book shows how the use of Jesus's parables affects society and culture and offers a richer appreciation for Jesus's most striking teachings. Readers will begin to understand how contemporary interpretations of the parables stand on the shoulders of centuries of conversations and that our interpretations are never independent of the readings and responses that have preceded us. The Parables after Jesus will serve as an excellent supplemental text for a variety of courses.

Contents

Introduction


1. The Afterlives of Jesus's Parables in Antiquity (to ca. 550 CE)

Irenaeus

The Gospel of Philip

Clement of Alexandria

Tertullian

Origen

John Chrysostom

Augustine

Macrina the Younger

Ephrem the Syrian

The Good Shepherd in Early Christian Art

Oil Lamp

Roman Catacombs

Dura-Europos House Church

Illuminations from the Rossano Gospels

Byzantine Mosaics, Christ Separating Sheep from Goats, Sant'Apollinare Nuovo (Ravenna, Italy)

Romanos the Melodist

2. The Afterlives of Jesus's Parables in the Middle Ages (ca. 550-1500 CE)
Gregory the Great
Sahih al-BukhariWazo of Liège
The Golden Gospels of Echternach
The Laborers in the Vineyard
The Wicked Tenants
The Great Dinner
The Rich Man and Lazarus
Theophylact
Hildegard of Bingen
Chartres Cathedral
Bonaventure
Thomas Aquinas
John Gower
Antonia Pulci
Albrecht Dürer

3. The Afterlives of Jesus's Parables in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Martin Luther
Anna Jansz of Rotterdam
John Calvin
John Maldonatus
William Shakespeare
Domenico Fetti
George Herbert
Roger Williams
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn
John Bunyan

4. The Afterlives of Jesus's Parables in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
William Blake
Søren Kierkegaard
Frederick Douglass
Fanny Crosby
Leo Tolstoy
John Everett Millais
Emily Dickinson
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Adolf Jülicher

5. The Afterlives of Jesus's Parables in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Thomas Hart Benton
Parables and the Blues: Rev. Robert Wilkins
Flannery O'Connor
Martin Luther King Jr.
Godspell
Latin American Receptions
The Peasants of Solentiname
Elsa Tamez
David Flusser
Octavia Butler
Thich Nhat Hanh


Conclusion: What Do Parables Want?


Appendix: Descriptions of the Parables Cited in the Interpretations


Indexes

I forgot the blog's third year anniversary! The first post was December 9, 2013.

Wow. Can't believe that I forgot to commemorate this blog's third year anniversary. I started the blog on December 9, 2013 after signing the book contract with Baker Academic. 

Three years later, and the book is almost out:

To commemorate the anniversary, here is the very first post (my next post will contain the list of all 62 people/items included in my analyses of various interpretations of 30+ parables of Jesus):

I just signed a contract (November 2013) with Baker Academic (Baker Publishing Group) to write a textbook on the reception history of the parables. I have been working with James Ernest of Baker, and the topic is an exciting but daunting one: examining how the parables in the NT Gospels have been interpreted over the centuries. 

This blog will document the process of writing that book, and it will include works that I find and insights I have gained through my research for the book.
The most difficult part of the book, as I have already discovered, is the 100,000-word limit. There are so many interpreters and so much material that should be included in such a book that it will be difficult to choose which ones should be included. Part of the reason for the creation of this blog, then, is to include interpretations that I cannot include in the book itself, simply because of space. I of course also will include in the blog insights about the interpreters that I do include in the book.

The blog, like the book, will cover not only written interpretations but visual and other interpretations. I intend not only to focus on theological or academic responses (the book will not concentrate on academic debates in modern scholarship that are adequately covered elsewhere, such as in my What Are They Saying About the Parables? with Paulist Press) but also on other types of responses including literature, the visual arts, music, social and political elements, and so forth. 

My goal is to include a number of diverse responses to the parables, to allow a wide variety of responses to be heard while attempting to balance depth and breadth, and to focus on important voices while being as comprehensive as possible. 

The manuscript is due by December 1, 2015, and I hope to update this blog regularly during the writing of the book and maybe beyond. 

The image below is a photo I took at the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam on October 20, 2013. It is a close up of the father and son in his Return of the Prodigal etching. More on that print later.

The Rich Man and Lazarus (part 20): Bonaventure (ca. 1217/21-1274)

Bonaventure

Giovanni di Fidanza (Bonaventure), in his biography of Saint Francis of Assisi, recounts how his commitment to Saint Francis began when as a young boy he was healed from a serious illness after his mother prayed to Francis. Giovanni took the name Bonaventure after he entered the Franciscan Order while a student at the University of Paris. He earned a doctor in theology degree, was elected as the leader (General Minister) of the Franciscan Order in 1257, and became Cardinal of Albano in 1274. He died just two months later on July 15, 1274, and was canonized as a saint in 1482.

Many of Bonaventure’s contributions to parable interpretations are found in his massive commentary on the Gospel of Luke. His exegeses include allegorical elements, since the Holy Spirit can lead interpreters to understand Scripture’s depth in “the multiplicity of its mystical understandings” beyond the literal words, but Bonaventure’s approach is significant because he also includes non-allegorical interpretations of parables (see Bonaventure 2001: xx-xxxii; 2003: x-xii; McKim 2007: 203).

Bonaventure’s interpretation of the Rich Man and Lazarus parable includes not only over one hundred twenty citations of Jewish Scriptures and over forty-five citations of the New Testament but also citations of over thirty earlier interpreters, such as John Chrysostom, Bede, Boethius, Gregory the Great, and Peter of Ravenna (Bonaventure 2001: 1516-51).

Augustine had argued that the rich man allegorically symbolizes those Jews who were filled with pride, Lazarus represents a poor tax collector or the Gentiles, the rich man’s purple and linen clothes represent the kingdom of heaven that will be taken away from the Jews, the banquets denote the Jews’ boasting about the Law, and so forth (see Wailes 1986: 255-6). Bonaventure, however, avoids all such allegorical interpretations: “this passage has more the character of an example than of a parable,” and it functions as an “exemplum of punishment for a lack of mercy” (Bonaventure 2001: 1516). Bonaventure also emphasizes the physical reality of what occurs in this “exemplum” to inform/warn his readers about the dangers of wealth, and Bonaventure finds three important lessons to learn (1516-1551):

First, the rich man lacked mercy because he loved himself and was filled with wicked desires: “For through its love for earthly things the spirit grows fat and is weighed down, so that it cannot travel into the higher realms of heaven.” The rich man also takes excessive pride in the glory of his “handsome and precious garments,” and his love of sumptuous banquets indicates his sin of gluttony.     

Second, this sinful lack of mercy results in a “merciless and impious” indifference toward his neighbor, Lazarus, who was sick, abandoned, and starving. In contrast, Bonaventure argues, Lazarus was holy and good. He shows patience, for example, in spite of the cruelty of the rich man, but the ultimate evidence of his piety is that he “was borne away by the angels into Abraham’s bosom.”

Third, the punishment for the rich man’s merciless indifference to Lazarus was “being cast into the calamity of hell.” Even though the rich man saw Lazarus’s need, he does not have mercy. Agreeing with others such as Macrina the Younger (although he does not refer to her) that the soul is what is being tortured, Bonaventure says that the “flame was real, but the tongue was imagined.” Bonaventure thus focuses on the physical reality of sin/punishment and faith/blessing.

Bonaventure’s monumental commentary on Luke is a tremendous achievement, and one that creatively combines literal and allegorical interpretations of the biblical text as Bonaventure seeks to enlighten his readers with the depth of Scripture’s insights. The literal meaning is never abandoned, but the allegorical meaning yields deeper “mystical” understandings.

A Christmas Message from Howard Thurman

The Mood of Christmas, by Howard Thurman

Rita and I received a Christmas card from our friends Chris and Catherine Rowland. The words on the card were especially meaningful to me, so I looked on the back to see the source/author of those words.

To my delight, the words were written by Howard Thurman, whose works on the parables hopefully will be the subject of my next book project (co-authored with Kipton Jensen of Morehouse College).

The words are from Thurman's "When the Song of the Angels Is Stilled" (from The Mood of Christmas) and here they are, repeated from above:

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

Can't think of a better Christmas greeting, thought, and never-ending mission.