Let Me Be Laid Aside For Thee

The peculiar genius of John Wesley lay in two, related, ideas. First and foremost, he taught that we are not Christians in isolation; only in a community of shared accountability can the Christian life be lived with both faith and integrity. Pursuant to that stated desire was the insistence on occasional meetings that Wesley referred to as Holy Conferencing. While the specifics may have changed and even become institutionalized, the principle is still alive. From the local church conference each year through the quadrennial General Conference, currently under way in Tampa, FL, we people called Methodists gather to work together to discern the Spirit's call in our collective lives. It's clunky, filled with politics either bad or horrible, and occasionally devoted to trivia, but it's a system worth preserving.

Or so I thought.

Heading in to this year's General Conference, the emphasis was obviously going to be on the Call To Action report from the Connectional Table. While there is little disagreement over the need for flexibility and change in the denomination to meet changing circumstances, the hope, as always, was CtA would be a starting point for larger discussions regarding change within the denomination. In the meantime, other matters of no less import arose that, under different circumstances, should have prompted at least as much discussion.

Last year, the Judicial Council, the denomination's highest court, upheld the right of local clergy under appointment to withhold membership in a local congregation to any individual. I've read the decision several times and I'm still scratching my head at how they arrived at it, given our history, our Discipline, and our laws.

There are eight states where same-sex marriage/civil unions are legal. In none of these eight states can a United Methodist pastor under appointment officiate without the threat of losing his or her orders. Even if the couple in question are members of the pastor's congregation. Apparently, some within the denomination, who favor local clergy discretion when it comes to keeping gays out, don't trust it enough to allow pastors to perform perfectly legal ceremonies at their discretion.

Instead of dealing with these matters, CtA and an alternative called Plan "B" died in a bitter, divisive committee fight on Saturday night. One part of the "reform", however, passed today. No longer will clergy in full connection be guaranteed an appointment. In essence, the United Methodist Church has as much as admitted that accountability - which begins from the moment an individual approaches a member of the clergy to discuss a possible call to ordained ministry - has failed. Furthermore, without any word whether this same kind of reckoning will be applied to members of the hierarchy - the District Superintendents and Bishops - I'm curious how that might work. If it is indeed the will of the General Conference that local pastors be held personally responsible for various performance metrics, why not extend that? Who, then, would be the first District Superintendent to go to his or her Bishop with a list of underperforming clergy? Wouldn't such be a blatant admission of managerial, administrative failure? As a practical matter, the whole issue is fraught; absent the whole idea of accountability, it is little more than window dressing, although as a declaration that we as a Church body no longer adhere to one of our core principles, it is still pretty disheartening.

Later on this morning's session, some changes were made to the wording of the preamble to the Book of Resolutions, declaring God's grace is available for all. Since the church, as a practical matter, ignores this, I have to wonder why such a vote is a success. As a friend on Facebook noted, that it only passed with 57% of the vote, that's a stunning statement that nearly half those sent to our denomination's highest legislating body do not accept the Wesleyan understanding of prevenient grace.

I'm struggling at the moment as to what all this portends. Part of me hopes the worst is over, although one should never underestimate the stupid at things like this. My prayers for the United Methodist Church at the moment are simple enough: That we survive our best efforts to act like the crew of the Titanic first building an iceberg, then steering straight for it.

Our Thin-Skinned Tough Guys

A few things that are out and about make me wonder why anyone, anywhere, thinks we might yet rescue ourselves from our descent in to Fourth World status as a nation. The same folks who advertise themselves as the tough-minded men's men ready to make the hard choices and stand up to the enemies that surround us have difficulty not flinching when the guy sitting next to them reaches his arm up to smooth his hair.

Some folks are up in arms because the President noted that, when he was first a candidate for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney said he might well not send American forces in to Pakistan if it was discovered that was where Osama bin Laden was hiding. The President didn't call Romney a pussy or a wuss. He didn't say Romney hated America because he wasn't wearing enough flag pins on his lapel. He didn't even question Romney's provenance because his father was the native of another country. Nope, he merely noted something his opponent said, and made the point, none too gingerly, that folks should take candidates for public office at their word and words.

Then there are those poor put-upon Christians suffering because Dan Savage is telling people that some Christians are violent assholes. Because what Dan Savage did is, as everyone knows, exactly the same thing all those fags claim people do to them only worse.

There are large swaths of the American Right that are populated by such fragile creatures, its a wonder they leave their homes.

The Story So Far: Notes Toward A Medium Opus V

Last week, I saw a BBC report on the latest from the Cassini Spacecraft orbiting Saturn. I was struck almost immediately with a fit of nostalgia for that long ago summer afternoon when I first discovered human's initial close encounter with the planet. It was the awakening of a kind of curiosity inside me about the world, how we understand it, and how we may well not understand it. Over the years, I've ranged far and wide in my courses of study, prompted by concerns of the moment or long-standing interests, but at the heart of all of it is a simple desire to figure out a couple basic questions: How is it we human beings understand the world around us? Is it possible these things are connected in some way, ways perhaps that we overlook in our pursuit of different kinds of understanding? Is this understanding linked in any way that might yet prove fruitful for making our life together as over six billion people on this planet not just less hazardous, but easier for all?

So far, I've mentioned a few names, teachers I've had in class and instructors who have offered their works to the ages in print, that provide some of the clues I needed, either to understand the questions I didn't even know I had, or the information to move forward in answering the questions I was starting to understand. We'll encounter other names and ideas soon enough, as before in no particular chronological order, but always drawn together, for me, in the hopes of making sense of so disparate a phenomenon as human understanding.

I decided to start this because, after reading the stories of our latest discoveries around Saturn, I realized that something had come full circle for me. While much of what I've already written and will follow has been settled for me for quite a while, I thought a bit of self-reflection was in order, if for no other reason than to make explicit those links that, until now, had only been implicit. What better time than now? What better way than to tell the silly story of me reading a magazine one summer afternoon when I was a kid, and the surprising impact it had upon a large part of my life? I've learned a few things on the way, offered some clues as to the direction I'm heading, as well as some red herrings just to keep things interesting. Making clear why it is I have such a wide array of interests has always been something I thought I might do at some point; with the prompting I received that point has come, and moving forward I'm looking forward to making sense of it all.

At its most basic, my curiosity revolves around the related points of human understanding and human sociability. Making our world a more livable place for its inhabitants certainly involves understanding our world, yet how do we understand it? How is it possible to work together toward particular goals of common justice and humanity when it is quite possible we have no idea what we're talking about when we insist we understand all sorts of things about the world? Does that leave us without any resources for improving our common life, hoping perhaps to keep things from sucking so much (the position of Richard Rorty)?

There are keys, not the least of them being a lesson I learned, first from my father, then from life: A little humility can go a long way. Beginning with the premise that no matter how much we think we understand, (a) it might all be wrong; or (b) even if what we have so far isn't wrong, there is still ao much left to discover and learn and understand, should keep us from getting too caught up in our own wonderfulness at all the things we think we know. It is far better to expect to be wrong, if for no other reason than the happy surprise that comes with being proved right.

There is no special virtue in having a lot of stuff crammed in one's brain. I don't consider it a point of pride that my interests are broad, my reading at least somewhat more deep than the average person, and my ability to articulate my thoughts a goal toward which I work. On the contrary. Compared, say, to those who work with their hands, those who teach, or even those who work each day to improve our world just a bit through their work with and for others, being impressed with the ability to read books is hardly something one should bandy about as marking some special virtue. First of all, there are always those who read and understand those books better; second, and far more basic - who cares? The information and understanding is meaningless unless it serves a larger goal and purpose. Since this includes never resting or settling easy with the answers and solutions we have so far, closing one book inevitably leads to opening the next. And the next. And the next. No matter how much we might think we have it figured out, a point is going to come when we say, with St. Thomas when he was asked why he had given up writing his Summa Theologica: "It's all straw."

We should never become so impressed with our own accomplishments that we forget no one else is. We should never forget that most basic, important lesson that has come from a lifetime of study and work and living: None of it, not a bit of it, is about me. For that reason alone, I have little for which to be proud. I do, however, have some explaining to do.

Learning To Read: Notes Toward A Medium Opus IV

Systematic Theology may have been the pump that rendered my head far too large to carry around. A course on interpreting Scripture taken the very next semester was the antidote I didn't even know I needed.

Under the bland, rather presumptuous title, "Texts and Exegetical Methods", the class offered itself as an introduction to a variety of interpretive strategies, including using various extra-Biblical resources for exegesis. The professor who taught that class was a tall, thin, good looking, charming man named David Hopkins. I'd taken David's Hebrew Bible survey class and was more than impressed with his intelligence, wit, and teaching style. Looking forward to his class, I had no idea that David, being witty and intelligent, was singularly unimpressed by those qualities in his students unless they were amply demonstrated with output. It took very little time for me to realize his class was not going to be easy. For which I will be forever thankful.

The goal of the class is easy enough to understand: Take all that stuff you learn in the survey classes about different literary styles and historical criticism and the various other types of critical reading styles, and demonstrate them using specific texts. Along the way, I learned, for example, that the story in Genesis is not about Cain and Abel. Abel is, for all intents and purposes, a prop. The story is about Cain and God (which should be a hint to folks paying attention; if at least one of the characters in a Biblical story isn't God, you might not quite understand what's going on). I also learned that there is a passage at the end of the story of Lot fleeing Sodom that would be difficult to preach. David actually challenged us to preach a sermon on it: it's the passage where, hiding in the caves, Lot's daughters get him drunk and after he passes out, rape him. The children conceived this way become the leaders of the tribes that were the traditional enemies of the old Kingdom of Israel.

At its heart, the class was about reading. Rather than treat any particular text as "Biblical", as if that was enough information for getting on with, the reader needs to understand what kind of text it is. Reading different texts requires different interpretive tools and exegetical mindsets. Part of the exegetical task is understanding not only what questions to ask, but even more basic, what the text is NOT saying. Reading the Bible, like reading anything else, leaves us with nothing more than . . . text. It's right there in the course title, a big clue to some of us not quite smart enough to get it for the first couple weeks. In order to understand what questions to ask, we have to understand there are certain things, as text, the Bible does not and cannot say to us. It does not give us "facts". It does not give us "truth". It does not give us historical information or details on the lives of famous people. As a particular kind of text - a religious holy book that contains the stories and claims about who God is - these are the matters that should always be in the front of our minds when reading the Bible. Searching through the Bible for clues about, say, when Abraham might have made his journey to Palestine, say, or whether or not Job actually lived (I heard of a preacher who not only insisted that Job was a real person, a contemporary of Abraham, but that it says so right there in the Bible; I've searched in vain for that information, and anyway, I'm still waiting on the whole "Abraham" as a real, historical person) is a bit like rooting through property deeds at a county records office and asking if the people who lived in these houses were alcoholics, say, or if they were good parents. It is possible, in other words, to ask and answer the wrong questions. When we do that, we may not be committing some mortal sin, but we certainly aren't interpreting the Bible.

During the class, David would drop a few names that intrigued me. One was Gerhard Ebelling, not very well known except among some few rarefied circles in English-speaking theology studies. Another, Roland Barthes, seems far more the preserve of literary critics. Both offer not so much method as something far more basic - an awareness that reading is a playful, interactive activity. Even something as simple as a novel can offer a reader rich rewards who comes to the text seeking something, not just passing one's eyes over a page. Reading is a playful activity, in which human imagination is as engaged as the critical faculties. Not elaborating too much on the role these particular individuals played in his own approach to reading Scripture, David did seem to see, and offered to his students, the marvelous notion that reading the Bible could be surprising and fun. As long as one kept in mind that all we were doing was reading.

Few classes I took at seminary were more liberating, not least because the class wasn't geared toward providing a bunch of information. It was, rather, about inculcating a habit, a practice that engaged one's eyes and ears, one's imagination and critical faculties. At its heart, David's class taught us that we did not know how to read the Bible; here were some intriguing possibilities for moving forward. There was one vital piece of information, however, that hit like a ton of bricks. In an early paper I turned in, David came down pretty hard on me for ignoring certain historical trends in interpretation. I went to him - David was tough but fair, always accessible, and even at his most adamant always cheerful and friendly; needless to say, he remains one of the great teachers for whom I'm always thankful - and asked him about this and he told me, in no uncertain terms, that it is always necessary to be aware of the history of interpretation when making exegetical choices. Even if that history is disagreeable, we cannot ignore it for the sake of convenience.

It was a nice surprise, at the end of the course, to discover that, twenty-two years after my mother first taught me to make sense of the marks on paper, I was finally learning to read. It involves being attentive to the text on the page. It involves understanding that text may well exist within a history of its own. It may also exist within a history of interpretation, which may itself be involved in larger circles of understanding. Even if we can never know everything about that whole history of overlapping discourses, we should at least be aware they exist. These thoughts were swirling about me, and, in a bit over three years, I would put them to good use in a totally different context. If you want to understand why I do the stuff I do the way I do, you need to understand it has a history, and is part of larger historical discourses. A realization I owe to David Hopkins.

The Finite Cannot Contain The Infinite: Notes Toward A Medium Opus IV

There is, perhaps, no single individual from the first half of the last century who transcends our typical categories of celebrity than Albert Einstein. Due in no small part to his own natural humility and accessibility - in later life, people in and around Princeton, NJ, would find him sitting on the porch of his small house, chatting with whoever might be passing by; parents would bring their children by for help with mathematics, into which he would dive enthusiastically, if not always successfully - Einstein seemed to radiate the exact opposite image of the buttoned-up intellectual, far afield from the concerns of the rest of us, even as his own area of study was understood, even as he admitted, by fewer than two dozen people.

Not long after my second semester in college began (that would have been January, 1984), I was in the bookstore in town. Ramming around the shelves, not particularly sure what I was looking for, or even why I was there, I stumbled, quite by accident, across a thick volume on the discount shelves. Entitled Einstein on Peace, edited by Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden, it was for sale for seventy-five cents. That, I thought, was a deal at any price.

I had no idea what I'd just done; reading through that book over the next couple weeks, sitting quietly in my dark dorm room, the only light the lamp on my desk - January and February in western New York, no matter the time of day or amount of sunshine, are very dark indeed - I entered a strange world that offered, I thought intuitively, a key to the puzzle I'd set myself to putting together a year and a half before. There was a link here between the questions proposed by that long-ago National Geographic article and my own, current, course of study and far more personal interest in politics. Nathan and Norden were the literary executors of Einstein's estate; after his death they gathered letters, essays, interviews, pamphlets, petitions he'd either written or signed, set them chronologically, and offered editorial comments, dates and other ways of setting context, to present the changing nature of Einstein's views on peace between and among nation-states. Perhaps best known, late in life, as both the instigator (on many levels) of the atomic bomb and the most visible advocate for the tiny but eloquent World Federalist movement (the head of the American branch of the World Federalists was a young California attorney; he won a seat in Congress in 1948 in no small part for his advocacy of reducing national sovereignty in matters of atomic armaments, and thirty-six years later was still in Washington as California's senior Senator, Alan Cranston). While I gleaned a lot of historical information from the work that has come in handy over the years, perhaps the biggest thing I got from the book was, alas, more questions: What was national sovereignty? Why were relations among states liable to break down? Was the logic Einstein used in his frequent arguments in favor of some kind of supranational mechanism for control of nuclear arms flawed in some way?

In 1905, Albert Einstein was an unhappily married, frustrated physics student, making ends meet as a clerk in a patent office in Switzerland. In his spare time he read the physics journals, and thought it would be interesting to offer his own views on some matters. He had been working on several different problems for a while and, finally, in three successive issues of the leading academic journal of physics, he published, first, a statistical analysis of Brownian Motion, what was thought to be the random motion of particles suspended in either liquid or gas. Einstein showed that, in fact, the movement was not random; there was a statistical regularity, once one examined the evidence closely. The answer Einstein offered was there had to be a force at work between the particles that operated at a level that was superceded once one moved from the very small setting of these particles. The second article considered the well-known but puzzling photoelectric effect. It was common knowledge among physicists that when materials are struck by light, the emitted electrons at particular frequencies. Einstein suggested that it was possible light, while being a waveform phenomenon might also be particulate, a bundle of specific energy that also had mass called a photon. It was when these photons hit the metal that, acting according to the laws of physics, the metal reacted and electrons were emitted, releasing not only energy but also mass in order to remain in steady-state.

The last concerned the problem posed by his solution to the photoelectric effect. How was it possible that light acted this way? How was it possible that materials, which were mass, reacted this way to light, which was energy? Einstein simplified many intersecting and contradictory possible solutions using Ockham's Razor - the simplest solution was probably right - and provided an equation, after much mathematical deduction, between mass and energy. In the process, by making the speed of light a constant as part of an equation concerning the most basic physical structures of the Universe, he went on to insist that the speed of light was a constant within all frames of reference. In other words, no matter velocity or acceleration, the speed of light - 186,000 miles per second - was always the same. It would be eleven years before the implications of this, what became known as the Special Theory of Relativity, were worked out. For the rest of his life, no matter what else Einstein would do, he was known for E=mc2, a formula that, while well known, was little understood.

Of the many virtues of Einstein's work here and later in life, perhaps the most important was his willingness to reduce the matters in question to their simplest, which would in turn create conditions for solutions that were not only logically foreseeable but also aesthetically pleasing. This insistence on the relative simplicity both of the problem and solution changed the way physics was understood, perhaps the greatest of Kuhn's paradigm shifts in the history of science. This quest for simplicity and elegance, rendering logic as necessary to understanding Einstein's thought as calculus, was also operative in his thoughts on the question of peace in world affairs. In particular after the Second World War, there was no small amount of discussion about control over both atomic armaments and the materials used in their construction and the engineering involved in their construction. Not long after the war, Harry Truman had industrialist and politically connected financier Bernard Baruch lead a small committee that would consider these problems and offer a plan to the UN Security Council. What became known as the Baruch Plan offered the gloss of international controls over the entire structure, from procuring nuclear materials to the creation and deployment of nuclear weapons in the hands of the UN Security Council; in practice, however, the entire plan was created to fail precisely because the other major powers, in particular the Soviet Union, would face massive violations of their sovereignty. A sociopath like Stalin, who didn't even trust those closest to him, was not about to allow huge numbers of American military personnel under the guise of the United Nations to wander freely through Soviet territory. The Security Council rejected the Baruch Plan before the ink was dry. 

Einstein understood the basic flaw in the Baruch plan slightly differently than did other observers. In 1905, he had started a revolution in science by making the one constant in the Universe the speed of light. Everything else, including time, was now a variable that could be altered as long as the key to the equation between mass and energy was intact. The equations, and the phenomena they represented, only made sense this way. After 1945, as Einstein saw it, the fundamental problem facing the world was the possibility of mass destruction through the use of atomic weapons in the hands of several nations with no realistic curb on their sovereign power. If that was the problem, the solution for Einstein was simple enough: alter the constants in current understanding in order to arrive at a simple, elegant solution. As Einstein understood it, his argument for some kind of supranational agency was to be limited to control over the material, technical expertise, construction, and deployment of nuclear weapons. Other matters in international affairs could be left to nation-states (although Einstein did note that, should such a mechanism be set in place, nations might well find it convenient to use as a way of settling disputes without the fallback of war that had become, even without nuclear weapons, devastating). Part of the key for Einstein was the creation and maintenance of an international force with both the authority and ability to intercede any time and place a nation might try to gain what would be the illegal understanding for building the Bomb. What, Einstein thought, could be more simple and clear given the massive destructive capability of such weapons?

Simplicity. Clarity. Elegance. These qualities were rooted in the belief that the Universe was intelligible in terms that, once reduced to their most basic were, in principle, available to anyone. Whether in physics or politics, the key was to rid ourselves of the baggage of superfluous nonsense, cut to the heart of the most basic problematic, and the questions and answers both would practically fall in to our laps.

It was difficult for a naive, young, idealistic, and extremely ignorant young man like me to articulate the fundamental flaw in all this. It was nearly impossible for a man who had all these qualities as well as a further one: I had no idea, at the time I was reading Einstein, how to articulate what I intuitively understood was the flaw. I just knew there was something amiss here. If a gun had been placed at my head, however, I wouldn't have been able to say what, precisely, that might be. Finding that flaw, being able to articulate it, became important to me, not least because right here, in this single volume in which a physicist ruminates on political matters, a big piece of the puzzle I had dumped on the table became clear. That puzzle - how was my innate interest in political matters related in any way to my growing interest in figuring out what the heck was up with things like science - had seemed impossible to put together.  No two realms seemed more different; Einstein, it seemed, offered an easy way of connecting them. Except, it was clear to me even though I couldn't have said why, I had discovered that the easy way was, in all likelihood wrong.

Learning To Run Too Early: Notes Toward A Medium Opus III

The worst thing that happened to me as a student as Wesley Theological Seminary was the "A" I received on my paper in my class in Systematic Theology. From the vantage point of two decades' remove, I can honestly say that few things could have been worse for me. Reading the paper, with its far too complimentary professorial annotation of "scholarly" on the front, I know I would create a far different paper now than I did then. I cannot judge the merit of the work too well, but the young man who produced it is all too clear to me now. A combination of personal and other circumstances had combined that long-ago autumn and early winter to make me perhaps one of the most insufferable, egotistical individuals around. Instead of an "A", I think Josiah would have been far better calling me in to his office, closing the door behind me, and saying, "What the hell's wrong with you?"

The assignment was simple enough. We were to write a "creed" then a defense of each article. The paper was supposed to be between 20 to 25 pages, pretty typical for that stage of our education. I began mine with several pages on the first two words in my own creedal statement, "I believe". I find it amusing that I would still do that, even after all these years; I would also say at least similar things regarding the equivocal status of "I" as well as the disputed status of "believe". What embarrasses me more than anything, however, as I read what I wrote so many years ago is the fact that the 26 year old man, so full of himself, so proud of all the things he knew, thinking he'd found his One True Love in life, had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Instead of an "A", I needed a boot, quite firm and hard, perhaps repeated, in my ass. I do hope the statute of limitations on apologies hasn't run out, because I am formally apologizing now to any and all who knew me at the time for being such an insufferable dick.

When I say I didn't understand what I was saying when I wrote about the questionableness of the notion of an "I" who has some independent status that granted it authority any should heed, I rested quite a bit of what I wrote on this thinker I'd encountered for the first time over the previous summer. A professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia, Richard Rorty had published three short volumes that same year, two collections of essays covering the previous decade as well as a volume integrating his anti-epistemological views and pragmatist ethics, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity*. I distinctly remember not quite understanding what Rorty was trying to say, except in one particular essay that, in many ways, summarizes much of his philosophical project, at least regarding his views on human knowledge and understanding. Entitled "Texts and Lumps", the essay offers the curious and surprising view that the long argument between the natural sciences and humanities over which provides a better understanding of our world was, by and large, an argument over nothing at all. In defense of his position, Rorty drags along none other than Thomas Kuhn. Arguing that Kuhn's view of science renders scientific investigation no different from textual criticism, Rorty sees the two things as not just similar, but the same. Scientists have a lump of stuff on their lab table; they use a variety of tools to figure out what this lump is, how it works, all sorts of things about it. Literary critics and historians and other practitioners of the Geisteswissenchaften have a text in front of them. They have little idea what it might say; therefore they use a variety of tools to understand its subject, its vocabulary, to make sense of this odd thing in front of them. I took this intriguing idea and ran with it, not least because I had doubts going forward whether there was any merit to the theological project. 

Part of Rorty's point was scientists and those in the humanities too often make the category mistake that their unique, methodological approaches are the sole way not only of arriving at something others can call "Truth", but are generalizable beyond the specific cases in which they are employed. Instead, Rorty celebrates the diversity of approaches, while regarding them as qualitatively indistinct, as a way of instilling an ounce of humility in the various intellectual pursuits we human beings enjoy. In an odd way, this seemed to defend doing theology even if, as I was feeling at the time, it had little application even within the Church, let alone outside it. It would be a while before I realized that, right then and there at that moment in time, I shared something with one of the premiere American philosophers of the late 20th century because Richard Rorty had no idea what he talking about. Specifically, his reading of Kuhn is wrong on so many levels, it is almost unrecognizable. Sad to say, my appropriation of Rorty's thesis in "Texts and Lumps" was actually a more fair reading of him than was his reading of Kuhn.

It was three years before I read Kuhn and realized that Rorty was carrying ten pounds of crap in a two pound bag when he wrote about Kuhn. When I returned to Rorty a couple years later, I realized what Rorty's error was. Again, it was similar to my own that fall of 1991 when my head was so big I'm surprised I could make it through doorways: Rorty had misinterpreted Kuhn because he didn't understand him. It would be some time before I realized that summer and fall, and even in to the next spring semester, I was (to borrow a metaphor) fighting above my weight. It was one thing to discover all these wonderful new authors and books and dive in to what I had started to call, in the high spring of 1991, this very long conversation within the Church (another metaphor I still use). It was quite another to think I could join the conversation having learned a few words of this very rich vocabulary called "theology". Furthermore, in my ridiculous, pompous brain, that I could "get" some basic stuff in theology and doctrine meant I could "get" some not-so-basic stuff in related fields like philosophy. Surrounded by people who were encouraging (I am grateful for that), I started to believe some of what they were telling me, not the least being that I was a pretty intelligent guy. It wouldn't be too long before I was brought back down to earth with the rest of humanity (thank God), and realized that, smart or not, I needed to learn to crawl, then stand, then walk, before I thought I could run with some pretty big dogs. That fall of 1991, I thought I was ready for a marathon. In fact, I was barely on my feet, holding on to whatever might be available to keep me from landing on my ass. It is cold comfort to me that I had some good company in not knowing what the hell I was talking about in no less than Richard Rorty.


*In 2007, I read all the Rorty works I own, from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature through Philosophy and Social Hope and wrote three posts that are far better summations of his thought than anything I wrote in those dim, dark days after first encountering him. If you care, check them out.

Be Very Afraid

Nearing the end of Christian Believer, we are entering the realm of the last things. The lesson plan for Christian Hope, like much of the rest of the course, was uneven. It seemed to lack focus. Yesterday afternoon, I talked with Lisa about my concerns. Lucking out, the video presentation, from Dr. Will Coleman, was excellent. My prior decision to concentrate solely on the series of questions at the end of the Study Guide for the week paid off.

 Since it's eschatology, a major topic is death. One of those questions we considered was our possible experience of those who had faced their own deaths in and with faith, and how that might have impacted us. One member of the class is a cancer survivor, and offered eloquent testimony on how her faith allowed her to deal thoughtfully and honestly with the very real possibility that she might well die.

It has long been my fervent belief that far too many Christians are scared of dying. The eventuality of our own demise becomes a matter of increasing concern as we get older. We begin to lose loved ones. Then, older friends or people who had been important in our lives are gone. Then, reaching middle age, Our peers might die, leaving us trembling not only in grief at our loss, but in the fear that death is no respecter of age or persons. All the same, we who confess faith in a crucified and risen savior should regard that only universal human experience (beyond birth, of course) without any fear or trembling. The grave should have no hold over us as we rejoice that this life, for all its joys and sorrows, is only part of our experience in and with the God who has defeated death.

Not fearing dying, however, does not mean we should not fear death. I want to make a clear distinction here. As I'm using them here (and as I understand them), dying is a physical process through which our bodies move until, at some point, they cease to function. Death, on the other hand, is the emotional experience shared by those who have lost a loved one. For many people, the most grievous experience of death is the loss of a parent. Some, alas, lose siblings. I know a surprising number of people who have lost children. Then there are dear friends, some who die in sad circumstances, others because of illness (either physical or some other kind). As I said last night, while we Christians shouldn't be afraid of dying, we should both fear and respect death, because death is a monster.

If we aren't careful, death can devour people, whole families even. It can destroy marriages and relationships. It can enter homes and never leave, making ever-present not the life that was loved so dearly, but the lifeless corpse that mocks our love, knows nothing of our pain and sorrow. Death can even take over whole communities, even nations. Consider the Tulsa race riot of the 1920's here in the United States, the madness in Kampuchea during the 1970's, or Bosnia in the 1990's. This was death stalking lands, casting its pall as far and wide as possible. When the Bible says that the wage of sin is death, I firmly believe this is the referent. Not our physical ending, which is both inevitable and little more than our time coming to an end. Death, as I understand it and have tried to describe it here, is this creature that robs our lives of light and joy. It is a creature that demands sacrifice, always hungry, always looking to feed on our desire for it to hear our plea to return to us those we have loved and lost. Its promises are false, its joy in our sorrow and despair creating a never-ending cycle that, if we aren't careful, will swallow us up, leaving us physically alive yet dead in all the other ways that count.

We Christians are not to fear dying; death, however, we should understand as something else entirely. It is a beast that, if we aren't careful, will carry us off before our time. We should never dismiss the pain and grief and loss dying brings; these are the cracked doors and windows through which death enters our lives. The only effective defense is being with those who are experiencing loss. Not saying anything, not doing anything other than reminding them that, in their pain, they are neither forgotten nor alone. This is the fortress that death cannot destroy. This is power of love that is stronger than death. Rooted in the love we have from God in the risen Christ, we can face death together, without fear perhaps, but certainly always respecting its neverending demand to make its way in to our lives and destroy them.

A Pair Of Dimes: Notes Toward A Medium Opus II

If you wanted a BA in political science at Alfred University in the 1980's, the road led through Robert Heinemann's course on political philosophy. Introducing an abundance of names - Machiavelli, of course, and Hegel and Marx, but also Thorstein Veblen and Michel Montaigne, as well as Bob's favorite, Edmund Burke - the course assignment was an amazing research project. Students were to choose a thinker, not necessarily one studied in the class, and write a three-part paper. Each part was to be ten pages. The first part was to be the historical background and setting. Bob wasn't too pleased with my decision to treat Mein Kampf as a serious work of political thought; my argument, which he accepted, was that it formed the basis for the most important political movement of the first half of the 20th century, and deserved to be taken seriously. Thus I found myself, near the mid-point of the semester, on the verge of a nervous breakdown* and having nearly forgotten the reason why I had to spend a month studying the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the mystical nationalism of Heinrich von Treitschke. Bob had insisted we needed to understand political thought in its historical setting because of some guy named Kuhn who wrote about a pair of dimes. At least, that's what I heard.

 Of the many mistaken applications of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Bob's has a special place in my heart. Who could blame him for thinking that Kuhn's description of the way scientific thinking changes has applications far beyond what Kuhn wrote? The "pair of dimes" that I kept hearing about, actually paradigms, are one of those marvelous philosophical terms that practically beg readers to find in them something special and important. Like Immanuel Kant's Thing-in-Itself, Hegel's World Spirit, and Montaigne's ideas on Law, Kuhn never quite gets around to defining what a paradigm might be; he points to the edges and limits of it, discussing everything from Gestalt psychology to the changing nature of language without ever landing on his target. This lack of definitional clarity, however, doesn't render the word itself meaningless. It does, alas, allow others to borrow the word and use it in ways for which it is, to say the least, ill-suited.

 Six years later, I took a course on Religion and Science at Wesley Theological Seminary. Taught by the late Roy Morrison, the class included in its reading list Gerald Holton's The Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought. Holton, like Kuhn a physicist as well as historian of science, offers a variation on Kuhn's theses regarding "normal science", "revolutionary science", and "paradigms". The book's main virtues, for me, were two-fold. There is a long chapter describing the Michelson-Morley experiments, the only I'd read up to that time, that include the not-unimportant observation that, rather than failing to find the so-called luminiferous ether, they were in fact, merely equivocal on the subject, with some experimental results landing squarely within acceptable parameters. The other virtue the book offered was name-dropping T. S. Kuhn. 

Working at the seminary bookstore, I had retained, even with the many changes of managers and supervisors, the ability to order books on my own without prior approval. Thus, I ordered Kuhn's major work as well as an earlier one, The Copernican Revolution. With all the other things I had to read, I set the books on my shelf, promising myself I would get to them. Someday. Someday was two years later.

 Lisa was ordained in 1994, and we moved to Jarratt, VA. As that first summer after our move neared its end, I had just finished my borrowed copy of Dreadnought and decided, more on a whim than anything, to pick up Kuhn's book on Copernicus. In hindsight, reading his work in chronological order helped me understand Kuhn's thought on the growth and change in scientific thought far more clearly than had I just read the latter book. Several things in Kuhn's book leaped off the page at me. First, the traditional view that astronomy was some undeveloped science was, historically speaking, nonsense. Indeed, Copernicus's "breakthrough" was little more than what the German's call a gedankenexperiment, fully embedded within a far more traditional, highly mathematical treatment of the motion of the planets. Later on in the work, discussing Galileo, Kuhn notes that Galileo's insistence that he was seeing satellites around the planets, as well as more stars, had little to nothing to support it. The theory of optics his opponents had at their disposal was time-tested, and on it the very telescope Galileo was using had been constructed. That Galileo was to proved correct is more a historical accident, in Kuhn's view, than any claim that Galileo had in fact discovered some "truth" about the way the Universe worked.

Reading this latter passage, I remembered something I'd read years before. I went to the book shelves and found my valued copy of National Geographic. I flipped to the page in the story discussing the Shepherd Moons and the way they seemed to violate our understanding of celestial mechanics. A piece - not the first, but an important one - in the puzzle I first thought I could assemble when I'd first read that magazine article landed squarely in my lap. There was something here, something about science, what it does, how it works, what we thought it was, how we thought about what science does. It took me a while to see the exact shape of the piece. After finishing both of Kuhn's books, I picked up another one of those science books I'd ordered for myself, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Right there, in the opening, dueling essays of Kuhn and someone named Karl Popper, the piece became clear. Language. There was something about language and meaning that was important, that linked all these weird, disparate things like the history of science and political philosophy and the Shepherd Moons and their odd dance around Saturn.  Pieces were starting to fall in to place, it seemed, but connecting more disparate parts would mean studying this stuff about science and language on its own terms.  So, I thought, why not go back to school and study philosophy of science?

*Some friends staged a bit of an intervention after a publicly embarrassing display I made in the Dining Hall one Friday afternoon. The deep immersion in to the depths of the darkness of the life and work of Adolf Hitler certainly took its toll on my fragile psyche; what twenty-year-old can really grasp the cruelty and evil, from the personal to the social level, in Germany during those twelve years? I am embarrassed by my behavior, and hereby, 26 years later, apologize.

Whoom Bop A Mau-Mau

I am so looking forward to hearing more like this.

Well, it won’t bother them; we know that. It certainly won’t bother Barack Obama. Matthew Owens doesn’t look like his son, and there are no votes to be had. For Obama, if it doesn’t help his re-election campaign, it doesn’t exist. Whether he likes it or not, however, I think incidents like this one, which have multiplied all across America, will hurt Obama in the fall. Millions of Americans voted for Obama in part because they thought his election would put racial division to rest, or at least contribute to that goal. But the opposite has happened. Obama has been an extraordinarily divisive president; neither he nor others in his administration, like Eric Holder, have ever hesitated to foment race hatred when they thought it would serve the Democrats’ political interests. As it turned out, Obama’s election represented a setback for race relations in the United States, an outcome that virtually no one foresaw.

Because, you know, equivalence.

“This here is an incident stemming from an ongoing dispute between neighbors,” Levy said. “We spend a lot of time defusing neighborhood disputes, neighbors who don’t get along. ... That’s what this is. And unfortunately, this can lead to violence.”
Tucker expressed a similar sentiment. “That’s an important fact that needs to get out to the public. This was not some random event that came out of nowhere.”
Neighbors have said a large group of black people confronted Owens at about 8:30 p.m. near his home on Delmar Drive. Levy said many people appear to have been present, but he said most merely watched and did not participate in the violence.
He said Owens had a dispute with neighborhood children who were playing basketball on the street. They told their parents, who were having a large get-together with friends.
“Really, the party just kind of moved down there,” Levy said.
It was not the first time violence erupted between Rawls and Owens. Levy said the 2 traded racist epithets in July 2009 and that Rawls assaulted Owens. While a witness initially told police that Rawls had used a baseball bat, Levy said the suspect denied that, insisting he had only used his hands. The witness later said he could not be sure a bat was used, Levy said.

Remember that song from childhood, "One of these things is not like the other?"

The stupid and hate will combine to create a frothy mixture that might well drown us all. Let the idiotic comments begin!

Connections: Notes For A Medium Opus I

Does anyone remember this program?



The show offered the marvelous thought that the lines we draw in our understanding of how the world is and works are not at all straight; indeed, the curves and intersections create a tapestry that cannot be unwound. Tracing the lines can be daunting, yet also marvelously surprising in how they lead us so far afield from whence we began.

What follows in this and subsequent posts in this series are some thoughts and reflections on the way I have worked to make connections among disparate parts of human experience, trying to understand how they weave together the marvel of human existence. While certainly worthy of study for its own sake, my own goal has always been understanding toward a particular goal: a life together worth living, in which all human beings are free, equal, treated with dignity and respect, and work together for keeping our whole world a better, decent, safe place for us to live.

This journey of mine began on a summer afternoon in 1982. Like many such journeys, it began not because I had decided to set off on it; it started, rather, because I was bored. Ramming around my empty house, I found a year-old National Geographic magazine. I probably picked it up because the cover photo of Saturn was interesting. I flipped to the story and the very first page offered a piece of information that troubled me. On a two-page photo of Saturn taken from Voyager 1 as it sped up and away from the planet after flying past it and its many moons, came the fact that Saturn was a billion kilometers from Earth.

I had no idea what that meant.

Not that I didn't know what a kilometer was. Nor was I ignorant of the figure "one billion". Put together this way, however, offered something that, in my young life, I had never experienced: I couldn't understand what those words, put together the way they were, referenced. What was "one billion kilometers"? The small city of Binghamton was forty miles from Waverly; that seemed a very long way away. My oldest sister and her husband lived in Rochester, which might as well be near Saturn somewhere. My mother's family, and my cousins on that side of the family, were in Dayton, OH, which seemed as odd and foreign a thing to consider as saying they lived in Bangladesh.

How could I understand "one billion kilometers" in any way that rendered it intelligible? I would spend quite a bit of free time over ensuing days and weeks reading and re-reading that cover story on Voyager 1's Saturn fly-by. From the discovery of the so-called Shepherd Moons - I've never forgotten one mission specialist's comment that their behavior violated the laws of celestial mechanics but, and I quote, "they seem to know what they're doing" - to the first photo of the Saturnian moon Mimas, with its mammoth crater that caused one person, seeing it for the first time, to shout, "That's no moon, that's a space station!".

After absorbing as much of the article as I could, I was left with something that, in hindsight, I can name easily enough: wonder. From realizing I couldn't really understand what was meant by the expression "one billion kilometers" to the idea that there were these weird little moons out there that had no idea what we human beings thought they should be doing to the sheer variety and beauty of the whole, it was an aesthetic experience unlike anything I'd ever had. More than anything, I lacked any vocabulary to describe the event, my feelings, or what I was thinking. Looking back, I find it even more troubling that I wasn't even aware I didn't have such a vocabulary, or that there was such a thing as multiple vocabularies that serve a variety of purposes. All I knew for sure was several seeds were planted across several summer days just before my senior year in high school that continue to push me forward.

In retrospect, I can see more clearly what was happening. At its most basic, I was trying to find a connection between this story of Voyager's encounter with Saturn and my own life and what was, I was coming to understand, my paltry grasp of the enormity of the Universe in which we live. Sure, there was something awesome about the whole thing, the pictures were beautiful and strange, and the information was changing the way we understood things worked. But what does it mean? More specifically, how can I take this information and make it relevant to my life?

These questions have kept me from ever resting comfortably with my understanding of the world. While I hope I've learned how to phrase them more accurately, these questions keep me curious and interested in the many things in our universe. They have pushed me to study a variety of matters, from language to science to politics to history to sociology, in order to figure out if they are pieces of a larger puzzle, or just random bits of stuff without any inherent connection to anything else. Along the way I've learned a thing or two, I hope I've gained the words to express what I think, to ask the questions that need asking in the way they need to be asked. Most of all, that basic sense of awe I felt that long-ago summer has not waned. The Universe we human beings inhabit is an enormous, strange, dangerous place, filled with things we cannot imagine, sometimes things that have no idea that we claim to understand them, instead going about their business without a thought to our insistent declaration that we understand the way things work.

The rest of the posts in this series will describe how I made the connections among the many questions that flowed from those first, most basic ones that were birthed in the awe at the beauty and strangeness of some pictures of a place very far away. I've made some of the connections, I would like to think; others remain elusive, which is why I keep going, trying to figure stuff out. I've also come to some conclusions that inform my way of beginning to understand the world, what I might call, for lack of a better word, axioms that I cheerfully understand could be wrong, but are necessary for getting on with.

Two notes on the whole Saturn thing. This post, and the ones that follow, were sparked by a story at the BBC about the Cassini Spacecraft and its orbital mission around Saturn. The story references the discovery of geysers on the moon Enceladus. The few photos from V-1 were blurry, taken from a great distance, and revealed little except that the place seemed incredibly smooth. It was well known that the moon was made up of water ice. Its location in orbit seemed to offer the intriguing possibility that gravitational pressure might keep it geologically active, thus refreshing the surface with water flows from beneath the miles-deep crust of ice. Sure enough, in sillouhette against the light from its parent planet, were enormous water geysers. I read the article, and it reminded me how much of what I continue to do to this day began with that long-ago article in National Geographic.

In the winter of 1991, a lady friend and I were at an antique shop in rural Maryland, somewhere between Baltimore and Washington. We weren't really all that interested in buying, but window shopping at antique shops is great fun. I was perusing a shelf holding some books and old magazines when something caught my attention. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Buried in a stack of other old copies of National Geographic was a copy of that very same issue - Volume 160, Number 1, from July, 1981 - for sale for a dime. I couldn't tell my lady friend why I had to have that particular magazine. There was no way I could make her understand how important this silly thing was to me. I think she understood my excitement; I remember a comment she made about the expression on my face. I held that magazine tight, dropped dime in the kitty, and, through the twists and turns and many moves to disparate places, it is still with me. In fact, it's sitting next to my laptop on my desk, the cover photo staring back at me as I type this. I've come a very long way since I first encountered the story and pictures and the questions it forced upon me; all the same, I am amazed at how beautiful that cover photo is, how strange. I am glad to have this particular magazine at hand to remind me that every story has a beginning, and the my own story started right here.

Would You Want To See Your Pastor In A Speedo?

I've been attending various clergy gatherings for decades. Such events are enjoyable, despite my own reticence in large groups to do more than hang back and people-watch. One thing I've learned over the years is clergy come in every shape, color, gender, size, and attitude. All the same, the stereotype - at least among we people called Methodists - of the older, bearded, white guy who has grown hefty on all the church dinners we serve, is still present. While on the wane, there are still many who fit the picture in our heads of the local pastor as precisely that: older, white, and fat. The variety and diversity of who are clergy are has not quite erased that image.

I got to thinking of that tableau when I read this article from the New York Times.

But somehow, despite our belief that both sexes can serve the church, it seems there’s still something unnerving about a priest who is a woman. It has to do with having a woman’s body.

A parishioner told me that he thought I was a great priest, but that if I became pregnant, it would be too weird for him to see me at the altar. Merely holding hands with my husband, even when I am not in clerical clothes, has elicited the comment “Can you do that? I mean, in public?” Another parishioner told me I was too petite to be a priest. I’m 5-10. I have never been called “petite.” I think he meant “female.”

What about when a priest wears a bikini? What if she complicates the picture by having sizable biceps or well-defined lats? Can “buff” and “holy” go together? “Ripped” and “reverend”? If the “reverend” is a woman?

Demonstrating the kind of discipline and self-care necessary to compete, even at an amateur level, in body building is something to celebrate. Were the clergy in question male, there would be little to no discussion of the appropriateness of him doing so. Would a man have the kind of guilt-laden thoughts Rev. Dr. Richter had as she thought about what she was about to do?

We seem to have little problems picturing our clergy as men doing all the things men do. Including, it seems, putting on weight. Women clergy face so many hurdles, not least the pressure to desexualize themselves (Rev. Dr. Richter's report of a parishioner's comment about how his feelings toward her possibly becoming pregnant is so familiar) as well as strip themselves of culturally-defined womanhood (except, of course, motherhood, housekeeping, and being supportive of her husband's life and career; even with women clergy a commonplace, there is still an assumption among many, both in local congregations and the hierarchy, that she will subsume her own career desires to her husband's), even the thought of discomfort caused by the desire to body-build should be evidence enough that we have a long way to go in our thinking about what it means to be clergy. Enforcing a series of behavioral and physiognomical norms upon clergy rooted in social and cultural reification of maleness is an on-going issue for so many in the church, even generations removed from the first female ordinations. Rev. Dr. Richter deserves all our support and gratitude for demonstrating that a ripped, bikini-clad priest is still a priest.

Ours Should Not Be A Life In Small

It was bittersweet to see the photos of the Space Shuttle, piggybacking on a 747, making its final landing at Dulles International Airport this week. As conflicted as I feel about the whole shuttle program, there is little doubt that this final resting place for this piece of Americana may well be more than a museum for what has passed. It could very well become the graveyard of the America we once knew.

For all its many faults, ours has not been a country that dreamed small. Even individuals and small communities saw themselves as part of a far larger, more grand movement. This continent could be made American; the land could be tilled; roads and canals and railroads would knit together its most disparate, isolated places and spaces, bringing the country together. Victorious in a war against the greatest threat western civilization ever faced, we had both the technical know-how and desire to look up and see, in the vast emptiness of the night sky, possibility, even promise.

Having reached the Moon, our eyes and ears roaming even further, going in to orbit became routine, part of the workaday practice of being America. An extension of our best sense of ourselves, the exploration of space was testimony to our willingness as a people to risk much in order to gain much. From the first, faltering colonies on the banks of the James River, this willingness to place our collective selves in the hands of Divine Providence in search of greater gain - sometimes commercial, to be sure, but also seeking a place to live out a sacred calling that differed from those around them, or just to break ground in hopes of building something one's children and grandchildren could continue to build upon - was best expressed by those earliest astronauts going out in to orbit and beyond in craft that, to our eyes, look flimsy indeed. Like the sailing ships that brought our ancestors to these shores, willingly or not, these early spacecraft are a marvel of will over ability, much as the land they founded would become.

That will has withered, however. Rather that risk, we insist that even the maintenance of the most basic parts of the links that bind us, our roads and bridges and rail lines and airports, are just too expensive to manage. Not only do we no longer look up and imagine a future, we barely look out from our homes anymore. Rather than see what we can achieve together, we elect leaders who reflect a fundamental fear that, our greatest achievements behind us, we cannot even hope to hold on to those things that bind us together.

Our politics, like so much else, has become a life in small. We seem a people no longer capable even of knowing our past, let alone learning from both the best and worst of who we have been. Arguments flare up over even the most basic realities of who we have been. These fights, proxy struggles for our identity, show us that we no longer even know who we are anymore. Struggles over race and religion, labor and ideology, demonstrate a fundamental fear among so many of us that our identity is disappearing. Even as our country grows more culturally diverse, taking in to itself more and more of the larger world, ever redefining "America" in wondrous ways, there are far too many of us who rage against any thought that who we are becoming should differ from who we once were. In the process, so much else is lost, the once proud idea that "America" is always a work in progress offering opportunity and, perhaps, real hope, dreaming big and achieving even bigger no longer even a recognizable husk.

We view one another not as fellow Americans who may well see different means toward a common end as a source for positive struggle together. Instead, those things that separate us have become unbridgeable gaps between those who are and are not true to whatever vision of America we see resulting from common work and life. No longer a helpmeet along the way to greater triumph, far too many Americans insist our public life is little more than an obstacle to achieving what we would be far better attempting on our own. This despite the many lessons from the past of the role the state can play, both for good and ill, in helping us along the way to meeting the challenges that face us.

So, even as our common life dries up and our physical infrastructure becomes increasingly abandoned to those who insist we can no longer afford to be a great nation, perhaps the greatest loss we face is the desiccation of the imagination. For all that it is true much of our current greatness was achieved over the trampled bodies of the poor and our African-American and Native American and Asian American fellows, I have long wondered why it became some kind of axiom that bringing these (and so many others) in to our common life, acknowledging the evil we have done as we invite them along as fellow Americans, is some kind of hindrance to a future where we can still dream big, and work toward a common vision of America that brings all of us along.

Why do we even have voices that insist that it is no longer possible to have or do things together as one people? Why do we not join in laughing at people who claim we can no longer afford those things that were built as a common inheritance? Why do we no longer even think it possible to look out from our cities and towns, our prairies and mountains, and see work we need to do together?

More than anything, these are the thoughts that trouble me at the moment. Led for far too long by interests that see private profit over public welfare as the only real end of our common life, we have forgotten that securing the public welfare first is the only way to ensure private profit. Along with this dream-drought, we have harbored far too many who would lie about our history, tell us we were not who we thought we were in order to insure we do not interfere with their gain at our collective expense. Our politics has become shadow play, meaningless ritual without any sense that it serves a larger purpose even as the voices within it have become more strident.

Am I, perhaps, bewailing something that never was? Is it possible that I romanticize too much over a past that never existed, ignoring the millions of victims for whom the dream of America was little more than a device insuring their destruction? Without ever once denying the point, I would insist that the sight of the space shuttle Discovery, not even landing under its own power, heading on to a future as a museum piece in a nation that insists that museums are a luxury we can no longer afford (never mind roads or schools or networks for the free flow of information) is the only evidence I need to demonstrate that, unless we demand an end to it, the voices that continue to call for an end to our common life will drive away the last of any attempt even to dream of something better for all of us tomorrow.

Food For Thought

Chew on this (thanks to Kait Dugan at Kyrie Eleison):

Even in the form of a servant, which is the form of His presence and action in Jesus Christ, we have to do with God Himself in His true deity. The humility in which He dwells and acts in Jesus Christ is not alien to Him, but proper to Him. His humility is a new mystery for us in whose favour He executes it when He makes use of His freedom for it, when He shows His love even to His enemies and His life even in death, thus revealing them in a way which is quite contrary to all our false ideas about God. But for Him this humility is no new mystery. It is His sovereign grace that He wills to be and is amongst us in humility, our God, God for us. But He shows us this grace, He is amongst us in humility, our God, God for us, as that which He is in Himself, in the most inward depth of His Godhead. He does not become another God. In the condescension in which He gives Himself to us in Jesus Christ He exists and speaks and acts as the One He was from all eternity and will be to all eternity. The truth and actuality of our atonement depends on this being the case. The One who reconciles the world with God is necessarily the one God Himself in His true Godhead. Otherwise the world would not be reconciled with God. Otherwise it is still the world which is not reconciled with God.
- Karl Barth, CD IV.1, 192-193

Much Better Start Than Yesterday

Remember this post? I summed up this way:

[W]ithout an attempt at analyzing music qua music, there is no way to come to terms with the meaning the music has. Relying upon historical accounts, without those accounts taking in to consideration musical detail, also fail in the end to give us as full an understanding as we might otherwise prefer. Moore's work is a good beginning in reframing our discussions of rock music by insisting on the primacy of the songs themselves.

Then, of course, the inevitable happened.

In the first paragraph you quote, after the writer claims that aesthetic questions are primary (or, rather, “the” aesthetic question, whatever that may be) he goes on with nary an address to aesthetic questions.

To which I responded:

Because that's the entirety of the book. The "aesthetic" question is just that: "the primary text" is the song itself, examined as a discrete unit, using the tools of musicological analysis, as a method of unraveling the many matters related to understanding rock.

I will admit the use of "aesthetic" puzzled me when I read it, until I realized it is used here in an analytical, as opposed to descriptive, manner. The questions you and I, and perhaps others, might consider under the heading "aesthetic" Moore actually sets to one side. Which is, all in all, a good thing, I think, as there is far too much baggage about the relative merits of pop versus classical music, among and within various sub-genres of various musical styles. I heartily agree with Moore that there is no way, a priori, to judge the artistic merit of any particular song or musical style. In that sense, more philosophical understanding of "aesthetic", the matter is one of value judgments, for which there is no handy musicological, or any other, tool.

The conversation deteriorated quickly.

At one point, I suggested Feodor's problems were not with me, but rather the author and that he take his questions to the author. At the same time, I thought, "What an inspired idea!" So, I emailed Moore, who is Professor of Popular Music at Surrey University in the UK.

This morning, I opened my email, and found this waiting for me.

Very many apologies for waiting so long before answering - I needed to get time to read your blog. I think you have it absolutely right - for all the book's faults you have described exactly what I was trying to do. I found the ensuing conversation interesting & quite fun too (although your interlocutor never did contact me) - I have soon to think about a third edition & I may bear some of that in mind. I am delighted to read that you found the book enlightening - I have recently published what is, in effect, a follow-up, again with Ashgate, in which I try & pin down some of the interpretive ideas which I don't think I really understood when writing R:PT. I hope most of it is still accessible to the non-specialist. There's some blurb at http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409438021 - let me know if it strikes a chord & I'll try & get a copy to you.

Thanks for taking the trouble,

Yours

Allan

Let's see. . . free book for a review, offered by the author who's a respected academic musicologist covering a field I personally enjoy.

That would be a, "Oh, hell, yes!"

And may I say that Moore is gracious and kind, and no apologies are needed. The only other author who has ever returned an email of mine is Gary Dorrien, who was just as gracious and polite as Moore.

This whole writing thing does have its rewards. So, thank you, Professor Moore, for making my day's start far more pleasant in most every respect. And, that whole vindication thing? Yeah, that was nice.

My Day From Bad To Worse

It's not quite eight a.m. as I start to type this, and my day has not been one anyone would label "banner". Miriam's home from school today; poor thing has a really bad cold. Emergency and one-time expenses are going to make the rest of April pretty tight. It's raining.

The one upside? The cat attacking my wife's right heel while she sat at her desk. I started laughing so hard I got THE LOOK.

Probably not the best morning to read this.

“Now, what I would hope that people would do in the media is — maybe you should do a little research, and start looking at what political ideology they stand for. There’s a very thin line between communism, progressivism, Marxism, socialism — or even, as Mark Levin has said, statism. It’s about nationalizing production, it’s about creating and expanding the welfare state. It’s about this idea of social and economic justice. And you hear that being played out — you know, now with fairness, fair share, economic equality, shared sacrifice, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.”

“And it’s also about the creation of a secular state. And this whole argument that the liberal left is trying to take you down, talking about women’s contraception, is really about a federal government that is reclassifying religious organizations, for them to be able to manipulate them however they wish. So that’s what I wish people would focus on.”

West also challenged his opponents to a debate: “And I would welcome anyone, to have a discussion, and a debate about political ideology. Because when you look at what’s happened in this country right now, you tell me that this government is not nationalizing production: automobile industry, financial sector, health care, cap and trade, and not going through the legislative process — look at what they’re doing through the EPA, as far as the energy sector. Look at what’s happening with the National Labor Relations Board. Who would have ever though we would live in the United States of America, where the federal government would be telling a private-sector organization where they can relocate?”

At first, I wanted to laugh. I mean, come on. This is Class A ignorance, wrapped in shiny stupid paper, delivered to America for free. I really want West to keep winning elections because this kind of thing is just golden.

Then, I saw this short piece from Charlie Pierce, which includes a link to and a quote from a Politico "analysis" of West's words.

The conservative congressman hasn't explicitly said as much, but he's following a path blazed by Michele Bachmann, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. Each of them ignored the historic barriers and reasons why House members haven't typically sought the presidency because they've were prescient enough to recognize that the equation has changed dramatically. What changed? Thanks to Internet and direct mail fundraising and the national platform offered by cable news shows, even a House backbencher can now build a well-financed national following. And Barack Obama's victory, just four years removed from the Illinois state Senate, suggests the boundaries surrounding the question of office-holding experience have been erased.

As I wrote in a comment, I couldn't be that stupid if I wanted to out of fear I'd hurt myself.

So, along with the rain, a sick kid, a delay in the arrival of coffee, I've had to read the kind of political analysis that only makes sense to morons, written by people who get paid a fair chunk of change to be stupid in public.

Despair, thy magazine is Politico.

God's Gift To Our Moral Scolds

President Obama's trip to Colombia was not his most successful foreign venture. Our southern neighbors have been, for years, far less tolerant and indulgent of the assumption of American pre-eminence. The inclusion of Cuba, while certainly long overdue, has caused consternation even among some who might otherwise support the President.

Worst of all, those whose job is to protect the life of the President have been caught in a still-evolving scandal involving Colombian prostitutes.

I have one of those urges to go to DC and smack these people upside the head. Do they honestly believe it is possible for folks in their position to get away with stuff like this? Displaying less common sense than my ten-year-old daughter, they got caught in a prostitution scandal; they got caught in a prostitution scandal in a country that has been, for more than a generation, the flash-point for drug production. Plagued by cross-currents of violence from narco-terrorists, indigenous rebels of varying ideological stripes, and state terrorism, Colombia is a country where the potential for honey traps such as this should be obvious. If it weren't bad enough these agents were off carousing with hookers, they were doing it in a country where the agents had to be aware such behavior would become potential fodder for exploitation by unfriendly groups.

Even more trying to our tired souls than the matters of the safety of the President and senior officials whose protection detail apparently leave thought and sense behind are the lectures that are starting to dribble in from our National Sunday School Teachers.

I realize that some party poopers will not share my delight at the Secret Service becoming a double entendre. But at the very least, this scandal, like the General Services Administration’s spending spree in Las Vegas, should serve to refute claims that the federal workforce is out of touch with ordinary Americans. As it turns out, some federal workers reflect our culture all too well.

Maybe we should stop blaming the feds for being like the rest of us — it’s hardly surprising that bad actors and buffoons find their way into the public sector as well as the private — and think of other lessons to draw from the scandal, such as possible recruitment tools: Work for the government and get a complimentary upgrade to a hot-tub suite? Join the Secret Service and be a playuh at the Pleyclub? Surely the GSA, a sleepy backwater of the government responsible for property, would raise its profile if it changed its name to the Garish Soiree Administration or the Grandiose Shindig Agency.

For crying out loud, a person would think no one in the history of the Universe had ever been caught being naughty. You'd think no country had its infamous individuals who specialized in debauching themselves. Isn't it bad enough we have to listen to moral scold clicking their tongues over the Lohans-Hiltons-Kardashians-Jersey Shore cast-Britneys of the world? Now, we have these antics raised as emblematic of some kind of unique American decadence, in whose footsteps members of the Secret Service are supposedly following?

My problem with this isn't "OMG, HOOKERS!!!!!" The display of a lack of any common sense among those who are supposed to protect the lives of our highest officials is outrageous. Is this lack of common sense some form of unique American culture? I would certainly hope not; I would not like our country known worldwide as the place where people lose all sense of perspective and priority at the drop of a thong.

None of this is to suggest that I approve of the antics of folks known far more for their penchant for going out in public without underwear than any positive achievement. Nor do I think paying prostitutes is the best way to spend one's hard-earned money. I am saying that these matters, which seem to be filling Millbank with the kind of moral superiority one would expect from members of the Anti-Saloon League, are not what trouble me the most.

The lives and safety of our highest officials are in the hands of people who seem to have no sense whatsoever. I admire the willingness to take a job where the most basic duty may well include sacrificing one's life for someone else. With such a job, obviously, comes a high level of stress that can display itself in excessive bouts of revelry when off duty. When accompanying the President in a foreign country, however, wouldn't one think "off-duty" didn't exist? Even more than OMGHOOKERSSEXSTRIPPERS!!!!!!, I am outraged by the idiocy and lack of thought on display here. Except, alas, the reality of OMGHOOKERSSEXSTRIPPERS!!!! is just too enticing for people to ignore, so now we are going to have to put up with all sorts of morality lectures from people like Dana Millbank.

Thanks a lot, Secret Service.

Jesus Is Risen?

Taking a break from writing to check out the mid-day news, I'm wondering now if all the cheering and celebrating nine days ago meant anything to anyone.

Whatever our differences might be, Christians from around the world gathered and in one voice in thousands of language declared that Christ is risen!

I'm struggling, at the moment, to see that it matters to anyone. Anywhere.

We Christians are supposed to believe this is kind of a big deal. We Christians are supposed to live as if it has changed everything. We Christians are supposed to proclaim to the world that all of us are now free from sin and the death it brought in its wake.

We are supposed to live as if it matters.

Nine days later, even a quick glance at the news makes me wonder if anyone has been paying attention.

Does it matter anymore that this guy died, then was raised never to die? Does it matter that the Creator of the Universe loves us all so much that the Son came for us? Is there anything worth saving?

Would anyone go, today, more than a week after the Big Event, and stand at the empty tomb and laugh with the same joy they did that morning when the world changed?

Excuse the pity party; it seems to me we just haven't quite got it through our thick skulls that everything's different now. "Same shit, different day" seems to be the rule, regardless of the claim by Christians, once upon a time, that it just isn't so. For the moment, the mourning that had turned in to dancing has returned, leaving me grieving for us all.

Instead of, "He is risen indeed!", we Christians seem to have responded, "Meh."

Theology And Confession

With thanks, as always, to Ben Myers for letting the world know about the best theological writers out there on the internet, this post at The Divine Wedgie (what an awesome blog name) got me thinking about something.

What if we in the Church were far more concerned about how we confess the faith than how we profess the faith? What if we recalled that the first confession of faith, as recorded in the Bible, consisted of three words yet contained all any Christian needed to say about who God is, who Jesus is, what God in Christ has done for the world, and what it means for us and the world? Jesus is Lord. That's all any Christian really needs to affirm. Each word, individually, is so loaded with meaning the Universe wouldn't be large enough for what they contain. Taken together, in pieces and in total - Jesus is; is Lord; Jesus is Lord - says all that needs to be said.

Obviously, we aren't satisfied with this kind of simplicity. We prefer to put all sorts of stumbling blocks on the road of faith, insisting believers navigate the maze of our own construction in order to pass the test of belief we have set up. It's a ridiculous, haughty exercise of human sinfulness to insist that it is profession that is as important as confession. Confession is the mark of the Christian; profession is the source of far too much human-engineered confusion and strife.

The various mutual denunciations of Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, Anglican, Wesleyan, and Evangelical professions of faith are testimony to the all too human willingness to dismiss large groups as unworthy of God's love and care. Add to that the many and varied and contradictory theological schools, the disputes that range from the denunciation of St. Paul's mission to the Gentiles through the disputes between St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure to the Reformation and its radical off-shoots, to the explosion in theological exploration of the past two to three centuries, we have been far more likely to insist those with whom we disagree are not just wrong, but dangerously so, than we are willing to lend an ear to something new, to be open to the Spirit blowing from a direction of its own choosing.

The modern Christian churches have been, it seems to me, far more concerned with theological conformity than confessional simplicity. Theologians as different as Friedrich Schleiermacher, G. W. F. Hegel, Adolf Harnack, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, Gustavo Gutierrez and more have been denounced by one or another individual or group for the ultimate sin of heresy. Yet, isn't heresy little more than the insistence that, sometimes, what passes for orthodoxy might have missed something important? While it certainly is the case that heresiarcs tend to be far more "dogmatic" than the orthodox, it is often the case that such errors as they make - whether the members of the Corinthian congregation who insisted there was no resurrection of the dead or the panoply of contemporary folks who insist on a "personal relationship with Jesus" as a mark of salvation - are those rooted in love.

There continue to be people who insist that Jesus' claim that the Way is narrow makes them Divinely appointed engineers, marking off the boundaries of acceptable profession of faith. That's OK, I suppose; everyone needs to feel needed. All the same, even if one or another detail may not jibe completely, it seems to me Christian unity should rely far more on our mutual confession, Jesus is Lord. Everything else is negotiable.

The Assumptions Of Our Betters Are Usually Wrong

It was the summer of 1984. I was at the laundromat in my hometown of Waverly, NY finishing up folding some clothes. My parents were out of town for the week, and my mother has this thing about people using her washing machine - to detail my mother's eccentricities would fill a small library - so I was down at the end of the business district, sitting in one of those old, molded plastic chairs. The gentleman my sister was dating at the time was on his way to pick me up (incredible as it seems, we had to agree on a pick-up time, because, obviously, there were no such things as cell phones) because ours was a one-car family. I'd been sitting and reading a book that now seems quaint to me. At the time, however, to my fevered young mind it had the clarion call of a revolutionary tome. Helen Caldicott's Missile Envy was among three books I read that summer that were important for shaping the way I thought about politics over the ensuing years. Not as long lasting, or re-read as Godfrey Hodgson's America In Our Time, which I still find indispensable for understanding so much of our recent national life, but still, Caldicott's book was important, for a while.

The car pulled up, I gathered up the last of my clean clothes, and was heading out the door. A gentleman stopped me on my way to the door and said to me, "That the book by that Australian doctor?"

I nodded.

"So, you think we really are gonna blow ourselves up?"

I shrugged. I could tell Lou was getting impatient. Lou tended to get impatient.

"Well, if we re-elect Ronnie, we just might." He smiled at me, because I think he could tell my ride was getting antsier by the second. I nodded, chuckled, and left.

That exchange, taking less than twenty seconds, has remained in my mind for almost twenty-eight years for one simple reason: It's an illustration of a maxim my Father used to offer to me, a maxim whose truth took me far too long to absorb. My Dad would look at me like I was some kind of ridiculous creature who was clueless about way too much and say, "You don't know every goddamn thing." How right you are, Dad. I'm sorry you had to remind me too often.

There are few persons more insufferable than those who believe themselves to be, despite all indications to the contrary, superior to others. We Americans, happily egalitarian in our outlook, are offended more by the assumption of hauteur than we tend to be than racial or sexual bigotry. We assume there are bigots out there, so why be surprised when some idiot says something hateful? We tend to be shocked when someone takes on an air of superiority, dismissing so many others as beneath their notice. Maybe because they enjoy NASCAR or reality TV. Maybe because they can't tell Brahms from Schubert from Mahler, but can instantly recognize the guitar styles of Carlos Santana and David Gilmour and Joe Satriani. Perhaps they have never even heard of Plutarch or Augustine, but own every book published under the name V. C. Andrews. The reasons for the presumption of superiority are many, varied, yet all wind up as fodder for a kind of Manichean world-view, a set of dichotomies in which "we", the privileged in our education and outlook, are both culturally and intellectually superior to "they" with their tendency to succumb to the Bread and Circuses of Hollywood.

Of the species of intellectual aristocrat, there are none more smug, more worthy of contempt from the rest of the Universe, than the college sophomore. I confess, here and now, that such a one was I. If I could go back in time and find myself, I'd probably beat the shit out of my 19-year-old self, just as an object lesson. One of the reasons that little snippet of conversation has remained in my brain was the immediate reaction I had: Someone in my hometown not only knew who Helen Caldicott was; that same person was afraid of the same thing I was! I'll confess (seems to be the day for it) that I am deeply ashamed of that reaction. It was a moment of nearly unforgivable presumption on my part. Such wise-foolery is the mark not only of youth but equal parts inexperience and ignorance. It is nothing to read a book and absorb its lessons; it is another to live a life and absorb its lessons, and let that living meet the book, argue with it, and let the two tussle it out to some kind of truce. At 19, I had far too little living under my belt to make any judgments about, well, pretty much anything. Now that I've lived far more years since that incident than I had up to that point, I would like to believe I have come to the conclusion that assumptions and presumptions are something we should never make about others.

Which life-lesson (hardly a huge one, I know; still, important enough, I think, as well as relevant) one would think David Brooks, older than I, would have learned years ago. Alas, as his latest column makes clear, the only thing worse than being inordinately proud of oneself, is not having anything for which to feel so inordinately proud.

When he published Bobos in Paradise, Brooks took over his main thesis - that there was an emergent class of young persons who aped the bohemianism of long past without taking on the burdens far too many of a previous generation of social and cultural outsiders had to bear. Like poverty. Social and cultural and political ostracism. Resigned to a life firmly outside the mainstream, true bohemians accepted, even reveled in their role as outcast and misfit, bringing the world everything from modern art - its cubism and surrealism, the nihilism of Dadaism and the psychology of Abstract Expressionism - to the highest form of modernist music, jazz to the kind of movies that deal in ideas and images instead of stories and characters. They never sought fame or money or prizes. They pursued a life of self-affirmation and expression, sometimes in the service of social and cultural and political improvement; sometimes, however, there was little more than the narcissistic joy of affirming one's existence within a society that worked very hard to deny their existence.

Brooks' markers for what made this creature he'd discovered, which he called "Bourgeois Bohemian" (thus, Bobo), however, weren't steeped in a study of how any person or group actually lived. As a critic in Philadelphia Magazine noted in 2004, Brooks didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

This remains true nearly eight years after being detailed so well. His current column, with its weird praise for the trash art of our pulp writers shows that Brooks is an ignoramus of the first water. Even a casual acquaintance with the writings he details should make any reader of Brooks' column laugh so hard he or she has to run to the bathroom to pee. Brooks, however, would wonder at the source of such laughter.

Yesterday, a good friend of mine said that my blog posts are "too cerebral", that I'm not focusing on the average person's desires. That's the kind of phrase that puzzles me. Who, precisely, is this "average person"? What are their desires? I doubt that, in most ways that really count, I would be outside whatever Bell Curve this person imagines the determinant of the social average. Further, isn't it somewhat insulting to say that average people aren't concerned about how stupid so much of our public discourse is, how venal and erroneous so much of our religion tends to be; like Brooks' nonsensical assumption that folks in a rural county prefer Dollar General to Nieman Marcus (without any evidence to support this assumption), isn't the assumption that the average Joe just doesn't care about this stuff rooted more in stereotype and prejudice, rather than real evidence? I've always operated under the assumption that I'm no different from the guy who sweats through a ten hour day fixing the plumbing in a house, or putting a roof on a building. These folks care about all sorts of things like a decent wage for their labor, decent schools for their kids, clean and safe roads on which to drive, safe neighborhoods and cities in which to live, safe food to eat and safe water to drink. All the things, in other words, that I write about.

I have no interest in pretending I'm something I'm not. Nor do I have any interest in pretense. Few things bait me more easily than someone making a claim that having a bit more education in this or that abstruse subject matter confers some kind of superiority upon an individual. How ridiculous a notion is that? Yet, we live with it just the same; bad social and cultural commentary is rooted in this kind of phony elitism, engaged in by people who tend to be, upon even a little digging, not only wrong, but almost overwhelmingly ignorant.

Much like I was on that long-ago Saturday afternoon in the Waverly Laundromat, David Brooks needs someone to walk up to him and smack him around a little bit and yell, much as my father did, "You don't know every goddamn thing!"