Humor
I love humor! I think laughter is the closest distance between two people. I think laughter is a God-given coping mechanism that helps us make it through the tough times. I think the ability the laugh at oneself is the essence of humility and one key to health and holiness!
An NCCer sent me an interesting critique of humor today. Here it is.
After hearing you reference the importance of humor on several occasions, I thought you might appreciate the thoughts of David Hart in a First Things critique of The Humor of Kierkegaard. Commenting on Kierkegaard's view of humor, Hart states, "I learned how profound a difference Kierkegaard saw between genuine humor and mere irony. That is to say, irony can certainly recognize that the incongruities that throng human experience typically frustrate the quest for truth; but, having seen as much, irony is then impotent to do anything more than unveil failure and vanquish pretense. Humor, on the other hand, is born from an altogether higher recognition: that tragic contradiction is not absolute, that finitude is not only pain and folly, and that the absurdiity of our human contradictions can even be a cause for joy. Humor is able to receive finitude as a gift, conscious of the suffering intrinsic to human existence, but capable of transcending despair through jest. And that is why the power of humor is most intense in the "religious" sphere: Christianity, seeing all things from the perspective of the Incarnation (that most unexpected of perpituities), is the "most comic" vision of things: it encompasses the greatest contradictions and tragedies of all, but does so in such a way as to take the suffering of existence into the unanticipated absurdity of our redemption. Which yields the - to my mind - gratifying conclusion that, to be both a "lover of wisdom" and an accomplished humorist, one must almost certainly be a Christian; or, rather, that only a Christian philosophy can be truly "comic."I think laughter is one dimension of the image of God. It is a unique God-given ability that we must be good stewards of--just as we are stewards of everything else.
Bottom line: learn to laugh. a lot.
An NCCer sent me an interesting critique of humor today. Here it is.
After hearing you reference the importance of humor on several occasions, I thought you might appreciate the thoughts of David Hart in a First Things critique of The Humor of Kierkegaard. Commenting on Kierkegaard's view of humor, Hart states, "I learned how profound a difference Kierkegaard saw between genuine humor and mere irony. That is to say, irony can certainly recognize that the incongruities that throng human experience typically frustrate the quest for truth; but, having seen as much, irony is then impotent to do anything more than unveil failure and vanquish pretense. Humor, on the other hand, is born from an altogether higher recognition: that tragic contradiction is not absolute, that finitude is not only pain and folly, and that the absurdiity of our human contradictions can even be a cause for joy. Humor is able to receive finitude as a gift, conscious of the suffering intrinsic to human existence, but capable of transcending despair through jest. And that is why the power of humor is most intense in the "religious" sphere: Christianity, seeing all things from the perspective of the Incarnation (that most unexpected of perpituities), is the "most comic" vision of things: it encompasses the greatest contradictions and tragedies of all, but does so in such a way as to take the suffering of existence into the unanticipated absurdity of our redemption. Which yields the - to my mind - gratifying conclusion that, to be both a "lover of wisdom" and an accomplished humorist, one must almost certainly be a Christian; or, rather, that only a Christian philosophy can be truly "comic."I think laughter is one dimension of the image of God. It is a unique God-given ability that we must be good stewards of--just as we are stewards of everything else.
Bottom line: learn to laugh. a lot.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home