Cache

Posts below = a cache of musings from seven good years.  Formative years.  

windy

Traveling up Lake Shore Drive en route to work this evening I caught a glance east at a handful of boats beyond the harbor with sails set and full.  Earlier this week I took Lauren out sailing (with a hired boat and captain, not a skill I have... yet) for a crispy morning cruise.  I made breakfast sandwiches and mimosas.  I laid on my back under the sail when the captain turned back toward shore, and I watched the boom swing above me from one wind-harnessing extreme to another.

The city was right there, always in view, but I was absent from it.  I realized with an aquatic rush of delight that this brand of wilderness has been at hand constantly; that we urban dwellers buzz in astonishingly close proximity to a wild alterity that feeds on the same winds that daily brush my body.  The winds  course between buildings, chasing through avenues on their way to vastness outside of city precincts.

In the midst of the buzz on my way to work this evening I saw those boats and saw myself reciprocally through the boats-eye-view and felt the levity of a sudden, welcome insignificance.

Monsanto as Beelzebub

My comrade responded to the latest post here (and to other conversations we've shared on rooftops while fabricating the concept of a liberating apocalypse; and to Dissent Magazine's most recent issue) with 17 lines of verse that pretty well sum it up, casting inculpation where it's due:


& we'll talk on & on about
farms & food & subsidies
Monsanto-as-Beelzebub
apocalyptic deities
the earth deserves another flood
(a potent rinse of pesticides)
reprising our own myth
rewrite erase rewrite:
the ensuing desolation strewn
with slow-growth plots
& ruptured food-chains;
and those once-regal banners
(proclaiming the eternal rule of humanity)
are reduced to fumes
arcing from the desert floor - 
the last belch of a world
finished with its masters


(By Benjamin Blevins)

Nuclear

Threats of catastrophe have shifted during the past several decades.  While the continual existence of nuclear weapons makes it impossible to ignore the possibility of nuclear holocaust, the nuclear threat that is actually effecting global calamity today is much more insidious.

Today is Earth Day, which means more to some of us than it does to others.  I am not opposed to giving the earth a holiday.  But celebrating earth a day a year is an insufficient means of campaigning for a conscious recollection of the diverse ecology that supports our livelihood, our economic ventures, and our hope for future sustenance.  In America, holidays tend to draw people together as occasions for cellular celebration.  We celebrate sometimes with our communities and most often with our nuclear families.  No harm done there.  Family reunions and community gatherings can be enchanting.  At the same time, however, our national fixation on the nuclear family poses as great a threat as the Cold War era nuclear arms race.

Trying to meet our family’s needs is one thing.  Privileging the excessive satisfaction of the desires of our nuclear families is another altogether.  Whose comfort are we willing to neglect in order to extend excess to our closest relations?  Who are we willing to cast as “them” in order to ensure the opulence of “us”?  This nuclear threat, seeing our small collective of relatives as an insular unit, distracts us from engendering the consciousness we need to survive and thrive as humans and as members of our earth-home.  By focusing on nuclear home-life, constructing our own tiny empires, we have forgotten the actual house-rules (eco-nomy) inherent to our earthly home.  Our excess, our surplus, our capital is not taken from the vaults of an inanimate bank.  It is mined from the sources of the livelihood of others.

I am skeptical about the possibility that a shift in individual behaviors would bring about any great amount of social change to the contemporary patterns of global relations.  I doubt that a great enough number of those of us who are privileged and excessively comfortable will recognize the calamitous impact of our luxurious expenditures.  It’s far too easy to coddle our consciences by comparison to others who are even more opulent than we are.  But I am hopeful that the catastrophe we are invoking (and it is primarily we privileged who are invoking it) may demand its own change.  In that sense the apocalypse (nuclear or otherwise) may be inevitable.  This inevitability (and current reality) of catastrophe does not necessitate resignation or despair.  At the very least let's prepare ourselves and be ready to re-craft society without the ignorant and myopic elements that dominate today.

In the meantime, as you’re celebrating with your families today try to think radically about the sources and costs of your sustenance.  And figure out someway to express gratitude.

Gulch God

I read this today during the CTS Ecojustice chapel accompanied by the flowing snarky sounds of a bass clarinet. I wrote it a month ago hiking through the Paria canyon. It's a touch of peripatetic theology in verse...

There’s that western God:

Consistently conceived as immutable, unchanging, absolute, insoluble, static, fixed, removed.

The same sort of God yesterday today and forever.

This divine tradition situated in our subconscious posing as irrefutable reality.

God is stuck.

Ironic: this notion of unchanging, immovable, absolute God;

Such a far cry from the dynamic impressions of God that saturate the soil of biblical tradition.

The bible God is an impassioned God.

Hardly a final fix to the human quest for relational integrity

Or the fervent, feverish desire to experience something, someone, anything that awes us.

The God that is streaming ruah, flowing pneuma, torrential spirit

Is nothing if not dynamic, forceful, powerful

In motion.

The wild God, God of the gulch:

She invokes an acknowledgment of aquatic movement

And stone sculpting thrust.

She is the God who compels weary feet to the confluence.

The confluence of what?

Is it the confluence where our deep fears meet with contrived certainties that comfort at the cost of asphyxiation?

Is it the confluence of our grandest delusions (of ourselves detached and in control) merging into a supposed solution with the Absolute who sees to our absolution?

No.

God is neither a certainty nor a solution.

God is not cheap comfort.

God is not a coddler of our conscience.

God is at the confluence of threshold and compulsion.

The threshold at hand is comprised of stone and sand

And river and sun.

Find a window that frames a scene of others in motion, in life;

And cast your gaze through.

Find a threshold that parts the way between self-fixation and sensational relation;

And edge toward.

At the confluence of windowed gaze, where threshold meets lure,

When others and self spark divine and ignite in interdependent flame,

Sense God pass through and whisper compulsion to join.

Remain

In class last Tuesday my professor said:

“At CTS we are imbibing scholarly traditions that are anomalous to what the majority of Christians are familiar with.”

Indeed...

We are reconciling our cultural and racial identities with our religious identities. Some of us are asking, “How do I remain black and Christian?”

We are queering our religious understanding and our political stances. Some of us are asking, “How do I remain gay and Christian?”

We are opening ourselves to questions and uncertainties thus resisting arrogant absolutisms and challenging the hubris of ideologues. Some of us are asking, “How do I remain skeptical and Christian?”

“One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of a pure desire for truth… Christ likes for us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.” [Simone Weil “Waiting for God”]

Some of us are asking, “Need I remain Christian?”

Rigid Theology

What is more Christian: dominion or partnership?

A few days back Rick Santorum was on Face the Nation doing his best to clarify some of the criticism he had previosly directed toward President Obama. One of his critiques is that President Obama’s policies on energy don’t stem from a desire to help American people, but stem from a “phony ideal… a phony theology”. What’s more, suggested Santorum, it’s by no means a theology that comes from the Bible.

When asked, What in the world he was talking about? Santorum said:

“I was talking about the radical environmentalists… this idea that man is here to serve the earth as opposed to husband its resources and be good stewards of the earth… we are not here to serve the earth. The earth is not the objective. Man is the objective. I’m talking about the belief that man should be in charge of the earth, should have dominion over it, and should be good stewards of it.”

In a book about faith, Buddhist meditation instructor Sharon Salzberg wrote:

“It is not the existence of beliefs that is the problem, but what happens to us when we hold them rigidly, without examining them, when we presume the absolute centrality of our views and become disdainful of others. Placing ourselves in a position of privilege – beliefs are treasured commodities and we are the proud owners – implies that we alone possess the earth, we possess the Truth.”

I am not a conservative Republican politician nor am I a Buddhist practitioner. I am however a student of the Christian Bible and a trained theologian, and I can attest with confidence that Santorum’s antiquated belief “that man [sic] should be in charge of the earth” is a lonely one in the field of mainstream theology. I would ask Santorum that he stick to crafting policy, and not dabble so erroneously in the construction and interpretation of God concepts.

If we continue to treat the earth as a thing we possess and dominate, much as men have treated women for millennia (a fact slovenly overlooked by Santorum), and if we maintain a rigid posture toward the earth we will break. And on our way to this self-induced destruction we will (continue to) abort countless lives, human and nonhuman, thus deserting our potential to partner with the fecundity of the earth in the process of inciting beauty rather than waste.

I ask you, What is more conducive to the Christian gospel? A rigid posture of domination, ownership, indifference, and power-over? Or a careful posture of partnership, mutuality, empathy, and power-with?

The Accountability of Responsibility

Once upon a time I drew from a list of conventional conservative Christian morals to inform my decisions about what was right and what wasn't. My last post suggested a disruption in my relationship with these conventions. This raises the question: Without an immediate, intimate connection to the posits of Christianity what influences my lifestyle decisions? What prompts my ethical posture in the world?

Do I still believe in right and wrong? The short answer is: I don't think the differentiation between right and wrong is cut and dry. But neither do I think that striving to live well, seek righteousness, or pursue justice are inconsequential matters.

Something drives us all. Something informs our decisions. Here is the reflection paper I wrote for my Ethics class this week:

A decade ago I encountered the quote: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” I believed that idea to be true. I am no longer so sure. Since coming to Chicago Theological Seminary I have encountered another idea, a different reality. I have encountered the reality that the world needs more than people who have “come alive”. Women, people of color, and indigenous populations require recognition of dignity that patriarchal and imperial cultures have long withheld. Many people in the world who are impoverished beyond the ability to survive need resources that will provide for the basic sustenance of life. The earth itself aches with urgency for us to pay careful attention to the demands we place on it, and it in turn demands that we attend to the natural ecological rhythms that sustain the diversity of life.

My first ethical considerations were informed by the only world I knew as a child. I was a Wesleyan evangelical Christian who believed that the Bible functioned lucidly as the ultimate authority in all matters of life. Such assurance granted me profound relief in making decisions. I accepted an exclusivist reading of the Bible and the testimony of my insular community as absolute. This acceptance of an external authority governed my behaviors and rendered me free of the responsibility to consider the implications of my style of life. I did not have to think about what was right or best or true. I was simply required to behave myself according to my community's code of conduct. Good behavior was primarily contingent on acts that I omitted, desires that I repressed, and ideas to which I submitted. Since then I have learned to think, and to question my impulse to be well behaved.

Life would be easier if I could still base my ethics on good behavior or on the simple question, “What makes me come alive?” But I can no longer, with a sense of integrity, ground my actions in such myopic concepts. I am troubled by a conflict. I remain convinced that, indeed, I must foster my dreams and drive for personal abundance in life. Yet that conviction is critiqued by an expanded consciousness including my recognition of personal privilege and exposure to the stretch of social and ecological injustices around the globe and in my neighborhood. I am not sure where my recognition of privilege ought to take me. How does my identity as a straight, white, credentialed, employed, sheltered, relatively affluent male inform and problematize my active intentions, ethical postures, and political stances? I think it depends on how my narrative intersects with the narratives of others with whom I am engaged.

Ynestra King wrote, “Practice does not wait for theory – it comes out of the imperatives of history.” With this insight I recognize that I may not be able to find or invent an ethical theory that will promise me absolute ease of conscience. But I must still act according to some driving principle. That principle for me is the responsibility I have to pay attention to relational encounters. Any theory that has proven influential has come to me on the heals of an encounter with an other that has resonantly prompted a shift in ethical posture. My ethics are based on how I relate to others – human and nonhuman. They are therefore relative, subject to the nature of the relationship at hand. This requires a careful measure of deliberation. I must address ethical decisions case-by-case and conversation-by-conversation.

I know of no absolute authority or standard that grants me the assurance that I have acted right. But I believe that, “Listening to all voices of subjugation and hearing their insurrectionary truths make us better able to question our own political and personal practices.” I am unwilling to dismiss my ethical responsibility by insisting that a sacred text, divine authority, or code of conduct has made it clear that I am to act one way and not another. I have to attend to my intuition, listening to my conscience, and I must reckon with the realities of my environment, letting my community impact me. This is a risky endeavor toward ethics. It is not sure. It provides a hazy accountability at best. But I think it is better to be aware of this than not. It is better to embrace the implications of my actions as my responsibility, rather than ultimately displace my decisions on an external source. I am responsible, and to a certain extent that keeps me ethical.

Metamorphosis Shown

I tuned in to Re:Sound on NPR while driving home from downtown this afternoon. It was Re:Sound #139 The Matamorphosis Show, recounting two stories of two people navigating an alteration of identity. I listened to half in the car, then streamed it online from my kitchen to listen to the rest. I cried big, honest, insistent tears at one point. I try to listen to my tears when they come. Tears seldom lie.

The first story is called Breaking Away. It’s about Luzer Twersky who was raised as a Hasidic Jew and decided, at the age of 23, to leave everything he was familiar with and engage secular society.

The second story is called Finding Miles. It’s about a man named Miles and recounts his transition from female to male, from identifying as Megan to identifying as Miles.

Each story starkly typifies the human experience of change, identity, and agency. Each narrative emphasizes the role of family, especially parents, in the person’s metamorphosis. Luzer experienced a sort of excommunication from his family, a shunning from his parents, when he confessed to no longer being a practicing Hasid. Miles used a long letter to come out to his parents as transsexual, and the way that they responded… that’s what brought me to tears. I hope you’ll listen to the stories if you get a chance. They demystify experiences that are not familiar to a lot of people, yet their experiences were incredibly resonant.

Earlier this month I came out to several of my close family members. My confession was more akin to Luzer’s, and the response I received was more akin to the one Miles received. But there were pieces of all of each of their narratives. I told my people that I am not an Evangelical Christian, which for some in my family is equal to saying, without the qualifier, “I am not a Christian.” I didn’t qualify my confession in order to try and squeeze into some alternate mold of Christianity. It’s just that as far as I’m concerned there is, and regardless of my lifestyle or beliefs always will be, something of my identity that is informed by Christianity.

But I am not a Christian. Not in any orthodox sense. I don’t confess Christian creeds. I don’t practice Christian habits. I don’t go to church. I don’t assert salvation through Christ alone, or posit that truth is found in the Bible alone.

I need to be careful, because I have dear friends who would align with many of my liberal views and my openness toward lifestyles that deviate from the Judeo-Christian moral norms, and these friends still identify as Christians. I’m so grateful for them. Grateful for my encounter with brands of Christianity that have room for me. I’ve discovered this roomy Christianity through voices such as Fredrick Beuchner, Marcus Borg, John Hick, and Catherine Keller; and I’ve discovered it first hand in community at CTS. But to be honest with my tribe, the ones who hold fast to the Christianity that I inherited but have since departed from, I have felt compelled to provide clarity, rather than incite confusion, by letting my confession be candid according to their terms. At least for now, at this stage, I have found severance to prove functional in communicating who I am and who I’m not. It’s emotional, for me and them. Parts of it feel like estrangement, other parts feel like unconditional love. But I feel more than anything the levity of honesty and the profundity of telling the truth.

Just finished reading...

Before I read it I thought the title referred to those in a society who are ostracized, lacking possession of either dignity or basic subsistence. But it's actually about a society that rejects possession as necessary.

It's about work, initiative - not as performance but as pure compulsion.

It's about confronting customs, disregarding laws, walking through walls.

It's about home, flight, empty-handedness.

It's about solitude and solidarity.

It's about partnership, its pains and pleasures.

It's about individuality and interval, relativity and return.

At first it seems to be about thinking about the world from a perspective that expects that other worlds exist, or at least acknowledging other realities.

But then it becomes something different, about perceiving time (the span of a day, a moment, the gap between birth and death) and perceiving space (the thing our bodies occupy, push against, evade, retreat from, return to) neither as confines to be broken or resources to be used, but as realities to be both questioned and engaged.

It's about risking death and risking disapproval, the latter being the more difficult of the two.

I definitely recommend it, but leave it to you, if any of these themes so compel you, to decide whether or not to read it.

Multivocality

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is some thing in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance…

We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation…

Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something… to become world…

Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion… is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough…

The love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.

{Rainer Maria Rilke}

Letters to a Young Poet #7

Merging and surrendering, ebbing and flowing, bordering and protecting, practicing boundaries and pushing boundaries – these are the tasks in the breathing-in-and-breathing-out of human relationship, of being human.

This is true internally as much as it is externally. Diana Eck muses on the traffic of voices in every person, suggesting that our recognition of multivocality is the foundation for navigating the external plurality of perspectives in the world: “Our prospects for pluralism surely begin with our ability to give voice to the diversity of voices within ourselves, not all of which we exercise at the same time, but which comprise the complex web of connections we call identity" (Diana Eck, Prospects for Pluralism, 746). The appreciation of multivocality in all of its dimensions is the primary boon from my seminary experience thus far. What follows are a few brief reflections on multivocality, diversity, and identity.

Farid Esack’s essay, In Search of Progressive Islam Beyond 9/11, begins with an ‘Ali Shari’ati quotation: “It is not sufficient to say that we must return to Islam. We must specify which Islam” (Omid Safi, Progressive Muslims, 78). Individual religions function as a sort of microcosm. Islam is in itself an array of theologies, traditions, and cultures. Jewish identity draws deeply from its multiplicity of con/texts and results in a vast variety of midrashic (expounded and expansive) manifestations. The term “Christian” is an applicable unit of cultural classification, but Christianity is in no way unitary.

Religious diversity represents and affects the reality of global pluralism. In a pluralistic world, where difference matters, a nuanced understanding of difference is the difference between perpetuating old habits of prejudice and finding our way beyond mutual misunderstanding. "To bypass the pursuit of deep diversity is to fail an elemental test of fidelity to the world (Pamela Klassen & Courtney Bender, After Pluralism, 10). Our (multi)vocation as relational citizens of the earth is to delve into diversity, and to experience the intersections and explore the divergences within.

Navigating deep diversity is foreign terrain for every one involved. Diversity is essentially and perpetually foreign. Conflict is inevitable. Conflicting interests, conflicting expressions of ideas, and conflicting vocalizations of life experience are present in every encounter. Conflicts that are too volatile to ignore erupt, thus forcefully demanding the bulk of our attention. Attending to conflict in quotidian encounters, however, helps establish an understanding that conflict is not a thing to be feared.

Conflict is a navigable aspect of human relationship, and navigating conflict is a reputable means of personal, social, and spiritual formation. It is not a thing to be feared but engaged. Yet attending to conflict without fear requires that we must cross lines of difference with ears open to other voices. Cultural fluency is a core competency for those who intervene in conflicts or simply want to function more effectively in their own lives and situations (Michele LeBaron, Culture and Conflict). Fluency takes persistent attention. “In practice many of us are not adept at thinking through the issues of voice, so strident is the push toward the unitary, the unequivocal” (Diana Eck, Prospects for Pluralism, 753). Fluency takes practice. Fluency is difficult. Ignorance is easy, but with Rilke “we must trust in what is difficult” and honor the friction that results when bodies touch.

During our wedding ceremony my wife and I read our self-crafted vows and committed to a love that consists of two solitudes that border and protect and greet each other. We were careful not to commit precisely to the brand of marital love that our inherited tradition urged, where one is absorbed into the other. We were intentional about committing to a mutual relationship that would continue to contain and catalyze the multitudes that comprise us each. And then we took Communion. This image parallels the exploration of my own inheritance and vocation that I continue to engage in. As I craft a vision of my vocation (can a call be crafted?) I am often fixated on the horizon, but I believe I ignore my roots at my own peril. My relationship with Christianity continues to be tortuous. I am not willing to be absorbed by Christianity. I am committed to evading any simple categorization. But my multitudes unambiguously intersect with Christianity’s multivocality. I push against my inheritance, but I press into its soil for sustenance all the same.

Marc Gopin insists, “Peacemaking requires… a constant moral calculus of silence and activism, pushing the envelope and maintaining relationships” (To Make the Earth Whole, 98). The many voices of the many selves in the many traditions of the multitudinous world resound and clamor. To find peace within myself does not require the repression of my particularity, nor does it require a final conversion to a fixed tradition. To realize peace in the world does not require the silencing of differing voices, nor does it require some final act of justice. Making peace/shalom/salaam is being engaged in the calculated process of active contemplation and contemplative action as we merge and surrender with one another, border and protect our common dignity, and pour over the porous boundaries that make up who we are.

Ethos

When people ask me what I study they invariably put me to the task of telling them just what it is that I intend to do with a degree in religious studies once I graduate. I tell them this: I want to contribute to an ethos of religious understanding in our religiously complex and confused world.

My rote answer functions for those fragments of interaction with the people I meet from day to day. But it really isn’t sufficient in the end. It doesn’t offer much substance or nuance. It actually forces my listener to fill a rather gaping hole. They have to decide on the definition of “religious understanding”. They have to imagine what it means to respond to religious confusion. I think it’s okay, even important, to raise these sorts of questions. But as a student of religion and an advocate for peaceful engagement across religious and ideological lines of difference, the onus is on me to be more specific and to cast a concrete vision of what an ethos of religious understanding might look like.

That means that I have to do more than simply suggest that religious understanding is a possibility, something that I believe in. I have to address religious confusion head on.

The matrix of religious confusion tends to thicken wherever multiple communities are attempting to put a common resource to divergent uses. Jews and Christians, for instance, share a sacred text. This is a reality that could potentially enrich both communities, but all too often it results in either party claiming that their interpretation is authoritative. This happens between different denominations of a single religion as well. Whenever multiple parties make confident claims about a multivalent source, and when those claims don’t align, it is easier to retreat to the corners and cliques of certainty than it is to continue to engage each other across lines of difference. This blind privileging of one’s religious perspective tends to discount the validity of the religious other. The idolizing of one’s own perspective typically results from a cankerous closed-mindedness.

People suffering from closed-minds do not usually identify with their closed-minds. They identify as a sort of Christian, Muslim, atheist, humanist, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, animist, Pagan, or something else. Closed-minds are dispersed amongst us. Yet I really believe that authentically closed-minded people are a minority. There are Christians who claim their understanding of the Bible is the equivalent to universal truth. And there are Muslims who hold the Qur’an in similar fashion. And humanists who think that their assessment of social or scientific data is incontestable.

And you know what? I think it is important for these people, who purposefully or inadvertently glorify their view while espousing intolerance of others, to be able to openly make their claims. I think it is important for these people to bring their claims of authority into the public square, rather than retreating with them into enclaves of intolerance. They are welcome. I don’t say this because I think the world particularly needs closed-minded representatives from the many religious and ideological traditions. I say this because I think that they need people like me. And people like you. I think they need diversity. Which isn’t to say that I think they need to change their identity, or even concede their fundamentals. I think they can be distinctly themselves without keeping their minds closed to the others with whom they share the world. Encountering others is exactly what these people need. Encountering others in the world has the potential to both open their minds and amplify their identities.

In the chaotic matrix of multi-religious and trans-ideological engagement we are forced awake to the others whom we encounter. In public spaces designed for engagement and disagreement we all hone our identities, holding to those things that enable us to live ethically and creatively, while hopefully dispensing of those things that block our capacity for love and civic survival.

An ethos of religious understanding would look like an open field, wide open, even open to the closed. In the field we would explore personality, identity, and belonging without restraining any of them. We would look curiously and receptively at the others all around us. My vision of religious understanding is not about isolating or defining one religious or sacred truth over another. It is about being in open and confident relationship with others. These relationships are not a context for unilateral conversion; they are a matrix of mutual transformation and personal amplification. But this sort of thing requires that we all show up in the first place.

Buckskin Gulch

Hello old friends. I was away last week traipsing through the Buckskin Gulch and on into the Paria River and along the canyon it cuts. It's good to be back home... but oh was it ever good to be away.

I cherish times of being elsewhere, just as I cherish times of being near. I think that we all have to continually create our own mini-utopias; that is, our own little "no-places" of retreat and solitude and privacy. Just as we need to engage in the solemn practice of transparency and in the frivolity of personal divulgence. We must come and we must go. We must hold and we must share. And always we must be shifting our posture, craning our neck, fluttering our eyes open to the monumental moments of momentum that tumble us through life and into each other.

I took this picture last week. It speaks to me of movement, light, spaciousness, and timelessness.

Camino

I walked el Camino de Santiago a few years back. I backpack with my dad frequently (Paria Canyon in ten days). This looks like a special movie: The Way.

Photoduet

My friend Andrew and I decided, since we're both super keen on toying with our cameras, to do a photo project together. For the next month or so, if you're interested in following some of my (and his) creative outlets then link over to our tumblelog: smallpostcardsbigphotos.

Our concept is simple and fluid. He lives in a small town in upstate NY. And I live in the big windy city of Chicago. Often times a small, post-card-sized image manages to convey a powerful message or emotion. Small town/Big city. Small postcards/Big photos.

We have 21 themes. We'll each post one photo a day that matches the theme for the day. We'll do this for three weeks, then gauge our enjoyment and yours to decide if we want to keep it going. We begin tomorrow, September 1st.

http://smallpostcardsbigphotos.tumblr.com/

thought samples

Here are a few articles I squeezed into my day today:

One on the complexities of the "ex-gay ministries" that are championed in some conservative Christian circles.

One by my man Zizek with a pretty excellent paraphrase of Ephesians 6:12 included.

A brief one (as it were, by the man who more or less introduced me to the depths of Zizekian thought) challenging radical theologians to be unafraid of tapping into biblical texts and making constructive claims.

And a follow up on the Wild Goose Festival, which I mentioned in my June 3rd post. What's the difference between having a "welcoming" posture toward LGBT identifiers and being "affirming" of and allied to the LGBT community? This article touches on attempts of some Evangelical Christians to wizen up and get with the picture, the WHOLE picture, of human rights.

All sorts of fodder for all sorts of angles and thoughts. Just a sampling of what my mind has been tackling these days.

ditching the double standard

A lot of people default to a double standard when it comes to the Christian symbolism used by Anders Breivik, the accused Norwegian terrorist. They will go to great lengths to deny "Christianity" had anything to do with his murderous rampage. They are careful to preserve the sanctity of the label "Christian", yet they are unhesitant to link "Muslim" with "terrorist" as if the two are indeed a compound word.

For example, I just read a Washington Post article on the recent Norway tragedy, and found myself responding to one of the comments at the base of the article. The article is definitely worth reading and contemplating. So is my post...

@collenut - I understand Thistlethwaite's argument to be more complex than you suggest.

You said that by “ticking a Facebook box and citing language that he clearly doesn't understand [Breivik does not make himself] connected to anything Christian.”

To use your example: by ticking a Facebook box and citing Christian language (regardless of how coherent the citation) Breivik DOES indeed connect himself to at least two Christian things - 1) he's connected with some sense of Christian self-identification, and 2) he's connected to Christianity as an interpreter of Christian language.

The first connection seems easily dismissible, since his self-identification seems absurd in light of his violent acts... but it's the double standard and default assumptions surrounding the religious identity of terrorists that Thistlethwaite is arguing against - her Juergensmeyer quote sums this up - "If bin Laden is a Muslim terrorist, Breivik and McVeigh are surely Christian ones."

Perhaps Thistlthwaite is suggesting that if representatives of the political right wish to detract Breivik's Christian self-identity, then they must also be prepared to treat Islam with the same grace as they are treating Christianity. They must be willing to apply the same benefit of the doubt to Islam. They must resist the Islamaphobic impulse to automatically HONOR the self-identification of Muslim terrorists while automatically DISREGARDING the self-identification of Christian terrorists.

I think that Thistlethwaite’s main point, however, deals with Breivik’s second point of connection to Christianity – he is connected to Christianity as an interpreter of Christian language, of Christian narrative, history, and tradition. She is clear that Breivik’s violence does not implicate Christianity as a whole (just as Muslim terrorists do not implicate Islam as a whole). What I understand Thistlethwaite to be arguing is that – right, left, or center – other self-identified Christians need to respond to Breivik’s interpretations by considering the complex connections between the array of sources (religious and political) that fueled his (mis)interpretations.

As she wrote in “When Christianity Becomes Lethal”: “It is absolutely critical that Christians not turn away from the Christian theological elements in such religiously inspired terrorism. We must acknowledge these elements in Christianity and forthrightly reject these extremist interpretations of our religion.”

softapocalypse

Driving up Lake Shore Drive last night en route to a reunion with some dear friends whom we haven't seen for several (too many) weeks I proclaimed to Lauren: I know what I'm going to write my thesis on!

Now, understand that this is not the first time I've made the claim out loud to her (she's totally an amazing sounding-board, the best a grad student could ever ask for). And for each time I've claimed it out load there have been a handful of other similar inner-claims that I've kept to myself.

Also, this is not a terribly urgent matter. I've decided to go to CTS part-time beginning in the Fall, which means I'll be kicking around the CTS community for another couple years, and won't be writing my thesis until next year, Fall 2012-Spring 2013. I'm rather ecstatic about spreading my grad experience out. I consider it an opportunity to delve deeper into the subject matter I'm exploring and to work up a more solid foundation for that penultimate plunge into thesis writing.

The realization that I had while on LSD (Lake Shore Drive) was boosted a bit by this video, an animated companion to a Slavoj Zizek lecture. It's worth a watch (or two or three if that's what it takes to track with it). The bit that I'm ruminating on doesn't come in until the end when he suggests a sort of soft-apocalypticism. What might it look like, from an ecological standpoint, to critique the hard-core apocalypticism found both in popular media and fundamentalist Christianity while arguing for the necessity of a soft-apocalypticism in our scientific, social, and theological language? It needs refining I know. And is subject to change, but what do you think? I welcome any of your offerings of insight.

Zizek is exploring a different question and domain. But, like I said, it's good stuff - as are some of the other RSA Animate videos I've perused. Enjoy...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g&NR=1

What kind of real is heaven for?

As I suggested in the previous post, I am rather obsessed with my own story. I am taken with the intricacies of my cultural and religious heritage. That being the case my ears pique when I here a story that is in anyway similar to mine, even if ultimately it is radically different. So I was tickled to discover that Colton Burpo, the protagonist of the bestseller “Heaven is for Real”, is a Wesleyan pastor’s kid. I am, or was at one time, a Wesleyan pastor’s kid. I thought this was ironic because the Wesleyan Church is not a big entity in the Christian empire. Wesley himself had a strong and lasting effect on Christendom, but the Wesleyan Church (not to be confused with mainline Methodism) is more of a mousy presence. But Colton’s father, Todd Burbo (who collaborated with Lynn Vincent, Sarah Palin’s ghost writer), managed to raise quite a ruckus when he published the story of his son’s near-death experience and brief visit to heaven.

There are plenty of reviews online that discuss the book’s claims. According to the record of sales those claims have a lot of clout in the readership of the American public. There are plenty of discordant reviews that rough house with the book’s implications, providing not an ounce of credulity to Todd Burpo’s claims. Perhaps the American public is credulous, or perhaps merely curious. But there’s something that tugs at the heart when people get more than speculative and start offering narratives of eyewitness certitude about postmortem reality.

As a fellow Wesleyan PK I can’t help but side with young Colton. (There is an oath that we all take, and it can’t be broken regardless of whether or not our pastor parent remains in good standing with the Wesleyan denomination.) The boy, quite apparently, had an incredible experience. One that I hope, despite the patronage of publicity, he is able to continue to claim as his own. But I can’t bite my tongue (without considerable pain) on one point that I find problematic.

Does the boy’s testimony of his experience amount to empirical proof that the popular evangelical images of heaven are really for real? Is this it – the proof that the public has been waiting for? The book concludes that the boy reported things he couldn’t possibly of known without actually visiting heaven. Can you argue with this evidence?

Between the two options of credulity and curiosity, I would suggest siding with the latter. Near the middle of the book the author describes the occasion that his son told him about meeting Jesus in heaven. Colton’s father is careful not to ask leading questions. With methodical devotion he is careful not to mar the evidence of the innocence of his son’s testimony. Colton described his encounter with Jesus, providing details about Jesus’ eyes and dress and “markers”. Todd Burpo puzzled over what his son meant by “markers” until it dawned on him… stigmata. He coaxed his son to describe Jesus’ markers and the boy stood pointing to the centers of his palms and the tops of his feet to show where the red markers were located on Jesus’ body.

This episode frames what could be considered the crux of the book, from chapter 12 “Eyewitness to Heaven”. Todd Burpo resolves from this incident that the evidence pointed to the fact that his son had visited the real heaven and, unprovoked and uninformed, Colton was describing his first hand encounter with Jesus. Colton’s encounter secured the traditional images of heaven as conclusively true, and it confirmed the reality of heaven as dauntingly irrefutable.

Again, I insist that I have no qualms with Colton’s powerful experience and vivid visions. I think of the potentially traumatic incident of emergency surgery that the boy (and family) went through, and of the healing and consoling effect that his vision of heaven had for him. I think this is beautiful. I think of the inspiring nature of the young Colton’s testimony, and the way that it must have moved his family and community to tears and celebration. I am thrilled by these happenings.

But why take this occasion and be so emphatic that it is incontestable proof that the piecemeal conglomeration of heavenly images used in most American evangelical churches is the absolute truth about the nature of the afterlife? And why insist that it is an undeniable indication of the complete, unadulterated, inerrant and consummate truth of the exceptionality of a very particular branch of Christian teaching about the gospel of Jesus? Is that necessary? Is it honest?

I learned in my 9th grade physiology class at a conservative Christian high school from a devout Christian teacher about the physiology of crucifixion. I remember this lesson more vividly than I do the lecture on the movement of blood through the heart or the synaptic leaps that occur in brain activity. It was detailed and disgusting. And one of the details I learned was this: Had Jesus been nailed to the cross through the centers of his palms as is portrayed in popular art the weight of his body would have pitched him down off the cross. The nails in his hands would not have been sufficient to support his body on a cross. His fleshy hands, lacking adequate bone support, would have ripped apart and he’d have fallen forward to the ground. Victims of crucifixion were not nailed to the cross through the palms of their hands but in their forearms, between the ulna and the radius, providing adequate structure to support the weight of their bodies and the duration of their torment.*

Colton pointed to the centers of his palms in recollecting his vision of Jesus’ “markers”. Does that inconsistent detail negate the value of his transcendent experience? No, I genuinely don’t think it does. Does it discredit Todd Burpo’s and Lynn Vincent’s use of Colton’s experience as forensic proof that the evangelical Christian gospel is universally and empirically a closed case? I think so.

It’s unfortunate that some lackluster adults used the images described by a playful and insightful child to narrow the expanse of truth to a very closed vision of reality. It’s problematic that they’re ending the conversation – about life and God and truth – by insisting on the final word. Perhaps by favoring our impulse for curiosity and resisting the temptation of uncritical credulity we can hear Colton’s story and keep the conversation alive.

*(Note: A scientist with an alternative conclusion regarding nail placement, but who also concludes with "It's never finished... It's always open.")

two influences

While conversing with friends the other night, over a flight of local whiskeys at Chicago’s Watershed, something became apparent to me. I spend a fair amount of time pondering my religious heritage, sifting through my memories with the same care I use when I sip from a tumbler of nuanced rye. I isolate the traditions and encounters that have informed my convictions about religion. I conjure the occasions, adventures, predispositions and relationships that have composed my sense of spirituality. I let this variety play on my tongue then I feel it meld together and slide down my throat, warming my heart on the way by.

The piece that caught my attention the other night was how distinct yet similar my two most recent religious influences are. The first influence is comprised of the voices and ideas I’ve encountered in the evangelical emergent movement since reading A New Kind of Christian almost ten years ago. The second has included the academic forays of the CTS portion of my journey. The thoughts and thinkers that I have encountered while at CTS and those engaged in the emergent conversation are don’t really cross paths. These two primary influential pools have very little to do with one another. Nominally at least. For I find them to be intimately connected, if only in my own faith, seeking, and understanding.

In each there is a commitment to openness, dialogue, difference, engagement. Each pulls from a multiplicity of voices, traditions, and opinions. And both are committed in a firm and flexible way (yes, I said firm AND flexible) to Christian exploration and relation with the divine.

It isn’t a big deal that these two forces come at much of the same material in much the same spirit. It’s not profound. But it has been a formative and pleasant inner-dialogue for me. It is a dynamic interaction that I have been engaging ponderously, and it is one that I thought worth sharing.

If you want a general idea of what this intersection sounds like in words not my own, there’s a decent interview on one of the podcasts I listen to regularly – Homebrew Christianity. The interview captures elements of each force – CTS and emergence - quite well. (It does not address CTS explicitly, but rather the academic and political elements of theology that I have encountered at CTS.) Tripp Fuller of Homebrew interviews Gareth Higgins and they discuss an event going on later this month that will likewise incorporate this CTS-esque element with the momentum of the emergent conversation.

I am going to be involved that weekend with a different event here in Chicago, one that is sure to change the world, or at least this Midwestern fringe. So I recommend that if you’re in my hood, come check out the intersection of art, justice, and spirituality being hosted by my personal muse and guru. If you’re anywhere near North Carolina then gander off for a Wild Goose chase.