Prayers For Chile

Oh dear. While Chilean society has the infrastructure to deal with this crisis that Haiti does not, they will still be in dire need.

Plus, that's one big quake.

An Open Invitation

I am going to attempt an experiment. I know Alan won't see the point of it; to be honest, it may not be fruitful. Yet, in an attempt at fairness (whatever that may mean), I am going to try it. I am going to post invites for some folks to address a simple question. Their answers will be allowed, without rebuttal (as far as that is possible). I want to offer a completely open forum for the airing of opinions here without getting in to any kind of argument, hurt feelings, etc.

The question is this:

Conservatives argue that Pres. Obama is a socialist. Since actual socialists have been pretty critical of his Presidency, how would you support the argument that he is, in fact, a socialist?

He Had No Staff

Disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said yesterday that many Capitol Hill staffers have never worked at a real job. “Of course it’s the nature of the modern Congress, which hires lots of nice young staffers who have never had a real job,” said Gingrich. He added that they “spent their entire life being arrogant to visitors from back home” and “write legislation as though they have some contact with reality.”

So . . .

He manages to insult thousands of hard-working public servants, including members of his former office staff.

Except, considering Gingrich's history of evasion of something resembling contact with facts, it might just be he didn't have a staff to keep him up from putting his foot in his mouth.

That would explain a lot.

All That's Missing Is The Thorazine

For some reason, some folks are up in arms about the CPAC Conference.

Me, I thought it was all the result of deinstitutionalization.

Lucky there weren't too many squirrels about, because they would have feasted on the nuts.

Religious Belief

A website to which I have been recently introduced is hosting a discussion forum on conservative thought, on February 27th, in Brooklyn. They will be considering conservative thought in several social and cultural areas, including religion (dear to my own heart). One of the readings they offer is a 1982 review article by George Scialabba, considering works by Kolakowski, MacIntyre, and Rorty.

In the article, Scialabba makes the typical modernist argument, not the least of whose highlights is the repeated assertion that with the arrival of the modernist project - the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the various 20th century responses to these movements - the intellectual assent to religious propositions, and therefore religious "belief" considered as intellectual assent to a set of such propositions, is now untenable. This may or may not be the case; while the French philosophes certainly were not concerned with upholding religious belief, many of the great Enlightenment thinkers (with the possible exception of Hume) certainly included religion within their sphere of interest. Locke, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel - all wrote extensively on "religion", which for them meant Christianity. Of course, Hegel considered other religions, although he thought of Christianity as the highest form of religious belief (in this vein, the Romanticist theologian Schleiermacher did as well; while they politely detested one another, they shared this at least).

Yet, few social movements have failed to die as easily as religion should have.

My question is quite simple - if religious belief should have ended when the intellectual superstructure underlying it became untenable, why didn't it? Could it be, perhaps, that, like Christmas Day for the Who's in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, religious belief is something a little bit more than the ex post facto intellectual justifications for it?

Experiment In Liberty

A book review in The New York Times considers Timothy Ferris' new book.

No real deep thoughts, just wondering if the caveat at the end of the review article is more a contemporary development, unrelated to the origins of both.

Music For Your Monday

I heard a week or two ago that an archive of Soul Train has been digitally remastered and is being released in multi-disc format. I spent many Saturday afternoons as a kid watching Don Cornelius and the Dance Line, listening to some of the best 70's soul and funk. It was one of the best musical educations I received.

First, the kings of the Philly sound (where Cornelius' show originated), the O'Jays with "Backstabbers"



Wow, I had forgotten about The S.O.S. Band! Here they are with "Take Your Time".



I love this next song. Much better than the stupid remake of it by Simply Red. This is Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes, "If You Don't Know Me By Now":

Blogging In A Time Without Crisis

Along with Delumeau's sprawling history of the idea of sin, I am also reading Simon Schama's equally ambitious Citizens (must be a French phase; hope it doesn't last too long). One of Schama's arguments is that the Revolution developed, in part, because of a sense of crisis over the nation's finances. Various royal ministers during the reign of Louis XVI attempted to deal with national debt without any consistency; indeed, subsequent ministerial cohorts would repudiate the policies of their predecessors. By the time the Estates-General was called, there was a sense of crisis among the people that was not necessarily shared by various crown ministers. The disjunction seemed to be that the King's ministers, regardless of policy preference, believed the red ink could be rid through various policies. The newly politicized bourgeois and their representatives in the E-G, however, did not so believe. Eventually, this divide became too great to sustain the regime as it had existed.

The unanswered question, of course, is was the national debt a crisis? It obviously became one; whether or not the flow of money from the government could be stopped through a stern application of political will cannot be answered because, quite simply, politics had ceased to function at the end of the ancien regime. No one was willing to make the crucial decisions, the unpopular decisions necessary to set the ship of state aright. Even the Revolution, as it developed, didn't deal specifically with the financial quagmire; rather, it treated it as symptomatic of institutional problems that could only be solved through the steady and progressive abolition of various older governmental forms.

The years of Republican governance were years of governance by crisis management. Every event, every public pronouncement, every piece of legislation - it all seemed to relate to some pending horrid national nightmare. Even the pre-9/11 Bush Administration treated something as relatively inconsequential as embryonic stem-cell research as something akin to a crisis. The problem, of course, is the past decade really saw few crises. The September 11th attacks, whatever else they signified, were not a crisis. An event of significant national import to be sure. Not an event necessitating a radical shift in our entire national life, however.

Part of the problem that comes with seeing events, big and small, as crises is there is no sense of perspective. Crisis management is a kind of administrative skill, really only necessary to oversee the unfolding of events with a coolness and clear-headedness that, for all their vaunted and alleged skills, the Republicans and Bush Administration officials seemed to lack. Tossing about on the winds of crisis is no way to exist, let alone govern.

The Obama Administration's outstanding virtue is its refusal to bow to pressure to view governance as crisis management. The Republican opposition, and their currently most vocal constituency, the Tea Baggers, are dedicated to crisis. Their view, not only of our current economic, social, and cultural predicament, but the Administration of Barack Obama is one of on-going crisis. The nation is in peril. Our country is facing the destruction of its most treasured values. The Constitution is in peril. Obama is a socialist bent on overturning our capitalist system. He's coming after our guns, our money, our fetuses.

Unlike the historical example of the French at the time of the Revolution, I think this gap between the perceptions of the governing class and a vocal constituency of the state is not one that could lead to trouble. For one reason, the Tea Baggers just aren't that numerous. For all the noise they make, and for all the press and Republicans dote upon them, they really have no power other than attracting attention. For another reason, while there might be good reason to see our various economic woes as a set of crises to be addressed more forcefully than the President and his advisers have up until now, the never-ending stream of crises under George W. Bush has made us a little numb to the call for solidarity in the face of impending doom. We elected Barack Obama in part, I think, precisely because he has a cool, detached demeanor. He presents himself as someone who understand that we face "problems", not "crises". Furthermore, he presents himself as someone with the competence to address these "problems" without resorting to overheated rhetoric.

While this makes for a more calm approach to federal governance, it makes blogging a little boring. In 2007, there was an abundant supply of Bush Administration folks saying and doing stuff that was just outrageous. Now, out of power, these same folks continue to say outrageous stuff, but it only seems to impact a bunch of liberal bloggers who think it actually means something. Rather than the daily outrage, we have the long slog of the health care reform debate; the impending financial reform and regulation debate; and, one hopes sometime soon, a serious discussion of cap-and-trade legislation. This is government-in-normal-time that seems so unfamiliar precisely because we have become inured to so many voices in positions of authority demanding attention to this or that national crisis.

It's kind of nice, actually.

They Hurt My Feelings

OK, not really.

As usual, my position is not offered correctly. The "facts" of the matter regarding the attempted kidnapping of some Haitian children by some Baptist "missionaries" became darker and darker; if I had to guess - which, with the few verified and verifiable facts available is all I can do - I would say that these well-meaning but misguided individuals were being used by persons with nefarious purposes. A bad plot to a bad book (soon to be a movie in a theater near you, directed by Michael Bay!), to be sure, but no less a possibility for all that.

Craig's "facts" such as they are, ignore my central contention that taking children from one country - regardless of the underlying desire of those who are doing it - is a crime. Had these people managed to fill out the paperwork, and to make arrangements with the Dominican authorities to cross the border, and made proper contacts with American consular officials in Dominica, we might never be aware that there was something less than noble occurring. I, for one, am grateful that these folks were stupid enough to think they could get away with this; I applaud the Haitian legal system for retrieving some of their own from the clutches of missionaries who believe they have the right and duty to steal people from one country and take them to another.

The whole episode stinks.

Reading For Pleasure

I have been introduced to The New Inquiry and this post, right off the bat, manages to capture my attention.

I immediately recognized myself in this passage, as someone who tends not to care what most people read, who thinks poorly of the common reader, and who doesn’t think literature can or should be justified morally—who prizes aesthetic over moral concerns any day of the week. The third habit is the one I struggle with especially. I tend to believe that literature exists solely for the pleasure of those who read and write it, and that claims that literature does moral good in society invariably rely on dubious logic.

--snip--

I balked and continue to balk at the implication that literature must be justified morally. Unlike Trilling, I believe that there are irreconcilable conflicts between ethics and aesthetics. What about great art that is amoral or perversely immoral? (For example, art that valorizes the anti-social impulses Freud considered in constant conflict with the positive, social ones, and which Camille Paglia explores magnificently in Sexual Personae.) Is that art (if you believe art has a significant impact upon society) a detriment to society? Should we eschew such art? Should artists ever privilege moral concerns over aesthetic ones when they create art? My answers to these questions tend to fall on the side of the aesthetic, not least because I don’t think we can determine the moral content of all impulses (sexual and violent impulses are particularly ambiguous).

The best literature contains multitudes. There are political dimensions, social dimensions, psychological dimensions, and, yes, narrative dimensions that exist purely for their own sake. I am not one to impugn anyone's reading habits; even the most dreadful works of writing offer to their readers something, a moment's escape, a way to investigate the lives of others. Those works, The Life of Pi, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, and A Suitable Boy that present whole worlds, characters that are more than mere sketches on paper, and even (as in the dense Pi) ideas and thoughts that linger long after the final paragraph is finished reward repeated visits.

The idea that there is some kind of inherent "conflict" between the "moral" and the "aesthetic" is a product, it seems to me, of a vision of art in general as existing in some pristine netherworld, divorced from life. While I have no issue with anyone who chooses to read purely for the aesthetic pleasure reading can bring, I find it a highly dubious notion that there can even be such a thing as "immoral art" (or even "moral art" for that matter). Do the stories and plays of the Marquis de Sade make up the former? In what way? Is "Billy Budd", Melville's "lost story" that many high school students read with relish, something of this sort as well?

Is "Piss Christ" immoral? What about The Last Temptation of Christ, in either book or film? I fail to see how such a verdict - it's immoral! - works in any of these cases, even the extreme one of the pornographic stories of the Marquis. Morality is the tale we tell ourselves of how wonderful our ideas are; we tend to read those stories, observe that art, and such not, that reinforce our own sense of ourselves as "moral" agents, and judge that which we do not take in as not satisfying whatever criteria we have set up to meet the standard of "morality".

So, the author of this piece eschews the moral dimension for some kind of pure aesthetics. Good for him. Sometimes, reading something for the pure joy of encountering those beautiful bits of prose or poetry for their own sake can indeed be a joy. To claim, however, that literature enjoys some kind of Platonic sphere, removed from the conditions that drove authors to create it, makes of it something artificial, even inhuman.

Speaking Of Competing Narratives

This post asks a good question. I wonder if our resident Haiti-expert, Craig, can tell us, exactly, who is right.

Taking Stock Of Our Heritage

Scott McLemee provided a link to this article from Inside Higher Ed. A general defense of an "intellectual history" approach to teaching Christianity in a secular institution, the article offers its best points, I think, toward the end.

[I]t’s not my business what my students do with the knowledge and skills I give them, least of all when it comes to their own spiritual lives or lack thereof. What is my business is giving them the tools they need to take stock of the cultural inheritance that has, for better or worse, been forced on us all, in different ways and to varying degrees, and to open the door for them to consciously and creatively reappropriate elements of that inheritance if they choose or else articulate their reasons for rejecting it entirely. To my mind, such a goal is not only compatible with liberal education, but it is at the very core of what we try to do in the humanities: to help our students come to the point of making their own critical and informed judgments about their stance toward their cultural inheritance, or put differently, to be active rather than passive in their relationship to culture.

I understand that for many, dealing with the Christian aspect of our cultural heritage may be too emotionally charged for a variety of reasons, either because of traumas associated with religion or else because of the fear of "losing one’s faith" through critical investigation. I am very conscious of that reality, and for that reason I would never propose making a course in theology a general education requirement at a secular institution and would in fact fight against any such proposal. Yet even if we can choose to avoid a class on Christian thought, none of us can choose not to have been born into a culture that has been deeply informed by Christianity. There are very good reasons to wish we had not been chosen for this particular inheritance, reasons that should be obvious to us all. Nevertheless, we owe it to ourselves to at least take an inventory. That’s how I view my teaching of the Christian tradition — helping my students to take an inventory. They can’t go back in time and decide not to have received some form of Christian inheritance, in all the varied ways they have received it, but I would hope that after taking my class they are in a better position to decide what to do with it.

The stock of ideas that make up our cultural inheritance includes a hefty amount of Christian ones. A university education that seeks to make its students not only more informed, but better critical thinkers, should definitely include these ideas. Setting them out honestly, which includes being critical of them, makes these young men and women more aware of what it means to be children of the western cultural tradition.

I would add that many survey classes in western thought could benefit from a more rounded approach. For example, teaching Descartes as the first "modern" thinker (his Meditations and Discourse on Method are usually the first texts read in a class on "modern philosophy" could benefit from making clear that such a designation is arbitrary; Descartes himself would have no idea what it would mean) includes the caveat that he saw himself as providing a better approach to talking about God and a better metaphysics than the Scholastics. Teaching Hegel without any reference to the impact of the Napoleonic Wars misses the reality that he lived, as the old saw had it, in interesting times, and was reacting to them. Far too often "intellectual history" that fails to set ideas firmly within the larger milieu in which they are articulated makes of them a "thing", free-floating, inhuman, rather than all-too-human responses to a received heritage in a particular political, social, and cultural setting. We can adopt the thought, for example, of Plato (one of my fellow students at Catholic University of America considered himself a thoroughgoing Platonist), but we should do so only with the understanding that Plato was an Athenian living two and a half millennia ago; he was responding as much to his time and place as any one.

As Charles Taylor makes abundantly clear, the past few hundred years of western intellectual life includes not only Christian theology and thought; it also includes countervailing ideas that pushed Christian thought further and further from its pride of place. I think any class on the history of Christian thought should also include this reality as well.

The complexity of the intellectual inheritance of we children of the west should, given even a passing glance via a survey class, provide the opportunity to understand that the narratives we often choose are only partial and artificial. That doesn't mean they cannot inform our lives. It only means that we should always be aware that we should never lay claim to any cultural narrative, be it Christian, Jewish, or secular, without an awareness that it is not the sum total of the meaning of what it means to be fully human.

Offering a class such as the one outlined and defended in this article would go a long way toward more fully presenting our cultural inheritance and giving young men and women tools with which to be more honestly children of the west.

Saturday Rock Show

From Fear of a Blank Planet, one of those enigmatic songs, maybe about running away, maybe about contemplating suicide, but definitely about escaping from the terror of existence. Enjoyed seeing and hearing this life last August. This video played above and behind them.

What an awesome band. . .

The Nightfly?

In August, 2008, someone asked McCain and Obama for their favorite songs.

Apparently, the Pope doesn't want to be outdone.

The picks range from the conventional - Revolver is number one - to the surprising - Dark Side of the Moon is number two - to what can only be called odd.

Don't know what else to make of this.

One Door Closes, Another Door Opens

Probably won't finish until tomorrow. But, need to start.

This thread, as quite a few do, gets interesting.

In order to honor ER's plea, I am shifting attention here, if for no other reason that I think Feodor's rather childish non-response response to the on-going discussion deserves an honest reply.

First, as a general rule, rage at God is neither new nor interesting, at least to me. The desire for a recognition of our common humanity, for the suffering caused in large measure by our own greed and lack of care for our fellow human beings is one I certainly share.

Yet, I cannot but think that "a pox on all your houses because you're not as angry as I am" is only a childish ranting at the silence of history and universe in the face of the real desire for us to acknowledge that we cause the innocent to die.

At what point does a recognition that we all share in a responsibility for the lives of our fellow human beings become a substitute for acting to change that? At what point do we surrender the explicit necessity to make the world a little more just, a little more humane, for the satisfaction of being right?

I have no need to justify my faith, my actions, or my words, before Feodor's tribunal of self-proclaimed prophetic utterance. His remarks are, for the most part, banal and trivial. His concerns, on the other hand are not.

He offered the silence of God in the face of humanity's propensity for profound evil as a challenge to the proclamation that God speaks. God is silent. God is speaking. It is never either/or. It is always both/and. The world will not, does not, and cannot alter its course because we stand over the broken bodies of our children, our parents, our brothers and sisters - even those we will never meet - and scream out our rage to the silence around us. That shriek certainly satisfies our refusal to take it lying down; stopping there, though, is petulance.

Which is why Wiesel, for all his profundity, does not satisfy. Ditto Richard Rubenstein, Richard Dawkins, or Feodor. Petulance is unbecoming. As a professor of mine in college remarked, shit or get off the pot. More than anything else, that sums up my approach to the Christian faith. Either get in the game, or get out of it; kibitzing from the sidelines about how we're all wrong, about how we are all missing the point, about our own faults and failures, is a distraction.

The suffering of today's unfortunates is no different in kind from the sufferings of millions over the course of human history. Misery has been the lot of the vast majority of human beings. So has God's love for them even in the midst of that misery. Occasionally, that love was brought to life in a parish priest offering the sacrament, or some folks offering bread or soup. Even a radical who demanded that the entire order be reset to end that misery. Since time hasn't stopped, history marches on, and human beings are imperfect and as bound to hate as to love, the question of suffering will go on. The answer, as far as my very limited abilities and vision can tell, is that love is stronger than death. It may not be much.

It may, though, be just about everything.

The "Not-Mount-Vernon-But-They-Still-Owned-Slaves-So-It's-All-Good" Statement

It's always fun to read conservatives talk about the Constitution. Especially Ed Meese, who violated it more times than most conservatives can count (unless they aren't wearing shoes and have a couple vestigial toes; then they might be close).

A couple things about this "statement". One bullet point toward the end reads:

* It encourages free enterprise, the individual entrepreneur, and economic reforms grounded in market solutions.

I guess I missed that part every time I read where the Founders wrote that Congress has the power to regulate commerce. Apparently, they meant "regulate by not regulating" which is a bit like going to war for peace.

The nice thing about being a conservative is you are able to destroy the country and never have to apologize for it. It's always someone else's fault, especially if they are liberal, the first black President, and have an African surname. And besides, everything would have been fine if the American people didn't notice how much they hated George W. Bush.

Not The God We Think

The advent of the so-called "new atheists" a few years back - Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, with the late addition of long-time religion-basher Christopher Hitchens and now, it seems, philosopher Donald Dennet - was an occasion for much garment-rending, attempts to "prove" them wrong. There is, in fact, a cottage industry among conservative Christian publishing houses that continues to pour out volumes taking their arguments to task.

I kind of miss them. Especially Harris. Talk about low-hanging fruit. Dawkins, however, isn't much better, really. His major work on religion, The God Delusion, was only the opening salvo in what he understood to be the on-going project of completely destroying religion from human life.

Good luck with that.

I honestly am not fazed by atheists. Arguing with them tends to be futile; as the "arguments" (such as they may or may not be) in both Dawkins and Harris show pretty clearly, what they insist Christianity is, and what all Christians in all times and places think and do, bears no resemblance to anything resembling the complexity and contradictory nature of Christian life and belief. Their "defense" - that Christian theology is intellectually untenable fluff, beneath their notice - is a dodge. Reveling in a self-imposed ignorance, they blithely insist they have the scoop on "religion", when they prove, over the course of thousands of words, they are as ignorant as fence posts. Taking them seriously is really not worth my time.

As I remarked last week, if we are to be clear about who this God is we Christians claim to encounter in Jesus Christ, we need to think in a Trinitarian way. While it is true it is difficult to find specific references to the doctrine in the Bible, the Trinity is a good way of talking very specifically about this particular God, how this particular God has chosen to encounter us.

This is the crux of my complaint about much of the "atheism". Whether it's Dawkins' claim to have given a definitive definition of "God" and gone on to "prove" the impossibility of that God's existence, or the kind of general rejection of the "sky fairy", most of this babble has little to do with the God whom Jesus Christ calls "Father", and whom we encounter through the power of the Holy Spirit.

In other words, most of the arguments of the "new atheists" are nothing more than a bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about insisting they know more than anyone else how people think, and telling them that what they think is wrong. My response is, no, we don't think about God that way, because in the first and last instance, God isn't some "thing" about which we "think", but the reality we encounter as a people called out by Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. Ours is not the God we think; ours is the living God who in turn gives life.

In the first and last instance, this is my own doctrine of God. This is why the Trinity is necessary to understanding who we are as Christians. Ours is not some posited universal Idea; ours is this very specific God who has done very specific things in the past; is continuing to do them even now; and will do them in to the future. We believe these things - we don't "know" them; knowledge is such a tenuous thing in any case; belief shapes who we are far more than something as mundane as "knowledge" - because this particular God has moved among us in very specific ways.

I know of no way of starting to say who God is other than this way.

Science As Metaphysics

Did you know that everything around you, for the most part, isn't really there?

Elementary particle physics makes it abundantly clear that, as we descend the ladder of the material universe, the various bits that make up physical existence are barely-there bits of stuff, in constant motion, with the space in between them occupying a far larger percentage of a given area designated for a particular "atom" or "molecule".

I urge everyone to test this theory by tossing a baseball through a window; better yet, do as my childhood friend once did and bash your head against a wall as hard as possible. Since the stuff isn't there, no problem, right?

Each and every meta-theory on the basic structure of the universe offers certain challenges to our common sense; whether it's Copernicus, or Newton, or Mach, or Einstein, or Bohr, or Heisenberg, or Hawking, we are challenged to consider again the old adage that the universe is not only weirder than we imagine, it's weirder than we can imagine.

Today comes word that, as the old saw goes, everything solid melts in to air:

"If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The "holographic principle" challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.(italics added)

2500 years ago, Plato posited that existence is akin to humanity sitting shackled, forced to stare at images on a cave wall; Plato, it seems, was the first to break these bonds and declare the images are just that, shadows without substance. Awake! Turn your head and see the way things really are!

The problem with these various theories about the way the Universe "really" is - microparticle physics as the Tao of all things; Bell's Theorem with its positing of a multiverse, each possible quantum state of each and every elementary particle since the Big Bang spinning off a new possible existence at each nanosecond of time; the physical unreality of all that is - require us to stand outside the world as we experience it. This is not to argue that holograph theory is or is not true; it sounds to me more like a certain mathematical model than anything else, most of which would be far beyond most of the people who read this blog. I am suggesting not so much that the theory is bogus as it is unfalsifiable. How would it be possible to falsify a theory whose very existence means assuming that entire Universe operates from its first principles?

Whenever I read somewhere that scientists deal with the way the world "really" is, I have to smile, because, far too often, theories like this are introduced that defy some of the most basic tenets of scientific inquiry. It may, indeed, be the solution to certain mathematical computations; that doesn't mean, however, it is scientific.

Ken And Me

I have had the name Ken Starr waved in my face a few times today, once in reference to an incident at Wesley Theological Seminary. Before he became infamous, when he was just Bush 41's Solicitor General, he spoke at the commencement in 1992.

The announcement that Starr would so speak was not greeted with enthusiastic cheers from the student body. I was reminded (again) that one student wrote to the student newspaper, and included the marvelous phrase "pale, male, and probably stale" to describe the choice. I was among many students who thought it might be possible to choose someone else.

I remember that commencement very well, precisely because it was one of those tempests-in-a-campus-teapot that seem so transcendentally important at the time, but really don't mean all that much in the long run. After all the hoo-hah and back and forth, Starr came and gave his little speech - spending, I recall, much of the first half half-heartedly defending himself against much of the animosity directed his way by students - and then sat down. Because I was in the student choir, I was sitting in the chancel, and Starr actually sat right next to me. I introduced myself, a moment I'm sure he recalls with fondness. I could be as polite as the next person.

The next year, when I graduated, Harry Blackmun gave the commencement address. Hard on the heels of his very public decision to no longer support the death penalty, and in light of his being the author of Roe v Wade, it received much less student angst. I had several opportunities to sit and chat with Justice Blackmun, because he attended Metropolitan Memorial UMC, where I also attended, and more than once sat in front or behind him. A very nice man, easy to talk to.

Anyway, having read Starr's name today, and being reminded of that incident, I thought I'd offer this apropos of nothing more than my own brushes with the infamous and noted.

Music For Your Monday

On Friday night or Saturday, I posted a Joni Mitchell video on Facebook, and one of my friends said that the only way one could really enjoy it was to be really high. I find that hysterically funny, all things considered. I decided to do some music I like that could very well be considered "only stoners like this stuff".

Miles Davis with the title track to his classic Bitches Brew:



Traffic's "Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys", which I picked as the entrance song for our wedding reception.



What's most interesting about this final pick, I think, is Robert Fripp's history of outspoken disgust with drug use among both musicians and fans. Yet, few bands were as trippy as King Crimson. This is "Larks Tongue in Aspic, Part II"

A New Wrinkle

Apparently, the lawyer advising the alleged Haitian kidnappers is wanted in El Salvador for participation in a child-smuggling-for-prostitution ring.

Nice.

I look forward to Craig explaining this one away. Those Haitian kiddies would, indeed, have such a better life in the U.S, blah, blah, blah . . .

Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out (UPDATE)

I would have thought Evan Bayh would have stuck around if for no other reason than the folks who control the conventional wisdom in our nation's capital dearly love him and his constant idiocy. Apparently, though, he has a bit more integrity than, say, Joe Lieberman.

Like Sarah Palin, another darling of Washington insiders, Bayh is quitting, only with more integrity than Palin, who left after two years in office.
No other thought than good riddance to bad rubbish. His "statement" is a meaningless combination of self-flattery and nonsensical drivel.

"For some time I've had a growing conviction that Congress is not working as it should," said Bayh. As a prime example, he referred to the recent filibustering of legislation to create a bipartisan fiscal commission. What particularly bothered Bayh was that it was defeated by Senators who had previously been co-sponsors of the measure itself, but then blocked it for what he described as political reasons.

Just ugh. Imagine a political body using politics to do its job. This is a Louis Renault moment from Casablanca if ever I read one.

UPDATE: While I would probably replace "immoral" with "venal and self-regarding", Matt pretty much sums up why Bayh's departure is as awful as his actual tenure.

Between The Times

In the 1920's, a little theological revolution took place in Germany. With the publication of the second, completely revised edition of his commentary on Romans, Swiss pastor Karl Barth became the focal point of a small group of Christian thinkers who were seriously wrestling with their times. Understanding the impact of Romerbrief necessitates understanding that, even in the first edition, Barth was out in front of many European intellectuals in grasping how the First World War was not just a political catastrophe for Europe; it was also a cultural catastrophe. The self-congratulatory, triumphal attitude of European culture - its philosophy, its theology, its political approach to the rest of the world - had bled out in the trenches of Flanders and France, and Barth recognized that the ground which had seemed so firm, now soaked with the blood of millions, could no longer hold the brave new European poised to stride the earth.

Little noted beyond a small coterie of fellow churchmen and theologians, Barth continued to write and preach and eventually, with his close personal friend Eduard Thurneysen and the Lutheran Friedrich Gogarten, started a journal entitled Zwischen den Zeiten, Between the Times. It reflected their own view that the Christian life was not the culmination of the Kingdom; nor was it existence in some primitive cultus. Rather, it is a life lived in the constant tension between two temptations - the desire to chuck it all, as it were and the desire to proclaim the arrival of the Divine Rule and rest on one's laurels. History would not allow the journal to survive too long; with the rise of German fascism, and with many including Gogarten siding with the demons, Barth took his leave of both the journal and eventually Germany. He published one final, famous, essay in Zwischen, entitled "Nein!" - essentially a huge finger to all the Hitler apologists and those like his fellow Swiss Reformed theologian, Emil Brunner (with whom he refused to reconcile even when Brunner lay dying because Brunner refused to admit that Barth was correct in his criticisms of Brunner's thought) - and retreated to Basel on the triple frontier of France, Germany, and Switzerland.*

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration. It marks the end of the first stretch of what is usually considered "ordinary time" in the Church calendar, from the Feast of Epiphany through Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. It marks the real beginning of Jesus' ministry. Not his baptism by John in the Jordan River, not his reading and preaching in the Nazareth synagogue, not even his calling of the twelve marked it out as clearly as this event. Harking back to other mountain tops, Jesus went up to a mountain where he was revealed in his fullness, standing around chatting with Moses and Elijah, the two great prophets of the Hebrews, who themselves knew something of events on mountains. The reaction of the disciples, in particular Peter, demonstrate how far they had yet to go in understanding, even in this fullness of revelation, what Jesus was to be about.

We do not, cannot, live on that mountain, in the fullness of the presence. Nor can we live at the foot of the cross, an event which Jesus predicted even as he descended from the mountain. We are destined to live in the far more ambivalent reality around us; the memory of that moment on the mountain, perhaps, staying with us as a reminder of who this Jesus really is, even as we still wrestle with what that "really" means in the context of the messy, sometimes horrifying, sometimes transcendent, always frustrating day-to-day in which we find ourselves immersed.

While we celebrate that moment on the mountain today, on Wednesday as we recall that we all are nothing more than dust and ashes, destined to die, we need to remember that our real Christian life, the one to which all baptized Christians are called, is a life between those two moments of the Transfiguration and the Cross. Like those so-called "dialectical theologians" of last century, we need to remember that ours is not a calling either to retreat or to final victory. Rather, we travel on, granting to the world its status as neither hell nor heaven, and serve as Jesus called us to serve, between those two poles.

*A detailed history of German theological life in between the World Wars and after is told in Christian Faith in Dark Times, which includes brief sketches of Barth, Gogarten Paul Althaus, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Emmanuel Hirsch.

Unpaid Profession

Matt Yglesias calls this piece by Leon Wieseltier "nonsense from top to bottom." I couldn't agree more.

What is especially awful is the seemingly high-brow attack on "bloggers" (Lord, how I hate that word).

Owing to its vastness and its velocity, no medium of communication and publication ever depended more desperately on “content”--the lifeless business expression for words and ideas--than the Internet. Some people celebrate this as a historic breakthrough for literariness in its various forms. They rhapsodize about the democratization of the writing life, about the demise of the “gatekeepers” and their institutions, about the pure and perfect autonomy of blogging and “self-publishing.” Who needs The New York Times if I can arrange for you to know what it is in my heart at this instant?

You read any writer on becoming one, and you see again and again, "a writer writes, and there's no way around it." The advent of the internet no doubt does reduce the mean intelligence of written material overall; it also offers opportunities for some to write. Some fewer gain an audience. Some fewer still actually manage to make something of a living at it.

All the same, Wieseltier's lament over the decrepitude of our culture is really nothing more than the realization that the barbarians are at the gates. I would feel bad for him, but I don't. The simple reality is that internet writing of all kinds attracts a relatively small audience. Most sites tend to play to a particular audience; they are nothing more than examples of market segmentation. The demise of the craft of writing as a paid profession is a bit overwrought because, as things continue to shake themselves out, there will be rewards in the form of pay for those who do the job well. Others, such as myself, are content enough to do what we do for the love of craft.

As a side note, Wieseltier's nostalgia for his avante-garde youth is disgusting. There never has been, nor ever will be, a "decent poverty". The very thought is vile.

The Trinity And Revelation

I shall state my thesis up front - The Trinity is a short-hand for the Christian understanding of how the God we encounter has chosen to reveal who this God is.

It's really that simple.

Now comes the hard part.

Part of the problem with any attempt to unpack trinitarian thought is the western Christian attempt to make of it something rational. It is not. There is nothing rational about the claim that God is three persons in one, one substance revealed in three always-present distinct persons, wholly separate yet never separated. Unraveling the knot of Trinitarian thought usually leaves only a few alternatives, most of them unattractive to a contemporary Christian. Falling back on the Nicaean-Constantinopolitan formula, usually referred to with reference to the Greek affirmation of Son and Father being "of one substance" (homoousios), with the procession of the Spirit added as an afterthought (at least in the west, where the procession of the Spirit became a bone of contention culminating in an official split with the Eastern churches in the eleventh century).

In defense of the original language of Nicaea, those present at that first, Imperially-decreed Church Council, had little else to use but the tools of neo-Platonism with which to work. In an attempt to clarify their understanding of the newly enthroned Imperial God's interaction with the world and people who were now officially Christian, they had no recourse but to use the technical vocabulary of substance and accident to express their insistence that, in the life and ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, humanity encountered not just one among many possible Holy Men, a wonder-worker of both wisdom and sagacity, but something more, something, indeed, final and complete. In this executed Galilean miracle worker, once a rebel against an Empire who now demanded all citizens become believers in his message, the bishops gathered at Constantine's insistence made as clear as they could that Jesus was the Christ because, in him, humanity came to see and hear God, completely, unblemished, without any question.

All "orthodox" theology, at least as that term is generally understood, is nothing more than an attempt to distinguish itself from those theologies that make claims that do not seem to embrace fully and completely the reality of the Divine-Human encounter in Jesus of Nazareth. As early as St. Paul, we see the beginnings of the attempt to claim that in Jesus, we Christians have encountered the fully-realized exposure of who God is. Who God is can best be seen by understanding what this God does in Jesus Christ.

By the time of Nicaea, over three centuries of controversy, argument, morphing of belief, and exposure to a vast array of settings and contexts, had rendered discussions of Jesus and God, of who Jesus was and who his "Father" is incomprehensible to the original bearers of the message known originally only as "The Way". The big controversy between those who declared (according to detractors; the writings and teachings of Arius are lost to us, known only through the sarcastic recollections of his detractors) "there was a time when He was not" and those who insisted that the Divine-Human encounter made such a statement not only erroneous, but dangerously so, led the young Emperor to decide that a clearing of the muddle was necessary. The irony, at least from an historic perspective, is that the Arians, with their high vision of Divinity which rendered any talk of a fully-divine Jesus of Nazareth intellectually incomprehensible, were by far the large majority of Churchmen. Constantine's Christian mother was an Arian, as were many of his advisers. Yet, once the council was called, Arius' rivals managed to out-maneuver him; with the blessings of Imperial power, the claim that Jesus was somehow not-quite-God was not just declared wrong, but dangerous.

In the 1700 years since that time, the formula adopted at Nicaea, and affirmed over a series of councils in the century following that culminated at Constantinople, became less a touchstone upon which the Church could build a dialogue about who this God is we claim to encounter in Jesus of Nazareth, and more a relic of a dead age. Ensuing centuries saw the attempt to make sense of this declaration of God's threeness and oneness, and for the most part they lose themselves in far too much technical discussion, losing sight that, at its heart, the declaration that, as St. Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians, God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, lies at the very heart of Trinitarian thought. When we affirm the reality of the Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - we are affirming that the God we Christians declare has claimed us in a unique way through Jesus Christ has chosen to reveal not something of the "whatness of Divinity" so much as something of the Divine mind and plan.

Protestant thought originally followed the scholastics in getting lost in all sorts of technical discussions concerning substance and accident, procession and interpenetration. By the beginning of the 19th century, however, there was a general recognition, at least by some, that far too much of this talk had become mere noise, a banging gone and clanging symbol. Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre disposed of the Trinity easily enough, adding it as an appendix, a mere afterthought. As late as the mid-20th century, another Reformed theologian, Emil Brunner, could declare in his own dogmatic musings, that the Trinity is not only not Biblical, but the affirmation of the Trinity was just not all that important. It is certainly not essential to salvation (which is really beside the point).

Karl Barth, on the other hand, returned Trinitarian thought to pride of place, putting it at the very beginning of his Church Dogmatics. Yet, over a century of neglect and ridicule had rendered even Barth's heroic attempt to revive the centrality of trinitarian language and thought somewhat off-balance. He tried to speak of the "persons" as "modes of Divine revelation", which could lead the casual reader (if he had any) to think that Barth was falling back on a time-worn error.

This is nit-picking. Because of his prominence, Barth's reversal of Schleiermacher's sidelining of the Trinity opened the door to a revival of sorts of Trinitarian thought in western Protestantism*. While they have varied in success and clarity, the return of the claim that we have to do with something unique in the God Jesus called "Father", and whom we declare has claimed us through the power of the Spirit at the very least offers the possibility of returning talk about God, about revelation, even about Jesus and the life in and of the Holy Spirit a little more coherent, if not always acceptable to a world where such talk no longer has much traction.

Which returns us full circle, I believe, to my thesis. The Trinity has always been nothing more (and nothing less) than a short-hand way of describing the Divine-Human encounter we Christian claim as our unique inheritance. From it flow all the discussion we will subsequently have - on who God is, on who Jesus is, on what it means to be human in Christian terms, on the Divine plan for humanity. No real grasp of my own approach to Christian confession comes without understanding this: I am a Trinitarian by choice, because in the declaration of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we declare the full story of God and creation in the simplest possible terms. Just as working through Scripture is always the starting point for real Christian thought, so, too, is the Trinity.

*I qualify this statement with "west" because the eastern churches have never lost their Trinitarian focus. Indeed, they are so relentlessly Trinitarian, they very often verge on a kind of tri-theism which is far preferable to the watered-down, muddled unitarianism and even Divine utilitarianism of the western churches.

Saturday . . . Well, Music

Sometimes, music evokes a moment in a life. Most people recollect the song that was playing the first time they kissed someone, the first time they made love, or the soundtrack to other life-moments. Sometimes, though, a performer evokes a mood. I cannot listen to the Allman Brothers Band, for example, without thinking of road trips. Their long jams, played very loud, are the perfect accompaniment for those long stretches of driving with the window down, turning them somehow from mundane to something not just fun, but perhaps sublime.

Joni Mitchell brings to mind, for me, high spring. I have no idea why. I hear any of her songs, and for some reason I find myself in the May of life. As we are now in the midst of the harshest of winter's attempts to make us forget the possibility of spring, I have found myself thinking more and more of those May days when the sun is bright and warm and sticks around later and later; those May nights when the breeze takes the edge off the heat without leaving a chill.

In 1976, she released Hejira, finishing a turn to jazz fusion. The most important performing addition on the album was the tragically wonderful Jaco Pastorius, bassist for Weather Report. Mitchell included not just Pastorius but also jazz guitarist Pat Metheny in a tour that showcased not just their talents as musicians, but their ability to subsume their own incredible abilities toward the end of making music for others. She had already worked with Tom Scott; now, with Pastorius and Metheny, she showed she was not messing around.

For me, there isn't a cut on this album that misses the mark. It is hardly "hip and cool", as the writer of the overview at allmusic.com claims. Even at her upbeat best, or her more contemplative down-tempo, thoughtful recordings, Mitchell isn't "cool" in any conventional sense, because she is so deeply, personally engaged with the songs. Here she is, performing the song "Amelia", with Metheny, Pastorius, Metheny's long-time keyboard collaborator Lyle Mays.

The Death Of An Institution

I follow many narrative threads on the internet upon which I rarely comment. The liberal murmuring about the on-going public embarrassment that is The Washington Post is something that needs a comment, I think, if for no reason other than it still sits on my link-list.

The meaningless "liberal media" nonsense of the right is easy enough to disprove; all one need do is point, say, to Eric Alterman's book-length analysis about the reality of media bias to show up that particular urban legend for the nonsense that it is. More than that, however, with the rise of editor Fred Hiatt, the Post has taken a deliberate turn, not so much away from a liberal slant to a more conservative one, as much as it has quite openly courted a certain group who, at one time, certainly held the reins of power and could be considered the shapers of conventional wisdom in the nation's capital.

Anymore, however, those men and women - David Broder, George Will, Kathleen Parker, Michael Gerson - are more and more exposed as either irrelevant, intellectually dishonest and bankrupt, or morally and politically confused. With the addition of Marc Thiessen, and a seemingly deliberate anti-science stance vis-a-vis climate change, the paper whose fame was sealed when two of its reporters hounded a sitting President and his advisers until their entire house collapsed under the weight of public exposure of wrong-doing, is now, as one internet writer called it yesterday, "fish-wrapper".

While an argument could be made that the editorial stance of the paper is distinct from its reporting (one hears this all the time in relation to, say, the Clinton-era Wall Street Journal, whose editorial pages were filled with conspiratorial drivel, but whose news pages were actually quite well-written with a careful attention to factual detail), but just a glance at the on-line front-page today shows how that distinction, which has always seemed to me to be largely artificial, cannot possibly be taken seriously.

I will not harp on the "conservative turn" of the editorial page or op-ed page. I will not carry on about what journalism "should be" (a habit of far too many non-journalists that exposes their ignorance more than any bad habits of journalists). I just note all this to say that I do and will keep the Post on my link list. Nostalgia? Perhaps. Hope that it may yet change not so much to a liberal stance as an intellectually honest and coherent one?

No, I don't hold out hope for that any time soon.

Reading II (UPDATE)

I find it inconveniently necessary at this point to do something I find dreadfully dull - say a few words about "method". In Langdon Gilkey's Reaping the Whirlwind, he stops the flow of discussion on the topic at hand to offer an over-long chapter on "method". I kept thinking to myself as I read it, "You know, I could figure this stuff out on my own, but now I have to read all about it." Except, that's not very fair. Gilkey was offering an honest assessment of his own position, giving the reader a chance to understand his own position, and how it had changed since his earlier writings.

So, as I was thinking of how to move forward, I realized that I hadn't really set out, except in some vague general ways, any "method". Instead, I just kind of started writing this. So, in the interest of transparency and intellectual honesty, I guess I should say a thing or two, not so much about method as such, but just generally stake out my own position.

As one could gather reading the first "Reading" post, the Bible is central to my own understanding of the Christian faith. Nothing shocking or surprising there, I suppose (well, maybe to some people). Yet, beyond some vague discussion that the Bible is the starting point, I failed to move forward and say how I read it. Recognizing the diversity of literary styles, the vast time spans covered by a consideration of discrete authorship and specific audiences, it would seem that any attempt at a coherent "reading" of the Bible is, as many scholars have indeed concluded, pretty much a non-starter. There was, for a long time, a vigorous "Biblical Theology" movement (it still exists; WTS's recently retired academic Dean, Bruce Birch, wrote one a couple decades ago). Yet, as Biblical scholarship has continued to move on, the old "New Testament/Old Testament Theology" writing has not only ground to a halt (mostly), it looks kind of quaint. Gerhard von Rad's work, while important, has been superseded. Rudolf Bultmann's Theology of the New Testament, while an important historical document, really doesn't satisfy much anymore.

Recognizing the splintering of any attempt to paste a coherent narrative on the whole of the canon, however, leaves the question still begged - how do you read the Bible, then? I think it is important to say that any attempt to do a cohesive reading of the Bible runs up against the simple fact of diversity of authorship, diversity of literary styles, and the sheer weight of two thousand years of commentaries. For example, I do not subscribe to the typical Christian belief that all sorts of Old Testament passages are actually predictive of, or refer in some way to the Christ event. Part of honoring the reality of the Bible is reading, say, Isaiah, chapters 40-55, as what it is - the celebration of the release of those held in exile in Babylon after the Babylonian Empire was destroyed by the Persians (the Emperor Cyrus is actually referred to with the Hebrew word "meshach" - the same word applied to David, "anointed by God", roughly transliterated as "Messiah"). Too often read during Advent as referring to the birth of Jesus and all that entails theologically, I think we miss the deeper meaning of these texts if we set aside the reality that these poems are songs of joy from a people who have been dreaming, and upon awakening discover their dream is coming true. Shifting the focus of these texts to a Christian context - "they're all about Jesus!" - strips them of meaning, and power.

As always, there is a "but" here. One can, I think, make a general comment about how to read the Bible without impinging on the textual integrity of various passages in and of themselves. I think it isn't a stretch to say that, even those Biblical passages referred to by one scholar as "texts of terror" are part and parcel of the on-going project of people wrestling with their own understanding that they have encountered something Other, an Other that has claimed them in some way. This Other is not some vague "idea" of "Divinity"; it isn't (as I read far too often by people who think they're being oh-so-radical but are really kind of stupid) "the sky fairy". This Other, this very specific, concrete experienced Other has been given the title "God", and a name was offered by this God. The specificity of this name, the specificity of the events in question and how they relate to these people's understanding of who this God is (as opposed, as always, to the very real claims made upon these people by other gods), should, if one is paying attention when one is reading, make clear that, from the stories of the creation of the Universe in the first two chapters of Genesis through the concluding "Amen" when St. John of Patmos declares his vision of the final consummation of this same God's plan for creation at a close that this God can be known. Fleshing out "this God can be known" is going to be the content of the rest of these related posts.

UPDATE: As serendipity would have it, I was pointed to this post, which covers, in a general way, issues that are central to the question of Scriptural centrality in our understanding of the faith. Just go and read it, if you would.

Galileo II

Galileo became famous not only because he invented a telescope, or was the first human being to see the four large moons of Jupiter, or all sorts of other things. He became famous because he managed to force a trial before ecclesiastical big-wigs that ended up with him spending the rest of his life locked in his house, retracting everything he claimed, and (according to one legend) muttering as he walked out after the final verdict was read, "Still, they move".

What's interesting about the whole Galileo episode, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out in The Copernican Revolution, was the theory of optics under review - Galileo's that is - was not only hardly established, it was indeed quite dubious. That it resulted in findings at variance with accepted cosmology was not the only issue; it seemed to violate common sense. Galileo had no answer to the counter-question that the "stars" he saw moving about Jupiter might not just be a trick. They only had his word on the matter, and an optical theory that wasn't even fully fleshed out.

Now, it is clear from the vantage point of several centuries, the whole thing makes the church look bad. The thing is, it could very well have turned out otherwise. What the optical theory Galileo used had going for it was the possibility of being improved upon through the use of tools of various kinds. All the Church elders had was Aristotle and Ptolemy.

I bring up this sad chapter of the history of the science/religion divide because we are experiencing it now. Rather than science/religion, though, it is a conflict between science and industry, science and politicians, and science and blabbermouths. All of the global-warming-deniers seem to rely on the same argument, which always boils down to, "Well, it isn't very warm here, so it's all crap." Which, in a way, was all the Church court had against Galileo; "We don't feel the earth move, and if it did move we'd all go flying out in to space. Besides that, you say you saw those stars move, but we didn't, and besides that, we have no way of proving it's anything more than a trick."

In the long-run, the climate-change deniers are going to look venal, ignorant, and power-mad. The major difference between then and now is the fate of millions of people didn't hang in the balance on the question of whether or not there were moons orbiting Jupiter. While there is little on the table right now that will address the issue as aggressively as it needs, at the very least an acknowledgment the problem is real would be nice.

BS Express

There are a series of short blurbs at Talking Points Memo on recent GOP attempts to make the President look bad on everything from health care to how the Feds handled the Christmas plane bomber. What stands out more than anything is the utter disregard for fact, for consistency, or for propriety.

This is why I don't really worry all that much about the November elections. While the Democratic Party is a sad failure, they aren't wedded to insanity and lies and hypocrisy the way the Republicans are. The simple facts defeat the Republican smear campaign every day. At the very least, if they took a principled stance on an issue rooted in facts, they might be easier to fear. As it is, well, they're a rectum right now spewing out offal at an alarming rate. It's actually kind of funny, because the only politicians the American people are more unhappy with than the Democrats in Congress are . . . Republicans in Congress.

One final thing - I so hope the Republicans get Newt Gingrich front and center this fall because their demise will be even bigger.

I will even start taking bets. Any takers?

Reading

I hold the Bible to be authoritative for the rather banal reason that it is the single best source for an understanding of our faith. "Authority" in my understanding rests on nothing more than, "What else do we have as a starting point?" We can certainly quibble over non-canonical texts, texts declared heretical by the early church, early post-Apostolic writings that almost made the canon. Some of them are certainly fun to read. At the same time, the Church was deliberate about the structure of the canon, and it seems to me the writings of both testaments (the Protestant rejection of Greek parts of the Old Testament is interesting, to be sure) do a fine job as a starting point.

And a starting point is what the Bible is.

I was asked a long time ago how I read the Bible. I said, without any sense of sarcasm, "One word at a time." How else do we read? How else should we read? I have cited, at various time, my conditional acceptance of the Rortyan view of language - as a tool and nothing more; marks on a page (or screen) or sounds - but I want to make the conditions more explicit here. Words have meaning not just because I make them meaningful. Others have found them meaningful as well. How have they been meaningful? Indeed, what is "meaning"?

This is the kind of circular argument and questioning that gets us all bogged down in interesting tangents. Something is "meaningful", words have "meaning" because we respond to them. Should someone attempt to call my name in Urdu, say, or Togalog, I'm not going to respond because those sounds, meaningful to some, would not be so to me. The Bible is meaningful in the same way - it gets us to respond to its words.

I'm not sure how else to put the background to all this.

Anyway, the Church has said over the millennia that the Bible is the source of our faith. It is to be read, to be studied, allowing its words to inform our lives, to challenge our lives, and (one hopes) to change our lives. And we do this by reading. One word at a time.

There is no magic formula for this. There is nothing in the Bible itself, no holy secret sauce that is going to grab this or that person and make him or her suddenly grasp what it is the Bible is offering. We approach the Bible always with the understanding that it is also approaching us. It is a collection of writings from all sorts of places and times, the authors of which are often unknown to us, the original intent of which is also often opaque. Speculating on authorship or original intent might be helpful to some; we can grasp some of the original intent of, say, the Pauline corpus, or the Gospels, without too much difficulty. I say "some" because I am skeptical of ever getting to the point where we read them as their original audience would read them (or hear them, should they be read to an audience).

Like reading any text that no longer serves its original audience, we should always approach "meaning" with the proviso that, with time like a river, layers of meaning have been added to the words, layers we very often can't see. We need to respect all those layers of meaning - even those we aren't aware of - by at least acknowledging their existence. The Bible has been read around much of the world, over the course of two thousand years, sometimes in ways and languages that still surprise us (an ancient Chinese text dating from sometime in the 3rd or 4th century was uncovered not very long ago, suggesting Christian missionaries, or perhaps just caravan members, were moving in to China far earlier than is usually thought). When we approach the Bible, we aren't a "self" in the current understanding of that word. Rather we are just a small part of the whole host of readers, past and present.

Unpacking a Biblical text has more requirements, however, than surrendering the illusion of our autonomy. Part of recognizing the distance in time and space that exists between the text and us means accepting the original language, and understanding that our reading in our contemporary idiom is as much an issue of interpretation as our reading of it. There is no escaping, at our distant remove from the original settings of the writings themselves, the question of interpretation. With this in mind, we should always read consciously, which is why my original answer, "One word at a time," was meant in all seriousness. Each word has weight, if we open ourselves to the possibility. The sum of the linguistic parts is certainly greater than those parts, themselves, but if we disregard those parts in search of some whole, it becomes detached from it.

The Bible is the first source of our understanding of what it means to be a believer. It is the deep root and trunk of our faith. In it we encounter kings and queens, slaves and whores, abandoned children and murderous siblings. We see how God has worked through all of them to bring about God's desired end of communion with us, the creatures God declared to be "very good" at the end of Creation.

In the Bible, we encounter the One whom we declare is our Savior, our Judge, the embodiment of the Divine Word that Created us and sustains us.

How we unpack what these events might mean, well, that's the subject of much of the rest of my planned posts. For now, it is enough to state up front this is the position taken herein.

Deep Background

The postmodernist is in every way a child of the romantics, one who stand alone in nature, defying demands upon the self and searching for that which will satisfy. The difference is that the postmodern self no longer harbors hopes of discovering truth or secure principles. Instead, driven by the ideals of therapy and consumption, it seeks, by whatever means will work, to provide satisfactions for the unencumbered self; it strives to reduce all individual moral actions to matters of choice for which there are no authoritative guidelines or binding principles. In the culture of therapy and interpretation, there is nothing to direct the self except its preferences. There is no goal for the actions of the self save the fulfillment of its desires.

Peter Lundin
The Culture of Interpretation:Christian Faith and the Postmodern World, p. 75

When the first volume of Douglas John Hall's Christian Theology in a North American Context, entitled Thinking the Faith was released, I had many, many faculty at Wesley Theological Seminary insist it would be a landmark. I bought it, and was, to say the least, underwhelmed. It has several things to recommend it, not the least of which is he states the problem of much of contemporary American theology quite succinctly; seeing academic theology blowing in the winds of fads and fashions, most particularly liberation theology, he desires to set forth a statement that is true to our own zeitgeist, while respecting countervailing theologies.

For all that, however, I have numerous problems with his work. First and foremost, he is Canadian. While he strives earnestly to link America and Canada under the rubric "North America", it falls kind of flat. Also, generally speaking, there just seems no methodological center. He insists he has one - the old Lutheran theology of the cross - but it doesn't really inform his musings and thoughts. He outlines it perfunctorily and then just leaves it there.

On the other hand, one thing he does quite well is insist that, before we get to the theological meat, we need an appetizer of a descriptive outline of our "context" (I wearied of reading that word . . .). I believe he failed quite masterfully at this - his main source if a long-dead Canadian psychotherapist - but he at least offered the attempt.

In that vein, I believe it important to state upfront and quite clearly, my own position as to where I believe the Church currently sits. What is the world, as it is currently understood, to which the Church claims to offer a word of grace, of hope, of love?

I offer the epigram above with more than a touch of irony. I wonder about the epithet "postmodern", to be honest. How can we be "postmodern", since we really aren't sure what "modern" is, or perhaps was? It is a lazy way of suggesting that the modernist project has run its course, to be sure; yet as a general way of describing the current state of philosophy, art, and culture in general, I think it is far too broad and ill-defined. Furthermore, while I think the general description Lundin offers - a rootless, monadic self, etching meaning on the walls of a meaningless universe always with the proviso that it is nothing more than a passing fancy - is correct (and would further add that even the heartiest philosophy is nothing more than that; it is our hubris which makes us believe we have reached a stopping point we can call "true"), I think it is banal.

I also do not think it captures the essence of our current culture. There are those who subscribe to this way of living in the world; I do not believe most people would be so bold as to put it this way. The possible exception, of course, are fundamentalists who think this kind of nihilism is pervasive, indicative of the secular mindset, and destructive of our common religious and moral heritage.

I think the world in which the Church currently lives faces far less a threat of cultural nihilism than it does the twin threat of exuberance on the part of some members who seem to believe Christian faith is necessary to our society, on the one hand, and the vocal opposition of at least a committed minority who see any expression of religious belief as a threat to our society. These extremes, to be sure, have limited appeal (as extremes always do), but they at least have the virtue of offering a vast middle ground wherein we Christians can stake out a position that challenges both.

To the fundamentalist, I would offer the insistence that to be the Church we are to live as those called out, set apart. To the secularist, I would simply ask how a world without the religious imagination in general, and specific, concrete religious expressions, would look. The fundamentalist disregard for the "Otherness" of the Christian community ignores the historic idea that we Christians are to be the salt of the earth; as Jesus himself asks, what happens when that salt loses its savor? It is to be cast aside and trodden underfoot! The idea that our society, our culture, can only be our society as long as it adheres to a particular, Christian, ethic and way of believing ignores the impossibility inherent in really being Christian that, at its heart, is part of the dilemma we all face. Since this fundamentalist insistence usually accompanies an insistence that Christian faith be reduced to a kind of middling morality - an obsession with sexual propriety, personal behavior to the almost total disregard of the social implications of love for neighbor, and a peculiar regard for the human fetus that borders on compulsion - it is easy enough to mock. Yet, we need to do more than mock. We need to be clear as to why this position does not address the Scriptural, historical approach that sees belief as a Christian as a witness to something other than prevailing norms.

To the secularist, the answer is completely different. While refusing to disregard the reality that Christians have been the authors of much horror, we would offer the unrepentant, "So?" The first attempt at a rational state, the French Republic after the Revolution, ended up at the logical conclusion of the Terror. I find that hardly exemplary, even from a humanist perspective. Any ideology is inherently totalitarian, which is why it must always be tempered with the acceptance of criticism. I fail to see where non-religious ideologues have offered anything remotely human, or anything that in the long run does not end with a mass grave.

While the caricature of the post-modernist as the romantic monad does have some validity, my own perspective is that uprooted self cannot exist. We are part and parcel of an historic stream, in to which we are born and from which we depart. We are rooted as human beings existing as part of that history - not History as some grand narrative, or overarching force driving us collectively forward or backward, but very concretely as the events of our times as reactions to past events, and creators of new reactions in the future - which keep us grounded. It is true that far too many Americans, most eloquently Emerson and Whitman, believed history was a chain binding us to a kind of ontological and ontic slavery from which we Americans must needs escape in order to be American. The impossibility of this, just on a practical level, is evident all around us. The constant striving to exist as a people outside the whims and fancies of time and history leads to unrealism in our approach to being a nation among nations, an unhealthy belief in our uniqueness, politically, socially, culturally.

Quite apart from any metaphysical argument, the simple reality is we as human beings exist as historic creatures. The attempt to actually live a life uprooted from history is, in the end, to choose not to live at all. It isn't even existence.

More than any other single thing, I believe this idea - our peculiar American notion that we do, or can, or should, exist outside our collective national and world history - is the most pervasive ideological stumbling block we face. From it we stream all the rest - our racism, our destruction of the native populations, our imperial wars in Central America and the Caribbean, the Pacific rim and southeast and southwest Asia, our refusal to allow others to be our guides as to how best to coexist with other nations, the pervasive insistence that ours is not only the greatest nation ever, but that all other nations desire to emulate our way of life. Both fundamentalism and secular ideologies hold these ideas; they are both rooted in our American claim to exist, in some way, outside of history.

Thus, our postmodern condition is only partly correct as a diagnosis, precisely because it, too, shares this delusion.

Music For Your Monday

In honor of American's First City of Music winning the Super Bowl, well, you know . . .

Jelly Roll Morton's "Finger Breaker":



Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five's, "Heebie Jeebies":



Mac Rebinack, known as Dr. John, plays old-time, New Orleans-style jazz and boogie-woogie, a purist to the core. His CD Going Back To New Orleans is a masterful celebration of the sound of a city. Here he is from 1986, doing "Mac's Blues":



Last and best, here are The Neville Brothers. If you listen close, you can hear zydeco, jazz, blues, funk, and even some serious rocking. These guys are among the greatest American bands of all time. "Fire On The Bayou":



If the Colts had won, what could I have done? John Mellencamp and David Lee Roth . . .

As Good A Place As Any

So, I was thinking if I'm going to do this whole "positive statement" thing, it might be a good idea to start. A good place to start is to anticipate a couple questions that usually come to the forefront when addressing the whole questions, "What do you believe? Why do you believe it?"

According to Albert Outler, John Wesley added to the traditional Anglican triad of Scripture, tradition, and reason. With experience comes a way of reflecting upon how these other three impact our lives as individuals, and individuals who are answerable to one another in and for the faith. I like this so-called "Wesleyan Quadrilateral" precisely because, potentially, it encompasses the Bible, Church history, theology, and our own growth in the faith. In fact, I have thought for a while a great, 40-week course (like the Disciple Bible Study and Christian Believers series the United Methodist General Board of Discipleship has developed, both of which are successful) using the Quadrilateral as a model: ten weeks on the Bible; ten weeks on church history; ten weeks on theological thought; and ten weeks on the spiritual disciplines. Then, if one is interested, turn to the Disciple series of Bible studies, the Christian Believer class, and perhaps develop other curricula as well, centered on the history of the Church and the spiritual life.

In any event, at its heart, those are what are often referred to as the "norms" of my reflections. Scripture. Tradition. Reason. Experience. If you want to push me, "scripture" refers to the canonical texts of the Protestant Bible; tradition is the whole broad, deep, and wide history of the faith and its expressions; reason is the multitude of ways people throughout time have wrestled with this whole thing they call "faith", and expressed it, sometimes well, sometime poorly; experience encompasses not just mundane "experience", the everyday living of life, but also and more specifically prayer and worship, the place of the sacraments in one's life, and how this is pursued, with or without a certain discipline, but always answerable to our brothers and sisters in the faith.

I have spent the better part of 20 years of my life reading, studying, discussing, thinking, arguing, and trying to understand theology. I have done so not as a disinterested observer, as if it were an interesting intellectual exercise, but rather as a deeply personal desire to understand others' attempts to come to terms with their faith. Even if I don't always agree with them; even if I find their conclusions questionable, their methods narrow, and their sources in need of some serious reconsidering, I still benefit from their struggle.

A friend said that his own theological inquiry was rooted in the question, "What do the Cappadocians have to say to Bedford-Stuyvesant?" My initial response to that was, "Probably not much." I think I would change that ever so slightly and say that I am searching for my own perspective, and while I can see where the Cappadocians - or St. Thomas, or William Ockham, or Zwingli, or Tillich - might come in handy, it would only be as deep background. They spoke to their time and place, and spoke well, to be sure. For that reason alone they have an authority to be respected. Yet, their dialect and idiom, their world and time are all strange to us. We can only use them so much before their words cease to have meaning.

Even a more recent Christian thinker - Reinhold Niebuhr, say, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer - might offer insights that seem, at first blush, to be right on the mark. After carefully considering them, however, we might come to see a word or phrase, or even whole works, as being answers to questions we do not understand. Part of respecting one's sources is respecting the distance in time and space, the very real milieu in which this or that person wrote and taught, lived and died.

Even a passing familiarity with the history of the Church* should humble anyone who thinks that his or her voice has anything significant, let alone original, to the conversation we continue to have on belief. Very often, all we have is a reshuffling of the deck, a change in emphasis at most. I offer no belief either in my own originality or even persuasiveness. All I offer is what I have, and since I am offering it, not to you, but to God, well, I know it won't be good enough on any merits. Because I understand grace to be both prodigious and prodigal, however, I don't worry.

*When you see "Church" capitalized, I am referring to all the various expressions of communal faith we call "churches" - Orthodox and Roman, Evangelical and Reformed, Pentecostal and Anabaptist. Some might disagree and think writing in this way is too abstract; I think it's a lot easier than writing all that out time and again.

Stripping Down

I have spent the better part of the past couple years standing aside from much "churchy" controversy. I have been highly critical of "theologies" that I find either purposely obtuse or obscurantist. I have concentrated a bit too much, I think, on left politics and my own music fetish, and not enough on any kind of positive statement of what I believe, how that belief guides my life.

I was reading Karl Barth's lecture, "Gospel and Law" this morning and I realized, like Barth did at some point, that "Nein!" just isn't enough. In a far more colloquial, vernacular way, I hear, "OK, wiseass, what do you believe?" I want to stammer, "But . . . but . . . can't you figure it out from what I've written so far?" If the answer is "No", then, well, I can't blame you. Positive statements have been few and far between here.

So, over the ensuing days and weeks, I shall be pursuing, in a rather unsystematic way, what it is I believe, why I believe it, and some of the roots of that belief. Just one caveat. As this is a blog, not a theology seminar, if it seems incomplete or haphazard in some way, that is more the nature of the medium than anything else. If a point seems off, or ill-conceived, or not thought through, make a comment and I'll address it best I can.

I would outline the way it's gonna go, but since I only have the desire at the moment to address these issues, and no plan in place, I guess we all will be surprised with what comes out, won't we?