Seek The Welfare Of The City - Stanley Haeurwas And The Problem Of Exile

After all, I have playfully used postmodern playfulness to try to remind Christians that we are in a life-and-death struggle with the world. - Stanley Hauerwas, "The Christian Difference, or Surviving Postmodernism", A Better Hope, p.36.

Jeremiah is a gloomy Gus. Reading through this prophetic book, one gets the sense that he rather enjoyed pronouncing judgment upon the evils of a people poised on the precipice of destruction, their kingdom small and weak about to face the onslaught of the Empire of Babylon. Once the catastrophe occurs, Jeremiah spends quite a bit of time comforting the people with, "I told you so".

He also offers a bit of advice to those in exile that was probably as difficult to hear as the dire warnings of imminent doom he spoke. He has a vision of two baskets of figs, and wonders what they mean. The LORD complies, starting in verse 5:

These are the words of the LORD the God of Israel: I count the exiles of Judah whom I sent away from this place to the land of the Chaldaeans as good as these good figs. I shall look to their welfare, and restore them to this land; I shall build them up and not pull them down, plant them and not uproot them. I shall give them the wit to know me, for I am the LORD; they will be my people and I shall be their God, for they will come back to me wholeheartefly.

But King Zedekiah of Judah, his officers, and the survivors of Jerusalem, both those who remain in this land and those who have settled in Egypt - all these I shall treat as bad figs, says the LORD, so bad that they are not fit to eat. I shall make them abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth, a reporach, a bysword, an object of taunting and cursing wherever I banish them. I shall send sword, war, famine, and pestilence against them until they have vanished from the land which I gave to them and to their forefathers.

Setting aside a whole host of questions that should properly be asked about such a text before doing the proper task of exegesis, I would, rather, prefer to offer this as a reply to Stanley Haeurwas' oft-stated desire for Christians to see themselves as those living in exile. In particular, as a reply to the all-too-often accommodated, mainline Protestant churches, their doctrinal differences getting ever fuzzier as they strive to become American Christian churches.

For Hauerwas, this has been unequivocally bad for the churches. They have lost, according to his reading of the history of Christian churches in the United States, the ability to worship, with any real meaning, any authentic prophetic or pastoral content, the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen. In the essays that open A Better Hope, he goes so far as to insist that the mere possibility of being a church that does so - i.e., authentic worship of the living God - would be an ever-living thorn in the side both of secular America and the all-too-willing accommodations of a neutered Protestant bourgeoisie.

Yet, "exile", at least for Jeremiah, is hardly a state of separation. Indeed, those who are in exile, as opposed to those who have been allowed to remain behind (or who have fled to Egypt) are "the good figs", those who still find favor with God. For a people whose identity has been shaped by an attachment to The Land rooted in Divine Grace and favor, this idea that there is blessing in exile from this land must have sounded not just odd, but may even have bordered on unintelligible. All the same, Jeremiah's famous declaration, the title of this post, is of a piece with this parable of the figs. The exiles are to pray and work and live as the people of God, including praying and working for the welfare of the city in which they are held as exiles.

For Jeremiah, then, exile is not a place of struggle against. Nor is it, I should add, a place of accommodation. Rather, the people are to maintain their identity; part of that identity includes being a living community, working and praying and worshiping together, who also seek the welfare of the larger community of which they are a part. Rather than a life-and-death struggle with the world, exile is part of the people's ongoing struggle for the world.

Hauerwas has maintained, for the better part of two decades, that the Christian churches in America, in order to be Christian, need to set to one side any effort at mutual accommodation. We are not to seek the Americanization of Christianity. We are not to seek the Christianization of America. For Hauerwas, only when the churches can worship the God incarnate in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen - and there are abundant references across many writings where Hauerwas is clear this has yet to take place, at least in mainline Protestant Christianity - without reference to America, are the churches not only authentically Christian, but also authentically working for America. For Hauerwas, in other word - to use his rather odd notions of narrative - the story of exile, as the Christian's story in America, is one of a dialectic of separation and prophetic transcendence on the one hand; and immersion and pastoral care leading to transformation on the other. This rather complicated way of envisioning Christian "exile", however, ignores the prophetic insistence, recorded in Jeremiah, that, as exiles, we are those favored by God. Furthermore, as exiles, we are to live our lives as part of the larger community, seeking its welfare in the ordinary, mundane run of life.

Not only is Hauerwas' insistence that real worship of God not yet happening in the Protestant churches, far too comfortable with American life; his understanding of exile is truncated, ignoring the Divine imperative to be - borrowing the imagery from Jeremiah - good figs. This is not treason to the God of Israel, apostasy to the God of Jesus Christ. Rather, in living as both Christians and Americans, including praying and working for the welfare of America qua America, we are living out the lives of exiles. Not in struggle with, even against it. In struggle for it.

Christianity, Marxism, And The Persistence Of Religious Protest

I decided it might be a good idea to pause and ask a really good question: Why am I at all interested in Marxist discussions and appropriation of Christian theology? Whether one considers Marx's ideas of a piece, or periodic with an early, more humanist Marxism juxtaposed to a later, more scientific approach, one thread that runs through his work is, at the very least, a hostility to the Christian religion as it was reified in industrial capitalism in western Europe.

I will state upfront that I think the other side of the equation, the Christian churches and their various theologians, have been all-too-eager to accept the indictment of Marx and his followers (they have been less enthusiastic toward Freud, but that is a subject for another day). All too often this agreement has been too vigorous, too shallow. Because they have sought it out, many theologians have found, within the text of the Bible, in the history of the faith, and in certain theological categories tools that can liberate not only this same dehumanized mass, but itself from the fate of going the way of the dodo. While there may be a genuine desire on the part of many to work for the liberation not just of those under the bootheel of late industrial imperialistic capitalism, for the most part I honestly believe it is rooted even more in a desperate attempt to keep the Christian religion alive, even vital, in the face of the protest against its use as a tool to degrade human beings.

Bad faith is never a good reason to do anything, especially a bad faith rooted in a shallow guilt and a desire to remain "relevant" rather than faithful.

The collapse of the Soviet bloc is so far in the past there are people in the US of legal voting age with no living memory of it. We have lived far too long under the lie, "There is no alternative" (TINA, as it has been shortened, was a favorite of Margaret Thatcher). There is a rich, vibrant history of Marxist thought, from the founders to our own day, and this is the precise moment it may well indeed speak to us who have the desire to hear of a better way, a more human way, of being together.

The Christian churches, in all their variation, are now, as they have always been, on all sides of various fences. The powerful and the powerless, the leaders and the herd of dehumanized masses who want only to live fully human lives find solace within the walls of the churches, comfort for their pains - social, psychological, physical - in the soothing words and outstretched arms of both clergy and laity. The challenge before us, really, is one of honesty. Were we Christians honest, we would admit not only that the churches have been complicit, sometimes overt leaders, in the exploitation of human beings for the sake of the powerful; we would admit, further, that it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to find support for such action within the text of the Bible and the categories of theology. The effort to lift out and read the Bible, the history of our theology and practice, those parts that favor a different view of what it means to be Church, to be a Christian, while noble and certainly finding support in various parts of the text, undermine themselves at precisely the point they deny any contradiction within the text itself, let alone in the history of the faith.

Like the far-too-shallow appropriation of large elements of liberation theology by North American Christians, the rush to accept the judgment that we have, indeed, been guilty of monstrous crimes against humanity in the name of God - implicating God, too - misses the point. We cannot rid ourselves of the distasteful past. We cannot wash the blood from our hands. We can work with those texts and categories that offer a way out of the abyss, but we should do so honestly, and with more depth than I think, heretofore, has been done.

In reading these Marxists and the ways theology informs their work, even as they deny any reality to the content of the truth claims of theology, I have discovered that, at the very least, much of the on-going protest against "God" and "religion" is not anything "radical". The God-deniers and church-bashers far too often are wed to an ideology that is hand-in-glove with those forces that continue to oppress and subjugate large parts of humanity. The shallow scientism of Dawkins and Harris, the sophistry of Daniel Dennett, and the imperialistic war-mongering of Christopher Hitchens are not at all radical critiques of religion and the evils it visits upon humanity in the name of humanism. Quite the opposite; Hitchens and Harris are enthusiastic war-boosters, with Harris going so far as to endorse the torture and murder of Muslism on grounds that can only be called genocidal. Dawkins beef with Christianity - its ridiculous creationist, young earth nonsense - has pushed one biologist past the point of endurance. The result, however, is an endorsement of an equally dehumanizing scientism that is itself part of the structure of liberalism that buries far too many human beings under its own groaning weight.

Furthermore, St. Paul did instruct us to be all things to all people, to be as wily as foxes. If there are, in fact, resources for imagining and living the Christian faith that can be found in Marxism - resources not only for judging those whose lives are rooted in human exploitation, but comforting and even struggling with those envisioning a better, more human/humane world - then, by all means, they should be given a third, or even fourth, look. That there are Marxists who struggle with theological issues, whose effort to consign religion to history's dustbin are thwarted by the reality that the many faces of religion include one that lives with, sides with, the exploited, dehumanized tools for the enrichment of the few, we owe it to ourselves to learn from them. Even if we cannot agree with all they say, by rooting around in the attic of western thought we may find some garments to drape across the tattered, withered frame of Christian thought and life.

A Catholic-Tinged Revolution - Louis Althusser

Fear is not a fatherland, nor is courage . . ., more the human condition is not a human fatherland. It is, perhaps, the fatherland of men as they appear to God; because we are Christians, we call this condition original sin. For the man who is not a Christian, and for the Christian who does not usurp God's place, the human fatherland is not the proletariat of the human condition, it is the proletariat tout court, leading the whole of humanity towards its emancipation. This proletariat has a real content.

For, as Christians, we believe that there is a human condition; in other words, we believe in the equality of all men before God, and his Judgement, but we do not want the Judgement of God to spirited away before our very eyes; nor do we want to see non-Christians and, occasionally, Christians as well, commit the sacrilege of taking the atomic bomb for the will of God, equality before death for equality before God . . ., and the tortures of the concentration camps for the Last Judgement.(italics in original) - Louis Althusser

Roland Boer moves from two semi-assimilated German Jews, comfortable with a certain German Protestant approach to Christianity to the first of two French Roman Catholic thinkers. In the case of Louis Althusser, the specificity of this description - French Roman Catholic - is necessary to understand the way Althusser takes a large part of what he, Althusser, found so attractive about Roman Catholicism. In the words Boer borrowed from Althusser for the chapter title, it lends to Althusser's work a certain "ecclesiastical eloquence." More, for Boer, it provides a clue to understanding some confusing aspects of Althusser's thought.

In particular is the way Althusser, in a way that is far too common, tended to use the word, "Church", written that way, that elided the many differences not just among various Christian churches, but even with the Catholic communion itself. As an active member of the post-war Catholic Left in France, the move from Roman-Catholicism to Marxism was aided, for Althusser, by a general desire for an alliance among various Left groups. This move was helped along by certain teachers, including Catholic ones.

In fact the Church, via its chaplains and encyclicals, made their own militants aware of the 'social question', of which most of us were totally ignorant. Foo course, once we recognize that there was a 'social question' and the the remedies proposed were ridiculous, it did not take much, in my case the profound political vision of "Pere Hours', for us to explore what lay behind the wooly-minded slogans of the Catholic Church and rapidly convert to Marxism before joining the Communist Party!

Boer examines not only four early theological essays. He also examines in some detail "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", which forms a nascent sociology of both religion and morality. Within this essay, however, Althusser seems to replace "ideology" for the God of Thomistic doctrine. Unlike its actualization in specific ideological structures - including what Althusser calls "practical ideologies" like religion - "ideology" itself, or perhaps better Ideology, is transhistorical, eternal, and inescapable. Rather than arguing about Ideology, Althusser seems to suggest that most people are arguing about various instances of ideology incarnate in history; Ideology, unlike its early Marxist formula, is not rooted in the historical form of the class struggle.

In this way, the various Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) are, in a way, mere appearances to the Platonic Ideology that Exists. Boer sees the shadow of Augustine here as well as St. Thomas, which in some ways is ironic. Augustine, like Althusser, was a restless intellect, moving from Manichaean religious beliefs through neo-Platonism to Catholicism relatively rapidly, dragging various bits and pieces with him along the way. Althusser, so Boer wishes to argue, was a self-declared scientific Marxist whose writings are suffused with various elements from the French Roman Catholicism of his youth and young adulthood. Confusing the specific with the universal, seeing in Ideology an easy substitute for the God he rejected, Althusser's work was more a continuation of the leftward journey he began as he moved from the Catholic left to Marxism. I do believe that the marriage might be far easier for a Catholic than some other Christian groups, due in small way to the universalizing tendency within Roman Catholic thought. In that way, Althusser's ritualized, sacralized Marxism does seem to bear a remarkable resemblance to his discarded Church/church.

Snapshots II

The ridiculous nature of our discourse in the wake of the Tuscon shootings just won't end. The right continues to act the real victim, ignoring the six dead and multiple wounded. Stupidity piles upon ignorance as the leader of the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, continues her highly profitable star-turn as the biggest victim of the shooting (as a side note, as I watched her appearance on Sean Hannity's television program, I was amazed at his ability to ask questions while his tongue was stuck so far up her ass). The impossibility of any serious discussion of violence, guns, politics, rhetoric was clear enough in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, as some on the left decided to point the finger of blame absent any evidence whatsoever. The right, however, decided to play the game, using the trump card of victimization. What follows, like my previous Snapshots post, is just a random, stream of consciousness list of stories, facts, and other items. Rather than offer a way out of the discursive impossibility we face, I want only to break through, perhaps, with some bits and pieces from the reality we all live without even realizing it.

In a review of a recent scholarly work on guns and violence, Reload: Rethinking Violence in American Life by Florida Atlantic University professor Christopher Strain, Scott McLemee notes an interesting, yet desperate, statistic. In 1996, there were 15 handgun-related deaths in Japan. In the US, that same year, there were 9,390. That is, on average, almost 26 per day. Even accounting for differences in population, that is an astonishing, horrible reality.

Incidentally, the comments on Scott's review are a marvelous example of why having a sane, sober, restrained conversation on guns and violence is impossible. If I weren't used to it, I think I would cry a little.

On July 18, 1984, James Oliver Huberty walked in to a McDonald's in San Ysidro, CA carrying a 9mm Uzi semiautomatic, a 12-gauge shotgun, and 9mm Browning. He killed 22 people before being shot by a SWAT sniper.

On March 24, 1998, at a middle school just outside Jonesboro, AR, 5 people were killed and ten wounded in a shooting. The perpetrators were a thirteen year old and an eleven year old.

The phrase "going postal" has become a commonplace for marking workplace violence, due to a spate of shootings in postal facilities that began in the mid-1980's in Edmond, OK and include other incidents in New Jersey, California, Oregon, Michigan, and Tennessee.

In a summary of a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they report that, in the fourteen years between 1992 and 2006, there were 11,613 workplace homicides in the United States. While the CDC does note variances among the years, the average is 829.5 people dying each of those years from violence in the workplace. Not accident, not unsafe working conditions directly related to workplace performance or equipment. 830 people died, on average, each of those years due to homicide.

The summer of 1919 was known as "Red Summer". As the United States tried to adjust to the post-World War I era, including the heroic actions of segregated African-American troops, the re-establishment of white supremacy, north and south, led to a series of race riots across the country. Between May 10, in Charleston, SC and October 1 in Elaine, AR, there were 34 separate racially-motivated attacks by whites upon African-Americans. The dead were numbered in the hundreds.

Two years later, the Greenwood section of Tulsa, OK, a thriving, economically and socially successful black neighborhood, disappeared, burned to the ground in an orgy of racial violence.

On January 17, 1989, Patrick Purdy opened fire on the crowded playground of Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, CA, kiling five children.

From today's Chicago Tribune:

Three men were killed and two others wounded overnight in a house on the south side of Gary in what police believe was a drug-related shooting.

According to police, a man called 911 at 10:40 p.m. from another home nearby, saying he had been shot in the home at 3829 Washington Street.

When police arrived, they found three adult males dead, all apparently from gunshot wounds.

They also found a 4-year-old girl, uninjured and now in protective custody. Police said her father was one of those killed.

According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, there were 88,097 forcible rapes reported in the United States in 2009, among the lowest figures from the past 20 years. That is 241 rapes per day. Hurray for lowering it to that figure.

I'll stop for now. All the blather on television, on radio, on the internet, at least as it is currently conducted, is meaningless. It seems impossible to grasp that there are 241 rapes - just forcible rapes - reported - just reported - each and every day in the United States. This is a low figure, as the violent crime rate continues to decrease. As long as these realities receive, at best, a sorrow-filled shake of the head, and a dispassionate shrug of the shoulders (what can you do, crazy people will do crazy things blah blah blah) we will continue to talk about inanities like "blood libel" and talk about pogroms of conservatives, all the while the bodies pile up, lives and families and whole communities lie broken and bleeding, as long as no one says quietly, but firmly - "Enough".

Looking Good For A Corpse

Yet another obituary for rock music.

So Neil Young was wrong. "Rock and roll will never die," the whiny-voiced old coot told us, and we believed him. But now along comes Paul Gambaccini, the self-styled "Professor of Pop", to announce that, since only three rock songs appeared in last year's top 100 singles, the genre has expired.

That's it? Because fourteen-year-old girls are buying Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber and Beyonce and L'il Wayne, because that's what the record companies are selling, rock is dead? Leith notes that this is hardly a marker of the demise of rock, but then goes on to note that ubiquity of pop/R&B will have repercussions down the road.

The problem is that if the kids aren't listening to rock, when they go into the music industry they won't make rock. It is going to run out. We have discovered too late that rock, like fossil fuels, is a finite resource. Sometime in the early 1990s, we hit Peak Rock: we now have only managed decline and a Mad Max style post-rock world to look forward to. Don't get me wrong. I love rock music. I'm so uncool I even sing along to the Killers in the car. But I have to recognise that I am that old fart I warned my younger self about. When I go to rock concerts, I don't look about me and see The Kids. I look around me and see The Man. The world's remaining rock deposits are being stripmined by irresponsible members of the boomer and post-boomer generations.

Um. Uh.

On the one hand there is the nostalgia circuit - Peter Frampton going from city to city replaying his Comes Alive LP from 1976, in running order, note for note. The reformation or on-going old-fogey tours - bands like Styx, Kansas, Journey, REO Speedwagon, and Cheap Trick hitting the road together, none of them with the exception of Cheap Trick having anything new to play - are cash-cows, because folks my age and a bit older have enough disposable income to afford the tickets and get a chance to go out, smoke some grass, and pretend they don't have gallstones or a hernia or have lost their hair or that it is gray. They can scream and sing along to songs that were popular, or at least played on the radio, when they were in high school, and feel young again.

If Robert Plant and Jimmy Page doing shows under the name "Led Zeppelin" depresses you - it certainly does me! - or if you have the experience I did at a Rush concert a few years ago, looking around and realizing that, when you start bringing your kids to rock concerts, it might be a sign that you should stop going to rock concerts, it isn't so much evidence that "rock" is dead. Rather, the pretend ideology of rock - it's music about young people for young people, and if you're "of a certain age", you just won't get it - might well have been wrong, after all.

A commenter to this article got it right.

So an entire wing of the music industry is declared dead because singles sales have fallen??

Festivals and live shows are in rude health.

Album sales may be down, but this is due to rock music diversifying and splintering into many sub-genres.
All of these sub genres are in creatively good health but have had to downsize their expectations and stage shows in accordance with their smaller share of the market.

It is doubtful whether any one band or one main genre of rock will unite all rock fans in the way it did in the past.
Back then there were only so many sub-genres and this is why rock bands like The Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Judas Priest and Queen ruled the roost. Small pond syndrome.
With new sub-genres being invented all the time and the rock fanbase being subdivided along with it, we are unlikely to see rock dominating the charts as it once did.

I DARE you to go to Download, Sonisphere, Rockness, T In The Park, V Festival, Reading, Leeds, Isle of Wight or Hammerfest, get up on stage and announce that rock is dead in front of a crowd of 70,000 young rock music fans.

I have been saying much the same thing for quite a while. Part of the reason there were supergroups who sold millions of copies of albums that really didn't warrant such sales was the monopoly major labels held, the power of radio in the pre-internet age, and the luxury of a whole lot of disposable income. Part of the reason the majors are in such trouble and CD sales are down across the board is the majors refused to price them properly. Charging as much, if not more in constant dollars, for CDs as they did previously for LPs, even though the technology should have made the price fall, the record companies committed suicide. They still charge almost twice for a physical CD what it costs to get the same set of songs on iTunes. Unable to come to terms with the changed nature of the music public, they will, in all likelihood, go the way of newspapers. Unable to come up with a business model to survive in changed market circumstances, combined with the relatively cheap cost of high-quality music production and mixing software, allowing DIY bands to record, mix, and even produce their own product effectively and less expensively, they, not the genre that kept them afloat for decades, are the ones that are on the way out.

As the letter writer said, the situation isn't so much that "rock" is dead. Rather, there are no bands - no Beatles, no Led Zeppelins, no Rolling Stones, not even R.E.M. or U2 fill the bill anymore - that create a center around which others can revolve. Rather, the musical universe is alight with all sorts of stars of varying brightness. They all have their fan-bases, their little publics that follow them, buy their music, shows up at gigs. Some are bigger, some are smaller, but it's all vibrant and varied and quite lively.

So what if 14-year-olds aren't perceptive enough to realize that Taylore Swift is more a product than any of the alleged music she creates? The biggest rock act in 1965 wasn't the Beatles, it was Hermans Hermits, for crying out loud; the number one song the week of Woodstock was "Sugar Sugar" by the Archies. All of this is to say the story we tell about rock music elides all sorts of uncomfortable realities we want to forget. I think rock will do just fine, and bury yet another obituary.

Sectarian, Fideistic Tribalist - Stanley Hauerwas On The Church Versus America

America is at once the name of an aspiration to liberty and equality of rights and the name of the power that stands in the way of that aspiration. - Stanley Hauerwas, "On Being A Christian And An American", in A Better Hope, p. 31.

As I wade through Roland Boer's dense commentaries on the Marxist appropriation of theology, I am pausing to read an essay or two from my one volume of Stanley Hauerwas. For those who may not know the name, Hauerwas is more than just "a Christian ethicist". His name is a symbol for kicking against so many conventions, not the least of which is his contention that "Christian Ethics", as a phrase (let alone a discipline of the academy) isn't really intelligible.

A Better Hope: Resources For A Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, And Postmodernity is one of the initial publications by Brazos Press, a small imprint of Baker Book House. A compendium of essays from the 1990's, the collection could be considered "dated" (it was published in 2000) were it not that the topics he addresses are not just pertinent but really vital.

I will confess that I have mixed feelings about Hauerwas. I want to like much of what he has to say. I get the feeling that his intentions are not just honorable, but rooted in instincts that are correct. His counter-claim to what he sees as the unholy alliance between political liberalism (broadly understood) and the Christian churches in America is simple enough. He writes the following at the end of the essay quoted above, on p. 34:

I believe . . . Christians can do nothing more significant in America than to be a people capable of worshiping a God who is to be found in the cross and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The worship of such a God will not be good for any society that desires a god made in the image of the bureaucrat. A people formed by the worship of a crucified God, however, might just be complex enough to engage in the hard work of working out agreements and disagreements with others one small step at a time.

Fair enough. Yet, unlike those who face the fire of his ire - John Rawls, in particular - Hauerwas is thin on the ground as to how, exactly, we are to negotiate the differences among incommensurable vocabularies, or to put it in his terms, reconcile the different stories we tell about ourselves. If, as Hauerwas suggests, Americans are a people predisposed to a certain avoidance of conflict, pasting over very real differences in order to keep a certain social peace - and I am not convinced this view, which he borrows from an essay by Alisdair MacIntyre, is true - then the alternative he suggests would seem to prevent anything else than agreeing that we do, indeed, disagree. These disagreements, moreover, under the terms he sets forth here, would be unmanageable because they are rooted in "stories" that start in different places, have a whole different cast of characters, themes, motifs, and serve such a welter of purposes that "disagreement" is a polite way to describe what really would be conflict.

So, we end up where we are in many ways. Different groups insisting on the primacy of "their" story as being the key to being "America" (and despite his insistence that his view denies a role for "America" in a Christian's self-understanding, the practical result is the same), without any common vocabulary, or single "story" to which to appeal, sounds very much like our current situation. The appeal to the Church to "be" the Church of Jesus Christ, witnessing to that reality in its life in the life-world that is America is hardly a sectarian call to arms. All the same, working through both his method, and his sectarian, tirbalist view of what it means to inhabit a story, leads me to the conclusion that a key ingredient is missing from his theological polemic - grace.

Without grace, that sense that God's justice and love are united in a prodigal condescension to our human condition - and Hauerwas is certainly correct when he notes that the Nicaean/Chalcedonian formula is a shorthand for the uniqueness of the Christian story of God (although I prefer "confession" to story) - leaves out the key to understanding the "why" of the Incarnation. Are we, in being the Church in America, presenting a set of stark alternatives, the "thou shalt" of a new law? If this is the case, what need have we to confess this same Incarnation?

Again, there is much in this essay, and in Hauerwas' larger theological project, to commend itself to a variety of publics. All the same, what I found wanting in this essay - how we get to the point where we can negotiate those agreements and disagreements - is really indicative of a far deeper problem. Hauerwas' view of the Church is one much like himself, confrontational, committed to its "story" without any need to justify that commitment to those outside its walls, and lacking any sense of grace, which would be rooted in an acknowledgment of the contingency and partiality of any narrative. This, too, is a Scriptural insight, one Hauerwas passes over in silence.

When Everything Old Will Be New - Mid-Week Music Sharing (UPDATE)

I am committing blogger theft. It has been at least a year, perhaps more, since I stopped doing my music posts, and I miss them. Rather than just do the same thing over and over again, I have decided to do something someone else does. Tbogg, and if you're not reading him you should, does what he calls "Pre-Friday Random Ten". He sets his iPod on shuffle and the first ten songs that come up, he posts, with one to grow on. It is such a genius idea, I thought, what the heck, right? Is he gonna sue?

Please, don't sue.

In order to make this a more perfect Wednesday, breaking up the monotony of the week, and the somewhat dumbed-down headiness that has become my blog over the past few weeks, I am going to be doing this, at least until I get bored with it or forget it or someone tells me to stop (OK, maybe not the last one; I don't like people telling me to stop doing stuff, ask my mother).

You can play along! Do the whole "shuffle" thingy on your little Walkman or whatever, and let me know in comments what is on your playlist, getting you over the hump.

OK, set your phasers to stunning . . .

Prayer for the Dying - Seal
Fragile - Sting
Sowing the Seeds of Love - Tears for Fears
Closer to Fine - Indigo Girls
She Sells Sanctuary - The Cult
She's On Fire - Train
Lovesong - The Cure
Free Man in Paris - Joni Mitchell
Please Read the Letter - Robert Plant and Allison Kraus
How Come - Ray LaMontagne

Not quite making the cut, but I'm putting the video for it up, because, well, it's my blog. . .



UPDATE: I hate to admit it, but I liked that so much, I decided to do it again, with another ten-plus-one.

Court and Spark (featuring Norah Jones) - Herbie Hancock
The King of 17 - John Wesley
Up for the Downstroke - Parliament
Never Gonna Stop Me - Rob Zombie
Us and Them - Pink Floyd
Water - The Who
Casey Jones - Grateful Dead (Workingman's Dead)
Whipping Boy - Train
One O'Clock Jump - Benny Goodman Live at Carnegie Hall, 1938
I Want You - Marvin Gaye

And the pinch to grow an inch . . .

Allegory, Myth, And The Possible Future - Roland Boer On Walter Benjamin

The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard places on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback wao was and expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called "historical materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to jeep out of sight. - The first Thesis "On the Philosophy of History", Walter Benjamin, in Illuminations, p.253. Edited and with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt.

If there is someone who could be imagined the opposite of Ernst Bloch, it would be difficult to escape the idea that Walter Benjamin is the perfect candidate. They were friends and correspondents. Both shared an affinity for literature as well as Marxism. Both were semi-assimilated German Jews "of a certain age". Beyond that, the differences could not be more plain. Bloch's works were many, varied, sometimes far too long, their Marxist pedigree always in dispute. Benjamin's longest work, his habilitationschrift, was his first work. Bloch's style of writing - expressionist, the words and sentences and paragraphs defying normal grammatical rules as they pushed the reader forward, sometimes against that reader's will, to see with new eyes - was nothing at all like the spare, traditional style of Benjamin. Yet, that style belied a depth of analytic vision, an almost furious desire to draw in whatever tools necessary to demonstrate that Benjamin understood late capitalism to be the great destroyer, not least of beauty. Among the tools Benjamin uses, from his Trauerspielbuch to his late, unfinished Passagenarbeit, was the medieval method of Biblical interpretation, the four levels of allegory. As he wrote in his first thesis on the philosophy of history, it is precisely because theology is now wizened that it can be sneaked in, almost without anyone seeing it, to be of service to stripping away the crumbling facade of late capitalist triumphalism.

The second chapter of Roland Boer's Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology considers the work of Walter Benjamin. Boer focuses on Benjamin's two major works, his first, long-languishing work on the baroque German mourning-play, to which he refers throughout as the Trauerspielbuch, and his late, never-completed work on the Arcades of Paris. While he draws in several of Benjamin's aphoristic "Theses on a Philosophy of History", as well as his essay on translation, by focusing on these two works, the bookends of his intellectual life, Boer shows that Benjamin displayed a remarkable consistency of vision, even as he, Boer, sees that consistency was paid for with the limitation that Benjamin became trapped within a certain mythological - and by "myth" Boer clearly means "false" - consciousness that derives from his too-heavy reliance upon certain theological and exegetical methods and assumptions.

Benjamin's allegorical method not only generates the failure of his overt proposal but also becomes an appropriate method for what I am suggesting. It is not, as the anti-allegorical polecmic of biblical criticism has argued for so long, that allegory seeks a wooden one-to-one correspondence to carious items in the test. On the contrary, allegory, particularly in Benjamin's hands, might be seen to reach across the divide between a capitalist present and a communist future to draw terms from that future to itself, however imperfect they might be. The question remains as to whether the mythological material that runs through Benjamin's writing is able to do the job. In terms of specific content, no, but in terms of the effort to think differently, then myth provides one way of doing so. Roland Boer, Criticism on Heaven, p. 105.

There are two parts to Boer's chapter. The first focuses on Benjamin's use of allegory. The second, which flows from the first, considers how Benjamin sees myth, not just Biblical myth, but the category itself, as a useful category for seeing how capitalism creates its own myths, destructive - even self-destructive - as they may be. Boer claims, however, that Benjamin's use of certain Biblical categories - in particular, he considers Creation and Eschaton - traps Benjamin within a mythological framework that leaves him, with his reliance upon certain theological and exegetical principles lifted from biblical criticism, unable to escape. He cannot, it seems use the myths for the sake of pushing a liberating message; indeed, by falling back, as Boer demonstrates pretty clearly, upon highly sexualized language (although I think "gendered", as clumsy as it is, would have captured Benjamin's use better), to the denigration of the female imagery. Indeed, Boer points to a passage where Benjamin, using the first three chapters of Genesis to work up a theory of language, can make a plea for more creative possibilities for men, while accepting without any criticism, the inherent secondary status of women, including downplaying procreation in favor of a yearning for a more creative masculinity.

It is Boer's analysis of this particular passage that is the clue for the much larger criticism Boer levels at Benjamin - the use of allegory traps Benjamin within the categories of myth. As he states in the passage quoted above, Boer does see possibility in Benjamin's method, but only possibility. Benjamin's ploy seems to be, according to Boer, that capitalism is not just myth-making, but is willing to draw on pre-capitalist imagery to hold up its teetering ideological structure. Much that capitalist society and culture has to say about itself is little more than a combination of myths, scavenged from wherever one may find them, that end up predatory upon themselves and even the society and culture for whose sustenance they are employed. In this sense, the destructive tendencies of capitalism are clear enough.

All the same, while Boer expresses a certain sympathy for the possibilities inherent in Benjamin's project at the very end, he nevertheless insists that, trapped by his reliance upon allegory and the inevitable mirror-game of myth, Benjamin cannot escape from myth because he does not explicitly set forth how these new myths from a post-capitalist reality, can draw us in. Too much beholden to the original creative myth, with its denigration of women, seeking solely for a creative possibility for the male, even seeing in the procreative act of women something akin to Nietzsche's eternal recurrence rather than something new, Benjamin does not move forward. While there is possibility, at the end his project flounders upon these rocks, rocks first set down when he decided to invite wizened theology in to the game.

Can We Be America - Some Thoughts Inspired By The Life And Words Of Martin Luther King

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!
-Langston Hughes

It is with both sadness and something like awe that I read through King's 1967 speech, "A Time to Break Silence". Delivered at New York's historic Riverside Church, it was more than just a statement against the wars in Vietnam. It was a thorough critique of American life, foreign and domestic. As in so much else, King cut through the illusion that the war, like segregation, was the illness. In this speech, he not only pleaded to end the wars. He also talked about America being America. Like his 1963 speech to the March on Washington, he proclaimed a vision for the United States that was in deepest accord with our most cherished values; unlike that speech, he offered no vision of hope or promise in the ringing tones of a vision of eschatological peace. On the contrary, he indicted the United States for betraying that vision, wondering whether we were not, perhaps, demonstrating symptoms of national decline, a failure not just of nerve, but of those qualities that would, indeed, make us a great nation, not just a great power.

Unlike the speech in Washington four years previous, King was not playing to our best sense of ourselves. He was, rather, holding a mirror before a nation already weary from social strife, yet destined for years more of it and declaring that, without justice, there can be no peace; that the peace we sought in Vietnam was inextricably linked to social justice at home; that the justice of which he spoke, and for which he had worked for over a decade required more than adjusting a few laws and changing a few minds. Repeatedly, at the end of the speech, King stated that the two goals for which he worked, the America he wished to see, could only come about through revolution.

Not just some "change of heart", although that was certainly part of it. The revolution to which he referred was that same revolution he spoke of seeing across the Third World, revolutions to which the United States seemed institutionally and inherently opposed. To live out its highest values, to "be America" as Hughes said we might yet be, America needed to be on the side of these revolutions, support them actively and purposefully. Only then could we, in the words of his 1963 speech, live out our creed that all people are created equal.

In the years since his murder, King's legacy as a public figure was contested space. The prophet of a necessary revolution became the preacher of peace. We are inundated with the sounds of his 1963 Washington speech - a marvelous piece of American oratory, to be sure! - but without the context of his later speeches and work, including a "Poor People's March" he was planning as he was gunned down in Memphis, a year to the day after delivering his speech on the wars in Vietnam, leaves one with the impression that King was a sober liberal. That image, imposed pretty early on, is part of the reason for the remarkable veneration among many young African-Americans, of Malcolm X, his alleged rival until Malcolm had his own final confrontation with a gun. The differences between the two men, the subject of James Cone's remarkable work of social and ideological detective work, Malcolm, Martin, and America, were far less than the public, and perhaps even they, imagined. Yet, it was the appropriation of the peace-loving, non-violence-preaching King by white liberals that rendered so much of King's actual work unintelligible, silenced a forceful, revolutionary agitator in favor of an image that was uncomfortably close to the Establishment's house negro.

In the early 1970's, radical black theologian William R. Jones, author of Is God a White Racist?, gave a lecture at Wesley Theological Seminary at its annual celebration of King. The contested legacy of King was of some import at Wesley at the time. The academic dean, Phil Wogaman, had gone to Alabama and marched with King; he had been attacked by the police at the Benjamin Pettus Bridge. His mentor at the theological school at Boston University had been King's as well, L. Harold DeWolfe (whom Wesley stole from Boston to be its first academic dean in 1965; DeWolfe dragged along several BU alumni, including Wogaman and Jim Logan and, later, William "Bobby" McLain). In that speech, Jones declared that the contested legacy of King was, in large part, a matter for whites. Blacks had no need, and certainly no desire, to take their cues on whom they should venerate as leaders from whites.

Jones' speech was met with consternation, to say the least. He was hardly dismissing King's work. Rather, he was stating, quite boldly, that the arguments over who King "really" was were irrelevant to the question of "leadership" among African-Americans. They were quite capable of understanding who King was and what he did. The imposition of a part of King's legacy - that peaceful preacher of non-violence and racial coexistence - stripped away not only the revolutionary King. It robbed King's message of its historic depth because the onus, at least in the whitewashed (pun intended) version being sold after his death, was upon the African-American community to meet the social and psychological needs of whites, rather than understanding desegregation as part of a much larger revolution of social and cultural and political values that would fulfill the promise, long ago stated succinctly by Langston Hughes, that, America might yet be America for all its people.

The First Blogger?

I'm just past half-way through Roland Boer's chapter on Walter Benjamin, and I decided to pause and go back and read what little I have on Benjamin. My introduction came through mentions other writers had made, and then I read Hannah Arendt's Men In Dark Times, which includes a profile of Benjamin. There are two small collections of various essays, fragments (including his "Notes On The Philosophy Of History"). One is entitled Illuminations, and its was edited by Arendt and includes the essay that appears in Men. The other, Reflections was edited by Peter Demetz.

What came through my reading these volumes was, initially, curiosity. As Arendt rightly notes in her essay, for an age that needed to pigeonhole writers and thinkers, Benjamin defies even the most ardent attempts to do so. Comfortable with Marxist thought, he didn't join the Party. He wrote essays on Baudelaire and Kafka, yet he wasn't a literary critic. He utilized theological categories in his analysis, yet was not a theologian (indeed, as a mostly-assimilated Jewish German, his ease with Christian thought was probably an oddity that defied explanation). He was led to Kabbalah by his lifelong friend Gershom Scholem, yet was not a mystic.

His longest works are intricate works on the interchange among the history of ideas, culture, and social thought. While one might be tempted to call him a cultural critic, even that doesn't capture the range of his vision.

In many ways, Walter Benjamin was an example of a kind of writer with which we are only now getting acquainted. I think Benjamin would have found the internet a marvelous tool; the academy wasn't sure what to do with him, literary and academic journals consistently rejected his essays and articles. Writing on a blog, however, would have provided a forum for Benjamin to present his musings without having to assuage the egos of those with whom he was engaging.

Arendt's essay on Benjamin, upon reflection, is frustrating on a number of levels. A pedantic, pedestrian kind of thinker, she focuses far more on the frustrations of Benjamin's life, personal and professional, reading backward from his suicide on the Franco-Spanish border to see little but tragedy. She calls his Habilitationschrift on the Trauerespiele a work on German drama, when it is in fact far more specific, far more wide-ranging in its analysis. She describes The Arcades Project an unfinished work on 19th-century Paris. That's a bit like calling Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics an unfinished work of theology. The Arcades Project was, as described and unfolded by Boer, a look at the way late capitalism had rendered Paris, rather than the pinnacle of culture (as it was viewed at the time by many), a decadent, Philistine realm where the final ravages of commodification had rendered people incapable of grasping their own decline.

It is easy, I suppose, to get caught up in the frustrations and failures Benjamin experienced in his life, looking back from that terrible moment when he decided to end his life rather than face the possibility of being turned over to the Gestapo and returned to Germany. In ill-health, he probably would not have survived long the gentle ministrations the Germans visited upon Jewish intellectuals. All the same, his writings are a testimony to the power of a mind and intellect refusing to bow to convention (including the conventions of academic politics and expectations) that offer a view of our society and culture that continues to enrich our lives.

What's It All About?

A colleague of mine enjoys teasing me because I (a) am married to an ordained United Methodist clergywoman, and (b) do all sorts of things one does not normally associate with what this person calls "being a churchboy", including liking psychedelic music (which this person refers to as "stoner music"). I find it fascinating not only because this person, who neither goes to church nor cares all that much for Church, seems to think it perfectly fine to tease me, with an undercurrent of moral scolding, for not conforming to some notion of what a "real Christian" does. Like, say, not listen to psychedelic music.

In a similar way, one of the recurrent right-wing scolds insists that I, and others, are "immoral". It is different only in degree rather than kind than my colleague's sometimes not-so-subtle scolding. Both charges - real Christians don't listen to all that weird music! Real Christians are MORAL! - hinge upon what is an irrelevant, and actually insidious, understanding of what it means to be a Christian. I was trying to figure out a way to sort through all this when I came across this post by John Meunier.

A holy person does no harm to himself or to others, either by what he does or by what he leaves undone.

A holy person does good to all people she encounters. Her life is one that enriches others in their bodies, their minds, and their souls. And she cares just as much for her own body, mind, and soul because there is great joy in living fully into the goodness of her own life.

A holy person knows where the power source of life can be found, and he is constantly found there. He worships with passion and reverence. He prays without ceasing. He searches the word of God with expectation that it has a word for him. He draws close to God by letting go of the world through fasting. He seeks out brothers and sisters to talk, listen, cry, celebrate, and mourn with because where they gather, God is.

This is a good start, and is very much in line with Wesley's understanding of holy living. All the same, I think there is a bit too much asceticism, a bit too little of the Bible in this. In particular, St. Paul. Paul's vision of what it means to be a Christian, at least in my understanding, begins with, "Christ came so that we have life, and that more abundantly." For me, holiness embraces not only the things John describes. Like St. Paul, and Jesus, it includes going about one's life no longer afraid that, in that living, one might slip and fall so far there will be no getting up. Jesus went about his work not caring for the moral scolds who insisted he hung out with the wrong crowd, or violated the rules set forth by God. St. Paul went about his missionary work even as he was chastised by St. Peter and the rest of the apostles. Why did they do this? Because both understood that, at its heart, being a Christian means being free.

It does not mean being free to do anything one wants to do. Rather, it means free to be as God intended. Living in service to others. Living with the understanding that God's love for us is real not because of what we do, but just because we are.

St. Paul does not speak of holiness directly. Rather he speaks of the fruits of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. While he certainly insists that we are to conduct our lives in a manner blameless before other persons and God, it is in these expressions of a full human life that a Christian demonstrates what it means to be fully human as a Christian.

I'm not one to sit around and write about the moral failings of others. This isn't because I am an immoral person. Rather, it is because conventional morality is irrelevant to the Christian life. Again, not because I believe God is immoral or amoral. Rather, the Christian life both embraces and transcends any passing ideas on conventional morality, seeing the Christian life as one lived freely, for others, in love and joy and all the rest. Further, I honestly cannot imagine any circumstance in which God cares what music we might choose to listen to, anymore than I believe God cares whether we wear a suit and tie to church, or shorts and flip-flops (I once raised eyebrows in a eucharist service at Wesley Theological Seminary by showing up in shorts, a t-shirt, and flip-flops; the celebrant, indeed, was "offended").

As long as we focus on non-issues - how we behave in inconsequential matters speaks more about who we are before God - the Church will always run in to trouble. Instead, we need to be living our lives full of joy and laughter, love and patience, with a heart and mind turned out to the sufferings of others, seeking to help them, be a presence in the midst of their pain. That is true holiness. That is what the fruits of the Spirit yield. Whether or not I tell other people they are immoral or bad or evil is immaterial; that we show them God's love through our freely-given love for them - that is what matters.

The Atheist Synthesis Of Bible And Theology - Boer On Bloch II

I would much rather that Bloch had allowed his politicised biblical criticism loose on theology. I think of the discernment of myths along class lines, between those that encourage sevility and those that enable human beings to stand up to the power that oppress. Is not this kind of discernment necessary in his readings of theology? These debates might continue, but, in the end, Bloch drops his ideological guard too often, especially in regard to theology and it is precisely here that is is needed. Roland Boer, Criticism of Heaven, p.56

One of the first books I read as a seminarian is Phyllis Bird's The Bible as the Church's Book, a succinct discussion of the history of the formation of the canon. It is indispensable to any understanding of the Bible, to any approach to this much-contested text, to grasp that, in its final form, we have a Bible at all because the Church as a whole, early in its life, determined certain texts to be central to our communal understanding, while others were not.

This does not mean the canon is "closed". On the contrary, one of the most important insights of Hans Frei's monograph on biblical hermeneutics, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, is that interpretation itself keeps the canon open.

All the same, a basic historic fact is the Bible, for all that it presents many faces to many readers, and offers so much to readers less interested in religion and theology, nevertheless is the book of the Church.

Ernst Bloch recognizes this reality, calling the Bible Christianity's "uneasy conscience". A fair description, to say the least; it is in the words of the texts that so many in Christian history have found the resources to protest all sorts of abuses of power and authority. This historical reality, one Bloch notes runs from the Albigensians (one could add the Cathars and Waldensians as well) through the Hussites in Bohemia through Joachim of Fiore and Thomas Munzer and the Peasant Revolt during the early days of the Reformation. Rather than denounce the Bible as nothing but a work designed by those in power to maintain their power, Bloch wants to know how it is possible this collection of writings has offered and continues to offer so many readers resources, strength for the journey from nobody to fully human.

Bloch finds it, as he writes in Atheism in Christianity, within the contested texts of the Bible itself. Using the best available biblical scholarship at the time - in particular that known as "redaction criticism", a fancy name for how the various writings are edited - Bloch espies in the texts abundant evidence not only of stories from above, but of protests from below, stories that tell not only of a people's protest against various authorities here on earth, but also the imposition of a God who supports and even defines and legitimizes that imposition. In other words, within the Bible itself (much as each historical age, according to Marx, contains within itself its own contradiction that will, over time, lead to its destruction and the creation of a higher stage through synthesis) there lies a protest against God, the core of an atheism that elevates trammeled humanity to stand as fully human.

While applauding, in general terms, this hermeneutics of class, Boer wishes, as the quote above indicates, that Bloch had moved from the Scriptures to theology. The Bible has, indeed served as a check on all sorts of theological excesses. Taking the next, somewhat logical, step, and insisting that the Church's adoption of the Bible includes the incomplete revision of a whole series of texts, rooted in an oral tradition "from below", that undermine the very idea of God, falls short for Boer.

I don't think that Boer gives Bloch due credit. While I agree his interpretations of specific texts - for example the Cain/Abel/God story in Genesis 4 - include an attention to editorial detail that demonstrate clearly enough the heavy hand of a redactor somewhere, I believe that Bloch's insistence that this undercurrent of protest a-theology is "hidden" is belied precisely by the history to which Bloch himself appeals. Were it as hidden as he insists, it would not have served as a source for various social and political protests movements in the history of European Christendom, awaiting academic historical criticism to unearth. That this fundamental contradiction within the text of the books themselves exists is obvious enough to a careful reader. That Bloch uses it to construct a vision of Christian thought as anthropocentric, atheistic, synthetic of the questions raised throughout the text as the stories from below and above clash without any clear resolution is a testimony to his respect for both the Bible and Christian theology.

Boer's basic criticism, that the success of Bloch's hermeneutic and use of various historical-critical methods is belied by his theologizing misses, I think, a crucial issue. Bloch's project in Atheism in Christianity is precisely to construct a Biblically-based a-theology, an understanding of human community rooted in the Scriptural narrative that sees no need for hypostasizing "God" in order to make of creation something more. The protest stories, the hermeneutic of suspicion within the Bible to its various triumphalisms, reveal that, at heart, the higher synthesis, without any need for "God", is at the heart of the Biblical testimony itself.

Matters Of Style - Boer On Bloch I

When I first cracked open The Principle of Hope back in 1992, this was the very first section of the very first chapter:

I move. From early on we are searching. All we do is crave, cry out. Do not have what we want.

This rather inauspicious beginning both reveals so much, yet hides so much, about the writing style of Ernst Bloch. Described as expressionistic, Bloch's writing has a distinctive beauty about it, an almost romantic sweep and grandeur that is unlike anything, in any language.

Before delving in to what Bloch has to say, Roland Boer first says what needs to be said about how Bloch says it (pp. 11-12):

For there is an extraordinary charge in reading Bloch. His style has always been a source of delight and consternation, often incomplete, missing the various elements of the more conventional sentences (most notable the verb), declaratory when speaking of the most ephemeral of matters and tentative where the ground is firmer. There are thoughts and ideas thrown forward full of suggestion and promise; the longer sentences in which he juxtaposes two or more ideas or metaphors; and then the impossibly long paragraphs that run on for pages. The style is energetic, allusive. . . More specifically, along with the expressionist presence, there is a prophetic and poetic feel to Bloch's sentences, paragraphs and discourse, one that seeks not only to speak with the urgency of prophetic voices but also the encyclopaedic allusiveness of Goethe's poetry. It seems to me that Bloch sought, by means of style itself, to allow what he called the 'spirit of utopia' to speak, to create a new way of writing through which the utopian would emerge. . . .(emphasis added)

The distinct pleasure in the style, an almost utopian charge in the syntax itself tempts me to apply the comment to Bloch that Terry Eagleton first used for Jameson, namely, that he would have the oppressive pleasure of knowing that his works will be read in some future, postcapitalist society. . . For utopia is not merely hard work but also an extraordinary pleasure, an intense charge of which we can find moments now but not the continuity it should have. This is what Bloch's prose provides - a glimmer of such a perpetual pleasure.(emphasis added)

The seductive power of Bloch's style is canny enough to make criticism more difficult. Like parsing poetry, it would seem an intellectual crime to take the step back necessary and point out where Bloch has erred; who would want to do something so pedestrian, so pedantic, so mundane as take the effusive writings and render them something less?

Boer's comments on Bloch's style are also important because of the very seductive quality of that writing. Because one can fall under its spell, it becomes necessary to make clear its beauty in order to do the difficult work of delving beneath that style to what it is Bloch is saying in this most beautiful way. Boer does this quite well, a point to which we shall turn in the next post.

By Way Of Introduction

Since the move this past summer, I have felt more focused in certain interests. In particular, reading through my small, incomplete Reinhold Niebuhr library gave me a greater appreciation for just how radical the pre-WWII Niebuhr was, that his critique of Protestant liberalism was from the left, although itself deeply rooted in much of the same set of categories. After Niebuhr, I read Ernst Bloch's most thoroughly theological work, Atheism in Christianity. While dated, particularly his approach to biblical criticism, there is still a wealth of beauty, as is usual in the case of Bloch. His thesis, that the dialectic of Scripture reveals a protest against the royalist vision of YHWH, that Jesus' life and ministry was a protest against just such a vision. Inherent in Bloch's critical work is the idea that, at heart, the Bible is as much a sustained argument against the reigning notions of God as it is a defense of God.

After floundering around quite a bit this fall, I was given a new sense of where I wanted to move in thinking about being a Christian after reading, twice in rapid succession, Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution. I was not just intellectually impressed, I was emotionally moved by much of Eagleton's writing, not least because, as a Marxist, Eagleton's work provided evidence that much of what has passed for "the God debate" over the past few years has been deeply flawed on any number of levels. I turned back to Ernst Bloch, a collection of his writings on aesthetics (The Utopian Function of Art and Literature), and then, taking a hint from a friend on Facebook, just received (after much toil and trouble) Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology by Australian Roland Boer. The book is nothing short of exactly what I'm interested in - a critical engagement of 20th century Marxist thinkers at their deepest engagement with theology. Boer reads Bloch, Walter Benjamin (I guess I never really considered him a Marxist, per se; more a fellow-traveler), Louis Althusser, Henri Lefebvre, Antonio Gramsci, Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Zizek, and Theodor Adorno. That such a wide array of important figures in 20th century Marxist thought have considered theology important enough to address on its own terms should give any critic who wishes to dismiss it as irrational drivel at least a moment's pause.

So, because I am utterly predictable, expect posts over the next week or two on Boer's work, as I work through what he has to say about each of these men. That this work was suggested to me at the very moment that I was moving toward this very subject - the junction of Marxism and theology, and how to engage with respect two very different intellectual traditions - is proof, to me, of the existence of God.

I Write So Others Can Read Me

I was recently informed that I write too much. Further, by providing links on Facebook, I am advertising my writing, which is apparently wrong somehow.

I'm not sure how and why this is bugging me, but it has really got under my skin. Do I write too much? I started to think I have; moreover, I think it far better to write less, and write it well, than write more, no matter how much rattles around my mostly empty skull. Furthermore, after four years of writing on the Internet, I just knew that, with the rise of a new Republican majority in the House (and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell acting like he's majority leader), there would be plenty of opportunities for me to huff and puff about how truly stupid and horrible and full of crap so much of our public discourse is; yet, this is no less true than when the Democrats were in control of Congress, the fault hardly lies with Republicans. The rhetorical nightmare that has been the national response to the Tucson shootings is evidence enough for me that we are a deeply flawed country, unable to confront an event like this in anything like a sane, contrite manner. Rather than exhaust my outrage button because I would keep hitting it, I am just going to allow the vast majority of the stupid to pass me by.

Furthermore, this site was never intended as a running commentary on our stupid discourse. That I bogged myself down that way far too often is my own fault. My New Year's Resolution to refocus has been aided by my decision to no longer get too upset by the constant flow of crap that is too much of our mainstream social and political commentary. Years of complaining, not just from me but all over the Internet hasn't changed the nature of our discourse one bit. So, far better to lean toward one's strengths, true?

So, sure, I write on the internet. Because I've always wanted to do that, there are topics that interest me; more important, I think they are important, serious topics, and I try best I can to treat them as such without (I hope) ever losing any sense that I am a walk-on, a bit player in so many of the discussions of the topics about which I write. My own preferences are eclectic enough that my guess is most of those who read are left scratching their heads, wondering why I'm wasting my time. That it is my time to waste should be clear enough, I suppose.

Finally, as to posting links on FB, like most writers (J. D. Salinger is the exception that proves the rule), I write so others can read what I've written. While the initial exercise is little more than making clear in my own mind what I might think about this or that topic under consideration, I put this stuff up on the internet to see if what I have to say, and the way I say it, makes any sense. Most of the time, I guess the answer on both counts is "No". All the same, I continue to do it, and to post those links, in the hope that someone, somewhere, finds something in my various typing exercises to make them mad enough, or sad enough, or frustrated enough, to start thinking for themselves. If you find those Facebook links too much, all I can say is, "Don't push that button!"

Finally, as a general response, I have to ask, "Why do you care?"

Will Illinois Join Civilized Society?

Just before leaving office under a cloud that turned in to a hailstorm for him, former Illinois Governor George Ryan not only imposed a moratorium on all death penalties, he commuted the death sentences of all those on the state's death row. He did this after 13 death row inmates were exonerated by DNA evidence, by the combined efforts of students at Northwestern University and The Innocence Project. After the commutation, two more inmates still serving life sentences were shown conclusively to be innocent. The moratorium has remained in place, with subsequent governors Blagojevich and Quinn supporting it until the state legislature rewrote the rules.

Yesterday, they went a step further. The previous week the lower house passed a bill ending the practice of judicial murder. The state senate followed suit. All the bill awaits now is Gov. Pat Quinn's signature. Quinn is dithering, supporting the moratorium while still supporting a more "just" death penalty. In the midst of so much horror and sadness, the news that Gov. Quinn has signed the repeal would be a moment of profound joy.

Fifteen states have ended the practice. A majority of Americans are opposed to it, for the first time in our history. Its deterrent value was long ago proved non-existent. Because of stringent appeal rules set up by the US Supreme Court years pass between the imposition of the penalty and its actual occurrence. In the end, those executed rarely are the same individuals who committed the crimes for which they've been convicted. Its disproportionality in relation to the race and class of the perpetrator have rendered it a joke, a sick, horrid joke. Two decades ago, a long-time supporter on the Supreme Court, Harry Blackmun announced that he no longer supported what he would term "the machinery of death".

I hope and pray that Gov. Quinn does the right thing, the just thing, and signs the bill.

Forgive My Lack Of Sympathy

I suppose I should have more compassion for the people of Tucson, AZ. The events of this past weekend have focused attention on their city in a way no one would want their municipality to suddenly grab the spotlight. Furthermore, mass murder does have a way of making people pause. All the same, I found some parts of this story on Morning Edition from NPR just, well, ludicrous.

Ms. SARAH EVANS: It's kind of like 9/11 for me. It took me a long time to wrap my head around the complexity of all the events that happened.

ROBBINS: The tears are never too far away as she talks. It will be a while before the processing is complete, if it ever is.

If there is any evidence that narcissism, now removed from the psychologist's "Bible", was still prevalent, this short bit should disabuse them of it. See, Ms. Evans, all teary-eyed, considers what happened on Saturday "complex", an inscrutable act like the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, that, for her, have everything to do with Sarah Evans. Her tears are for her inability to "process" (which reporter Robbins helpfully adds, in an aside, may never end).

I'm sorry, but I have very little sympathy for Ms. Evans. A nice woman, I suppose, gathering with a couple hundred fellow Tucson residents to walk and run through the streets of the city, she seems to have little comprehension that events on Saturday have nothing to do with her. They are, by and large, clear and easy enough to understand. There is no "processing" needed. Not really.

All I can get from Ms. Evans statement is she almost no psychical or emotional resources to deal with even the most peripheral tragedy. I consider this a symptom of how far too many Americans can be considered ill-prepared to handle any type of emergency situation. Seriously. This woman is aflutter because of a shooting in her city. Good Lord, what if she sat back and considered the reality that there is, roughly speaking, a hate crime committed once an hour each and every day somewhere in the United States? That there were, on average, 151 violent crimes committed each and every hour in the United States in 2009? Of course, these numbers reflect reported incidents.

What if I were to say to Ms. Evans that 34% of women in the United States were the victims of sexual coercion by a spouse or significant other? Would that leave her teary eyed, unable to leave her home because the situation is so complex?

We are not going to be able to address the reality of violence in the United States as long as close our eyes and ears to its banality. As long as a single shooting incident leaves people so flustered and unable to cope that they cannot leave their homes, and when they do emerge are teary-eyed and barely coherent, I have to wonder how it will be possible to talk about the reality around us without causing a national case of the vapors.

Our moral confusion in the face of the events on Saturday are as much a result of our insulation from the reality far too many of our fellow citizens face as it is a measurable and acceptable emotional response to a public trauma. Far too many Americans understand the reality of violence as just another part of their day to be either surprised or unduly horrified by the mass shooting. It is cheap and easy to point the finger of blame. It gives us an eased conscience to denounce the act, something that costs us nothing, asks nothing of us, and leaves us content in our remove from the human reality around us. I am not saying that the shooting on Saturday is not evil; on the contrary, I am insisting it is an all-too-common evil, something with which we have become too familiar, too accustomed to do more than shake our heads at its "senselessness", without ever grasping the far more disturbing reality that, perhaps, it might just make sense as being part and parcel of living in America.

Stupidity Wastes No Time

I must admit I am still frustrated, even angry, with the on-going political commentary concerning Saturday's mass shooting in Arizona. Matt Yglesias, Duncan Black, and Digby, among large-traffic liberal bloggers, have written quite a bit - with digby clearly out in front with the whole "It's the right's fault because they use violent rhetoric!" angle - including stirring defenses of the politicization of this event. The discovery of a similarity between some of Loughner's beliefs, expressed in his YouTube uploads, and those of one David Wynn Miller is adding fuel to the inferno of the whole view that, sure Loughner may be legally insane, but he was insane in a certain way which gives us license to make all sorts of accusations about our political opponents.

Of course, the right has enough evidence to give them tools to shoot back. Loughner's reading list includes The Communist Manifesto, Fahrenheit 451, and other classics of liberal education. It also includes Mein Kampf (full disclosure, I have read the first and last of these, but not the middle). All of which, really, means absolutely nothing.

There is no way to stop the endless flow of stupid crap, sides-taking, pointing fingers. I mean, really, not only is it fun, it doesn't involve any effort, it gives one a sense of moral and political superiority to make clear that a mass murderer is one of The Other. We congratulate ourselves on "proving" that he is One Of Them. It's cheap, it's easy, and like most such things, it is wrong.

To the morally righteous who insist we must denounce violence, I posted yesterday in order to remind readers that ours is a society so soaked in violence we do not even notice it anymore. Taking the opportunity of an event like this to denounce violence may make one feel better. It would be less egregiously hypocritical and shallow if one spent some time, each and every day, denouncing the attrition among the poor, among women and children, a steady-stream of broken bodies and lives we tune out because it is so common.

To the oblivious, who wonder, "What is happening to us?", I can only say, "Nothing new." Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John Kennedy were successfully assassinated. Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama have been targets of high-profile failed assassination attempts (more full disclosure - my grandmother happened to be in Niagara Falls in 1901 when Pres. McKinley was assassinated, a reward from her grandmother for good grades in school). From Shays Rebellion in Massachusetts to the New Orleans police department using the Katrina flood as an excuse to murder African-Americans, our country has seen violence as a legitimate tool for making political and social statements. It's just a fact. Violence is, indeed, as American as cherry pie. Who holds the gun is an important consideration, but at the end of the day, it seems, in America, someone is always holding a gun.

Before we start casting aspersions on our political opponents of whatever stripe, or claiming we are king of moral hill because we can denounce violence, we need to take a good, long look at the country, the state, the city in which we live. We need to hear the cries of the families whose lives are disrupted by violence every day. This event may have a whole cluster of specific markers about it that may, indeed, mark it out as some kind of political statement, fed in part from the poisonous rhetorical atmosphere - when Democrats are denounced as standing for policies that are contrary to American tradition and law; when the President of the United States is denounced as an anti-American foreigner holding political views antithetical to our traditions, is it any wonder there are folks out there willing to pick up a gun and solve our problems this way? - but, right now, I think we need to take a moment and look around us. The bodies lie unburied, the cries of the slain call out just to be noticed. Instead of shouting about how evil are those who don't think like we do, we might all shut up, listen, and maybe do something about the carnage in which we stand, the killing floor that is America and its history.

Snapshots

What follows are snippets, glosses and illuminations that I offer as revision and extension upon the following comment, via a friend on Facebook: "There is no stopping crazy and no politics to it. But many people want the nation to search it's soul and ask why "America" has changed. All while 49% of every year's averaged murdered are black men. Poverty, education, nutrition, access, rights are all things we as a nation can change. Our shock is cheaply won and immorally numb." Lest we get too far ahead of ourselves, we should remember - ours is a nation that cleanses itself each and every day in the blood of the forgotten.

From Wikipedia:

On April 19, 1989, the slightly-built 28-year-old investment banker was violently assaulted while jogging in New York City's Central Park. She was raped and beaten almost to death. When found about four hours later, she was suffering from severe hypothermia and blood loss from multiple lacerations and internal bleeding, and her skull had been fractured so badly that her left eye was removed from the socket. The initial medical prognosis was that she would die or, at best, remain in a permanent coma due to her injuries. Remarkably, she largely recovered, with some lingering disabilities related to balance and loss of vision. As a result of the severe trauma, she had no memory of the attack or of any events up to an hour preceding the assault.

The crime, one of 3,254 rapes reported in New York City that year, was unique in the level of public outrage it provoked. New York Governor Mario Cuomo told the New York Post, "This is the ultimate shriek of alarm."

According to a police investigation, the culprits were gangs of teenagers who would assault strangers as part of an activity that became known as "wilding." New York City detectives said the word was used by the suspects themselves to describe their actions to police.[4] This account has been disputed by other journalists, who say that it originated in a police detective's misunderstanding of the suspects' use of the phrase "doing the wild thing", lyrics from Tone Lōc's hit song "Wild Thing".[5][6] April 19 was known to have been a night when such a gang attack occurred, in which the suspects had entered the park in Harlem with over 30 acquaintances. Contrary to normal police procedure, which stipulates that the names of suspects under the age of sixteen are also to be withheld, the names of the juveniles arrested in this case were released to the press before any of them had been formally arraigned or indicted, including one 14-year-old who was ultimately not charged.[1] The mainstream media's double-standard — printing the names, photos, and addresses of the juvenile suspects while shielding Meili — was cited by the editors of the City Sun and the Amsterdam News to explain their continued use of Meili's name in their coverage of the story.[7] While many teenage suspects were identified (or identified themselves) as participants in the Central Park assaults that night — although not necessarily in the attack on Meili — only five, known later as the Central Park Five, were brought to trial.

--snip--

In 2002, another man's confession, plus DNA evidence confirming his crime, led the district attorney's office to recommend vacating the convictions of the teenagers originally accused and sentenced to prison. In 2002, convicted rapist and murderer Matias Reyes, serving a life sentence for other crimes but not, at that point, associated by the police with the attack on Meili, declared that he had committed the assault, and that he had acted alone. The DNA evidence confirmed his participation in the crime and identified him as the sole contributor of the semen found in and on the victim "to a factor of one in 6,000,000,000 people"

A small school of literature arose in the wake of the initial convictions in the Central Park jogger case, questioning the moral education of minority youth that would lead to "wilding".

Wikipedia, again:

The Columbine High School massacre occurred on Tuesday, April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Columbine, an unincorporated area of Jefferson County, Colorado, United States, near Denver and Littleton. Two senior students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, embarked on a massacre, killing 12 students and one teacher. They also injured 21 other students directly, and three people were injured while attempting to escape. The pair then committed suicide. It is the fourth-deadliest school massacre in United States history, after the 1927 Bath School disaster, 2007 Virginia Tech massacre and the 1966 University of Texas massacre, and the deadliest for an American high school.

The massacre provoked debate regarding gun control laws, the availability of firearms in the United States, and gun violence involving youths. Much discussion also centered on the nature of high school cliques, subcultures, and bullying, as well as the role of violent movies and video games in American society. The shooting also resulted in an increased emphasis on school security, and a moral panic aimed at goth culture, social outcasts, the gun culture, the use of pharmaceutical anti-depressants by teenagers, violent films and music, teenage internet use,[1] and violent video games.

As with the Central Park jogger, this incident spawned a small industry of social and cultural commentary. Newt Gingrich blamed liberal Democrats. There arose a suspicion of difference, particularly over anyone who participated in Goth culture. A host of myths, each and every one proved false, followed the retelling of the story of Columbine.

Jim Crow was not just a set of laws. It was an entire social and cultural system, enforced by extra-judicial murder, events that took on a form of social and cultural liturgy, reinforcing roles and status. Unlike contemporary executions, done quietly, in secret, these were community events. This photo was turned in to a postcard.

The following are two stories that appear in today's Chicago Tribune, so routine they do not even merit major comment.

Benjamin West was standing in a public housing play lot in University Village when two teenage boys approached, asking him for a lighter.

Moments later, West, 59, lay naked and dying, with his clothes heaped atop him in the cold after the teens robbed him and beat him, Cook County prosecutors said Saturday. West was pronounced dead at Stroger Hospital less than an hour after the Tuesday-morning attack.

Chicago police said a dispute over the 99-cent lighter erupted into a fight. The teens — cousins Sharee Musgray, 15, and Angelo Cobbins, 17 — were both charged as adults with first-degree murder and robbery.

A 15-year-old boy who was shooting at several other teens on the street was shot to death Friday afternoon by an off-duty Aurora police officer trying to intervene in the fight, a police spokesman said.

The teen, who has not been identified, refused to drop his revolver after the officer told him to do so and then aimed the gun at the 11-year-veteran who fatally shot the teen, Aurora Police Spokesman Dan Ferrelli said in a press release today.
The teen, whose name has not been released but who is from Aurora, was declared dead about 5:25 p.m. at Rush Copley Medical Center in Aurora, about two hours after the shooting, according to the release.

Similar stories, from the Los Angeles Times:

A 26-year-old man was fatally shot Saturday at his home in the Central-Alameda neighborhood of South Los Angeles, authorities said.

Eleodoro Gaspar-Tlatelpa was in his living room about 10 p.m. when he was struck by multiple shots fired through his window, according to Los Angeles Police Lt. Samuel Rhone and a coroner’s investigator.

The suspect fled, and police said at this point they had no leads. The victim was pronounced dead at the scene.

Redlands police have redeployed two-thirds of their 74-officer staff in the wake of a shooting Wednesday night in which a suspected Latino gang member fatally shot two black youths and wounded two others, an incident that the mother of one victim believes was racially motivated.

According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Statistics Report, Preliminary Findings for the first six months of last year, there were 21 murders in the city of Tucson, AZ during that time period, roughly three-and-a-half per month. So, yesterday was an unusual day, but hardly unique.

Former Chicago police officer Jon Burge presided over a reign of terror on the South Side of the city, from 1972-1991, when he is alleged to have tortured as many as 200 criminal defendants. Burge, white, serving in the majority-black south side, was found not-guilty several times, although he was fired by the police department in 1991, and a series of civil suits followed. He was eventually convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice charges, leveled by federal prosecutors in regard to testimony in the series of suits the City of Chicago had to settle.

I could go on, but I think I'll stop for now. When blacks are lynched to enforce white supremacy, it's a party. When blacks for a political party in the city of Oakland that includes wearing army fatigues, and carrying perfectly legal sidearms, much of the nation quivers in fear. One of the people who inspired the Black Panthers, H. Rap Brown, was denounced when he quipped that "violence is as American as cherry pie." Yet, it is Brown, not his critics who are correct. All the hand-wringing over the mass shooting yesterday is a cheap escape from the reality that our history is a river of blood in which we swim.

Who Needs To Soul-Search?

Yesterday's mass shooting in Tuscon, AZ is a test case for our public discourse. Quite apart from the untold human tragedy, our reaction to the event as a people will tell us not so much about who we are, but about those who are the gatekeepers of our national dialogue. So far, color me unimpressed, sad, and amused.

We are so accustomed to the left/right divide, absent any but the slightest evidence whatsoever, there was a rush to answer that most difficult of questions: Why did this happen? Perusing Twitter yesterday, the general sense was there was a need to tie this event to the seeming uptick in violent rhetoric, particularly on the right; to tie Jared Loughner, the alleged shooter, to the Tea Party, to the culture of gun enthusiasm. As Duncan Black said, "Which Team Does This Nut Play For".

The reality of violence, its ubiquity in our social and cultural and political history, its prominence in our popular and high culture, the reality of violence in our homes, our schools, our streets, our prisons, our churches, our places of work all make placing blame in a case such as this virtually impossible. Furthermore, "blame" is for children. It is an escape from responsibility.

There are other ways to escape responsibility, too. Among the statements released yesterday by various elected officials, House Speaker John Boehner's use of the adjective "senseless" can be taken any number of ways. Personally, I take it as meaningless. No act is "senseless". The person who acted had "a sense" as to why the act was performed. Political assassinations, successful or not, are usually done to make a statement, to achieve a particular political goal the person so acting believes cannot be achieved any other way. Even John Hinkley's attempt on the life of Pres. Reagan in 1981 made sense, to him. Obsessively pursuing the actress Jodi Foster, Hinkley decided that, like Robert DeNiro's character, murdering (or at least attempting to murder) a political figure would garner her attention. Calling the act "senseless" divorces it from any possible attempt to understand the act as something real, something human, some part of our national life.

I would like to offer an alternative approach. One that seeks to understand what happened yesterday, given our limited understanding of the event and the facts surrounding it, that nevertheless provides us all an opportunity to take in the enormity of it, the horror of it, the humanity of it.

Shut the hell up.

There are 9 people dead, including a nine-year-old girl. Nine families whose lives have been torn asunder by the persistence of violence in America. Those who survived, including Rep. Giffords, are in for a long road to physical and psychic recovery. The young man who has been placed in custody for the event, from what little evidence we have, seems to show signs of some kind of mental illness; some bit of compassion needs to be extended to him, as well, as someone who might not have been aware of the moral import of his actions.

Rather than rushing to judgment - which team does this nut play for? - in silence, we might discover our own complicity in the prevalence of violence. Politics is, indeed, about struggle, about power, and violence is merely an expression of struggle, a tool for those both in and out of power. In America, however, there is an almost mythic quality to the resort to violence. We read it in declarations concerning our private response to crime. We read it in the celebration, not so much of our military personnel, but of military actions that result in mass death. We see it in homes where far too many women and children find no haven, no respite from the ugliness of the world outside. We fear it at work, wondering if some employee or former employee might decide to take out frustrations or grievances by bringing a gun and opening fire. We read it in our newspapers as various politicians and their supporters declare that violent opposition to whatever prevailing party or ideological rule is not only possible, but morally and politically legitimate.

All of this violence, and we far too often remain silent. All the calls to violence and all too often dismiss it as "mere" rhetoric. In short order, I am quite sure, we will read (if it hasn't been suggested already; I don't peruse the comment threads of right-wing web sites for the sake of my mental hygiene) that, had some person in the crowd had a weapon, the alleged perpetrator might have been stopped (I'm guessing that owning a gun provides psychic powers; such an individual would know who this person was and what he planned, and could stop it before it began). Thus is the cycle of violence heralded, and given force to continue.

Since we remain silent in the midst of the ordinary violence that surrounds us, why is it that when the extraordinarily violent occurs, we suddenly find ourselves moved to speak?

Rethinking Christian Sexual Ethics: Human Agency Under Capitalism

Once again, it's the fault of The New Inquiry and their damn syllabus. Anwyn Crawford's essay on the intersection of capitalism, feminism, and sexuality has made me realize that this subject, a theme with which I've played on and off over the life of my time writing on the internet, has been far too abstract, far too naive, far too blind to the realities that shape our understanding of being human, being engendered, being sexual beings. Before we can be clear about how it might be possible to be Christian - that is, fully human, free for the sake of freedom in service to others - we should be clear about the intersecting systems that limit our ability even to make that choice.

Ms. Crawford's essay has made me realize I have much more to learn, much more to think through. The essay itself, covering everything from anorexia to porn to riot grrrl from a radical feminist perspective, is well worth the read in and for itself. It has also made me see that unpacking the ways the world seeks to define us, and to do so without our consent and prior to our ability to grasp that we are being defined and limited, is part and parcel of what it means to do Christian ethics. Unless the scales fall from our eyes, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how thorough we may sound to ourselves, we are being unfaithful to the calling to work out what it means to be Christian, living in free community for the sake of the world.

"The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death"

The New Inquiry is to be thanked and praised for providing a link to this 2005 commencement address by the late author David Foster Wallace. I really don't have anything to say about this, beyond praising the beauty and profundity of the possibility Wallace presents his listeners (and now readers) available in even the most mundane, perhaps (as he describes them) even frustrating, situations. That right here, right now may just hold the possibility for some transcendent moment - each here and each now, provided we open ourselves to it - is indeed a cliche. As Wallace makes the point, however, it is the "capital-T truth".