Some Personal Reflections

In the midst of thinking about and praying in this Passion weekend, I have been led to read the Preface to Jurgen Moltmann's The Coming of God. Normally, I skip prefaces, yet I sat and read this and discovered a passage that echoed in my own heart. First, he notes that he was not brought up in a Christian home, and only discovered and read the Bible as a German POW after the Second World War.

Right down to the present day, theology has continued to be for me a tremendous adventure, a journey of discovery into a, for me, unknown territory, a voyage without the certainty of a return, a path into the unknown with many surprises and not without disappointments. If I have a theological virtue at all, then it is one that has never hitherto been recognized as such: curiosity.

I have never done theology in the form of a defense of ancient doctrines or ecclesiastical dogmas. It has always been a jorney of exploration. Consequently my way of thinking is experimental - an adventure of ideas - and my style of communication is to suggest. I do not defend ay impersonal dogmas, but nor do I merely express my own personal opinion. I make suggestions within a community. So I write without any built-in safeguards, recklessly as some people think. My own propositions are intended to be a challenge to other people to think for themselves - and of course they are a challenge to objective refutation too. Theologians also belong to the communio sanctorum, the communion of saints, provided that the true saints are not merely justified sinner but accepted doubters, too, thus belonging just as much to the world as to God.

Unlike Moltmann, I was brought up in church, baptized and confirmed at First United Methodist Church, Sayre, PA. After a pretty standard and typical college experience, I went through what I now consider my own wilderness years, landing safely, if somewhat bruised and psychologically battered, at the safe shores of Wesley Theological Seminary 20 years ago. I have, ever since, considered this the singular event of my life. What came before was, at best, preparation. What has come since has been a blessing beyond words, all down to that moment in the late summer of 1990 when I stepped in to my dorm room in northwest Washington, DC and discovered a people who were willing to let me be a part of their lives, to start this journey that, for me, will not end even as death takes me.

This blog has been an important part of my own working out of what it means for me to live as one claimed by the risen Christ. Even at its most profane, most bombastic, even occasionally humorous moments, all I have ever been doing is trying to figure out for myself what it means to call myself a Christian. Does it even mean anything at all, or is it little more than fantastic thinking surrounding the on-going delusions of the mad, those who actually consider our world something more than a passing phase in the emptiness of cosmic history.

Nothing I have ever written here, whether on topical matters of the moment, my own philosophical curiosity, or faithful reflections on what God continues to do for all of us, has been to satisfy some vain grasping after intellectual integrity for its own sake. That kind of thing, the life of the mind chasing down various ephemera for the sake of itself, doesn't interest me in the least. Nor am I interested in being seen by others - for I surely do not see myself! - as some kind of self-proclaimed expert. On any matter whatsoever. Expertise is a highly overrated commodity. I am astounded each and every day by the array of things I cannot know and will never know. All I can say in my own defense is I write what I do know, never claiming any more for it than that - it is what I know - and I chase down what it might mean for myself and others, to the best of my meager abilities. I am quite happy with the expectation that quite a lot, if not most, of the things I have written and will continue to write, will be proved quite wrong. Not to do this, however, would be a kind of premature death for me. To refuse to take a stand, even if all upon which I stand is washing away by the tides of time and the pressure of reality, is a kind of cowardice. One cannot fall unless one first stands, and the rock upon which I claim to stand, that cornerstone the builders rejected, has held up countless others, so I have faith there is room for one more.

All this is to say that what I do here, and will continue to do as long as I can, to the best of what little abilities I have, is and will be working through what it means to profess that one is claimed by the crucified and risen Christ. Not for me, because the first thing that bursts forth on Easter is the realization that none of this is about me, or you, or you, or any individual. To stand upon the rock that is the risen Jesus of Nazareth is to look out and realize that our world is not defined as a veil of tears, that the burden of existence has been lifted, that the pain and suffering we see around us - not just of our fellow human beings, but the planet itself, groaning as it does under the weight of our many violations of its integrity and wholeness - is not the final word. If God exists, if Easter really happened, if Jesus was indeed raised from the dead, then all bets are off. We are, even now, if we are willing to see and hear and even work for it, watching the birth of that New Creation. Chronicling my own meager perception of that birth is what I do.

In short, this is all personal because I believe and proclaim and confess and profess that none of it has little to do with me at all. The beauty and joy and pain of life, in all its various flavors and colors, fill me precisely because I am unimportant, ignorant, a tiny voice in the deafening chorus before the throne of God. I have no interest, nor investment, in saying anything once for all. I am glad, however, that I have been baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, bearing in my very being the marks of the crucified and risen one. That is the only unchanging reality of my life. To quote St. Thomas Aquinas, all the rest is straw.

The Mystery Of Holy Saturday

N.B.: This was originally published on April 23, 2011.  I have made some minor corrections for spelling, but otherwise it is at it appeared two years ago.  I can't imagine saying more, or better, what I wrote here.  Wait and watch with me, as we consider the dead Jesus in the interconnected reality of the Triune Life of God.

The vision of death by the mode of immediate experience, is the most complete punishment possible. And since the death of Christ was complete, since through his own experience he saw the death which he had freely chosen to undergo, the soul of Christ went down into the underworld where the vision of death is. For death is called "underworld", infernus, and it has been loosed from out of the deeper underworld, ex inferno inferiori. The lower or deeper underworld is where one sees death. When God raised Christ he drew him, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, from out of the lower underworld, after delivering him from the torture of that underworld, solutis doloribus ingerni. That is why the prophet says, "He did not leave my soul in the underworld." Christ's suffering, the greatest one could conceive, was like that of the damned who cannot be damned any ore. That is, his suffering went to the length of infernal punishment. . . . He alone through such a death entered into glory. He wanted to experience the poena sensus like the damned in Hell for the glorifying of his Father, and so as to show that one should obey the Father even to the utmost torture. That means praising and glorifying God in every possible way for our justification - which is what Christ has done.

Nicholas of Cusa
De Civitate Dei

We are in that time over which the Gospels remain silent. From the moment on Friday evening when Jesus corpse is laid in the tomb until the arrival of the women on Sunday morning there is nothing. One sentence and paragraph ends, another begins. The Sabbath lies in-between. The only hint that day contained anything of substance is given not in the Gospel, but in 1 Peter, where the author claims Jesus preached to the dead.

Which, of course, raises far more questions that such a short phrase could possibly answer.

The mystery of the Passion is boundless. On this day of Biblical silence, we are nevertheless pushed to consider the naked fact of Jesus' death. What does that mean for one who claimed solidarity with the God of Israel whom he called his Father? In a sense, reflecting upon this day only becomes possible because of Easter. Had there been no resurrection, there would be no reason to consider this day, what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls "the hiatus". Yet, there is this hiatus, this break. Jesus is dead. The silence of the witnesses is deafening in the questions it raises.

The same von Balthasar noted above has a short yet powerful meditation on the Passion, Mysterium Paschale, from whose pages the Nicholas of Cusa epigram comes. The chapter on Saturday is entitled "Going To The Dead", and in it, von Balthasar considers the 1 Peter passage as well as later doctrinal developments, the question of the development of the idea of Sheol, Gehenna, Purgatory, Limbo, Hell, within the context of the fact of Jesus being dead. His final move is to a Trinitarian consideration of the event, which is, to me, the starting point of a fuller understanding (never full; the events of these days are without full measure). From pp. 174-175:

That the Redeemer is solidary with the dead, or, better, with this death which makes of the dead, for the first time, dead human beings in all reality - this is the final consequence of the redemptive mission he has received from the Father. His being with the dead is an existence at the utmost pitch of obedience, and because the One thus obedient is the dead Christ, it constitutes the "obedience of a corpse" (the phrase is Francis of Assisi's) of a theologically unique kind. By it Christ takes the existential measure of everything that is sheerly contrary to God, og the entire object of the divine eschatological judgment, which here is grasped in that event in which it is "cast down". . . . But at the same time, this happening gives the measure of the Father's mission in all its amplitude; the "exploration" of Hell is an event of the (economic) Trinity.

--snip--

If the Father must be considered as the Creator of human freedom - with all its forseeable consequences - then judgment belongs primordially to him, and thereby Hell also; and when he sends the Son into the world to save it instead of judging it, and, to equip him for this function, gives "all judgment to the Son" (John 5:22), then he must also introduce the Son made man into "Hell" (as the supreme entailment of human liberty). But the Son cannot really be introduced into Hell save as a dead man, on Holy Saturday. This introducing is needful since the dead must "hear the voice of the Son of God," and hearing that voice, "live". (John 5:15) The Son must "take in with his own eyes what in the realm of creation is imperfect, informed, chaotic" so as to make it pass over into his own domain as Redeemer. . . .

This vision of chaos by the God-man has become for us the condition of our vision of Divinity. His exploration of the ultimate depths has transformed what was a prison into a way. . . .

There is much more in this vein, but the point, I think, should be clear. Even as that moment of abandonment lingers, it bears the character of inner-Trinitarian obedience, of the furthering of the mission of the Father by the Son through the Spirit. What von Balthasar calls throughout the solidarity of the dead Christ with the dead captures the fullness of this mission, in both its immanent and economic Trinitarian forms, and what the historic doctrine of the descent to Hell and the Harrowing of Hell by the dead Christ cannot. What constitutes the character of this obedience is nothing more or less than taking in to very existence of the inner life of the Triune God that which cannot be, that which was before God created, chaos and lifelessness. Matters of Hell and Gehenna, of Purgatory and Limbo, not only cross a line where speculation rooted in misunderstanding and silence should calm our nervous spirits, but in any event continue to see the Passion as something rooted in human existence, human needs. The being solidary with the dead is part of the Divine desire to be in relationship even there, with the dead in the nothingness, the powerlessness (he quotes the Hewbrew refa'im, those who are powerless, to emphasize the utter passivity of Jesus even in death) which is their lot. Salvation is not only God's act for Creation. Considering the death of Jesus within the context of the Trinitarian life of God leads one to see the fullness of God's desire to take in to that mysterious love of the Three for one another that which cannot be a part of it. The Passion becomes, through the emptiness and silence of Holy Saturday, more clearly understood as a working out of the depth of the Three Persons for One Another in the world God created, even to that which denies creation.

We are in a time of vigilance, of waiting and watching. As we wait and watch in silence, what no eye has seen nor ear heard is about to burst forth. We believe this and proclaim it as the heart of the Good News which even now rests in the silent depths of the grave. On this Holy Saturday, only because we can look back from Easter, we see just how far Jesus is willing to go, not only for us, for for the Father who loved him, and left him alone to die on the cross.

Death Of The Son Of God

The scene from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is iconic. After voluntarily going to The White Witch's camp, offering himself as a substitute for the crimes of Edmund Pevensie, Aslan the Great Lion is humiliated, his mane shorn. He is bound and gagged and set roughly on a table. The White Witch, her face flush with triumph raises the knife and plunges it in Aslan's heart. The noble beast breathes his last. The White Witch, an almost erotically charged look of satisfaction upon her face, declares the final end to the great Lion, and moves on to the battle with the Pevensies and the armies of Narnia.

This too-obvious allegory of the crucifixion never ceases to move me. It also makes me wonder if people understand that, on that Friday afternoon, God died. The day belonged to the Adversary. The signs and wonders reported in the Gospel of St. Matthew - the rending of the veil in the Temple; the rising of the dead saints; the darkness at noon - can be understood, I suppose, as marks of victory. Yet, whose victory? With the veil in the Temple torn, the God of Israel has departed. The dead, vomited out of the ground like bad beef, are not to be embraced but feared. In these hours and days before the real ending of the story (which should always be borne in mind, but at the moment set to one side as we contemplate this moment of pain, suffering, agony, Godforsakenness, and death) these walking dead are a blasphemy, a violation of the Divine order.

As a side note, I suppose, we should consider the betrayal of Judas. As I've read The Gospel According to Judas, with the author I have to ask how Judas' betrayal is qualitatively different from the abandonment by the disciples, the denials of St. Peter, and even that final abandonment by God. On that Friday, in the midst of all the horror and pain, Jesus comes to understand the lengths to which he must go, the loss he must endure. Pain and death are a part of life, of being human. Any reading of the Gospel narratives leads to the conclusion that Jesus' predictions of his own passion are rooted not in some weird Divine foreknowledge, but the all too human realization that the only way his path leads is the very sticky end of a Roman cross.

So, how important then is Judas' betrayal in the overall scheme of things? Jesus made the choice to follow the path to which God, his Father, called him. He walked it, understanding it led to the Hill of the Skull, outside the city gates. Judas was paid, to be sure. No less dishonorable, however, was the fleeing of the Apostles. No less a betrayal was St. Peter's insistent denials, "I do not know this man." No more final an act of abandonment was that moment when Jesus, his strength already stretched and tested by a night of no sleep, the ritual humiliation and torture of the Romans made even more so by the crown of thorns, hangs on that cross and feels and knows that even his Father, even the God in whom he trusted, who walked with him, called him, loved him, gave him the Disciples, has left him utterly, and completely alone. In that moment, Judas' betrayal is as nothing to that cry that God has forsaken Jesus, that he hangs there in pain and humiliation, alone.

Even if there is some small part of Jesus that understands this is not the real end of the story, how is that any consolation for the utter, hellish knowledge that there is a gulf, a final separation, between himself and the God whom he called Father? How can that chasm be crossed (no pun intended)? To die is one thing. To die in the full understanding that even God is no longer there . . . there is no hell hot enough or cold enough, no eternal darkness trapped in the madness of one's own thoughts, that challenges my own sense of loss more than that single moment when Jesus cries out, from the depths of his now objectless faith, that even God, along with his Disciples, has abandoned him.

Seems to me the silence of the grave, the coming darkness, would be welcome. Even if it offers nothing. Even if, as that abandonment makes a mockery of all one's hope, all one's love poured out for others. Even if it gives no meaning to all the pain and humiliation, it seems to me far more welcome than the never-ending torment of the eternal moment that Jesus, moreso than any person who has ever or will ever live, is utterly, completely, totally alone. No God. No victory. No friends to stand and watch him.

On another note, isn't it funny that the old pagan Day of the Dead is considered a day to celebrate all things spooky and even evil? Isn't it odd that we dress up this night in the midst of autumn with all the trappings of a bad horror show when here in the midst of spring the real victory - Pyrrhic though we understand it to be - of death and hell, the abandonment by God not only of the Divine Son, but the very real death of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, provides the true moment when evil is triumphant?

Like the trussed-up and shaved lion, over whom Susan and Lucy Pevensie weep, when Jesus is taken down from the cross he is quite dead. His eyes would have been cloudy, his jaw gaping. If he wore a loin cloth, it was probably soiled. There may have been very little blood in him, since he had gaping wounds in his feet from the nails placed there; with his heart having stopped hours before, the blood pulled by gravity would have started pooling in his legs, only to run out those huge holes. Since it was near dark, his body would not have been ritually purified; the flies who had come to feast and lay their eggs would be a cloud. All the ways nature has of making death ignoble and inhuman would have been present.

It is impossible, this side of the resurrection, to completely live in and grasp that moment, to live in the despair of Divine failure, abandonment, and death. All the same, we need to recall over the next thirty-six hours the very real, very horrifying thought that worse than death triumphed that day. Abandonment, betrayal, denial, meaninglessness all win. Death may seem welcome, yet the eternal moment when one sees the triumph of nothingness, the helplessness of God may well chase us down even as the light fails, and silence engulfs Jesus.

Conservatives Hate The Military

I'm so old I can remember, back in the dim, dark days of 1994, when the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R-KKK) said the following:

Just days after Mr. Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, created a furor by saying that President Clinton was not up to the job of Commander in Chief, he told The News and Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh: "Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard."

Mr. Helms said soldiers disliked President Clinton because he had avoided service during the Vietnam War, supported homosexuals in the military and had reduced military spending.

On its face, this is one of the most insulting things I can imagine anyone saying about the military. Did members of the military dislike Pres. Clinton? In all honesty, I have no idea, but my guess is probably some did, quite a lot. All the same, this little quip by the big old hooded Tar Heel Teddy Bear not only envisioned a military so unprofessional it would allow political differences to affect its actions; it seemed to suggest that this lack of professionalism was so broad that it actually raised the specter of a military coup (and please note, dear reader, that the implied threat to the life of the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief of the US military, by a member of the uniformed services, is just that).

For years, decades, we have been hearing how liberals hate the military, think folks involved in combat are evil baby killers to be spat on when they return from service, that we liberals, being pacifists and traitors, want the military weakened so that our foreign enemies will have an easier time taking us over. How anyone could lend any credence to these statements is quite beyond my capacity to understand, yet they are not only given credence, they are so much a part of our political culture one continues to read stories of Democrats and liberals being "nervous" about discussing any military question because of "credibility".

Yet, if one considers actual facts - those strange things that impose upon us whether we like them or not - I have to wonder how this upside-down situation arose. If one considers just the Bush Administration, there is the war of choice in Iraq - open-ended and on-going despite the claim that it has "ended"; 50,000 US troops in Iraq are a huge target - and all the opera bouffe nonsense surrounding it. Too few troops too ill-equipped and ill-trained (in particular for the aftermath, the policing duties, etc.). Slashing services to wounded military personnel, in particular mental health services. The deplorable conditions at veterans hospitals made glaringly obvious by the horrible scandal at Walter Reed. When the occupation of Iraq dragged on, and the Afghanistan conflict seemed never to end (it still seems that way), rather than spend more money for recruiting new troops by providing for larger numbers of uniformed service personnel, troops were rotated in and out of the various theaters multiple times. Even retired and discharged troops were eligible for service through the ready reserve. Then, of course, we had National Guard troops, who are supposed to be nationalized only in cases of emergency, not because the Executive is unwilling to spend more money to recruit more troops.

The anecdote about troops asking family and friends to send body armor and equipment for improving the armor on HUMVEEs should be enough to convince anyone the jokers in the Bush Administration not only had no idea what they were up against, but seemed to threaten the lives and bodies of the military unduly. No one, however, raised the latter claim, for the singularly stupid reason that they were Republicans.

Fast forward, to the past half-year or so, and we have the nonsensical claim that the military will experience a mass-exodus due to the repeal of the anti-gay Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. Except, maybe, not so much.

You might remember General James Amos from such anti-gay rumors as “Letting gays join the military will cause a distraction” and “If gays join the military, there will be a mass exodus of soldiers.” Yeah, good times.

In news that is sure to shock absolutely nobody with half of a brain, General Amos has revealed that he’s heard of exactly zero soldiers resigning from the military since the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

“It would be naive to think that somewhere down the road there’s not going to be issues,” Amos told reporters. “I think there probably will be in probably all the services, but I don’t think it’s going to be of any magnitude that’s going to cause much more than a blip. So I’m very optimistic.”

Implementation of repeal is going smoothly, according to the service chiefs in testimony before a Congressional committee. Why is that? Is it because the military is secretly gay? Perhaps a more likely explanation is that the military, which among its many other points of pride is its professionalism, understood that the order to allow full integration of gays and lesbians in to the services was legal, and therefore devised a policy (my guess is it has existed in some skeletal form since the early Clinton Administration, when the subject first arose; never underestimate the ability of any bureaucracy to have all sorts of contingency plans ready to hand) to do so that served the twin goals of making the policy real without disrupting the overall mission of the military.

All the same, most of the declared candidates for the Republican nomination for President are tripping over themselves claiming they will re-institute the policy if elected. Why? Not because they know anything about the military. Not because they accept the findings of the service-wide survey that found a majority of uniformed service personnel in favor of repeal. Not because there is any evidence that repeal is being done in an unprofessional manner that threatens national security. No, their sole beef, it seems, is their own fever dreams of shower scenes from bad porn movies being enacted on military bases around the world. Yet again, they are not only showing their bigotry for all the world to see. They are also displaying a marked lack of faith in the integrity and professionalism of the members of the US military in acting as adults usually act.

There is abundant evidence from recent history that shows how little conservatives regard the lives and health of the military, as well as its primary mission, protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States and our national interests in extreme emergencies. With the reaction - rooted not in reality but bad sexual fantasies - to DADT repeal, we have yet more evidence how little conservatives regard the military.

Right On Cue

The other day, I wrote a bit about the gas exploration boom in and around the area in which I grew up. Today, there's a report that one of the drills, near Canton, PA, is out of control and the fluid used in fracking is spilling out all over the ground.

So, um, is this just one of those things, over which we should all shrug our shoulders and say, "Oh, well"? Or, perhaps, is this an indication that we might need a tad bit of, well, regulation, considering what is spilling out over the ground is a secret, a secret that contains known toxins and carcinogens?

I love it when reality comes along and smacks us in the face. Except that such things are painful, both in reality and metaphorically.

Paul Ryan Is An Ignoramus

I want to respectfully disagree with Matt Yglesias on what is the most important point of this little story. Along with lying about what his "budget plan" does to Medicare and Medicaid, Ryan styles himself as someone who understands monetary policy. Yet, as the exchange at Matt's post makes clear, he doesn't know anything about monetary policy.

Gas prices are currently high due to the exploitation of Middle East unrest by futures traders manipulating the market. Here in Illinois, prices are especially high because we have higher standards which increase the base price. None of this is especially murky, and it certainly has nothing to do with monetary policy.

That Ryan would make such a claim, in public, after insisting he understands monetary policy, is all the more reason to cease paying any attention to him whatsoever. Except to call him an ignorant boob and move on.

Variety Is The Spice Of Life

Over the weekend, I had a couple great conversations regarding music. From an old college friend I learned there was a marvelous, all-black punk band, before punk was punk as it were, with the cheery name of Death.



Then, thanks to one of my FB friends acknowledging a recording by Pat Metheny, got into a discussion not only about him, but the great electric bassist Jaco Pastorius.



This led to a mention of the work Pat Metheny and Jaco did with Joni Mitchell (and in the following clip, that's Metheny's long-time keyboard collaborator, Lyle Mays).



Learning to Fly (Live) - Pink Floyd
Demon Queen of Spiders - Bigelf
Analog Kid - Rush
Dream The World Away - Wakeman with Wakeman
Dancing With Eternal Glory - Transatlantic
49 Bye-Byes - Crosby, Stills, and Nash
Get Ready - Temptations
A Time And A Place - Emerson, Lake, and Palmer
It's Alright - Indigo Girls
Neon Knights - Black Sabbath

Yeah. I hope your ears bleed.

Freedom Of Speech Includes The Freedom To Call Crazy Lies, Well, Crazy Lies (UPDATE)

What follows is an expansion of this comment.

It isn't just me. The level of crazy-stupid-bullshit in our public discourse rises and rises. We are actually having a serious discussion whether or not the United States will meet its debt obligations. We are treating a fiscal deficit due to a seriously warped revenue system in line with a bad economy as a puzzle on par with quantum physics.

For the life of this blog, I have made it my policy that I do not "argue" with, first, Holocaust deniers. Seems simple enough. I haven't encountered any, but, if I do, well . . . I have, in the intervening years, come to include creationists, global warming deniers, and now birthers. In each case, the principle is simple enough - I refuse to coddle people who hold beliefs that are counter to reality. If you wish to believe, say, that pouring billions of tons of carbon compounds in to the atmosphere in a relatively brief span of time has not created easily measurable effects on our climate, with disastrous results, that's OK, I can't stop you. If you refuse to acknowledge the .5-degrees centigrade rise in global temps over the past couple decades, bully for you. Just don't expect me to treat your ideas with anything like legitimacy.

Part of our problem, I think, is we in America believe that freedom of speech means we need to treat all ideas as having some kind of equal demand upon our attention, some equality of potential truth value. That's nonsense. If we had a public figure who insisted that he or she was the spokesperson for a group of aliens from the 28th century who wanted to rule us for our own good, I think most people would assume a serious mental illness.

Why do we not do the same thing for notions equally insane? Because a whole bunch of people, sincere, honest, hard-working, otherwise good-enough folks, hold them? Since these ideas - say, birthers - are rooted in claims that are demonstrably false, why not just make the point they continue to hold false beliefs and carry on? I mean, seriously. Are newspaper editors, journalists, and public figures so afraid of hurting the feelings of large groups of people they will coddle people who hold crazy ideas? We do these sections of the public no demonstrable good by indulging their fantasies.

We would be far better off if someone in a position of authority made it clear that, while there is no harm done by individuals holding all sorts of fanciful notions - I was abducted by aliens! Bigfoot ate my dog! - we cannot conduct our public affairs based on such ideas. I see not qualitative difference between believing in the tooth fairy and birhterism, say, or "cryptozoology" and "creation science" (or Intelligent Design, as it is now called). Why pretend otherwise? Since our country has been demonstrably harmed by social, economic, and political ideas that are the equivalent of belief in Hobbits, it seems to me a wise way of moving forward is taking these folks by the hand, smiling at them indulgently, and moving on. If their feelings get hurt, well, that can't be helped. Best to treat adults like adults, and inform them it is time to surrender belief in Santa Claus.

And, no, this is not "cowardice", as one person recently told me. There is nothing cowardly about laughing at nonsense. It is the height of intellectual integrity to tell someone who says something crazy, "That's just nuts."

UPDATE: Just one of so many stories that, I am quite sure, Marshall Art will dismiss as liberal lies.

Global warming is driving the American pika, a unique cousin of rabbits that dwells in the snowy peaks of the Rockies, to extinction. Pikas, who spend the summer days collecting alpine plants and flowers for their winter nests, die off when exposed to temperatures above 78 degrees. New research published in Global Change Biology find that local populations of pikas — each isolated on the upper reaches of different mountains — are being extirpated by warming temperatures at an increasingly rapid rate.

And Al Gore is fat.

Judas And Grace

With Holy Week upon us, I am venturing down a long-neglected road. As I speed through The Gospel According to Judas (a theological exploration of grace, not the novel of the same name or the spurious non-canonical text claimed to have been found) by Ray Anderson, I am confronted by a multitude of questions, most of which make me uneasy, and for which it seems there are no answers that leap to mind. It would be easy, I suppose, to rest with the traditional Biblical testimony that Judas was possessed by the devil, that Judas was a traitor all along, stealing money from the common funds, that Judas, consumed by guilt and remorse, cursed not only himself but the entire plot of land upon which he took his own life.

As Anderson makes clear, those easy answers are retrogressive justifications, the collective memory of the Apostles through the tradition making clear that Judas was, from the start, apart from the rest. Anderson also makes clear that these are half-self-justifications on the part of the rest of the Apostles for their own failures of nerve and abandonment of Jesus, as well as half-understandable reactions to betrayal that are a common occurrence in any such situation. Even taking these remarks - that Judas was acting through the impetus of demonic powers, or was a thief and not to be trusted from the get-go - at face value, we still confront the reality that grace, as worked out through a reflection upon the cross and resurrection of Jesus, never allows our choices, our actions, even death, to have the last word. We profess this to be true even for those chronologically out of synch with the history of redemption; does not, after all, the author of Hebrews insist that the patriarchs and matriarchs of the people of Israel are counted among the "great cloud of witnesses" to the faith embodied in Jesus?

As we Christians move through this week in which we remember the events from the triumphal entry to the ignominious death to the empty tomb, Judas' act of betrayal takes center stage, forcing us, should we so choose, to ask uncomfortable questions about ourselves, our relationships with one another and with God, and how we justify our own election and acceptance always with one eye on the one man who kissed Jesus to death. It isn't easy, and I have yet to rest comfortably with the implications. That, I suppose, is the mark of good theology, however. We should never rest comfortably with our own sense of theological truth, bound up as that is with the life of the Triune God.

Let's Wait Until Everyone Dies Before We Do Anything

Back in the 1970's, scientists discovered, to their surprise, that the use of choloflorocarbons had a deleterious effect on the ozone layer. It destroys it. They published their findings and a whole lot of people thought it might be a good idea to stop producing and using these chemicals for the perfectly sane reason that human life would be seriously threatened by the depletion of the ozone layer.

The chemical companies went in to full-bore lobbying mode, but their essential argument was this - since even the scientists admit their science isn't exact, how about we do nothing and see what happens, OK? So, no country did anything and in 1986, while doing som atmospheric mapping a satellite discovered a huge fricking hole in the ozone layer, as well as the presence of high concentrations of chloroflorocarbons. It actually didn't take very long to get up a treaty on the manufacture and use of CFCs, as they came to be called, and somehow, western civilization hasn't toppled because of their phase out. All the same, what the scientists said would happen, in roughly the way they predicted, actually happened, and industry, when given the evidence, shrugged and said, in effect, "Who knew?"

This little story is not only an analog of another, on-going story. It is a precautionary tale as well. Last June I wrote about how my hometown is ground zero for the biggest natural gas boom in the country, spanning a couple states and tens of thousands of square miles - the Marcellus Shale. Scientists have known for a very long time there might well be vast supplies of natural gas buried deep in the bowels of the shale deposits of this part of the Appalachians. Until recently, however, the problem of extracting it was technological. With the advent of hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, the final hurdle was leaped, and the companies hit the area like men wandering the desert hit an oasis.

There is one teensy detail. Most of what goes in to the compounds used to crack the shale and force the gas to the service is unknown (coffee grounds?) and some of it is quite toxic. Stuff like benzene and toluene. In Colorado, folks living near areas where fracking takes place have experienced their tap water catching fire (probably saves electricity having to boil water for dinner, I guess). A report in today's New York Times covers familiar territory, including the difficulty of finding out details on the exact makeup of the hydraulic fracturing materials. Since there is no law that compels the companies to reveal this information, and it is proprietary, they have every legal right to refuse to make public what goes in to the stuff they're pumping underground.

Except, of course, it doesn't stay put, and the benzene, and the xylene, and the other fun ingredients migrate and end up in the water table and eventually in the water supply. The companies have insisted this can't happen. When water has been tested, however, it is shown to have happened. When it is determined to have happened, the companies insist the levels are well within legally acceptable limits, even in their original use. Except, of course, as pointed out in the Times article, that isn't true either. For example, levels 28 times the legal limit was found in wastewater being dumped from one plant in Pennsylvania.

Just as with CFCs, at some point a whole bunch of people are going to get sick, and after all sorts of investigations and years in the courts, it will be determined that, indeed, the chemicals used in fracking are to blame. Just as the scientists said would happen. My guess is these drilling companies will react in much the same way the chemical industry did at the time the CFC treaty was being worked out - "Who knew?" Well, we all knew, of course.

Whackadoodle

Three different items of note converge today that make it quite clear the Republican Party is opposed to reality.

The current leading candidate for the Republican nomination for President believes the sitting President was born in Kenya.

As the state of Tennessee seeks to make science illegal, one member of the state legislature thinks that Albert Einstein was a Christian creationist.

The assumptions behind the "budget" of Rep. Paul Ryan are inherently false.

This isn't conservatism in any accepted understanding of the word. It isn't "reactionary" in the time-honored Metternich-de Maistre tradition. It isn't even fascism. It is, quite simply, embracing anything and everything that contradicts uncomfortable realities that might force tough decisions that would upset the current status quo.

It is one thing for an individual to believe in the existence of fairies. It is quite another for an entire political party to legislate based on ideas just as fanciful. Yet, we are seeing it even now.

The Constitution II

Unlike most nation-states, what makes Americans a unique national entity, what provides our identity is not ethnicity, or language, certainly not religion. What makes an American, well, an American is that remarkable document that created our current form of governing structure, both reflects the changes of the past two centuries as well has helped effect some of those same changes, and remains, despite all the criticisms and claims to the contrary, the living, breathing heart of this country.

Our military does not make us free, the Constitution does. Our police do not keep us safe, the Constitution does. Our industrial might, our technological superiority, our vast entertainment industry do not make us the envy of the world, the Constitution does. Our collective acquiescence to any particular economic practice does not provide opportunity, our Constitution does.

To be an American is to live under the Constitution, to admire its flexibility as well as its intransigence. To be an American is to abide by the idea that we are a nation not of race or religion or language but a nation of laws, binding on all. One can be a communist, an atheist, a Catholic, a Lutheran, a libertarian, and still be fully American. One can speak Spanish and Armenian and Urdu and Tagalog, and still be an American. The single requirement for being an American is swearing allegiance not to any God or economic or social system, but to the Constitution. The military and elected officials do not swear an oath to capitalism or plutocracy but to the Constitution. From the President to that homeless woman on the corner, ideally all are bound to the limits and strictures not of power or privilege, but to the Constitution. Making these ideas and ideals real in our day-to-day living is what it means to live as Americans.

If I am ever asked what I think it "means" to be an American, this is my answer. We are not a culture, let alone a single society bound by shared history and traditions outside the civil and legal ones enshrined in the Constitution. The Constitution knows no preference regarding gender or race, religious or moral code, but sees all as part of what makes the United States the truly great and unique place that it is. To be great is not to be militarily unchallenged, still less economically powerful. To be great as America is to celebrate our differences bound only to the civil practices set forth in the Constitution. This is the source of our strength, because it is, in the most fundamental way, who we are.

The Constitution I

It's tax day - well, actually, this year Monday is tax day, but you know - and it is with a mixture of happiness and amusement that I see a coming together of various threads and strands from a variety of discussions and matters that are leading me to write a couple posts on the United States Constitution. Being tax day, it's always fun to note there are cranks out there - I've even seen them covered on C-SPAN, years back - who insist the income tax, despite having its very own amendment, is unconstitutional. It is easy enough to find refutation of this claim.

This argument [viz., that the income tax is unconstitutional] is based on the premise that all federal income tax laws are unconstitutional because the Sixteenth Amendment was not officially ratified, or because the State of Ohio was not properly a state at the time of ratification. This argument has survived over time because proponents mistakenly believe that the courts have refused to address this issue.[emphasis added]

Here is the Law: The Sixteenth Amendment provides that Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on income, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration. U.S. Const. amend. XVI. The Sixteenth Amendment was ratified by forty states, including Ohio (which became a state in 1803; see Bowman v. United States, 920 F. Supp. 623 n.1 (E.D. Pa. 1995) (discussing the 1953 joint Congressional resolution that confirmed Ohio's status as a state retroactive to 1803), and issued by proclamation in 1913. Shortly thereafter, two other states also ratified the Amendment. Under Article V of the Constitution, only three‑fourths of the states are needed to ratify an Amendment. There were enough states ratifying the Sixteenth Amendment even without Ohio to complete the number needed for ratification. Furthermore, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the income tax laws enacted subsequent to ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in Brushaber v. Union Pacific R.R., 240 U.S. 1 (1916). Since that time, the courts have consistently upheld the constitutionality of the federal income tax.

I use this as an example in order to make a broader point. We so often hear or read, more recently from those on the right, but certainly those on the left as well, this or that function of the federal government or even this or that agency of the federal government, is unconstitutional. Recently, a commenter on another site wrote the following:

I suggest that we eliminate every Federal program which is constitutionall prohibited, such as the Departments of Agriculture, the Interior, Education, Health and Human Services, Housing, non-military NASA programs, the EPA (which we need, but is actually unconstitutional), the NEA, the NEH, the DEA, NPR, and PBS. To name just a few off the top of my head.

And the insane war on drugs is, of course, spectacularly unconstitutional, destructive to our society, and expensive.

Sell off all federal lands and buildings not used for constitutional purposes and use the funds to make one-time block payments to retired people or people nearning retirement who are or will be dependent on Social Security. Then eliminate Social Security (which is also unconstitutional).

That's quite a laundry list of totally illegal actions on the part of the federal government, don't you think? Except, of course, the author is dead wrong. As in the case of the income tax claims, one often reads such nonsense from people who do not know - or do not care if they do know - that these matters have already been adjudicated.

In the course of preparing these two posts, I discovered this marvelous annotated rendering of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The annotations are nothing more or less than summaries of court cases which have defined and clarified the relevant portions of this particular amendment as it has been contested in law. For example, as the author noted above claimed that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is unconstitutional, the question of the constitutionality of enforcing, via the federal constitution, housing laws might be an important consideration:

Buchanan v. Warley 98 invalidated an ordinance which prohibited blacks from occupying houses in blocks where the greater number of houses were occupied by whites and which prohibited whites from doing so where the greater number of houses were occupied by blacks. Although racially restrictive covenants do not themselves violate the equal protection clause, the judicial enforcement of them, either by injunctive relief or through entertaining damage actions, does violate the Fourteenth Amendment. 99 Referendum passage of a constitutional amendment repealing a ''fair housing'' law and prohibiting further state or local action in that direction was held unconstitutional in Reitman v. Mulkey, 100 though on somewhat ambiguous grounds, while a state constitutional requirement that decisions of local authorities to build low-rent housing projects in an area must first be submitted to referendum, although other similar decisions were not so limited, was found to accord with the equal protection clause. 101 Private racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing is subject to two federal laws prohibiting most such discrimination. 102 Provision of publicly assisted housing, of course, must be on a nondiscriminatory basis. 103

As there is a large body of substantive case law in which the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment applies to housing, and as the executive branch of the government is the branch that executes the law, then it stands to reason, without too much thought, that having a federal department to oversee the enforcement of housing laws is quite constitutional.

The counter-claim on this topic, as on so many others related to the insistence that this or that or even most functions currently including a federal jurisdiction, actually violate the constitution of the United States simply ignores the facts of the matter. For example, the above author claims Social Security is unconstitutional. Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court found, in a 1937 case, the exact opposite to be true. Which is why we still have Social Security.

Now, one can, I suppose, claim to disagree with the reasoning behind this or that Supreme Court case. After all, not too many people would agree with Chief Justice Taney's decision in the Dred Scott case, which included the legal finding that Americans of African descent were not citizens, enjoying - in the words of that decision - "no rights a white man has to honor." All the same, since the cases cited in the annotations are still binding, it might be better perhaps to claim, "I do not agree with the current law that sees Social Security (or whatever else might be the pet peeve of the day) as constitutional." The first construction is, quite simply, wrong. Like claims about the income tax, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and pretty much anything else, it is false. False beliefs are fine, no one can insist an individual must hold beliefs that align with facts (the internet would be a dull place if everyone thought that!). All the same, to claim something is the case when it manifestly is not, and to go on making these claims even after abundant evidence has borne this out, is to lie. Pure and simple.

Jesus And American Politics

I don't know if I've ever been explicit on this point, and I think it surprising that such clarity is even needed, but as it is the persistent belief among some that Jesus would endorse a particular partisan or ideological political position, I think it only fair to state quite baldly that I would never make such a claim. Furthermore, the idea that, say, "Jesus was really a liberal," or, "Jesus was pro-life," are two manifestly erroneous statements. Trying to lasso the Son of Man to any ideological or political commitment is wrong on many levels.

This does not mean that one cannot see in the teachings and life of Jesus certain tendencies and preferences. It does mean, however, that these are thoroughly theological in nature. One can be a devout Christian and hold diametrically opposed political views from the person sitting beside one in worship on Sunday morning and that's OK. There are no absolute demands for certain political or social or even cultural ends embedded within Christian doctrine. There are, to be sure, certain theological claims that impact how we interact with others, how we view others, how we are to live our lives toward others. These, in and of themselves, however, do not require any particular set of political principles in order to manifest themselves.

I do what I do here in the full understanding that the positions I stake out are my own, and could be wrong from top to bottom. Yet, I could not and would never say that this attitude necessitates I remain silent. As Barth said about the Christian faith, "We must never claim to have the truth. We must always live as if we had the truth," so, too, my attitude toward politics. I hold both as principles, well-founded on the merits, and avoiding all sorts of practical errors along the way.

A Celebration Of A Lost Genre

One of the cultural by-products of the feminist movement in the 1970's was the emergence of what came to be known as women's music.

Women's music (or womyn's music, wimmin's music) is the music by women, for women, and about women (Garofalo 1992:242). The genre emerged as a musical expression of the second-wave feminist movement (Peraino 2001:693) as well as the labor, civil rights, and peace movements (Mosbacher 2002). The movement was started by lesbians such as Cris Williamson, Meg Christian and Margie Adam, African-American women activists such as Bernice Johnson Reagon and her group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and peace activist Holly Near (Mosbacher 2002). Women's music also refers to the wider industry of women's music that goes beyond the performing artists to include studio musicians, producers, sound engineers, technicians, cover artists, distributors, promoters, and festival organizers who are also women (Garofalo 1992:242).

I remember listening to Sweet Honey in the Rock and Holly Near a lot as a kid. While a lot of media attention swirled around Australian Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman", that was a watered down, poppy version of the much more radical ideas in women's music. Here is one of Near's more famous songs, "Gentle, Angry People", a title that kind of proves the point that the vocal ideas were not quite ready for prime time.



Personally, I thought the whole Lilith Fair thing in the 1990's could have been the seedbed for this same kind of thing. Except, watching a documentary on it, it is clear the professional rivalries, differences in musical styles, and audiences created more friction. The audience for Sarah MacLachlan . . .



. . . is far different from the audience for Liz Phair (just a warning, some might find this offensive).



Interestingly, the whole thing was about ready to fall apart until The Indigo Girls arrived on the scene, bringing a sense of joy and solidarity to their offstage time. The widening of possibilities present in the diversity of the performers at Lilith Fair showed, in some respects, the success of women's music, but also the dangers that women's music tried to overcome - buying in to capitalist notions of competition, of swagger and toughness rather than seeing all the differences as a source of strength.

So, here's to that half-forgotten genre that reminded women that their voices were important, their words had power, that they could achieve much together as women.

So, some random stuff that might even contain a woman singer or two.

La Villa Strangiato - Rush, Live in Rio
Time Crunch - Jordan Rudess
Ballad of Big - Genesis
Blue Monday - Dr. John
Masquerade (Live) - Steve Howe
Controversy - Prince
Sweet Dreams - Yes
Violin Concerto in D, Movement 1 - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Radiant Hearts - Black Mountaint
Did I Happen to Mention - Julia Fordham

See, I managed to get a woman in there!

An Ambiguous Anniversary (UPDATE)

Today is the sesquicentennial of the opening shots of the American Civil War. No event in our history, with the exception of our founding, is the source of more historical and popular curiosity, debate, discussion, general interest, and controversy. In part because post-bellum academic historical reflection on the causes of the Civil War was dominated by southern historians who combined an agrarian romanticism with a collective professional mendacity that is breathtaking in its thoroughness, generations of Americans were taught that, while certainly misguided, the southern secession and resulting conflict were far more the result of northern perfidy than southern intransigence on slavery. At this historical juncture, thinking again about the day-long shelling of St. Sumter in Charleston, SC harbor (an event, unlike the resulting conflict, that left no one dead), it might be nice to read one of the documents the state of South Carolina produced to defend its decision to secede from the union.

The ends for which the Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.

Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation, and all hope of remedy is rendered vain, by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanction of more erroneous religious belief.

We, therefore, the People of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved, and that the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State; with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do.

The entire declaration, it should be noted, does not mention a generalized adherence to "State's Rights", the insistence upon which so many post-bellum Confederate apologias have centered. Such an abstract principle is not, nor could ever have been, the cause of any conflict. As this declaration by the people of South Carolina through their representatives makes clear, the sole reason for secession and war was the right of southern states to keep and hold other human beings as chattel.

One point should be noted regarding their view of Abraham Lincoln. This document, produced in December, 1860, four months before the attack on Ft. Sumter, the legislators declared that Pres. Lincoln had every intention of waging aggressive war to destroy slavery. This, despite repeated statements to the contrary by Lincoln during the campaign, and his many statements regarding restoring Union as his sole purpose. Furthermore, the idea of "The War of Northern Aggression" begins right here, in the sincere, if erroneous belief, that the entire war was planned, from the start, and that the attack on federal troops in South Carolina was a pre-emptive action on the part of South Carolinians.

With all the nonsense currently swirling around concerning Pres. Obama - he's a Marxist Muslim anti-American radical born in Kenya - and the actions of the federal government - they want to steal our money and our guns to impose socialism, Sharia, and gay marriage that will destroy the real institution and the country in the process - has a dangerous precedent in our history. That nearly half of those who are self-declared Republicans believe that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii should trouble anyone who cares about America. Our nation was rent asunder by people who exploited lies and phony conspiracy theories to bolster their own economic and political agenda. Over half a million Americans died because a powerful, relatively small number of slave holders across the south feared the end of their hold on power.

Anything else, any other excuse, any other alleged reason, is a lie. One hundred fifty years later, we need to remember so that they truly will not have died in vain.

UPDATE: Ta-Nehisi Coats has this on another persistent lie about the Civil War.

It's worth considering how this claim lingers. James McPherson is a Pulitizer-Prize winning historian, one of the titans of his field. Bruce Levine wrote a highly readable investigation into the charge. Historians from the Park Service have debunked the myth. There is a website specifically devoted to further debunking the myth. And yet it does not simply linger, it thrives and actually spreads to reputable places like The Takeaway. The information is widely available. We simply can't cope with it.

That black people are participants in the spread of this myth doesn't mean much to me. I'm sure somewhere there are Jews who deny the Holocaust. All this says to me is that it is extremely painful--for blacks and whites--to face up to the fact that Civil War was about the right of white people to pilfer the labor of blacks. We really need to believe that our ancestors were better than this. But they weren't. And, as proven by our inability to accept the truth, neither are we.

See, if blacks fought for the Confederacy, then the war had nothing to do with slavery. But the war had everything to do with slavery, and no blacks fought for the right of states to hold their fellow blacks as chattel. Lies piled on top of lies.

Moments Of Clarity And Resolution

Unusually for me, I am reading two very different books simultaneously. I have neither the attention nor deftness of mind, normally, to read more than a single book at any given time. Roy Jenkins' Gladstone: A Biography coupled with Paul Tillich's The Courage To Be are an interesting duo, to say the least. The first, a witty and engaging survey of that singular giant of Victorian politics; the second, the most popular work of that odd combination of German theology, existential philosophy, and American indulgence certainly seem an odd pair. Jenkins' combines a biographer's insight with a practical politician's grasp of the possible (Jenkins was a Labor MP for many years, serving as Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer in various Labor governments until that party's collapse in the 1970's; he now sits in the House of Lords, and has left the Labor Party, which has become indistinguishable from Thatcherite Toryism, far behind), and his discussion of Gladstone's career often involves a survey of mid-Victorian social and political realities that are far more clear than the fanciful notions of other, less knowledgeable, historians.

Tillich's remarkable achievement is to distill in a short work the essential elements of that most elusive quality because it is the most demanding of the classical virtues. At the heart of so much of our current malaise lies fear, and courage not only takes in fear in order to transcend it, by stripping the facade created by fear, what Tillich calls "masks", we already being the journey to overcoming fear and facing reality with true courage by recognizing it for what it is.

Politics is usually not a forum in which courage is conspicuous. Democratic politics, by and large, discourages not only courage, but honesty as well, because the choices we face are often unpalatable, and the solutions out of favor with the ruling class. As John Quiggin notes in a post at Crooked Timber, the public continues to support a more firmly left-wing set of solutions to our current problems than is acceptable by our elected officials. The turn to the Republican Party by the majority of those who voted in last November's elections is explainable at least as much by the large group that refused to vote because they have become disenchanted by the Democratic Party's weakness as an inherent trust in the approach of the Republican Party.

In this I must confess my own complicity. Despite my own repeated assertions that I understood Barack Obama to be resolutely centrist, I allowed myself to believe it possible that, given his across-the-board rejection, during the campaign, of the Bush Administration approach to pretty much everything, change would come quickly and decisively. While there were certainly some early moments that would give most comfort - the Executive Order calling for the closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison for instance, now long forgotten - the result of the past two years has been the realization that the President is, despite his repeated insistence on hope and a Kennedyesque call to arms and support among so many young voters, a creature of the limited, and unreal, politics of our time.

While our current budget impasse is a glaring example, one could name so many instances where the Obama Administration has not only continued policies one would think it would end, but expanded them - domestic surveillance, military tribunals without due process for those who continue to be incarcerated at an open Guantanamo Bay prison, the expansion of our military commitment in Afghanistan without any clear strategic goals, the participation in the misguided NATO mission in Libya - that it is clear now our support was the triumph of self-delusion over clarity of thought. I, for one, believed the President to be better than his record, or at least that such would be possible given the latitude of action granted any President, particularly one elected with such broad support and with a commanding party majority in both Houses of Congress. We are where we are not only because the current Republican majority is an alchemy of unreality and political insanity, but because the President is tepid, silent, quick to compromise rather than stand for policies the American people support, and, at the end of the day, far more weak than any Democratic President I can remember. Even the claimed weakness of Jimmy Carter was as nothing to that of Barack Obama.

Our moment calls for clarity, honesty, and, as I have been repeating, courage. The times have not produced anyone able to address them, but done quite the opposite. Thus, for the moment, despite its seriousness, I find myself firmly believing it far better not to involve myself in matters of public import. Should circumstances change, that may change as well. By and large, with events of the past two years as a guide, I doubt any such change will occur.

Yes, by the way, I still feel quite dirty by even contemplating how odious is our current discourse and the practical consequences that are flowing from it.

This Moment (UPDATE)

We are a day or so away from a shutdown of the United States government. I have no desire to pretend it is the fault of this or that party, this or that ideology. In general, I tend to refuse to play the blame game. Right now, at this moment, I find myself in the curious position of not really caring about the situation, while simultaneously recognizing that, with hundreds of thousands of troops in harms way, this is a most dangerous moment in our history.

First, beyond any doubt in my mind, the whole idea that there is a fiscal crisis with which we must deal, that the public is demanding action, is ridiculous. There is no such crisis. We have a decade-long, multi-front war which has been carried on without any serious funding plan. Indeed, even in the midst of this war, taxes remained at historically low levels, and any increase in revenue to cover the expense not only of these conflicts, but general governmental expenses, has been considered out of bounds.

Simultaneously, a domestic financial bubble was allowed to grow, then burst abruptly, although certainly not without having been predicted, dragging down not only the housing and banking industries, but the automobile industry, and the economy as a whole. Fiscal measures that, for two generations and more, are generally considered favorable to restarting a stalled economy became a matter of controversy, and a plan to stimulate the economy through government spending, while certainly helpful, was neither large enough, nor long enough in duration to do anything but, perhaps, stave off the worst possible scenario, economically speaking.

The previous Congress, with its Democratic majority, was both highly productive but also, in its final months, cowardly in the extreme. The hectic days of the lame-duck session, after the Republican Party retook a majority of seats, proves this more than anything as many measures that were considered dead were passed easily enough. One matter, however, overall federal spending for the current fiscal year, was not dealt with. The incoming Republican majority was determined to use the failure of the previous Democratic majority to force a confrontation that could lead, and has now led us, to the brink of a shutdown of the federal government, including, as noted Tuesday, stopping pay to troops now in combat in Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Libya.

Not once in all the discussions has the threat of a government shutdown in a time of war been noted. Not once in all the column inches of any newspaper or website have I read anyone say that the "fiscal crisis" is imaginary, a product of and underfunded federal government and an economic downturn. Not once in all the finger pointing and blame announcing, have I read anyone call what is now happening false, fake, contrived, phony, or nonsensical. With certain obvious solutions not up for discussion - higher taxes, ending the conflict in Afghanistan and bringing home combat forces in Yemen as well as our troops stationed in Iraq, ending our involvement in the NATO airstrikes on Libya - any "real" solution to the current mess is out of the question. No matter if a government shutdown occurs or doesn't occur, we shall find ourselves again, next year or the year after, in this same situation, facing a massive shortfall of revenue, a sluggish economy (most economists agree it will be years before we approach the kind of economic activity we had in the middle years of the past decade, and far longer if ever before we achieve anything like what we had in the 1990's), and a largely false political discussion.

This is a moment of deep, troubling events. No one - not the President, not anyone in Congress - has displayed any kind of courage or honesty or integrity in addressing what is before us. For this reason, as well as for the insipid, ridiculous nature of so much of what passes for commentary, I am trying, best as I can, to distance myself from any involvement in these events. To be blunt, I feel dirty even thinking about it all, disgusted with our country, ashamed that there is no one willing to be the kind of leader we need right now.

UPDATE: While Paul Krugman has certainly shown remarkable good sense in dismissing Rep. Paul Ryan's "budget" as the nonsense it is, the following, thanks to a link from Jay Ackroyd at Eschaton, is even more clear on what should be, were our politics less insane, the political realities.

As I’ve noted previously, you can do a combination of tax increases (not too much, just nudge them back up to Clinton-era rates) and defense cuts and you don’t even have to voucherize Medicare or implement a millionaire’s tax and just like that you have yourself back on the right fiscal trajectory through 2030. Small tweaks to Social Security fix that program, and Medicare can only be fixed if we tackle the healthcare system as a whole – which Obamacare begins to do. Ryan’s budget repeals the ACA.

--snip--

I’m confused. A lot of Democrats have suggested some sort of compromise on spending cuts and tax increases. It’s the Republicans who won’t countenance repealing the Bush tax cuts. It’s Republicans who are bound to block any serious effort to scale back defense (though Tom Coburn is good on this, and many Democrats have their fingers in the defense money-pot as well…) It’s Republicans like Ryan who are proposing radical measures that are tantamount to massive wealth transfers from the poor to the wealthy.

That this pretty clear statement of reality is outside the bounds of our current discourse is evidence enough that staying out of the fray is by far the best option for those who cannot impact it at all.

A Day Late

There are fewer indications that ours is a decadent, superficial society than the viral status of the fluff, vanity video, "Friday".



While one could say that the multitudes of parodies of this parody of music show a certain robust sense of balance, to me the simple fact that so many are both fulminating about it while simultaneously staring at it as one might a bad multi-car accident we are indulging in a kind death-bed scene, the final rattling breaths of an industry no longer certain it has anything to offer the world, believing, beyond all reason and without any evidence, that pandering to fourteen year old girls is the sole recourse to economic survival.

Happily, there are hundreds of musical acts out there who struggle gamely on, refusing to bend to the winds of their industrial handlers or otherwise compromise their visions for the possibility of suddenly mounting stadium tours in the summer. Content to follow their muse, aided by technology that can turn a sitting room in to a music studio, they write and record songs that appeal to them, a sure-fire way of appealing to discerning music fans everywhere. Even the most facile of these singer-songwriters - Iron & Wine, John Mayer, Norah Jones - have something of an auteur about their work, even if occasionally slipping in to nonsensical solipsism and the recording of minutiae at the expense of revelatory introspection. That our fading music industry refuses to hear their many virtues in favor of indulging and already indulged child, simultaneously providing fodder for critics both of this misguided young lady and the many insiders who shepherd her along is testimony to the deafness and stupidity of an industry that, once upon a time, allowed its favored acts to use illegal drugs in its offices, sat back and let musicians produce album after album of material that could not produce a hit single, and trusted in the discernment of the public to weed out the grain from the chaff.

Considering this year has already produced a singular musical achievement in Amos Lee's Mission Bell, the Rebecca Black phenomenon is even more ridiculous than it might otherwise be. Here, by way of contrast to the foregoing, is "Violin", a gut-wrenching plea for divine intervention by one who sounds lost and on the brink.



Because quality will out, here are ten different songs, randomly chosen by iTunes, with nary a fluffy filler among them.

Hier Lasst Mich Ruhn Die Letzte Stunde - Franz Schubert, Lazarus Oratorio
Burning Rope - Genesis
Lines in the Sand (Live) - Dream Theater
End of the World - Blackfield
It Is For You, But Not For Us (Live) - King Crimson
Bitter Suite - Marillion
Red House (Live at Woodstock) - Jimi Hendrix
How Come - Ray LaMontagne
Hope For Us - Shadow Gallery
Cesaro Summability - Tool

If there is any testimony to the possibility that quality defeats the quick buck, it is the on-going career of Tom Waits.

Tea Party Republicans Dis American Troops Fighting Wars They Support

The imminent threat of a government shutdown has been the goal of the incumbent Tea Party majority in the House of Representatives since they were elected. They broached the subject initially when discussion turned, before they were seated but after the election, to budgetary matters. They love the idea of the kind of confrontation that makes them look like they are standing on principle when, by and large, there are no real principles involved, the fiscal mess has nothing to do with spending patterns, but the mash-up of a burst financial bubble and two unfunded wars (with a third now added, just to make things interesting). We are told, over and over, that the troops in the field will not be effected by the shutdown, it only deals with "non-essential" matters, like postal service, day-to-day operations of civilian departments, that kind of thing.

Except, of course, that, like the Republican protestations they do not want the shutdown, is a lie.

U.S. military troops at war in Iraq and Afghanistan would receive one-week’s pay instead of two in their next paycheck if the government shuts down this weekend due to the federal budget impasse, according to a senior defense official.

As the Cable’s Josh Rogin reports, after that initial one-week’s worth paycheck, “all uniformed military personnel would continue to work but would stop receiving paychecks.”

If the federal government shuts down, “you could have forces deployed in the field, with their families back home, and no one’s getting paid. And that could be an issue,” the defense official said.

You think it could be an issue? Hmmm . . .

As I have been saying all along, the lack of any fundamental grasp of the reality of our economic situation in the midst of fighting two wars is breathtaking, but in a bad way.

Living As Those Already Dead - Reflections On Bonhoeffer's Cost Of Discipleship

Pursuant not only to our on-going theme of courage and cowardice, but also to clarification for those readers who continue to believe, despite there being abundant evidence to the contrary, that I just don't get what it is to be a Christian, I got to thinking about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In particular, his remarkable little book The Cost of Discipleship. It is an easy book to misunderstand, in particular as regards his opening chapter on costly grace. His point seems, without due consideration, to be antithetical to the entire spirit of freedom that is ours in Christ through the Spirit. Yet, on even the most minor further rumination, he is talking exactly about that freedom, a freedom that costs us everything because it cost God everything. It is free, there is no price we can pay, it is ours because it is grace. It costs us everything, our lives and fortunes and honor and all we hold precious, and is never to be taken for granted but continually sought in prayer and discipline because it is grace. In the freedom granted in the grace of the cross and empty tomb we find this dichotomy in which we come to understand ourselves as grasped by the love that is God without anything asked of us; yet, as we take hold of this freely-given love and forgiveness, we come to realize that it demands of us not just this or that, but everything. It is freedom not just from the fear of eternal separation from God, but freedom for the most rigorous, continuous searching with others who live in the continuous shadow of the cross for that to which God calls us.

At the heart of Bonhoeffer's little book is his famous dictum that when we are called by God, we are called to die. Not some metaphorical death. We are called to embrace our own very real death. We stand before God as those whose lives are now forfeit. All that we have, all that we are, all our great and good thoughts and deeds are over. To live in the very real, very costly grace of God is not to rest in the peaceful bosom or enfolded wings of an indulgent parent. Rather, it is to stand before the blood-soaked cross each and every moment of our lives. Who we are, before that moment, urges us to run away. The paradox of grace is just this - even as it is offered without price, it demands that we surrender everything we hold precious, our lives and our loves, our fortunes and our families. When the shadow of the cross falls upon us, the full measure of the price demanded of us for the freedom offered here demands that we turn and run. Our old lives cost us nothing, invite us to warmth, to a life lived without thinking about the very real ending that awaits us. The cross invites us to embrace that end, to make it our only reality, the only possibility that provides for true human life. There is no escaping this paradox, nowhere any of us who have been grasped by God can hide once the shadow of the cross falls upon us.

With that in mind, it is important to remember that the possibility of true human life, lived always with the understanding that we are, all of us, already dead, only comes with discipline. It is a discipline rooted in grace, to be sure, not possible outside the faith granted us in the Spirit, something we are to work out together with others who wear the wounds of Christ in their hearts. Yet it is a discipline. It cannot be assumed as something which God will grant to us out of the bounteous goodness of the Divine heart. On the contrary, precisely because each and every moment of our existence forces us to face the cross and the desire to have nothing to do with this bloody mess, this travesty of human and Divine judgment, this mockery of all we thought truly sacred, truly noble, we need to steel ourselves through prayer and devotion and sacrament and the vigilant, loving care of others so that the possibilities of living out the promises of God for real life - a real life lived in the full embrace of our own deaths - can become realized in and through us.

This is the background against which any of what I have written about Christian freedom needs to be considered. This is the background against which anything I have written about my own spiritual development, my own own deepening of faith, must be understood. It is right here, at the heart of the paradox of freedom and discipline, of Divine gratuity and human death, that I find myself living. It is why, by and large, I am unsympathetic to the embourgeoisement of American Christianity, its facile "praise", its encouragement of family over faith, its only demand being we make sure no fetus is left behind, and that all gays be denied the full rights of citizenship. It is why I find all talk of morality to be a dodge, a way of avoiding the very real discipline that calls us, each and every day, to understand that we are dead. We are dead to all that which calls us good, calls us kind, considerate, thoughtful. The cheap grace of social mores brings nothing but the haughty pride of those who seek to exclude. In grace that is truly costly, any question of morality becomes as meaningless as the empty family values that see in Christianity some bulwark for the family we are to renounce if need be in favor of that which is far more precious, far more lasting, that pearl of great price.

Now, I know some will read all this as a bunch of hokum, a further obsurantist denial of the "true" heart of the Christian faith. That's OK, because I'm not here to persuade anyone. I am here telling anyone who might wish to listen what is possible in the very real, very costly grace that is our in Jesus Christ crucified and risen.

43 Years

I feel I have been remiss because I haven't even noted that today is a terrible date in our nation's history. The early morning air in Memphis, TN was rent by gunfire and a great and good man bled out the last of his life on the balcony of a Howard Johnson's motel, beginning days of rage that included the 101st Airborne being called in to Chicago.

I think it is important today to remember that Martin King died in the full understanding that was most likely his lot. He pressed on, however, day after day, year after year, fourteen long years from his beginnings as leader of the Montgomery, AL bus boycott until that fateful early spring morning. His was the kind of courage we note too infrequently, the courage of someone doing the job they've been appointed, in the face of all sorts of trials and terrors.

We who live in a world that was only possible because King lived and fought and, ultimately, died do him a multitude of dishonors, remembering this or that speech, this or that act, this or that moment from his life without taking his whole life in to account. We who live in an age of rank cowardice, who shiver and shake before obstacles far less intransigent, far less dangerous to our collective hearts and souls, dishonor his memory by meekly submitting to the many threats, giving up without fighting, surrendering before the battle has even engaged. His life, his legacy, is that ordinary people, preachers and students and teachers and housewives can indeed change their country, even as all the forces around us insist that the status quo is natural, even necessary. We can make our country a better place, and it isn't easy, and there are fewer more ardent foes than the forces that benefit from how things are right now.

I think the only weapon I would add to King's quiver with a single arrow with "Love" written on it, would be laughter. The powerful may take a long time to fall to love, even militant love. Laughter, however, is intolerable. Beyond that, we should, on this April 4, decide that we will not have let him die in vain by refusing to submit to the dead hand of the status quo. Remember, even if we don't get there, we do at least have the possibility of getting to the mountaintop and seeing so clearly that promised land to which we march together.

A Recurring Theme

It has come to my attention that a certain thematic thread is running through much of my commentary on matters both political and Christian - that of courage, and its all-too-present opposite, cowardice. In the face of so many threats - economic, social, cultural, political, military - we find ourselves, as a nation and as Christian churches, in the position of striking out against a host of foes, many of which don't actually exist, and some of which would be overcome easily enough if we did not succumb to fear. I find it more than a little amusing, even in the midst of such dire circumstances, that we as a people might well need to remember that nothing is accomplished out of a sense of dread.

I shall turn to courage as a theological theme in a moment, but I would be remiss if I didn't note that, 300 years before the birth of Christ, Aristotle dealt specifically with this subject in the Nichomachean Ethics.

Now the brave man is as dauntless as man may be. Therefore, while he will fear even the things that are not beyond human strength, he will face them as he might and as the rule direct, for horour's sake; for this is the end of virtue. But it is possible to fear these more, or less, and again to fear things that are not terrible as if they were. Of the faults that are committed one consists in fearing what one should not, another in fearing as we should not, another in fearing when we should not, and so on; and so too with respect to the things that inspire confidence. The man, then, who faces and who fears the right things and from the right motive, in the right way and at the right time, and who feels confidence under the corresponding conditions, is brave; for the brave man feels and acts according to the merits of the case and in whatever way the rule directs. Now the end of every activity is conformity to the corresponding state of character. This is true, therefore, of the brave man a well as of others. But courage is noble. Therefore the end also is noble; for each thing is defined by its end. Therefore it is for a noble end that the brave man endure and acts as courage directs.(1115b, 11-24)

As we have said, then, courage is a mean with respect to things that inspire confidence or fear, in the circumstances that have been states; and it chooses or endures things because it is noble to do so, or because it is base not to do so.(1116a, 10-13, both passages translated by Richard McKeon)

The whole structure of Aristotle's approach to the virtues is summed up in this description of courage: that virtue is the result of a rational calculation; that virtue is finding the mean, using a set of rules, with the understanding of the proper end of each virtue; that this is accomplished through discipline and practice (what St. Thomas would call a habitus); that the most exemplary dramatization of courage is martial courage.

Despite the intervening 2000 years of Christian discussion, aided no doubt by the return via the Muslims after the Crusades of so much pagan literature, and the rediscovery of non-Christian virtues as equally compelling human ends, this approach, not only to courage, but to the rest of the virtues, exists largely intact. Indeed, utilitarianism is nothing more or less than measuring the costs and benefits of certain actions, and acting appropriately. Rawls' notions of justice as fairness and its implications for society are little more than understanding what the ends of justice are - provided we pretend we are acting as if we did not already exist in a society where the scales were out of balance - and acting accordingly. Aristotle's ideas concerning virtuous action, the rational calculation according to a set of rules prior to acting, and that courage, among the rest of the virtues, is nothing more or less than an action that falls somewhere between rank cowardice and foolhardiness (rushing in where angels fear to tread) should be familiar enough precisely because it is the way most of us consider how we are to act virtuously.

I would submit, however, that St. Thomas, when discussing the virtues in the Summa, erred when he excluded not just courage, but the rest of the pagan virtues from what he termed "theological virtues". He limited these to those imparted by grace and named by St. Paul at the end of 1 Corinthians 13 - faith, hope, and love. All the virtues discussed by Aristotle - magnanimity, temperance, prudence, courage - are also ways of being both fully human as well as acting in accord with the grace of God.

Courage, along with justice, is arguably a sub-theme of so much of both Testaments. The Psalms are filled both with pleas for assistance in the face of fear, and admonitions not to fear because of the omnipresence of God. The eighth chapter of St. Paul's letter to the Romans is nothing more or less than a long note of encouragement in the face of persecution and doubt, rooted in the reality that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ the real fight, the real struggle, is over, and we are to live and act as those who know that nothing in this world can really destroy us.

We are living in difficult times, to be sure. Threats seem to press in on all sides, a never-ending stream of attacks on our sense of personal and social equanimity. In the face of these, we are experiencing what is, in essence, a national panic attack. While certainly understandable, understanding is never condoning (a point most conservatives seem not to comprehend; for instance, I can understand why some young Muslim men might see in martyrdom through mass murder an attractive alternative given a multitude of social and political circumstances, but this understanding certainly does not mean I condone such behavior, or find it reprehensible). That there are some politicians who would exploit these fears for their own rise to power is a reality that is always with us. It seems these voices exist, for example, in my own denomination of The United Methodist Church. By and large, however, fear and its exploitation are easy enough to spot, and, regardless of ideological or theological bent or preference, the best antidote is the recurring words of Scripture: "Fear not."

I have already written a bit on this theme before, and I am quite sure it will crop up again. This general, sketchy survey is meant as a way of underlining an important point. If we are ever to get beyond our current historical moment, to rise above the economic doldrums and our collective sense of foreboding, we each and all need to buck up, face our fears head on without flinching, and refuse to listen to the voices that insist we need to cower and let others do our living for us, make decisions for us, make of all the vicissitudes of the moment monsters that are more strong than any weapon we can fashion.