Disasters in Burma and China, and human response

The airwaves over the last two weeks have been beset by sights and sounds from the wreckage left by Cyclone Nargis in Burma and the earthquake in China. The destruction has been massive and widespread, and the suffering that this has led to has been profound. In both cases, the scale of the disaster has made rescue efforts incredibly difficult, complex and involved. In Burma, the political situation and the closed nature of the government have made relief efforts much harder, and have transformed a natural disaster into a human tragedy.

Last weekend, the Young(ish) Adults group from St. Mark's, Newnham, collected money to help with relief efforts in Burma. (We gave through dec.org.uk; I discovered them through an appeal on BBC Radio 4.) In all, we collected around £45: not a lot, but I know that people gave generously, and one feels rather like the 'widow' giving her mite as a foreign student on a student budget. We hope and trust that it will, in time, go to alleviate some of the suffering and help in the rebuilding in whatever small way it can. Thankfully, aid from foreign sources does seem to be slowly getting through at last.

Last night, whilst in a local pub having dinner, we saw some of the scenes of destruction from cities in China affected by the earthquake. According to the BBC, there are roughly 22,000 confirmed dead and many thousands missing or unaccounted for, so that figure is likely to skyrocket; there are also 4.5 million people homeless - 4.5 million! Of course, the most moving and haunting scenes were those of people being rescued from collapsed buildings, particularly children. You see such scenes and think of your own child. You can really identify with the loss and anxiety of parents, and this is a way of empathising (by analogy) with the broader situation of loss and suffering.

When confronted in this way, one wants to do something and not be simply a voyeur to suffering, not simply a romantic emotional parasite, turned in on oneself and not responding outwardly. In this day of the television, and even more of the internet, it is easy not only to be confronted with the images, but to respond in some way - primarily through giving money. This seems to me to be a really salutary effect of the internet and the ways we can be connected with it - not that it is everything, or gives us genuine knowledge of the other such as can be gained in a personal relationship, or that it overcomes the process of objectifying the other, not even that it might not be deeply ambiguous in some ways (it can certainly be used by emotional parasites or worse). But it does also open up other salutary opportunities which would not be had so easily otherwise.

Interestingly, I looked into donating to the relief efforts in China as well, and dec.org.uk mentioned that they are not collecting for them because the Chinese government has many resources at hand, and are responding in a competant and admirable (and open! this is somewhat new!) manner. (This is not to say that other reputable agencies are not also collecting for work in China: see, for example, Oxfam, British Red Cross or your local Red Cross agency.)

These are just some ruminations on the recent disasters and the opportunities we have at this particular historical moment, which we have not had in past and which will no doubt be transformed in unexpected ways in future.

Miscellaneous updates and an AKMA reference

I haven't blogged for some time, partly due to a lurking illness which hasn't yet been bold enough to assert itself fully. Low grade sickness saps your energy, but not enough to wipe you out, In this way, it is rather like an inch or two of snow: not enough to cause life to grind to a blessed halt so you can rest and recuperate, just enough to add misery to exhaustion.

Also, I've been busy, not least with looking at several General Ordination Exams. I will be helping the Board of Examining Chaplains to assess them next week at an Episcopal camp outside of Houston. I've done this for three years now and while it is an awful lot of work, I think the GOEs are important and I am glad to be able to serve the church in this way. In a certain slightly perverse way it is even fun. But it also means I won't be able to blog next week.

All grad school applications are now in, but I won't hear about them until probably March or so. Shpilkis in the meantime. I don't like not knowing where we will be living several months from now.

AKMA has contributed an interesting post on the subject of Christian marriages, with all of his usual eloquence and charity. (This was the third in a series for him. Here's the first, and here's the second.) Along the way he expands his discussion, summarizing and clarifying what I have written elsewhere about contested questions. (I don't mean that he actually looked at what I said and summarized or clarified, this isn't a statement of literary dependence -- it is more likely, if anything, that I have unwittingly imported ideas he set out on his own. But it seems at least that our minds are travelling in similar circles.)

His entire post is very much worth a read, but I thought the following sentence particularly worth marking:

Facile binaries between “us” and “them” serve the political purpose of drumming up the fevers of the
partisans (especially when we pathologize or anathematize those with whom we disagree), but they rarely
clarify the best grounds for advocating one or another theological position, and almost never give somebody a good reason for changing her or his mind.

I originally wrote "...the following sentences worth marking:" but when I returned to the original post, I realized that I wanted to quote the whole darn thing: it's gold. So go and read it. Now. That's okay, I'll be waiting here when you're done....

Other miscellaneous tidbit to include here include a couple of note about upcoming blog stuff:

1) I owe Peter (and others, no doubt) a definition of "church marketing", which is forthcoming.

2) Rhett has asked me to discuss premillenial dispensationalism and what I find problematic with it, particularly its eschatology, and this might be more interesting in a post than in an e-mail. (Tell me if I'm wrong, Rhett.)

3) I need to provide some more evidence and argumentation about church marketing generally, in support of my earlier post.

4) I am planning to start a series of entries which introduce modern theologians to readers, with links to online resources. Regular readers will be not at all surprised to find that my list of theologians leans towards Anglicans, the Radical Orthodox, and postliberals. Rowan Williams, David F. Ford, John Milbank, and Stanley Hauerwas will be among the first.

5) Some more ruminations about the Christian faith and its relation to the "public sphere" (and why the "public sphere" is such a dubious and dangerous idea).

6) I also owe Howlin' Hobbit something on the relationship between doctrine and life/ethics/behavior/something like that. I have been wanting to blog on this for a while, anyway.

7) More book reviews.

So, watch this space! But not next week, I'll be gone.

Language lessons

I am continually grieved by how we talk about each other in the church. We have become masters of the subtle (and not-so-subtle) put-down, the ridiculing snort, the label used to marginalize someone (e.g. literalist, revisionist). We have even come up with strangely anachronistic ideas of what an Anglican is, and promote little myths about others: e.g. evangelicals are dumb and not truly Anglican; anglo-catholics are a sick lot and a relic of the past; liberals don't care about Scripture and only want to kowtow to the cultural elites.

Our foe is either benighted or wicked or sick: if we stick to this story, then we don't need to listen to their reasons, we don't need to see them as human, we don't need to see ourselves in them, we don't need to agonize over whether or not we could be wrong. And if we keep telling the story that people are either liberal or conservative, that it's them or us, then we can have our nice black-and-white world where the other doesn't need to be engaged or taken seriously. We can assume power and force out the others, or just not listen to them; either way, we're insulated.

If you ask me, it's a recipe for damned smug self-righteousness and triumphalism, a table we seem to gather around especially when we're with like-minded people. But I don't think it's the right Table. It's certainly no credit to our faith or the gospel.

I do it too, I am not an outsider but very much an insider trying to be...what? Human? Is that too self-congratulatory? Probably.

But the more we live in this land of enmity, the more and more I feel as if we are in a Babylonian Captivity, far from our home -- and I don't want to learn to love exile.

An example of what I'm talking about

I just ran across this at Sojourners' website (specifically, here), and I thought I would quote it -- if for no other reason than to remind me of the bile and vitriol which is out there.

(David Batstone writes) On a more personal note, I recently received a note from a SojoMail reader full of profanity and insults. My attacker closed his note wondering how I could call myself a Christian, taking the position I do of waging peace in the Middle East at the expense of partisan support for "freedom fighters" in Iraq and uncritical support for the state of Israel. I usually do not take the time to respond to such letters (believe it or not, I get a few hate letters...:-), but this time I did write back a short note asking how he, in turn, could call himself a Christian and use such profane, violent words toward another human being. His e-mail back to me was revealing, albeit shocking: "I can write to you as I like, for you are not a human being. You have forfeited that right; you are nothing but pond scum."

How very sad. Is this really what we have come to? I understand passionately held convictions; I have them. I understand wanting to be firm and differentiate yourself from others; I try to. I can even understand being frustrated if (for example) Mr. Batstone was dismissive or condescending; that burns me, too. (Of course, I don't know if Mr. Batstone was, this is just hypothetical.) But this person's response just seems so far over the line, so deformed by anger, so blinded by ideology (not convictions but ideology), that I worry for his soul -- and for each of us. Please pray for us all.

One of my frustrations about this sort of thing is this: there are actually good arguments to be made, and this kind of interaction distracts from it. I suspect that I would side with Mr. Batstone in the case he was making (vis-a-vis peacemaking in the Middle East), but surely there are sound points to be made for the other side, too? Personal attacks send up defenses, occlude understanding, and discourage us from listening to those who are different than us: and we all end up the poorer for it.

(I originally was pointed in the direction of this Sojourners' posting by AKMA, here.)