Until Translucent

2012-01-22T10:03:00.000-05:00

And to close John Donne Week, the famous passage where he addresses today's Anglican bloggers. Well, not really.

To this Man, every Wheele is a Drumme, and every Drumme a Thunder, and every Thunderclapp a dissolution of the whole frame of the World : If there fall a broken tyle from the house, hee thinkes Foundations are destroyed ; if a crazie woman, or a disobedient childe, or a needie servant fall from our Religion, from our Church, hee thinkes the whole Church must necessarily fall...

[We are justified to lament that] there should be such Exasperations, such Exacerbations, such Vociferations, such Ejulations, such Defamations of one another, as if all Foundations were destroyed. Who would not tremble, to heare those Infernall words, spoken by men, to men, of one and the same Religion fundamentally, as Indiabolificata, Per-diabolificata, and Super diabolificata, that the Devill, and all the Devills in Hell, and worse then the Devill is in their Doctrine, and in their Divinitie -- when, God in heaven knowes, if their owne uncharitablenesse did not exclude him, there were roome enough for the Holy Ghost, on both and on either side, in those Fundamentall things, which are unanimely professed by both.

And yet every Mart, wee see more Bookes written by these men against one another, then by them both, for Christ.

2012-01-21T09:52:00.000-05:00

Again, remarkably contemporary:

Such a church there is; a Jordan to wash thine original leprosy in baptism ; a city upon a mountain, to enlighten thee in the works of darkness; a continual application of all that Christ Jesus said, and did, and suffered, to thee. Let no soul say, she can have all this at God's hands immediately, and never trouble the church; that she can pass her pardon between God and her, without all these formalities, by a secret repentance.

It is true, beloved, a true repentance is never frustrate: but yet, if thou wilt think thyself a little church, a church to thyself, because thou hast heard it said, that thou art a little world, a world in thyself, that figurative, that metaphorical representation shall not save thee. Though thou beest a world to thyself, yet if thou have no more corn, nor oil, nor milk, than grows in thyself, or flows from thyself, thou wilt starve; though thou be a church in thy fancy, if thou have no more seals of grace, no more absolution of sin, than thou canst give thyself, thou wilt perish.... (Sermon XXXV)

2012-01-20T09:51:00.000-05:00

Remarkably contemporary, I think:

It is true, we have not a Demonstration; not such an Evidence as that one and two, are three, to prove these to be Scriptures of God; God hath not proceeded in that manner, to drive our Reason into a pound, and to force it by a peremptory necessitie to accept these for Scriptures, for then, here had been no exercise of our Will, and our assent, if we could not have resisted. (Sermon 36, St. Paul's Christmas-Day)

2012-01-19T17:47:00.000-05:00

John Donne week continues.

I have seen minute-glasses: glasses so short liv’d! If I were to preach upon this text (“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” Matt. 6:21), to such a glass, it would be enough for half the sermon, enough to show the worldly man his treasure, and the object of his Heart, to call his eye to that minute-glass, and to tell him, “There flows, there flies, your treasure, and your heart with it.” But if I had a secular glass, a glass that would run an age; if the two hemispheres of the world were composed in the form of such a glass, and all the world calcined and burnt to ashes, and all the ashes, and the sands, and atoms of the world put into that glass, it would not be enough to tell the godly man what his treasure, and the object of his heart is. A parrot ... will sooner be brought to relate to us the wisdom of a council table, than any Ambrose, or any Chrysostom, men that have gold and honey in their names, shall tell us what the Sweetness, what the Treasure of heaven is, and what that man’s peace, that hath set his heart upon that Treasure. (Sermon CXXXVI)

2012-01-18T09:50:00.000-05:00

To find a languishing wretch in a sordid corner, not only in a penurious fortune, but in an oppressed conscience, his eyes under a diverse suffocation, smothered with smoke, and smothered with tears, his ears estranged from all salutations, and visits, and all sounds, but his own sighs, and the storms, and thunders, and earthquakes of his own despair, to enable this man to open his eyes, and see that Christ Jesus stands before him, and says, Behold and see, if ever there were any sorrow, like my sorrow, and my sorrow is overcome, why not is thine?

To open this man's ears, and make him hear that voice that says, I was dead, and am alive, and behold, I live for evermore, amen; and so mayest thou; to bow down those heavens, and bring them into his sad chamber, to set Christ Jesus before him, to out-sight him, out-weep him, out-bleed him, out-die him, to transfer all the fasts, all the scorns, all the scourges, all the nails, all the spears of Christ Jesus upon him, and so, making him the crucified man in the sight of the Father, because all the actions, and passions of the Son, are appropriated to him, and made his so entirely, as if there were never a soul created but his, to enrich this poor soul, to comfort this sad soul so, as that he shall believe, and by believing find all Christ to be his -- this is that liberality which we speak of now, in dispensing whereof, the liberal man deviseth liberal things, and by liberal things shall stand. (Sermon LXXV)

2012-01-17T09:48:00.000-05:00

Donne week continues:

S. Paul was mad for love. S. Paul did, and we doe take into our contemplation, the beauty of a Christian soul ; Through the ragged apparell of the afflictions of this life ; through the scarres, and wounds, and palenesse, and morphews of sin and corruption, we can look upon the soul it self, and there see that incorruptible beauty, that white and red, which the innocency and the blood of Christ hath given it, and we are mad for love of this soul, and ready to doe any act of danger, in the ways of persecution, any act of diminution of our selves in the ways of humiliation, to stand at her doore, and pray, and begge, that she would be reconciled to God. (Sermon #5)

2012-01-16T07:00:00.000-05:00

I've been very taken, over the past week, by John Donne's sermons, which I'd never really read. I'm declaring it John Donne week, with an excerpt every day. Today's:

God will speak unto me, in that voice, and in that way, which I am most delighted with, and hearken most to. If I be covetous, God will tell me that heaven is a pearl, a treasure. If cheerful and affected with mirth, that heaven is all joy. If ambitious, and hungry of preferment, that it is all glory. If sociable, and conversable, that it is a communion of saints. God will make a fever speak to me, and tell me his mind, that there is no health but in him; God will make the disfavour, and frowns of him I depend upon, speak to me, and tell me his mind, that there is no safe dependence, no assurance but in him; God will make a storm at sea, or a fire by land, speak to me, and tell me his mind, that there is no perpetuity, no possession but in him; nay, God will make my sin speak to me, and tell me his mind; even my sin shall be a sermon, and a catechism to me. (SERMON CXX. PREACHED AT ST. PAUL'S)

2012-01-14T13:14:00.001-05:00

"I have never been comfortable with the term 'neurotheology.' This is of course a great problem for someone who is frequently engaged in the field of neurotheology."
--first two sentences of Andrew Newberg's most recent book

2012-01-03T11:35:00.000-05:00

I missed this Christmas Day article by Michael Thomas, a 30-year veteran of Wall Street over the holiday break. Stunning piece, very timely, and who's to say he's wrong?

At the end of the day, the convulsion to come won’t really be about Wall Street’s derivatives malefactions, or its subprime fun and games, or rogue trading, or the folly of banks. It will be about this society’s final opportunity to rip away the paralyzing shackles of corruption or else dwell forever in a neofeudal social order. You might say that 1384 has replaced 1984 as our worst-case scenario. I have lived what now, at 75, is starting to feel like a long life. If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer. It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all-enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes, that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now. Sixty years ago, if you had asked me, on the basis of all that I had been taught, whether I thought this condition of general rot was possible in this country, I would have told you that you were nuts. And I would have been very wrong. What has happened in this country has made a lie of my boyhood.

2012-01-02T20:33:00.001-05:00

I got a Kindle for Christmas (the simplest version) and have been downloading some of the 99-cent classics. One of them was My Life in Christ, by the Russian priest St. John of Kronstadt; I'd heard various things about him but never seen a copy of the book. It is lengthy and a mixed bag with little structure, but I was struck by this insight: "passions usually contract the heart, in the same way as God expands it and gives it true freedom." ("Passions" here in the somewhat technical sense of natural desires manifested in a disordered or misdirected state that carries us away from our true selves.)

The interesting things to me about this remark are that A) the passions inevitably give the illusion of heart- or self- expansion, but actually cause contraction, and that B) quite a lot of whipping up of religious fervor, emotionally violent doctrinal ideology, and over-the-top super-spiritual self-abgnegation/exaltation in the long run just boils down to feeding more of "the passions" under the cover of Christian language. St. John of Kronstadt's remarks help explain why people who emphasize this kind of stuff usually seem so contracted and brittle as human beings. The devil must be very happy when a longing for God, who alone can give true freedom and spaciousness, can be redirected into yet another way to contract and narrow us more.

2011-12-20T19:35:00.001-05:00

I don't have any specific comments on any specific currently-hot athletes, since I don't know the first thing about football. But I was thinking yesterday about how rapidly people -- both Christians and secularists -- roll their eyes when a winning athlete exclaims into a microphone, "I want to thank Jesus; I couldn't have done it without him." We all know the immediate sarcastic retorts: Oh, are you saying Jesus made you win and the other team lose? Jesus scored the touchdown for you? So he's for your team and against the other? Why don't you blame him when you lose if you give him credit when you win?

When you actually stop to think about normal human beings and what they naturally do at joyous moments, though, all these bitter little barbs are just plain silly. Nobody pauses in the middle of a spontaneous outpouring of joy to make abstract philosophical statements about causation. For example, athletes are even more likely, as they exult in a win, to say "I want to thank my wife and kids; I couldn't have done it without them."
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2011-12-08T19:15:00.001-05:00

I've been reading Joel Salatin's first mainstream book, Folks, This Ain't Normal. It made me laugh out loud several times until I got used to seeing Salatin's irresistable no-nonsense Southern diction on the page (not that I was laughing at it; I was laughing with recognition of the way people who counted as "talkers" spoke in my childhood.)

I came away from the book (which is really a series of essays, I think) all charged up about "OMG we have to get chickens!" and that kind of thing, but there was one point he made along the way that I found very deeply persuasive, and it comes from his belief that the way God does things is written all through the universe. Many people know that Polyface Farm's strategy in essence has been to discover how things work in nature, the way God set it up, and then imitate that. But this example I found particularly thoughtful and telling.
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2011-12-04T18:25:00.001-05:00

At just about 14:00 in this video, N.T. Wright shares what has been most meaningful to him about being Anglican: Praying the Psalms. The Daily Office with its steady NT/OT pattern. The Eucharist.

Me too.

N.T. WRIGHT part 2 from ETS Productions on Vimeo.

2011-12-02T09:10:00.000-05:00

Now here's a great Advent watch: "Accurate" is its name. And indeed it is. Memento mori!

2011-11-30T17:22:00.001-05:00

If you, like me, are going crazy with all the 24-days-early Christmas music (we actually just changed the radio station on our alarm clock for that reason), here's an Advent playlist I put together on Spotify to keep the seasonal themes appropriate to the actual season.

2011-11-29T08:30:00.000-05:00

Happened on this satirical 2007 article while doing some research for an Advent class I'm teaching, and I love it:

"Like the crafty steward in Luke 16, we need tocopy the prudence and cunning of the children of this world and marketAdvent with all the drive and initiative of a battalion of Macy'sholiday shoppers. In late October Advent commercials would start to pepper ourprimetime television programs. There would be pitches from Bread for theWorld, Second Harvest, or the local food pantry or soup kitchen,reminding us to purchase our annual memberships and drop off a few cansat the local shelter.... And afterthe Thanksgiving Day parade, we would all settle in to watch the AdventBowl, sponsored by Habitat for Humanity, Catholic Charities, or theUnited Appeal and featuring the Katrina Victims playing the TsunamiSurvivors, with the proceeds going to all the folks still crammed inFEMA trailers.
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2011-11-27T20:25:00.001-05:00

Also... I've said most of this before, but the new-ish appropriation by conservative non-liturgical Christians (including "progressive" conservative non-liturgical Christians) of the word "Advent" to mean "Christmas," or more specifically, "Christmas, but kind of edgy, spiritual and socially conscious, while still observed according to the secular American calendar" is getting so bad that already today on Advent 1 I almost want to shut down Twitter, Facebook, and my RSS reader until Dec 24th. Half the posts with some Advent-related tag on Twitter are actually about Christmas.

I have a Bible app on my phone, and this afternoon it tweeted me Advent begins today, so it's a great time to start a Christmas Reading Plan! Guys, there could hardly be a WORSE time to start a Christmas reading plan. JUNE would be a better time to undertake an off-season Christmas reading plan then the first three weeks of December. Doing a Christmas reading plan in Advent is a 100% guaranteed way to wreck your Advent.
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2011-11-27T19:10:00.001-05:00

While I didn't have to deal with a new Mass translation today, I certainly have seen plenty of commentary on it, ranging from a friend who teaches at a Roman Catholic school exulting "this is a GOOD thing!" and rejoicing in all the Biblical echoes restored in the corrected English, to several posts various places by sometimes informed, sometimes pretty uninformed Protestants which essentially boil down to "I don't like the way the Catholic church does things" (yes... that would be because you're Protestant), to some big articles which were either shamefully biased or thrillingly honest, depending on whom you asked. I also re-checked the French translation, which I know about as well as the prior US English text from going to a lot of Roman parishes in France over the years, and which has all along been way closer to the new English.

I did, however, smile at the 8AM Eucharist I was celebrating as this occurred to me: You wanna see groveling (gasp!), formal (gasp!), grammatically complex (gasp!), often Latinate-root-vocabulary (gasp!) texts? They've been right there in our 1979 BCP all along, and in all the BCPs before that, and nobody howled:

And we earnestly desire thy fatherly goodness mercifully to accept this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving; most humbly beseeching thee to grant that, by the merits and death of thy Son Jesus Christ, and through faith in his blood, we, and all thy whole Church, may obtain remission of our sins, and all other benefits of his passion.
And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee that we, and all others who shall be partakers of this Holy Communion, may worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son Jesus Christ, be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him.
And although we are unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice, yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offenses, through Jesus Christ our Lord;
By whom, and with whom, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, all honor and glory be unto thee, O Father Almighty, world without end.
.

2011-11-25T20:38:00.001-05:00

While I don't know much about UK politics, I think the #torybible tweets on Twitter translate pretty easily into American politics. Many are hilarious. (There are also #labourbible tweets, but the #torybible ones seem to me to be funnier because more Biblically literate). A few favorites:

ladylikepunk: And the Samaritan kept on walking, because he knew the disabled man was just faking, and a drain on the system #torybible

dgmagee Truly I tell you, whatever you did for the least of these was wasted on them #torybible

deborahjaneorr The commandments ... are summed up in this one rule: "Love your neighbor as yourself." So make sure you buy in a *good area* #torybible

johnedginton Let he who is most outraged cast the first stone #torybible

gedrobinson In the beginning was the Market, and the Market was with God, and the Market was God. #ToryBible

wubeyonekenobi And Jesus went into the temple and approached the Money Lenders, and said :"Nice work guys" #torybible
paulstpancras It is easier for a Rich Man to enter the Kingdom of Billionaires than for a poor man to climb out of the eye of needle of poverty #torybible

drstart "And the Angel Gabriel said to Mary - "Go and get a job, you benefits sponge. Single mothers like you are ruining this country"". #torybible

2011-11-19T09:30:00.000-05:00

"Because of the profound and complete conversion of my intellect, I thought I was entirely converted." -Thomas Merton

My goodness, how true this is of so many people. So many seminary students. I'm sure it was absolutely true of me the first several times I read those words. How little I knew. Now, I hope to be converted one day.

2011-11-18T07:44:00.001-05:00

One of the most moving things on the #N17 day of action, to me, was the projection on the Verizon building in New York. I heard reports of it on Twitter as the night went on, and read some of the slogans by people who were tweeting them, and just thought "Wow." This morning, I was even more moved to read the interview with the artist who created the installation, especially to hear how and where he made it happen, which is right out of Joshua 2 (or some other places come to mind as well):

XJ: How did you go about finding someone nearby who would allow you to stage this from inside their home?
MR: Opposite the Verizon building, there is a bunch of city housing. Subsidized, rent-controlled. There's a lack of services, lights are out in the hallways, the housing feels like jails, like prisons. I walked around, and put up signs in there offering money to rent out an apartment for a few hours. I didn't say much more. I received surprisingly few calls, and most of them seemed not quite fully there. But then I got one call from a sane person.Her name was Denise Vega. She lived on the 16th floor. Single, working mom, mother of three.

2011-11-15T09:00:00.000-05:00

"Plenty of Christians, alas, have imagined that a 'divine Jesus' had come to earth simply to reveal his divinity and save people away from earth for a distant 'heaven.'... It has become all too possible to use the doctrine of the Incarnation or even the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture as a way of protecting oneself and one's worldview and political agenda against having to face the far greater challenge of God's taking charge, of God becoming king, on earth as it is in heaven. But that is what the stories of the Bible are all about. That is what the story of Jesus was, and is, all about. That is the real challenge, and skeptics aren't the only ones who find clever ways to avoid it." --N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus

2011-11-14T12:28:00.000-05:00

A few posts back I was expressing annoyance at a (perhaps deliberately) superficial reading of the theological term "mystery" in the book Crimes Against Logic. These comments from this week's "On Being" on NPR say rather well what the term evokes for me.

"Mystery" can sometimes be used as a way of deflecting real inquiry. To say, "well, we just have to resign ourselves to the mystery.... It's a mystery. We should leave it be. We should just let it go." Now, the scientist in me says no, that something is not right with that interpretation of mystery. It's too easy. Rather, what I think we need to do is to recognize that no matter how deeply we engage the world, no matter how far we manage to penetrate into the mystery, there will always be more mystery. It's always deeper, it's always bigger, it's always wider than our possible imagination at any given moment. But it's always an invitation. Mystery is kind of an invitation in. It's not a wall before which we have to give up, but rather, a kind of 'find the door.' Where is that little chink that allows you to peer through and then gradually to open up and find resources and capacities in yourself to take a little step or to put the horizon a little further away?
--Amherst College Physicist Arthur Zajonc

As we used to say in seminary, "a mystery is something that can only be understood by participating in it," which is about as far from a wall, a deflection, or a smokescreen as you can imagine. It's in fact an invitation to precisely the kind of empirical immersion into new discovery and expanded capacities that Zajonc is talking about.

2011-11-13T13:00:00.000-05:00

One of the things that got me motivated to write up the walking meditation at Occupy Boston was reading this article in Rolling Stone, which to me summarizes well all the reasons why, despite lots of reasons for skepticism and caution, I think the Occupy movement is a sign of hope in our decayed and superficial culture. Taibbi's points chime for me with what we did by sitting in the middle of Copley Square in silence during rush hour. Some excerpts with commentary:

This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.

Taibbi catalogs well the misguided, within-the-system responses of both the right and the left to Occupy, with the right mocking and the left trying to co-opt. But, he says, trying to parse this movement as an expression of an existing location within the system is misguided, because it's about something more primal.

We're all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob's Ladder nightmare with no end; we're entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.
That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.
...People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something.

And the ending point:

People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.

2011-11-12T08:58:00.001-05:00

A couple weeks ago, we went down to Dewey Square to Occupy Boston -- I had been once for a march before, but Mark had not yet -- to participate in a unique event. Some of the monks from Thich Nhat Hanh's order were coming by the occupation as part of a national tour of campuses, and the plan was to do an interfaith meditative walk from Dewey Square to Copley Square where there would be a silent meditation flashmob. Now this, we thought, we know how to do. We can contribute something here.

Since this was a silent public witness I thought I should put on my clericals, and I was glad I did --as we got off the red line I crossed paths with someone who looked like she was probably headed into South Station to wash up in the bathrooms; she gave me a big smile and said "Are you coming to the occupation?" and when I said yes replied, "I could tell!" (The clerical garb also made for a very delighted, reverent bow from the leader of the monastic group, all in their own habits, when they arrived.) There was a bit of milling around and vagueness as to who was doing what when at the Occupy site (true to my previous experience at the march), but eventually the meditative walk began and we pointed ourselves to Copley.

There were probably about 25-30 of us on the walk, and we were making our way through rush hour urban Boston. The experience was extraordinary, as we moved steadily with our breaths down the sidewalks surrounded by people who were frantic, distracted, half on the smartphone, running for buses. I was quite struck to be on those city streets, where I have always gone right into urban-warrior mode and behaved pretty much like everyone else is behaving, but instead to be moving spaciously with attention on what you're doing this moment rather than on where you need to be or how unassailable the front you have up is.
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2011-10-25T17:20:00.002-04:00

I have a hard time not RTing everything Bible Students Say posts on Twitter, but this one kills me. Let's take perhaps the world's most prominent current academic advocate of a theological position and claim he says the exact opposite:

RT @BibleStdntsSay: "I agree with NT Wright. Since the earth is going to be destroyed anyway, why work so hard to preserve it?" [Then no you don't (facepalm)]

However: I've seen at least one highly educated left-wing Episcopalian do the exact same "180-degrees from what he actually said" misrepresentation of a piece by Wright, explaining that the fatal problem with the article is that, being by an evangelical, it teaches an "escape" theology in which being "saved" means that we will be taken away from earth to heaven. No, seriously. Seriously.

2011-10-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

So here's the last fallacy from Whyte's book Crimes Against Logic that I wanted to comment on....

3. "Begging the question." Again, just massively popular but difficult to spot because it's so widespread. Begging the question consists in taking for granted precisely what is in dispute, "passing off as an argument what is really no more than an assertion of your position." A constant example these days is a slogan that always annoys me intellectually, and Whyte's treatment of it has helped me see why. "If you're against XYZ, then don't XYZ yourself! [Understood: but be tolerant of others who want to XYZ]." Whyte uses the example of abortion here; I would be very surprised if he himself were not pro-choice, but he points out that "anyone who has ever listened to an anti-abortionist ought to be incapable of this response... [because] they think it's murder. They think killing a fetus is no different morally from killing an adult. If their prohibitionism [of abortion for everyone] is wrong, it's not because they are insufficiently tolerant of murder. It is because killing a fetus is not really murder." [italics mine]
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2011-10-12T20:47:00.000-04:00

We were out in Western Mass recently, and part of our time was spent meandering from bookstore to bookstore. Usually I keep a running list of titles that interested me, but not enough for me to have bought them, so that I can get them from the library. One of those titles this time was Jamie Whyte's Crimes Against Logic, a book pointing out the errors of reasoning in what passes for argument. It offers a very telling collection of examples of ways people try to (and do) win arguments -- I was going to say "these days," but as Whyte points out, "people may have become no worse at reasoning, but they now have so many more opportunities to show off how bad they are" with the proliferation of media. While most of the book is great, I liked his treatment of three logical fallacies so much I'm going to post about them -- two today, one later, just to keep the post a manageable length.

1. Motives. Trying to impugn someone's motives rather than address what they say is an old trick. However, Whyte points out that increasingly, the media tend to focus on why someone may have said something, rather than assessing the merit of what was said. This fallacy that someone's motive for making a statement determines the truth or falsity of the statement is, as he says, so common that we're just desensitized to it now.
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2011-10-01T19:56:00.000-04:00

You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.
--Thomas Merton

2011-09-29T12:31:00.000-04:00

Perhaps this season we're in nationally would provide a good time to re-read Walter Bruggemann's 19 Theses:

1.    Everybody lives by a script. The script may be implicit or explicit. It may be recognized or unrecognized, but everybody has a script.
2.    We get scripted. All of us get scripted through the process of nurture and formation and socialization, and it happens to us without our knowing it.
3.    The dominant scripting in our society is a script of technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism that socializes us all, liberal and conservative.
4.    That script (technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism) enacted through advertising and propaganda and ideology, especially on the liturgies of television, promises to make us safe and to make us happy.
5.    That script has failed. That script of military consumerism cannot make us safe and it cannot make us happy. We may be the unhappiest society in the world.
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2011-09-24T11:06:00.000-04:00

"Your church is only as good as its disciples. It does not matter how good your praise, preaching, programs or property are: If your disciples are passive, needy, consumerist, and not moving in the direction of radical obedience, your church is not good." -- Neil Cole

HT: Todd

2011-09-19T18:43:00.000-04:00

Found via the inimitable Eve Tushnet:
"So I’m convinced your deepest problem is not the cigarettes you smoke or the alcohol you drink in secret. It’s not the slander you speak and the gossip you cherish. It’s not the pornography you pleasure yourself with when no one’s looking. It’s not the baby you aborted; it’s not that you betrayed your brother, cheated on your bride, lied about the whole thing, and retaliated with murder [King Herod]. It’s not even that you slaughtered the Lamb and killed the Messiah. Your deepest problem is that somewhere deep down inside, you believe Jesus the Messiah rose from the dead just to kick your ass.
When, in fact, He rose from the dead so you would believe all is forgiven. It is finished! Justice is accomplished. And the Father is pleading, “Come home, come home, come home!"

2011-09-14T14:10:00.001-04:00

I was taking a walk around town Monday, and sitting on the top of someone's paper recycling was the August 2011 issue of Bon Appetit. (I used to buy those kinds of magazines, but haven't for some years.) I scooped it up and brought it home in a pale imitation of dumpster diving, whereupon I skimmed it and put it in our own recycling -- except for one page. Our CSA has been loading us up with eggplant, and if you are in the same situation I highly recommend these eggplant fries. The odd technique of soaking your eggplant for several hours in an ice bath first really does solve a number of the problems that seem to go with this vegetable. I didn't have rice flour or za'atar, and I think I cut the fries too big, but even so it worked very well.

2011-09-12T21:23:00.000-04:00

I heard a bit of Thomas Groome on WGBH last week talking about his new book, and was interested in the comments he made (here, from his actual text) about "restorationist" movements trying to bring back the "old ways" in Christianity. Excerpt:

There are lots of empirical data that mainline religions in the United States are not doing so well with their religious education. Even among churches that seem to have some success in retaining their youth, the research indicates that their young people’s faith often reflects a “moralistic therapeutic deism” rather than authentic Christianity. They embrace a “nice guy” image of a God who comforts and consoles, is called upon only as needed, and makes no real demands on their daily living other than that they “be good, nice, and fair to each other.”...

2011-09-09T20:31:00.000-04:00

I've been reading Michael J. Sandell's Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?, an interesting review of ethical systems with a lot of cases to ponder, based on a popular class at Harvard. (My gosh, it's been a long time since I had ethics and philosophy.) Anyway, I was just going over Sandell's argument that John Stuart Mill's defense of utilitarianism isn't consistently utilitarian, and found this quote from Mill: "It really is of importance not only what men do, but what manner of men they are that do it."

Well, that quote reminded me that when a friend tweeted awhile back that he had gotten around to seeing Of Gods and Men on our recommendation, I realized I had meant to make a comment on a review of the film whose perspective I found quite surprising, and perhaps useful as a way to notice how public conversations don't really have a shared sense of what is ethical at the moment.

If you are not aware of the story, it turns around a small group of Trappists in Algeria who refuse to use their privilege to flee their town when it is threatened by terrorism. Roger Ebert gave it three stars, and thoughtfully raised the issue that the French were originally in Algeria for exploitative reasons and that the implications of this background are not really dealt with. (Although the film does make extremely clear the loving, mutual relationships of these particular monks with the community of Muslims that has grown up around their monastery.) But what left me speechless was the way he ended his review:
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2011-09-08T07:45:00.003-04:00

Why am I all "Callooh! Callay!" about Rod Dreher, with whom I have several disagreements but (I have gradually come to accept, as a lifelong Democrat) perhaps more agreements, being back in the blogosphere? I'm certainly not as interested in spending hours on political commentary as he is. But with him writing, I get to read things like this, in response to the nauseating cheering of 234 deaths at the GOP debate last night:

It is worth contemplating why it is that conservatives who believe the government is incompetent in most areas of its agency are willing to assent credulously to its unerring competence when it comes to exercising the ultimate power over its citizenry: killing them.

And this, in his "hey I'm back and here's what I've been thinking about the political situation" post:

It seems to me that both parties are such hostages to their own rhetoric and interest groups that they cannot move in creative ways to deal with the world as it is. ...Above all, the raison d’etre of each party seems to be, at the core, demonizing the Other.

2011-09-05T08:13:00.005-04:00

A bit more on the doubt topic: on GetReligion (a journalism blog I liked much better before it became as snarky as it is, but whatever) Tmatt had a post about an article on Perpetual Adoration. (Incidentally, what's with the fact that the various 24/7 prayer movements seem to have absolutely no interest in or desire to connect with the Perpetual Adoration people? Is it just rank bias?) In a section dealing with unanswered prayer and doubt, Tmatt described the writer's tone as "the key is to remember that these strange natives in this strange chapel have never dwelt on these mysteries in any serious way (as opposed to the penetrating thoughts of the journalist paying a brief visit)."

I found the first line of the article delightful: "Here’s a little secret known only to faithful religious believers and, perhaps, to journalists who are willing to pay close attention to their lives: People who pray a lot know more about doubt than people who dedicate little or no time to serious prayer." This feels self-evident for me and it's nice to hear someone make it explicit. But after having been helped by that Smith article a few days ago to see that there's also an issue here of whether we're trying to practice faith or certainty, I wonder, is it really self-evident, then? If you are a "religious believer" looking for intellectual certainty rather than practicing faith, might you actually engage with doubt in a somewhat similar way to the way the journalist models in this article?

2011-09-01T16:26:00.003-04:00

An interesting post by James K. A. Smith about the differences between doubt and skepticism. I've never really been invested in a Christian environment which saw doubt as anything less than a positive and natural aspect of faith, but I certainly have met people who either were afraid of it, or who were newly flushed with transgressive delight at tearing down their anti-doubting pasts, whether from within some different school of Christianity or as ex-Christians. (Actually, now that I think of it, my first real communication breakdowns with believers who saw doubt as negative may have been as I began to write about U2, when I struggled to grasp why there was supposed to be some problem, e.g., with telling Jesus to "wake up dead man." Wait, I thought, isn't that just what regular prayer by any seasoned Christian in pain sounds like?)

Anyway, I think Smith's framing here is helpful, at least to me. The view that our own current intellectual take on things should have ultimate veto power on how we live out our relationship with God is dependent, Smith implies, on a modernist confusion of faith with certainty. And here I'd add that it seems to me this confusion is a problem both for highly conservative Christians who see doubt as something to be avoided, and for skeptics of various stripes, who as Smith writes "want the faith to be cut down to the size of their doubt, to conform to their suspicions. Doubt is taken to be sufficient warrant for jettisoning what occasions our disbelief and discomfort... For the new doubters, if I can't believe it, it can't be true."

But for what Smith calls "catholic doubters," of whom I certainly am one, my own inability to believe something right now isn't of all that much interest and certainly isn't a reliable source of information about its truth. "Rather, like the movements of a lament psalm, all of the scandalizing, unbelievable aspects of an inscrutable God are the target of my doubts." In other words, doubt is something that you immediately aim right back at God, within the context of the existing relationship. Whereas, if I understand Smith correctly, for those who prefer certainty to faith, you are the "target" of your doubts. Doubt brings you into closer relationship not with God, but with yourself; what it makes you take aim at is not God, but the opinions you hold about him, in an attempt to either shore up your prior certainty or re-shape it into a new, smaller certainty. What we're talking about here, then, is not divergent theological systems per se, or clashing views of authority -- it's more like two very different ways of assessing the role and usefulness of your own mental constructions in the process of living Christianly. Helpful to me, at any rate.

2011-08-22T19:33:00.003-04:00

This summer, our community has been experimenting with a different prayer schedule. For the past 5 years, our routine has been a full, required Morning Prayer early on work days, and a brief optional Compline every night. Because of children's morning schedules last academic year, getting a quorum at Morning Prayer became very difficult, and in an effort to make life easier, we went to this routine: a brief, optional morning office at 7:15 am every day (borrowed from the Church of England's materials for "prayer during the day") and a full, mandatory Evening Prayer at 8:30 pm on "school nights."

As we launched this experiment, I commented that perhaps we would learn why no monastic community I'd ever heard of organized their days like this, and indeed, I think we have - or at least I have, and I would like to write about it a little.

I had not really appreciated, until we tried to change it, how completely the typical routine of fixed-hour prayer is predicated on the natural rhythms of the day. It is meant to fit in with those rhythms seamlessly, such that the various times of prayer slide almost unnoticeably into the natural spaces the pace of life gives us in every 24 hours. So: a long stretch, or sometimes 2 stretches, full of content, first thing in the morning to get the day going and mark the transition from dark to light. Brief, simple pauses at intervals through the work day. Another long stretch at the end of the work day, marking the shift to evening, the transition from light to dark. And finally, a brief goodnight prayer at the close of day to button it up.

The longer stretches incorporate content, readings, input; the brief pauses are mostly chances to reorient with a few phrases, a song, a prayer. This naturally fits in with, and even actively expresses, the natural character of whatever phase of the 24-hour day you are in as you're gathering.

When you do the Office this way, you barely notice it. It is a routine like brushing your teeth, not an event you need to arrange to be at. I was looking at our tomatoes out back, and the bushes have grown to the point that you can barely see the cages that are holding them up. The offices are, I think, supposed to be like that cage, almost invisible but providing an indispensable supporting role within a natural process.

But an 8:30 pm service with content is not like that at all. It's not a cage, it's a big ol' tomato, obviously sitting out there in the middle of everything and demanding you deal with it. An 8:30 pm service is a Thing you are obligated to go to, an Event that disrupts your plans and breaks up your evening in an unnatural way. I'm not saying that these Evening Prayer services have not been good, and in fact they've worked fairly well for the house (altho now that the novelty has worn off, people are finding reasons they can't be there more frequently) and solved the AM difficulties that were there for folks who quite genuinely have to tend to kids first thing in the morning. And the brief early morning event is also pretty well attended and feels positive.

But I think, now, that what we're doing currently is simply not even the same spiritual discipline as doing the Daily Office as it is designed to be done. These two prayer times are perfectly good Christian events, but they're not really the Office. They're just too foregrounded and idiosyncratic, especially the odd 8:30 long-stretch with content. It's more like committing to meet with friends at lunch to pray for half an hour before eating, or going to a special event at church after supper. There is not a global community carrying you when you meet for prayer at an offbeat hour the way there is when you join the same rhythm as everyone else in your time zone, nor is the natural movement of the day carrying you either. And the pattern never fades gently into the background to let you watch the result of its being there grow and thrive around it.

I don't think I could have learned this as completely without this experiment. But I come away convinced that there is a very deep internal, almost physical, logic to the way the organization of the Office echos and undergirds the organization of a day.

2011-03-04T17:33:00.002-05:00

Liturgy is where art and community life meet. Where spirit is not thought but made flesh through hands, knees, and vocal chords. In worship the stuff of art is offered up in the name of the community, not the ego of the artist—or the clergy.
- Gregory Wolfe, Image Journal

This is from an article on Trollope, an enthusiasm of my husband, here. Another quote from it below:

Ironically, the spiritual-but-not-religious embrace a consumerist mentality that in other contexts they harshly criticize. The irony is compounded when one realizes that these spiritual individualists—inheritors of an “I” culture—most often pluck items off the shelf of “we” cultures. Spiritual tourism offers the benefits of wisdom derived from those who submit to authority and discipline and tradition without having to do so oneself. But spiritual tourists have no home to return to; they are always restlessly consuming new experiences. They can’t eat, pray, and love enough.

2011-02-14T10:58:00.003-05:00

We woke up today to discover that 20-30 cars on our street and the next street over had had their tires slashed. Not clear why - random malice, vendetta against a landlord, dislike of the neighborhood from someone outside it, something else? Most of us park in back and thus weren't affected, but the one of us who parks in front lost (only one) tire. Praying for the person who did it, but also that this extra notch of stress for residents won't be the last straw that kicks a tenuous relationship into a fight, makes someone late to the job they were about to lose, makes paying the gas bill impossible this month....

2011-01-22T09:21:00.004-05:00

What, an actual post? Something to "share" that doesn't fit in the frame of just posting a link and 140 (or a few more on Facebook) characters? I did see it on Facebook, but I actually, yes, want to write more about this than can fit in any of the thought-shrinking media we all use now.

So this site, Do Nothing For 2 Minutes. Go take a look; I'll wait.

A nice stress reduction page, yeah? Probably if someone with no other spaciousness in their life did even this every day, it would lower their blood pressure a couple points. But of course I'm going to look at this from the perspective of someone who practices and teaches a variety of methods of apophatic prayer, and it immediately struck me how very far from "nothing" this actually is and how much content it gives to make the to-us-arduous task of just sitting there tolerable. The wave sounds, which change and have seagull noises coming in and out. The picture, which you can certainly occupy your mind looking at ("Oh, hey, there're some birds down there on the left... the right horizon is just slightly pinker, isn't it?..."). And of course the countdown timer, which encourages "trying" to stay on the page and recalls effortful contexts like the treadmill ("C'mon! Only 0:47 more at this 10% incline!")

Now for many people even disciplining mental activity to this level would be quite helpful, I'm sure. On the spectrum I sometimes use in teaching it's a very non-threatening "concentrative" practice with a couple extra crutches to make it as easy as possible to stay in the practice. But it's quite a long way from "nothing" (a "receptive" practice), actually. Thomas Keating (just to choose one framework) could probably write 10 pages pointing out ways in which we've likely engaged in all five "thoughts" (his technical term for all the various inner and outer attachments, attractions, reactions, and self-reflections that separate us subtly from our selves and our immediate experience) while looking at this page.

I'm in general not drawn to concentrative practices anyway, so probably am not the best suited to imagine what the mind and soul benefits of something like this are. But here is the thing that fascinated me the most: I have little difficulty spending way longer than 2 minutes in a receptive practice with no crutches or only one subtle crutch (Again, Keating: "the symbol of your intention to open yourself to the mystery of God's presence beyond thoughts, images and emotions.... chosen not for its content but for its intent... as lightly as if you were laying a feather on a piece of absorbent cotton.")

But. On a screen? Completely different experience. It hit me instantly how (and of course we all know this) the mind is trained by the context not to rest and attend, but to graze for gratification: Oh, what's this? Do I want to engage with this? That's maybe a second's worth of very superficial attention. You can't do your standard F-shaped scan on a page like this, which results in annoyance. On the screen, I am now wired to expect the digital world's full "ecosystem of interruption technologies" (Cory Doctorow) to be constantly at work to offer a panoply of shiny distractions (a word with a long pedigree in contemplative practice...) that will keep me both interested and in constant restless motion.

So, two minutes looking at a screen is a subjective eternity, even if for you thirty minutes actually doing nothing in a chair isn't. This made me wonder: given everything we now know about neural plasticity, would it be good for those of us who can do nothing in a chair to now also force ourselves to stay still for 2 minutes while in front of a screen? Or is the better answer just to spend less damn time looking at screens?

2010-11-24T10:09:00.000-05:00

http://whoarethejoneses.org/

2010-11-23T18:41:00.004-05:00

I can't say that The Suburbs has affected me anywhere near as deeply as the other two Arcade Fire albums, and because of that I haven't been keeping up with what's going on in AF live performances since seeing them here in Boston quite early in their tour. However, I was on Us Kids Know tonight and found this recent performance of "Month of May"; the song has really developed, and just for the sake of having a little Arcade Fire content here again I thought I'd post it. This came out in advance of the album, on the day after Pentecost, and I thought then (and still do) it was a perfect Pentecost number. Nice to see it growing.

2010-11-22T11:44:00.000-05:00

In case anyone is interested, here's what was in the first installment of a two-month early-winter CSA share we picked up over the weekend. Two floors of our house have these shares, and we've created a large storage root-cellar-type-thing in the basement (except it looks more like a toy skyscraper with garbage bags over it). We blanched and froze a decent amount of stuff as soon as the share arrived, too. Mark and I had the bunch of chard we received tonight, and I believe it was the highest-quality, most flavorful chard I have ever eaten in my life.

2010-11-21T20:30:00.003-05:00

In general, to "do justice" means to live in a way that generates a strong community where human beings can flourish. Specifically, however, to "do justice" means to go to places where the fabric of shalom has broken down, where the weaker members of society are falling through the fabric, and to repair it. This happens when we concentrate on and meet the needs of the poor.
How can we do that? The only way to reweave and strengthen the fabric is by weaving yourself into it. Human beings are like threads thrown together on a table. If we keep our money, time, and power to ourselves, for ourselves, instead of sending them out into our neighbors' lives, then we may be literally on top of each other, but we are not interwoven socially, relationally, financially, and emotionally. Reweaving shalom means to sacrificially thread, lace, and press your time, goods, power, and resources into the lives and needs of others.
--Tim Keller in Generous Justice

I first heard this image of reweaving the fabric of a neighborhood through personal investment of time, power, goods, etc in 2006, when we had been living at MSH only a few months, and it galvanized me as a description of exactly why we chose to move here. Still today, I find it deeply moving, and I wonder how I ever lived unaffected by this kind of vision. As messy and inconvenient as it can be -- and this life we've chosen certainly has cost us money, time, stuff, reputation, power, and even friendships -- this is the deal. I don't want to be anywhere else.

2010-11-12T10:28:00.000-05:00

I liked the point about balance and time management made in this post from Kitchen Stewardship: We sometimes talk about putting God "first," but this in fact sets up a false tension of priorities (based, I would add, on the hard-to-eliminate human habit of trying to keep God in the "god" slot.) There's a qualitative difference there: God is not a priority to be ranked among other priorities, but a Presence to be welcomed at the center during all our activities, whatever priority.

2010-11-09T10:01:00.000-05:00

Left to myself, the god I want is a god who will give me what I want. He – or more likely it – will be a projection of my desires.

At the grosser level, this will lead me to one of the more obvious pagan gods or goddesses, who offer their devotees money, or sex, or power (as Marx, Freud and Nietzsche pointed out). All idols started out life as the god somebody wanted.
At the more sophisticated level, the god I want will be a god who lives up to my intellectual expectations: a god of whom I can approve rationally, judiciously, after due consideration and weighing up of theological probabilities. I want this god because he, or it, will underwrite my intellectual arrogance. He will boost my sense of being a refined modern thinker.

The net result is that I become god; and this god I’ve made becomes my puppet. Nobody falls down on their face before the god they wanted. Nobody trembles at the word of a homemade god. Nobody goes out with fire in their belly to heal the sick, to clothe the naked, to teach the ignorant, to feed the hungry, because of the god they wanted. They are more likely to stay at home with their feet up.

But on one particular day in the year we celebrate the God whom we didn’t want – how could we have ever dreamed of it? – but who, amazingly, wanted us. In the church’s year, Trinity Sunday is [that] day. You see, the doctrine of the Trinity, properly understood, is as much a way of saying ‘we don’t know’ as of saying ‘we do know’. To say that the true God is Three and One is to recognize that if there is a God then of course we shouldn’t expect him to fit neatly into our little categories. If he did, he wouldn’t be God at all, merely a god, a god we might perhaps have wanted.

The Trinity is not something that the clever theologian comes up with as a result of hours spent in the theological laboratory, after which he or she can return to announce that they’ve got God worked out now, the analysis is complete, and here is God neatly laid out on a slab. The only time they laid God out on a slab he rose again three days afterwards.

-NT Wright, For All God's Worth

2010-11-08T08:00:00.000-05:00

I realized I'd noted, but then forgot to post, this nice profile in which Sister Mary Ann Scofield reflects on her 30 years as a spiritual director. (Had to smile at “Tell me about the experience. What exactly happens?”: words I've spoken more times than I can count in my far fewer years as a director). I liked her line about "to listen to the whole story"; I think it's so true that we directors run the risk of missing the real direction experience when we don't listen to the whole story -- either because we want to get to what we have to say, or because the person is nervously looking for an escape from actually having to tell it and we collude in giving them one.

2010-11-05T15:18:00.000-04:00

The North Shore Bazaar - third annual! - is coming up this weekend. There will be over 25 vendors of locally sourced and fairly traded goods, including some great food and coffee, and live music by Maeve. If you're in the Boston area, check it out: Community Covenant Church, Peabody, 1-4pm Sunday Nov 7th.

2010-11-04T18:55:00.004-04:00

We had a hard frost the other night, and leaves were dropping off the trees, just falling straight down from every tree in sight in a regular pattern, making a slight "plop" noise as they hit. We'd already taken the garden out (except for a few herbs) so no worries there. We're still enjoying produce from what was a very good year; some of our eggplant and peppers are in the freezer, and the basement has our butternut squash being stored on a wine rack. Two of our households are doing the two-month Nov-Dec share from Shared Harvest, and then our floor is also doing the January-March "deep winter" share from Red Fire Farm, so we've been working at creating root-cellar type areas for longer term storage. Any readers who've lived here would barely recognize the basement, it is so clean and well-organized!

2010-11-02T11:20:00.000-04:00

I wanted to link this post from last week, which I found clever: We Need A Bigger Cake. It's a simple illustration of how having "more" doesn't necessarily fix the problem of some people having "less."

2010-10-31T13:58:00.001-04:00

Incidentally, it's fun having Lutherans living here on October 31st.

2010-10-30T19:02:00.005-04:00

Well, having wondered what would happen, perhaps I should say a few words about what did. I thought the rally was hobbled a little bit by Colbert having to play an especially exaggerated version of his right-wing character whereas there was no far-left character available to respond (since Stewart does not play one and instead played "the sane guy"), and I was a little sorry that the answer to the "will this help?" cheer was not "no, easy three-word slogans don't help." But overall, I was very moved by the huge turnout, by the clear effort to be bipartisan, and by the many guests who showed up to support the concept. (I was also moved that when I retweeted the sign "Real patriots can handle a difference of opinion" it instantly became the most widely RT'd thing I've ever put on Twitter!)

Stewart's closing speech was amazing, I thought:

His point about the media's amplification of everything distorting the world to the point that truth can no longer be heard is very true. But I think I was most impressed by his line about inflammatory language like "terrorist," "racist," etc as "titles that must be earned." I admired his warning about how we're losing the ability e.g. "to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers," and agree completely with his point that really, very few people have actually "put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate."

If it actually happened that we could let go of that kind of "hater" language -- that, say, fewer people on the right used "stalinist" to mean "on a different place on the spectrum than I am about economic policies" and fewer people on the left used "homophobe" to mean "on a different place on the spectrum than I am about gay marriage," that would be a major, major victory for sanity.

2010-10-30T10:48:00.003-04:00

If I wasn't booked for big neighborhood things today and tomorrow, I would have been pretty likely to go to DC for the Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive today. I've been interested however, to see the debate about whether this event is actually about sanity/respectful discourse, or whether it is sort of a front for politics. I was on the site to look at the signs submitted by fans, where you can vote as to whether they're sane or not -- and the alternative the site happened to serve up was two intemperate anti-Republican options both of which would have gotten a "not sane" vote from me had that been a possibility.

It's funny: I personally am a lifelong Democrat, and from that point of view I have things I want to see voted for and people I want to see in office, but right now what I understand Stewart/Colbert's actual point to be seems way more important -- that we need to be able to believe that good, rational human beings can disagree with us. We need to cease assuming that the only reason someone could be our political opposite is that s/he is a monster or a dullard. I've gone on here before about the great book The Big Sort, which helps make sense of how our culture has been losing the ability to imagine difference as healthy and normal. If asking this of ALL sides is indeed what the rally is about, may its tribe endure.

A relevant meme that is going around (I saw it from Camassia, but it's lots of places) is this tongue in cheek test based on a Charles Murray piece arguing that the "elites" being attacked in one arena of public discourse are, in fact, "isolated from mainstream America and ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans." As with many folks I've seen taking it, I'm almost certainly part of that elite under fire, but according to the scores they get (mine = 22% elite) I/we couldn't possibly be. The meme is in the long run a joke, of course, but it makes the great point that in fact, you just can't argue back from the political position someone now holds to prove that they are uniquely isolated, uniquely stupid, "not like me," or in other ways not really classifiable as a normal human being.

1. Can you talk about “Mad Men?” Never seen it.
2. Can you talk about the “The Sopranos?” No.
3. Do you know who replaced Bob Barker on “The Price Is Right?” Yes. (Drew Carey)
4. Have you watched an Oprah show from beginning to end? Yes.
5. Can you hold forth animatedly about yoga? Yes, but only because I have the very non-elite condition Type II diabetes.
6. How about pilates? No.
7. How about skiing? Oh my gosh no.
8. Mountain biking? No.
9. Do you know who Jimmie Johnson is? No.
10. Does the acronym MMA mean anything to you? No.
11. Can you talk about books endlessly? Yes.
12. Have you ever read a “Left Behind” novel? Yes.
13. How about a Harlequin romance? Pretty sure the answer is yes here.
14. Do you take interesting vacations? They interest me, but often baffle other people.
15. Do you know a great backpacking spot in the Sierra Nevada? No.
16. What about an exquisite B&B overlooking Boothbay Harbor? No.
17. Would you be caught dead in an RV? Have taken an interesting vacation in a (rented) RV.
18. Would you be caught dead on a cruise ship? Yes, although I probably would choose other things to do first.
19. Have you ever heard of of Branson, Mo? Yes.
20. Have you ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club? I think no.
21. How about the Rotary Club? Yes.
22. Have you lived for at least a year in a small town?I PASTORED for 7+ years in a small town. Yes in spades.
23. Have you lived for a year in an urban neighborhood in which most of your neighbors did not have college degrees? Yes -- three times.
24. Have you spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line? Yes. Not counting college, either.
25. Do you have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian? Uh, yeah.
26. Have you ever visited a factory floor? Yes.
27. Have you worked on one? No.

2010-10-27T09:07:00.000-04:00

Very realistic, profound, true words from NT Wright as he reflects on going back into academia and rebuts the false 1960s-ish idea that he "tried to make an impact on an institution and it didn't work." Now here is a guy who just gets it! Thank you folks at Duke for N.T. Wright: Working on a building:

Sometimes the inertia is itself a strength, because there will still be people going to that church even if the last three vicars have been a complete dead loss. There are people in that parish who know that, in this community, this is where you go and say your prayers and where you go and get married or buried or whatever it is.

You can work with that. You can bring new life within that, even though sometimes it is absolutely deeply frustrating and you just want to get the bulldozers out and say, “Let’s clear this off and start again.”... It’s deeply part of the community.

So I don’t think in terms of institutions. I think in terms of community. The institution is like the scaffolding that you need to be working on the building. The scaffolding isn’t the reality. When people say, “Isn’t General Synod frustrating?” I say, “General Synod is basically the plumbing.” When you go into a friend’s house, you don’t expect to see the plumbing, but you need to know that it’s working, because if it’s not, fairly soon there’ll be a bad smell in the house. On the business side, the institutional paraphernalia has got to be working. Otherwise, things go wrong. People get hurt....

Part of the difficulty is that we have in the Western world for far too long a kind of romantic idyll, that if only we were really plugged in you wouldn’t have to have any organization. There wouldn’t be any overheads, any administration. There will always be things that need to be handled structurally, and it’s not then a question of Spirit or structure. It is good structure or bad structure. I’m happy to have given a fair chunk of my life to try to make some of the structures at least better than they would otherwise be.

2010-09-21T17:06:00.001-04:00

This post amusingly titled Low, Low-Tech Water Conservation is a good example of something totally second nature and routine to me now that never would have crossed my mind 6-7 years ago.

On the other hand, I'm reading Hamlet's BlackBerry right now, and it refers in passing to the sudden burst of interest in the brand new Slow Food movement. Uh, I published a meditation using Slow Food as an example in... (I actually had to go get the book; I would have said 1999, but it's actually 2000. Though I probably wrote it in '99!)

Strikes me that these seeds get planted, God puts these interests and desires in us, and they all mature at their own rate. Sometimes, the trajectory is such that you have the luxury of discovering other people who are invested in the same stuff (as with not wasting resources, a topic you could find on many blogs these days, at least Christian ones); other times (as with my 1999 Slow Food piece) you're sort of on your own, an oddball for caring. Sometimes you have the joy of taking a stand; other times, all you're aware of is your own inconsistencies. But there's a fabric being woven with it all, even if you can't see it till later.

2010-07-12T10:54:00.000-04:00

...Hey, it only took us four years and two months!

2010-05-18T16:57:00.000-04:00

On so many levels, an extraordinary sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury at an event commemorating the martyrdom of a group of Carthusians who refused to accept Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy. (I said "on so many levels"!) Excerpt:

In many ages and many places, authorities even more appalling than Henry VIII have believed that they could abolish God and the cross of God; and they have had to discover that while they may vanquish, they cannot destroy. That which is the last hope, the last longing of the condemned and tortured, remains. The cross stands while the world turns. And whatever human power and human injustice can achieve and effect, the hanged God, the failed God, remains a sign forever.

The cross stands while the world turns: the sign of our terrible human failure, the sign that God is not to be abolished, that justice cannot be extinguished forever; that the voice of the poor and the lost and the tormented cannot finally be silenced - not by any power that the universe can show, because it is rooted in what does not change. The cross stands and the world turns. The world changes, the world comes and goes - powers rise and fall, fashions come and go - sometimes the Christian faith looks attractive and fashionable in the world, and sometimes it looks stupid and marginal. And always it is what it is because the cross stands.

The Christian who knows his or her business is the Christian who has the freedom to return again and again into that silent unchanging presence - the hanged God, whose love, whose generosity, springs out of depths we can never imagine. It is the sounding of those depths that is the heart of the contemplative life - that life lived in such an exemplary way by the Carthusians then and now, lived by so many others in our world over the centuries, lived, we hope and pray, for many centuries and millennia to come.

We treasure with perhaps a particular intensity the martyrdom of the contemplative, because the contemplative who knows how to enter into the silence and stillness of things is, above all, the one who knows how to resist to resist fashion and power, to stand in God while the world turns. In that discovery of stillness lies all our hope of reconciliation, the reconciliation of which John Houghton spoke in this place, this place where we are met to worship, before the community gave its answer to the King's agents. A reconciliation of which he spoke (as do so many martyrs) on the scaffold, a reconciliation which is not vanquished, defeated, or rendered meaningless by any level of suffering or death. If Henry VIII is saved (an open question perhaps) it will be at the prayers of John Houghton. If any persecutor is saved it is at the prayers of their victim.

2010-04-11T18:48:00.005-04:00

As I pulled into our driveway from church around 1PM, a crowd of boys ran to my car, motioning for me to open the windows. When I did, they breathlessly told me that a turkey had been sighted behind my house. Indeed, when I got out of the car (which they'd escorted to its parking place as if I were a returning war hero leading the way to certain turkey-victory) and looked where they were pointing, there was a wild turkey strutting around a neighbor's yard. A text message came in about that time with the same news. This was clearly a big event. The kids called "Here turkey, turkey, turkey," for awhile, but then jumped the fence and opted for the "hot pursuit" option. I went back inside, but later was informed that the turkey had been pursued out to the little strip mall near us, where it took refuge on the roof of Dunkin Donuts. Can't say as I blame it.

2010-04-06T17:11:00.003-04:00

Now that we're into Easter week, I did want to note some of the things I said I had to cheer about in After You Believe.

First: Brilliant, memorable, Lewis-for-2010 images.
--The moral law as a rumble strip along a highway: You are responsible for driving, yourself, along the road, but the moral law is there so that should you run up against one of its tenets, that jar will warn you, like the loud noise of a rumble strip, that you have veered in the wrong direction and are now risking injury to yourself.
--Spiritual formation as golf: When the coach first shows you that the way you've been gripping the club all this time is actually wrong, changing it feels unnatural and bizarre, but if you stick to the new way, the ball will begin to go where you want it to.
--Already-not-yet life as jet lag: Your mind and body know that it's a new day; the sun has already risen, yet the world around you is behaving as if it's still night.
--Scripture as your older brother's suit: You're given the clothes, yet when they first come to you you flop around uncomfortably in acres of fabric, because the suit's too big for you at first. However, as you mature, you will grow into it.

Then this:

What the earliest Christians were struck by, and what they returned to again and again, was that in Jesus they had seen... a way of being human which nobody had ever imagined before... which was both original in itself and the source of those other virtues that are commonly recognized as Christian innovations - namely, humility, charity, patience, and chastity - all four of which, as contemporary secular philosopher Simon Blackburn notes drily, "would have been unintelligible as ethical virtues to ancient Greeks."

And more, some really excellent stuff (this is one of the examples of how moments in the book aim squarely at what will be recognizable to those in Wright's denomination as aspects of our current issues) giving a thorough and persuasive critique of the commonly held notion that the central transformative revelation from Jesus was that he "accepted people as they were and urged them to discover their real identity and to be true to that essence. He encouraged people to throw the old rules into the trashcan and take up the challenge of living spontaneously, authentically, in the freedom of the spirit rather than the slavery of the letter." Wright traces how major historical forces (the romantic movement which values inner feeling, the existentialist movement which highlights personal authenticity, and the emotivist movement which insists that moral discourse is actually no more than statements of emotional preferences, likes and dislikes) have "[swirled] together in a confused world of impressions and rhetoric" to make this utter misunderstanding of the Gospel plausible, convincing people of the Gnostic lie that "whatever we deeply, most truly find within ourselves must be right" and should trump every other moral rule and virtue. (Wright notes that one reason this notion is so appealing is that it does counterfeit something genuine, the "second nature" aspect of virtue. He says it "tries to get in advance, and without paying the true price, what virtue offers further down the road, and at the cost of genuine moral thought, decision, and effort.")

Finally, there is an excellent chart which I won't seek to reproduce here (pp 66-67) which presents the moral framework (ultimate goal, how the goal is achieved, and what kind of living it produces in the present) of "just get souls saved for heaven" Christianity and the moral framework of "we must build the kingdom on earth ourselves" Christianity, and then contrasts both with what Wright is proposing as the actual vision of the New Testament. Worth the price of the book.

2010-04-06T07:59:00.001-04:00

“Church is the appointed gathering of named people in particular places who practice a life of resurrection in a world in which death gets the biggest headlines: death of nations, death of civilization, death of marriage, death of careers, obituaries without end. Death by war, death by murder, death by accident, death by starvation. Death by electric chair, injection and hanging. The practice of resurrection is an intentional, deliberate decision to believe and participate in resurrection life, life out of death, life that trumps death, life that is the last word.
Jesus Life...."
--Eugene Peterson

2010-04-04T07:44:00.001-04:00

“We know of lots of other messianic and similar moments in the Jewish world roughly contemporaneous with Jesus. In many cases the leader died a violent death at the hands of the authorities. In not one single case do we hear the slightest mention of the disappointed followers claiming that their hero had been raised from the dead. They knew better. Resurrection was not a private event. It involved human bodies. Jewish revolutionaries whose leader had been executed by the authorities, and who managed to escape arrest themselves, had two options: give up the revolution, or find another leader. We have evidence of people doing both. Claiming that the original leader was alive again was simply not an option. Unless, of course, he was."
--N.T. Wright

2010-04-02T07:49:00.000-04:00

The peer group of spiritual directors I'm in had the chance for a workshop with William Barry S.J. this Lent (a pioneer in the field; I never imagined I'd actually meet him). The topic was working with people who are suffering, especially those who are suffering inexplicable, slogging tragedy and darkness.

Barry talked a fair amount about the inconceivable magnitude of the suffering of God in history (perhaps especially compared to what any individual person experiences as their own suffering) - how, for example, in the Haiti earthquake God was sustaining and present in the suffering of every single dying or trapped person, every family member broken by loss, the earth itself, every nurse or doctor stunned at the sight, each of us on the globe reading or watching the reports in shock... not to mention all the other people on the planet at that point unrelated to Haiti but just then losing jobs or parents or hopes, plus the ones experiencing joy, conversion, childbirth, and all the other natural events of that period of time.

This is a familiar concept, of course, but he twice added an idea to it that I have never heard before and that really broke my heart in admiration of God's compassion with us in a new way. He pointed to the crucifix and asked "Can you imagine what it was like for God, being present to the experience of every living creature and sustaining the entire universe at the same time that was going on?"

2010-03-29T10:57:00.005-04:00

So a little more on After You Believe in general, specifically the how-to section in the final chapter. Wright proposes a "virtuous circle" of basic practices: Scripture, stories (watching for them in our lives and the lives of others), examples (of saints etc), community, practices (especially Baptism and Eucharist). He points out that many people will object "but I'm already doing all that," to which his answer is that the transformation happens when we "understand, ponder, and consciously choose the patterns of life which [all that is] supposed to produce." In other words, keep doing it, but think harder about why you're doing it. His strong emphasis earlier was on the "transformation of the mind" to consider implications of Biblical faith; that chapter is full of phrases like "mental deduction," "get your mind around it," "think out for yourself, weigh up and consider," "the thinking is front-loaded," "thought through, studied, reflected upon."

Now it's impossible to fault this emphasis, I think (and Wright is very correct to lament the way in which emotivism has taken over from careful reasoning in so many areas having to do with spirituality); it's equally impossible to fault the bedrock Christian activities that make up the "virtuous circle." However, in terms of people really being transformed, I think it's too generic. We can engage in the activities of the circle as intentionally as we know how while functionally leaving large areas of life untouched. So many of us already have our minds colonized by other paradigms, other practices; we think we know what the Bible is getting at when we're actually off base (I'm sure that applies to me... and Wright has pretty much dedicated his career to that problem!) Also, let's be honest: others of us are simply not as strong in "mental deduction" and "front-loaded thinking" in a way that lets us regularly work out how to apply a narrative expressing assumptions of 2nd Temple Judaism to, say, the health care debate in 2010.

My argument would be that to really form virtues, intervention at the level of practice is needed at a far more routine level, causing behavior patterns to get disrupted in a way that enables us to notice the paradigms inculcated by our society or our religion that are shaping us for a goal other than the New Heavens and the New Earth. I know many intelligent Christians who do all Wright's practices and give plenty of time to thinking out their implications as best they are able, but who functionally order their families, in areas where culture has a strong shaping influence (let's just pick consumerism for one), in a way that is largely indistinguishable from goodhearted secular people with similar economic/educational backgrounds.

We certainly don't need a new legalism and a different set of rules, but within Wright's paradigm of remembering that all our behavioral decisions are about getting ourselves shaped for competency in the New Heavens and New Earth, I do think we need to be encouraging people to take on more grassroots, rubber-meets-the-road practices whose power hasn't already been watered down or truncated in the minds of many (the way the power of say Baptism or Bible study often has). NT Wright is a Bishop; he knows for sure that things like the sacraments and the lectionary have incredible power to change the world, and he wants to see them demonsrtate it more and more. I do too, but I'm afraid we can't count on their not having already been declawed before people get to them.

That's it for my critiques: all I have left now is things I love and want to cheer in After You Believe.

2010-03-26T10:10:00.001-04:00

From local Fair Trade activist Kellie G:

It seems that almost every time I talk to a Fair Trade activist on the North Shore, I learn about a Fair Trade product carried at a local store. A Fair Trade Shopping Guide is an attempt to pool that individual knowledge into a collective resource that will help us all move in the direction of just consumption.

There are several ways that you can help us:
1. Go to our wiki survey and enter information about where you currently buy your Fair Trade products.
2. Take a few extra minutes as you shop at your regular grocery store to wander the aisles and jot down a few notes on the Fair Trade products available.
3. Use this as an excuse to stop by that store you've been wanting to visit and survey their Fair Trade offerings.
4. Email the owner or manager of a local store with the survey link below so that they can provide a detailed list of the Fair Trade products they carry.

You can find the Fair Trade survey along with a printable version for taking notes at the store at http://sites.google.com/site/nsfairtrade/Home/shopping-guide-flyers

Thanks for your help! I can't wait to learn about new places to buy Fair Trade and share them with you.

2010-03-26T07:35:00.003-04:00

So I mentioned in a previous post that After You Believe wasn't what I was expecting. The book begins in its first couple chapters by winding together two really fine insights. The first insight is a trenchant and telling characterization of the two ways Christians tend to talk about behavior and why they are inadequate: either the "yeah, you're saved by grace but now you have to keep all these behavioral rules" mentality, or the "discover your deepest inner self and live in a way that's true to it" mentality. (I'll probably do another post on his comments on where we got the latter and what its results are.)

The other insight is a presentation of NT Wright's alternative suggestion, that we hold a vision of the new heaven and new earth in mind and begin acquiring the skills and habits that will be at home there and that will enable us to fulfill the roles in the new creation to which God has called us. (He spends a whole chapter unpacking the two neglected Biblical descriptions of those roles: kings and priests.) We are to be "shaped in relation to the final goal for which we were made and redeemed. The better we understand that goal, the better we shall understand the path to it." Wright compares this skill acquisition to learning a second language, which requires thought and slow, painstaking practice, but pays off as you find yourself at home and able to communicate competently in the new country. In other words, the book explains in a thoroughly Kingdom-centered, Biblical, eschatologically-aware way why it's permanently important to acquire the virtues and be reshaped by practicing them.

I was delighted to find this new intellectual underpinning for a way of presenting practice that's common in ascetical theology, but doesn't always find itself able to articulate a compelling "why." With the "why" so powerfully articulated, I expected as I continued past chapter 2 to find a "how" and to find more trenchant analysis of what this looks like, and even more does NOT look like, in ordinary life. Instead, the largest chunk of the book -- chapters 4, 5, and 6 (and perhaps 3, the "kings and priests" one in a different way) -- trace the ideas Wright has put forth through different strands of the New Testament, demonstrating that they are indeed present and discussing how they're expressed both in the Gospels and in Paul.

As I thought about this later, I realized, well of course; the man is a New Testament scholar. And when you read those chapters having realized that this is what he's attempting to do, and not saying "yes, yes, you've made your point" while waiting for the "how" and the "in which contexts" and the application, they are all full of great stuff. But I wonder if this whole middle section isn't perhaps a bit technical or narrowly targeted, and thus not as appealing to the kind of people who picked up the other two books in the series. We do eventually get to some "how" at the end; I'll save that for another post.

2010-03-25T08:35:00.000-04:00

I want to give some reactions to NT Wright's newest book, After You Believe, which I will probably do in a few posts that will not pretend to be a comprehensive review. I was really looking forward to this book, Surprised By Hope having been so useful to me and some of the advance material having seemed so promising. I read through it at one sitting at great speed and came away somewhat disappointed, but upon rereading it I think I understand more clearly what the book actually is (which is perhaps somewhat different from the book that was promoted) and see a great deal of value in it. But it's not as immediately and broadly recommendable as some of his other works, I don't think. (It also struck me straight away that there are more moments than usual here where Wright's words address in not-so-veiled ways current trends in our mutual denominational family -- probably not that noticeable to others, though.)

My first exposure to After You Believe's themes was hearing Wright use the illustration of Chelsey Sullenberger, the pilot who landed a disabled plane in the Hudson River, in a lecture podcast from Fuller. It was extremely timely at that point, and I thought it was a brilliant illustration of how spiritual formation actually happens; in fact, I subsequently cited it in my spirituality class that fall and again in a directed study this winter. The virtue orientation fit well with some of what I was trying to convey to students through what Simon Chan says about how virtues are formed in us in his 1998 book Spiritual Theology. In fact, next time around I may end up supplementing Chan with at least a chapter from After You Believe. Wright is of course much more of a celebrity than Chan, but each of them is pitching their work mostly to an evangelical audience who are not likely to have been encouraged to take virtue formation as a goal or to be very conversant with traditions that emphasize it, so they read to me as having a fair amount in common here.

Chan, at the end of a long section on the theological and cardinal virtues:

How are the virtues formed so that they come to constitute one's character? The answer in Christian tradition has been quite consistent: virtues are formed by acts. This teaching found its fullest elaboration in Aquinas and has hardly been improved upon ever since. ... However, when it comes to virtue formation, not any action will do. All actions are habit forming or habit reinforcing, but to acquire a certain virtue that is not there requires courageous action, acting against a host of other contrary habits. ...No single act is adequate to form a habitus or disposition. It takes intentional, repeated actions of growing intensity for virtues to grow. The principle of virtue formation by acts is extremely important, since all ascetical pratices must finally come to rest on it.

Wright, unpacking his wonderful Sullenberger illustration:

You could call it the power of right habits. You might say it was the result of many years of training and experience. You could call it "character," as we have so far in this book. Ancient writers had a word for it: "virtue." ... Virtue in this strict sense is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices requiring effort and concentration, to do something which is right but doesn't "come naturally," and then on the thousand and first time, when it really matters, they find that they do what's required "automatically."... Like an acquired taste, such choices and actions, which started off being practiced with difficulty, ended up being, yes, "second nature."

I would like to go back and look at Jordan Aumann, a 20th century Roman Catholic spiritual theologian whom Chan uses a fair amount, and see how he treats virtue formation, too, but haven't had time. At any rate, as someone who's oriented to ascetical theology, I came to the book having long been in the same place as Chan on the basic ascetical principle ("virtues are formed by acts") and hoping that Wright would delve into how and why this formation works with his customary brilliance.

I'm not sure we got that, but we did get a truly magnificent theological superstructure for helping to explain why followers of Christ must be growing in virtue and motivate us to do so, as well as a very useful comparison of this with the other two main ways Christians today tend to talk about moral behavior. Finally, there's a thorough examination of virtue ethics in the New Testament. I'll say more about all that in another post.

2010-03-24T08:31:00.001-04:00

I can remember a common quip back in the Reagan/Bush I era in which Christians would ask how people could claim that the Bible supported "Family values" when there was no noun for the 20th-century concept of "family" in the Bible. This post carries that quip over into the realm of actual scholarship (from the perspective of a Baptist teaching theology in Scotland) and it's a good reference for discussions. Excerpt:

[Rhetorical efforts from conservatives about "family"] assume a normative situation of a nuclear family (i.e., a cohabiting unit of mother and father with their birth-children, and nobody else) which has easy access to safe and reliable contraception and which is economically productive only away from the home. A family living in this situation cannot possibly be living according to ‘Biblical’ patterns, simply because every facet of the situation highlighted in the previous sentence is a modern Western reality, unknown to the Bible (and indeed to much of history since, and to much of the world today).... what is being celebrated is a patriarchal vision of being a nuclear family that has its origins in the industrial revolution....

If we choose to base our concepts of what is ‘Biblical’ on the Bible, not on a conservative grasping at an idealised version of our grandparents’ experience, then the basic thing we find is astonishing variety. Families are polygamous and multi-generational; re-marriage and fostering are common and sometimes required; slaves are a significant part of the family unit; marriage can be a political act, or the result of rape, and is rarely based on romantic attraction; etc. I think it is true to say that there is not one single nuclear family (a shared household of wife, husband, and birth-children only) in the entirety of the Scriptures.

Suggesting we might actually want to "base our concepts of what is 'Biblical' on the Bible" is a comical way to put it, but absolutely a serious issue when "truthiness" seems to have carried the day. It reminds me of a friend who once insisted that Christ's teaching, because it returns frequently to the theme of God's judgment, was not "Christlike."

2010-03-22T08:45:00.000-04:00

It was so warm this past weekend that we were able to grill! On March 20!

2010-03-21T12:36:00.000-04:00

I had no idea this existed -- a directory of Kiva's indigenous Christian field partners through whom one can do microlending. I had noticed a few of them just in the course of being on the site, but I'm glad to have it, since IMHO the more holistic the addressing of poverty and development, the better.

2010-03-20T07:58:00.001-04:00

A great article by cosmologist Brian Swimme asking How do our kids get so caught up in consumerism? He treats the issue as what it is - a religious one - calling consumerism the dominant world faith (certainly true in the West and perhaps becoming true in places with good access to Western media?) and noting its commitment "to promulgate a world-view, a mini-cosmology, that is based upon dissatisfaction and craving." He explains:

Advertisements are where our children receive their cosmology, their basic grasp of the world's meaning, which amounts to their primary religious faith, though unrecognized as such. I use the word "faith" here to mean cosmology on the personal level. Faith is that which a person holds to be the hard-boiled truth about reality.

This definition would probably strike some readers as a misunderstanding of faith's nature, and that is precisely because the worldview inculcated by consumerism prefers to see gods/God/spirituality in the gnostic way which consumerism (and some other influences) teaches: as about subjective, inner, self-enhancing emotions and personal insights that help me grow or cope -- precisely NOT about claims for hard-boiled reality. Well, of course: if we let God have a claim on reality, we might have to resist consumerism! He points out how we have come to assume that the indoctrination our culture delivers for its favorite faith is normal and non-religious:

Before a child enters first grade science class, and before entering in any real way into our religious ceremonies, a child will have soaked in 30,000 advertisements. The time our teenagers spend absorbing ads is more than their total stay in high school. None of us feels very good about this, but for the most part we just ignore it. It’s background. It’s just there, part of what’s going on. We learned to accept it so long ago we hardly ever think about it anymore.

But imagine how different we would feel if we heard about a country that programmed its citizenry in its religious dogmas in such a manner. In fact, it was just such accounts concerning the leaders of the former Soviet Union that outraged us for decades, the thought that they would take young children and subject them to brainwashing in Soviet lies, removing their natural feelings for their parents or for God or for the truth of history, and replacing these with assumptions necessary for their dictatorship to continue its oppressive domination.

Immersed in the religion of consumerism, we are unable to take such comparisons seriously.

2010-03-20T07:13:00.000-04:00

In a fit of annoyed spontaneity yesterday, we and a couple neighbors who were working in the back garden plot pulled down a section of our fence in back (which was falling over and rotting). It gives us way more access to that part of the neighborhood, although last night I started thinking of reasons why pulling it down could pose issues...

2010-03-18T18:42:00.001-04:00

2010-03-16T07:39:00.005-04:00

A friend shared this article on the "Theology after Google" conference. You know, tho I'm coming from exactly the same background as Doug and sympathetic to some of the points this article makes, I cringed at the line "You can be a free agent. You could start your own church... you could be a Methodist today, Anglican tomorrow -- it's your choice."

Sure, someone indeed could, and many people do, cycle around visiting services of different denominations, thus sampling different visions of the whole Christian way of life as lived by actual incarnate communities. There are some benefits. But you will not "be" a Methodist or an Anglican by doing this. What you will "be," and increasingly solidify your identity as, is a consumer.

(And incidentally I'm happy to see blogs like Jason Clark's taking this seemingly unquestioned situation on: a Starbucks parable, an are third-spaces neutral? critique + story thoughts, even a D.Min. module on the problem.)

I also can't help but remark, as is typical with this realm of discourse, that the description of the scorned, "oh-please-we're-over-all-that-now" Church 1.0 strikes me as actually being a description of Enlightenment-Presuppositions-Shaped Western Non-Liturgical Evangelical Church 1.0 ("big brains in a room"? What? ...thus leaving the majority of Christians in the world out of the conversation from the get-go.

2010-03-13T15:54:00.000-05:00

In 2007 I started microlending on Kiva, and in that time I've made 31 loans, supporting people like Clementine Ingabire who owns a general store in Rwanda, Oluwabimi Ayandokun who photographs special occasions, weddings, etc in Nigeria, Alba Pastora Mena Arana who has a bookstore in Costa Rica, and Galina Vasutinska who sells bed linens, blankets, towels and other household items in Ukraine. That makes for a total of $775 lent out, and of that amount only $18.26 has defaulted. I'd say that's an incredible success rate for lending to small businesses, especially since the one loan that defaulted was by a woman who was killed by rioters in Kenya.

13 lenders have paid me back in full already. When that money is paid back, you can either lend it again (as I have done, adding in a small donation for Kiva's overhead each time) or withdraw it (since it is a loan, not charity.) If you lend it again, of course, your initial $25 will get sent back out into the field 2, 3, 4 times, even more, helping to fund additional businesses.

A friend who works in a more traditional microfinance ministry commented to me that while this one to one, emotionally affecting "child sponsorship" type model will always raise a lot of money, it isn't the most efficient way to operate (overhead, etc). In fact, I've given more money to his ministry than I have to Kiva, in part for that reason. But I'll keep recommending Kiva to people because it just makes the situation so clear: Can ya just give this smiling guy $25 to, say, buy some flour and make bread and sell it in his town in Togo? It'll help a lot.

2010-03-12T15:39:00.000-05:00

Dark
a poem by Martin Wroe, from The Sky's Window

You are the dark of the world
When all is brightness and dazzle

You are a deepening mystery
When life is a surfeit of simple solutions

You are the nagging doubt and secret sceptic
When everyone believes so much

You are jangling discord, right out of tune
When all the sounds are harmony

You are the abstract art of paint and poem
When our propaganda makes everything clear

You are the parched throat, the desert defeat
When there’s water, water everywhere

You are the silent absence, gone-missing god
When the cacophony of belief becomes deafening

You are uncharted journey, road less travelled
When we’re all mapped-out. Been there, done that

You are stranger in the night, throwing us to the ground
When all we want to do is get away

You are the cloud of unknowing
When we know–it-alls, know it all

2010-03-10T18:38:00.001-05:00

Anybody North Shore-ish out there open to the idea of splitting a fish share (whole fish) from Cape Ann Fresh Catch this summer (just alternating weeks)? We had a whole one last summer, and it was unbelievably good (and cheap) but 5 pounds of fish every week was too much for us.
[edit: we're all set now; thanks!]

2010-03-10T17:01:00.000-05:00

Nice article by Christopher L. Heuertz of Word Made Flesh about prayer as muscle memory. Though he has a lot more credibility than I, this is pretty much what I try to tell young Christians who are launching full-speed-ahead into social justice work. Excerpt:

I am part of a community of contemplative activists who are committed to serving Christ among the most vulnerable of the world’s poor. We give ourselves in relationships to grassroots movements toward justice. We locate ourselves in some of the forgotten corners of the world -- red-light areas, refugee camps, favelas and slum communities, and neighborhoods more known for their criminal activities than known for their hospitality. We live and serve among victims of human trafficking (such as former child combatants), women and children exploited in the commercial sex industry, populations of youth who live and work on the streets, and children orphaned because of AIDS or who are HIV+ themselves.....

We haven’t always described ourselves as “contemplative” activists. The contemplative part has only emerged as a qualifier over the past few years. Before we discovered a contemplative basis for our activism, we saw many of staff members teeter on the edges of burnout. We lost a number of good people to exhaustion and grief.

Cultivating the contemplative basis for our active life hasn’t been easy. It’s meant stopping our activity and evaluating where its motivation should originate. It’s meant creating rhythms for rest, Sabbath, and sabbatical. ...It’s meant learning about and practicing many of the church’s historical contemplative prayer practices like lectio divina, the breath prayer, the welcoming prayer, the examen, and centering prayer.... The more I make contemplative prayer practices a central part of my spiritual formation, the more able I seem to face the 100 fastballs of pain, suffering, loss and violence in our world.

2010-03-09T12:14:00.004-05:00

I found this simple video from Worthers (who work with Living Generously) very moving.

Every once in awhile we get a tiny glimpse into the infinite webs of causality God is seeking to manage, and which we either cooperate with or thwart completely unawares most of the time.

2010-03-08T14:51:00.002-05:00

One of our two year olds was with us for the Daily Office today, and was quietly playing on the floor with a small collection of toy cars and trucks as we went through the rite. This morning Psalm 39 came up, and one side of the chapel prayed, taking the requisite "distinct pause" at the asterisk:
"We walk about like a shadow, and in vain we are in turmoil, *
we heap up riches and cannot tell who will gather them."

The other side picked up at the next verse: "And now, what is my hope? *"

At which point the 2 year old suggested an answer: "Truck!"

2010-03-07T08:11:00.000-05:00

The belittling of Scripture into a short and puzzling noise that intrudes upon our liturgy here and there is dangerous and destructive, especially, of course, in churches when there is not even much strong dogma to take its place.... In short, we have to discern ways of letting Scripture be heard not only when it says something that we understand but want to disagree with (that is where "the authority of Scripture" normally bites) but also when it says something that we do not understand because we have carefully screened out, or never even imagined, the narrative world within which it makes sense.
--NT Wright, "Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture"

2010-03-05T16:08:00.000-05:00

Now that it's out on campus, let's say it here too: our second floor apartment (two bedrooms, living room, kitchen, bath) is opening up as of July 1. The space would be suitable for 2 singles, a couple + child, or a couple + roommate, depending. If you know someone who wants to explore living in low-key liturgical community for 1-3 years, send them our way.

2010-03-05T07:55:00.000-05:00

If I come upon the letters "BC" written down somewhere, it is only the larger context, the larger implicit narrative, that can tell me whether they mean "Bishop's Council" (in an entry in my calendar), "British Columbia" (in my cousin's address), "Before Christ" (in a book about ancient history), or the two musical notes that bear those names (in the conclusion of Sibelius's seventh symphony). If you affirm a doctrine but place it in the wrong implicit narrative, you potentially falsify it as fully and thoroughly as if you had denied it altogether.
...Christology, for instance, has, in my view, suffered in the Western tradition because of people simply putting a check in the "Jesus is divine" box without really stopping to think which god they are talking about, what it means within the biblical narrative to say such a thing, and how this integrates properly, not merely accidentally, as it were, with the other box that people will usually check, the "Jesus is human" box.

--NT Wright, "Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture" (italics mine)

2010-03-03T15:08:00.000-05:00

Quaker pacifist and classical scholar Sarah Ruden on sustainability in justice work: "In many South African NGOs, I saw played out the paradox that faith is the basic thing that brings social justice. Activists who relied on their human capacities were ground into the dust. Activists who believed that God was in charge were unstoppable. If they got things wrong, they just tried another way, because they saw themselves as weak sinners with a very partial vision; it was okay, and in fact comforting, to admit they were wrong. If their practical goals turned out to be destructive or impossible, they could cheerfully let them go--to love God was their mission, which no one could take away from them. And like Paul, they have done far more for human justice than they ever consciously intended, merely by impressing on people--who had never heard such a thing--that God cared about them and had suffered for them."

2010-03-02T08:24:00.002-05:00

This poster, 10 Ways to Change Your Life, Not just Your Light Bulbs from Yes magazine is pretty cool (I like the antique bicycle theme). "Drink from the tap" and "commit to not wasting" are nice pragmatic ones. I remain a bit baffled by how unlikely it seems to be for people to begin an effort to live in a way that's more conscious about creation care by just using less. (Turning off the lights. Not running water down the sink for no reason.) I guess it's the power of consumerism that makes it - at least in my experience - more common for people to begin by buying themselves a lot of cool, new, pricey "green" stuff.

But one of the things I loved about this list was the spillover into a spiritual perspective (whether the author considers it to be such or not) with the recommendation of tithing a fixed percentage of income to non-profits of your choice, and of taking an "eco-sabbath" by using NO resources for an hour... four hours... a day. I am passionate about the value of tithing, but I have never even thought of the idea of an eco-sabbath. I'm intrigued by it; turning EVERYTHING off, not answering the phone, etc. A little late to add a Lenten discipline at this point, but that would be a good one!

2010-03-01T07:55:00.000-05:00

GOOD magazine has an interview with the blogger at Fed Up With School Lunch.

2010-02-28T11:18:00.000-05:00

HT to Mike for these thoughts from Richard Rohr:

As long as you can deal with evil by some other means than forgiveness, you will never experience the real meaning of evil and sin. You will keep projecting it over there, fearing it over there and attacking it over there, instead of “gazing” on it within yourself and “weeping” over it within all of us...
Forgiveness is probably the only human action that demands three new “seeings” at the same time:
* I must see God in the other who has offended me,
* I must access God in myself to forgive major grievances, and
* I must meet God in a very new way that is larger than as an enforcer or a judge.

I have the luxury of having plenty of people in my life who are ready to face what evil is and deal with it through forgiveness, as costly and vulnerable as that is. But like most of us, I also have to absorb and work with the reality of people who de facto do not believe forgiveness is possible, and whose only method for addressing situations that can't be healed without forgiveness is either to avoid talking about "it" or to project wrongness outside.

I've been spending a lot of time recently with the band mewithoutyou, an experimental rock band from Philadelphia (I know I'm quite late to this party, but what can I say). One of the first songs by them that really struck me was "Bullet to Binary, Part 2" which gravely accepts that "we all well know we're going to reap what we sow/ we all well know what kind of crops are going to grow," but then bravely upends that conventional wisdom with a powerful chant saying that nevertheless, "let's forgive everyone, all the time, everywhere, everything." And they have an escalating forgiveness theme in the closing song on their most recent album that resonates with what Rohr says above. I wish I could convey the rhythmical creativity that makes the repetition come off as non-repetitive (you can listen if you like below). The song moves from the discovery of being forgiven no "matter what you done," on to discovering compassion for someone specific who "did you wrong," on to embracing a forgiving community as a way of life - the honesty required for which, as their lyric hints, is not cheap -- and all of this with a marvelous abandoned buildup of joy.

Allah, Allah, Allah - mewithou...

It doesn't matter what you done,
It doesn't matter what you done.
What effect is without a cause?
It doesn't matter what you done.
Now lay your faithless head down
In necessity's cotton hand.
There's a love that never changes
No matter what you done.

If your old man did you wrong,
If your old man did you wrong,
If your old man did you wrong,
Well, maybe his old man did him wrong?
If you care to sing forgiveness songs,
Come down and join our band,
And we'll cut you like a sword!
--and sing forgiveness songs.

Those are the songs I want to sing; that's all there is to it.

2010-02-26T07:45:00.001-05:00

The Flourish weblog is new to me, but a newsletter I read linked their article called Front Porch Revival: Building Community Through a Neighborhood Mainstay. I was immediately interested in reading it because of the great importance our front porch has had in building relationships and offering time and energy to people in our neighborhood, and it did not disappoint. Excerpt:

In the 1600s [the concept of the front porch] traveled to the New World on the backs of African slaves who survived the journey across the Atlantic and, upon setting foot on land, were instructed to build their own houses. They built what they had known in Africa: small dwellings fronted by a roofed outdoor area to provide cool shade during the day’s hottest hours and to be a social space that bridged public and private worlds.

This intermediary social nature of the porch is its strongest asset. The porch is a physical space that is both personal to its owner and hospitable to guests and strangers. It is a threshold of community: neither a place of anonymity, nor of complete intimacy. It is a place where new connections are wrought and old connections are strengthened. One can be invited onto a front porch even as a passerby; it provides opportunities for welcoming the stranger.

Contrast the front porch with the back deck, an architectural feature that arose in American neighborhoods in the 1970s. The back deck is purely private, a sanctuary into which only the friends and relatives of the deck owner are admitted.

One of the things that concerns us about some new construction planned for our street is that the large building will lack any kind of front porch, stoop, or hangout place, and will be experienced basically as a flat wall up against the road. The argument for this design is that pragmatically, leaving space in back for parking is more important. While I understand that concern, I know from watching how this neighborhood functions that losing those front porches will bring a real cost in terms of community connections. More:

Additionally, while reinvigorating a front porch culture might strengthen a Christian ethic of hospitality and welcome, it also encourages more living en plein air. Walking, gardening, and letting our children play outdoors all become more attractive activities when we know there are eyes on the street (part of writer and urban activist Jane Jacobs’s prescription for safe and healthy cities).... We learn more about our local topography and ecology along the way to the neighbor’s porch. We take responsibility for each other: we discover who in our community is in need of prayer, a good meal, or help with a month’s rent.

2010-02-24T15:18:00.000-05:00

I've been reading a lot this past week since Mark has been out of town, and one of the books I read was Buy-ology by Martin Lindstrom. This book chimed with my recent interest in neurology by talking about neuromarketing. In essence, that's a research technique that bypasses' research participants' reported claims of "I like this ad/I don't like it" by actually examining the consumer’s brain responses. It uses the same high–tech brain scanning techniques that I've written about being used to document the effect of contemplative practice, except this time they're being used to investigate brain activity as people watch ads or look at images/hear sounds branders want them to associate with a product. Here is a blog post about all this from Fast Company.

Neuromarketing has revealed that people respond to lots of things they aren't aware of, on a brain level. The health warning labels on cigarettes, for example, light up the craving centers in the brain just as images of cigarettes do in smokers. Eliciting fear, going for a reptilian amygdala response, works particularly well in infuencing people (think political ads like the famous LBJ "daisy" campaign - watch it.) "When fear-based advertising plays on our insecurities about ourselves," writes Lindstrom, "it can be one of the most persuasive and memorable types of advertising out there... The more fearful we are, the more we seek out solid foundations. The more we seek out solid faoundations, the more we become dependent on dopamine. And the more dopamine surges through our brains, the more we want, well, stuff."

Whatever else that is, it's a great restatement of Tim Keller's (and many others') account of how subtly various unnoticed idols function in the human soul. (Read: "American Idols" or David Powlinson's X-Ray Questions) Did I say there is a whole chapter on how brands function in the brain as religious images?

If you're wondering if neuromarketing has the potential to be unethical, Lindstrom argues that knowing about it gives the consumer more power, but I'm not so sure. I find it frightening to learn that there are stores that play music containing concealed recorded messages prodding shoppers to buy more ("don't worry about the money"), and cigarette companies who compensate bars for promoting their product by decorating in its color scheme (which the evidence shows works). What percentage of consumers know these things, and pause to reflect on them as, say, they enter the bar?

One more thing that struck me in the book -- Lindstrom recounts an experiment in which subjects were shown episodes of three UK TV shows, one of which was being considered for replication in the USA. The "control" shows were a proven hit and a proven flop; the pilot was for a chaotic, random quiz show requiring little skill and involving verbal abuse of phone-in contestants. Everyone liked the hit, but as for the pilot, people said they didn't like it; however, Lindstrom believes that they were lying since "viewers' brains were actually more engaged" when watching it than watching the other shows which they claimed to prefer to it. And then he adds, "proving to me once again that what people say and how they really feel are often polar opposites."

Now isn't that interesting? What a reduction of who we are and of "how we really feel" to instinctive responses. Do we not get to choose what we "really" want to watch with our conscious minds? -- to say, for example, "I don't choose to nourish fear in myself so I will not watch fear-based programming" or "I do not choose to habituate myself to verbal abuse so I will not saturate my mind in shows that glorify it"? The possibility that our reptilian brain can jump at something, but we can nevertheless decide, honestly, not to privilege the reptilian brain and to shape ourselves in different ways (again, see my posts on the longitudinal studies of how contemplative practice affects the brain), seems not to have occurred to Lindstrom.

By the way, if this all gives you the willies, you could check out Commercial Alert (who seek "to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy") and write a letter or two.

The Lenten Experiment

2010-02-24T09:23:00.000-05:00

Apart from Fed Up, I have another blog to recommend that's more specifically on food and economic justice. This one's an archive that's a year old, but check out The Lenten Experiment, in which a (not unknown in Christian circles) middle-aged couple decided to live for the 40 days of Lent on the the U.S. Department of Agriculture's thrifty food budget plan, which is the basis for food-stamp allotments. Roughly:
* For one adult: $6/day, $42/week, $180 month
* For a two-person household: $12/day, $84/week, $360 month
* For each additional person in the household: $4/day, $28 week, $120/month
She includes recipes, anecdotes, and confessions of times she "cheated." As the blog ends up pointing out, eating real food on this budget is not that hard, if you have time and energy to spend on researching which store currently has the cheapest prices on the particular non-processed, non-pre-packaged items you want to make, and then cooking them from scratch. If you never learned how to cook from scratch, on the other hand, and you've been cleaning houses since 8 AM for $2 an hour, and have no car to get to the best-stocked store, and are exhausted....

2010-02-23T21:04:00.000-05:00

A quick addition to my post from today about Fed Up -- a commenter there pointed us to What's For School Lunch? which shows US school lunches contrasted with those served in other countries -- e.g. India, Japan, Singapore, Sweden, UK.... It's pretty interesting. (Gotta say France is not really representing, though!)

2010-02-23T13:43:00.003-05:00

[The fact that love does not result from "doing what comes naturally"] is why love is a virtue. It is a language to be learned, a musical instrument to be practiced, a mountain to be climbed via some steep and tricky cliff paths but with the most amazing view from the top. It is one of the things that will last: one of the traits of character which provides a genuine anticipation of that complete humanness we are promised at the end. And it is one of the things, therefore, that can be anticipated in the present on the basis of the future goal, the telos, which is already given in Jesus Christ. It is part of the future which can be drawn down into the present.

Here - as most people are aware but few really reflect on - we have a problem of language. A problem about this particular blessed word "love." The English word "love" is trying to do so many different jobs at the same time that somebody really ought to sit down with it and teach it how to delegate.
--from NT Wright's forthcoming book After You Believe

2010-02-23T08:22:00.000-05:00

So I mentioned Jamie Oliver and his project in Huntington WV. A similar thing that has come up (apart from, of course, Michelle Obama's “Healthy Food Financing Initiative,”) is "Fed Up: The School Lunch Project," a blog in which an ordinary Illinois teacher eats the lunch that is offered to her students (who are mostly economically disadvantaged, it so happens: "As a teacher it's available to me for $3.00. Most of the students at my school get free lunch or reduced ($0.40)") and documents it every day.

Here is her project's Flickr stream which you should really, really click on and have a look at. Not to get in touch just with the array of scary edible foodlike products given American children, but also with the wasteful and environmentally damaging flotilla of packaging in which it comes.

If you have time for only one post, it ought to be the prefab PBJ-graham-cracker meal. One reader commented: "This is a horror show. A peanut butter sandwich--something that is easy to make well and healthfully (not to mention affordably)--turned into a plastic-wrapped gut bomb. When the Food Industry has convinced us we're too stupid to make a peanut butter sandwich from scratch, we are in deep trouble." Another : "That's not a lunch. Each of those items are sides that go with a real lunch. This is a collection of desserts."

Back to Jamie Oliver for a minute - now that you've looked at the pictures, you might be a little more motivated to sign his petition for better food in schools?

I commented to someone when I found the blog a couple weeks ago that this was a fantastic, cutting-edge idea for a blog and I thought she would get a lot of media attention -- and in fact a recent post says that she's averaging 1000-4000 hits a day and getting lots of requests for major media interviews; for obvious reasons she's remaining anonymous and fears for her job. But you know what this teacher is? She's a hero.

2010-02-22T10:40:00.001-05:00

Over the next 2-3 days I have a few interrelated posts to make about "eating food," as Michael Pollan would call it in his delightful book Food Rules (as opposed to eating industrially-fabricated pre-packaged edible foodlike substances - which, by the way, do not rule). So let's start with this one.

This year's TED prize went to British chef Jamie Oliver, known not just for his success in cooking but for his leveraging that success for justice and for the empowerment of others -- for example, his school dinners program in the UK ("I wanted to show how little government was spending and demand proper standards to get rid of the junk. I had to prove that, for the same price as a bag of crisps, only 37p, I could produce a properly cooked, nutritious meal at lunchtime"), his Ministry of Food (local centers teaching basic cooking-from-scratch skills), and Jamie's Kitchen (in which he mentored fifteen unemployed or homeless people to train as chefs - now on their fifth class). Incidentally, U2's bassist Adam Clayton was so impressed by this last vision that he arranged to work secretly in the kitchen for a week, of which Oliver said, "he was a good bloke. ...He wore the same whites as everyone else, he got changed with the students and he got told and briefed like everyone else. And I'll tell you by the end of the week he was making the best cannelloni."

Oliver's TED wish, in essence, was to teach children about making real food. You can watch his talk here. Don't miss the terrifying schtick with the wheelbarrow.

Oliver's current US project, which will begin airing in late March, holds special interest for me because it's set in my former hometown, Huntington WV, "the unhealthiest city in America." We lived there for over two years, and there's a lot that looks familiar about the coverage of this show so far. In conjunction with the Huntington project, Jamie Oliver has a petition for better food in schools which will be presented to President Obama after the show airs.

People who know me will know that, frankly, the health aspect of cooking for yourself and using real ingredients has, uh, never been an especially large motivator for me, and is unlikely to become one... but the political aspect, the economic justice aspect, the taste aspect, and the spiritual aspect all rank high on my list. I especially like Oliver's insistence, right across all his efforts, that real food is not a classist, narcissistic luxury, but a basic right and a building block of culture. I'm sure he met a lot of opposition to this idea in Huntington, but you meet it all over the place.

2010-02-21T07:13:00.000-05:00

Really wonderful news: Globally, Ben & Jerry's is going go 100% Fair Trade by the end of 2013. Not surprisingly, they were already the first ice cream company in the world to use any Fair Trade Certified ingredients at all. But this is huge, both in terms of how much awareness it will raise among consumers and in terms of the actual impact on producers. (Their press release comments, "This is a huge commitment that involves converting up to 121 different chunks and swirls, working across eleven different ingredients such as cocoa, banana, vanilla and other flavorings, fruits and nuts. It also means working with Fair Trade co-ops that total a combined membership of over 27,000 farmers.")

2010-02-20T11:07:00.006-05:00

It still doesn't feel like Lent to me. I suppose this is in part because Lent is early this year, but it's not that early! We do a joint discipline as a house, and some very interesting ideas were floated ("no media in the car" being my favorite.) However, finding something that works as a reasonable sacrifice for 7 different adults is pretty tough (one person said they never listened to anything in the car anyway), and we ended up with a combination of two old Lent standbys: no sweets, and no alcohol.

I've been interested to see this week some of the online pundits who are sharing their discovery of Lent over the past few years turn their noses up at such practices. A semi-consensus among at least some of the "evangelicals discovering liturgy" crowd seems to be that a worthy Lenten discipline needs to have a cognitive aspect -- it needs to relate conceptually to the Cross, or involve reflection on Jesus' suffering, or something like that.

While it seems to me that giving up anything has at least the potential to invite you to reflect on Jesus' suffering, and while conceptually-oriented practices are of course fine, I'd like to raise a hand for the value of practices that leverage very ordinary behaviors without worrying about constantly invoking a theological overlay. We can think no end about Christian or Biblical ideas, affirming good ones and voicing a desire to live by them, but it seems to me that a significant part of the real battle for spiritual formation is fought on a much more mundane level, at much more baseline leverage points.

Not drinking coffee for 6 weeks will put you in visceral, bodily, embarrassing, unglamorous contact with your own sin-nature in a way that mentally rehearsing propositions about that nature won't. Having poignant emotions about Jesus's forgiveness on the cross while you read John's passion narrative is a great thing, but it will not, de facto, mean that you acquire the ability to muster actual forgiveness each time you have to interact with, say, that narcissist whose bland dismissals of your worth as a person have been stinging for years. I remain convinced that what makes those how-tos (slowly, unreliably!) begin to happen is the "just do it" level of practice.

In fact, I'd even want to see value in rehearsing not depending so much on second-level cognitive theology (the after-the-fact, post-practice theologia secunda which at various points most of us lose a taste for at least briefly), and building the capacity to "just do it" at the prima theologia level anyway. (For those unfamiliar with this distinction in liturgical theology, David Fagerberg uses the analogy of grammar: secondarily, grammar is indeed a subject to think about and articulate the rules of, but primarily grammar is a tool that allows us to communicate.) If giving up sweets as theologia prima is good enough for Mrs. Murphy, I'd like it to be good enough for me.

2010-02-02T08:53:00.001-05:00

There's a nice interview with Joel Salatin in The Observer, which includes sidebars from some of the people involved with Food, Inc (which is just coming out in the UK). I still haven't seen Food, Inc yet!

From Rebecca Seal: "We subsidize food in the United States that makes you sick. The fact is, we love cheap food, and I'm no different. But the job of the film is to say that this food is much more expensive than it looks... Food, Inc has become an Inconvenient Truth-type of film – the debate is very new in the US. There is a growing food movement, but Food, Inc helped explode it – Michael Pollan had bestselling books before, but now he's being outlawed on college campuses. The food corporations are funding these universities and they say: 'You'll lose your funding if he goes on stage without someone else to counteract what he's saying.' "

From Salatin: "What happens when you don't ask: how do we make pigs happy? Well, you view the pig as just a pile of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly human hubris can imagine to manipulate it. And when you view life from that kind of mechanistic, arrogant, disrespectful standpoint, you very soon begin to view all of life from a very disrespectful, arrogant, manipulative standpoint. And the fact is, we aren't machines."

2010-01-20T19:47:00.000-05:00

Haven't had a chance to listen yet, but Michael Pollan was on NPR discussing his new "Food Rules: An Eater's Manual." Podcast here.

2010-01-20T07:45:00.001-05:00

This is something I've often wondered about, given the way our society deals with charity. Here's an article on how giving at the level of a tithe and above can trigger an IRS audit. It has stories from a few individuals ("'Anyone who follows Ron Sider’s advice for graduated tithing is probably going to be audited,' says Jonathan Kopke with a laugh.") There's also some helpful stuff on record-keeping and how to approach the audit experience overall. What is nice to see is the generally positive reports from those who were called in by the taxman:

Susan Brown viewed her one-on-one with the IRS as an opportunity to share her faith. “I explained that I’d been given so much, and I had made the decision to limit my lifestyle, and I wanted to be generous,” she recalls. Dick Towner did the same thing. “I didn’t go in wearing that on my sleeve, but, inevitably, you can see the kinds of charities I am giving to. You can effectively speak to what has motivated you to be that generous.” The second time Towner was audited it actually worked to his favor. “They found an extra $800 donation that I hadn’t claimed, so I ended up getting more back,” he says.