A bad sign; an awful trend

From today's Guardian:

Up. Up. Up. Child poverty, pensioner poverty, inequality
Gap between richest and poorest families wider despite government efforts

Here and there around the blogosphere

I've been crazy busy recently, but have also had the pleasure of running across a few interesting essays and posts that I thought I would share with you.

Stephanie Paulsell writes in the latest Christian Century about the importance - the proper importance - of a learned ministry. I heartily endorse what she is saying; in fact, I would have written a broadly similar essay if given the opportunity. The church suffers when it is anti-intellectual. The church also suffers when it is over-intellectual, although it is my sense that, on the whole, we have suffered more from the former than the latter recently. The key is loving to learn and using whatever intellectual gifts one has to love and serve others, not fancying that being a smarty pants makes you better than or above others - and not letting others put you down or marginalise you because you've got a lot of 'book' learning. (I've written more about this elsewhere.)

Being part of the 'body' of Christ means that we are each given gifts which are meant to be realised in serving and loving others; it also means that others have gifts which are meant to be realised in serving and loving others too, including oneself. There is no gift which puts us 'above' another, and there is no gift which puts us 'beneath' others. There is of course difference, genuine difference, but this is not a difference which exalts one and puts another down.

We should never nourish the conceit that we can 'go it alone', any more than we would look at a dismbodied hand lying in the street and say 'hey, good for it - it's finally decided to go its own way!' This is another way of acknowledging that whatever gifts we have also involve limitations and incompletions which can only be filled by others - and similarly that we may have something for them as well.

Also, Doug over at Metacatholic draws our attention to a survey which seems to bear out the intuition that self-identified fundamentalists don't know the Bible better than others. In light of the study's finding that there is no correlation between Biblical literacy and political orientation (i.e. conservative may be either biblically literate or illiterate, liberals the same), Doug makes the observation that: "If true, however, it may suggest very controversially that not only does “believing the Bible” function as a shibboleth rather than anything else, but that the scriptures may exercise very little power over the biblically literate and illiterate alike. If Bible reading and knowledge has no correlation with political affiliation, that would seem to be suggested."

That is one way of analysing the data, but not the only one. It may actually suggest that it is people who have ideologies and political orientations, and not texts - and so a broad range of people may know and love the Bible, but interpret it differently. Or, a different and less hermeneutical point would be this: perhaps the politics suggested by the Bible are not easily mapped onto present-day political syntheses, and so there are both continuities and discontinuities between Scripture and the present day, such that the Scriptures do form people when engaged thoroughly and with depth, and yet without dictating which of the present political syntheses on offer is most appropriate or faithful.

He does helpfully raise the question about the (potential) incorrigibility of our beliefs and practices, political and otherwise, which is a serious question, as well as the possibility of our failing to hear and not even realising our failing - a possibility which ought to haunt us.

On the cross: and true and false gods

The formidable Kim Fabricius has provided the internet with a copy of his brilliant and bracing Palm Sunday sermon, entitled Lose your Faith, via Faith and Theology; it is moving, bold, poignant - and theologically right on.

It's possible that his wife was right and he should have curtailed the refrain of 'Lose your faith' - or maybe repeated something in a mood other than the imperative. But on the other hand the boldness - parrhesia? - and honesty in what he says, being unwilling to 'make it safe' or even 'wrap it all up' at the end makes it. On the whole, it's a tour de force. Here's an excerpt, to whet your appetite for the rest:

(All content of this excerpt is from Kim Fabricius, and I'm sure he claims (at least) moral right to be identified as its author - just so we're clear)

This sermon doesn’t have three points, it’s got three words: Lose your faith! (I warned you I would be sacrilegious.) Yes, lose your faith. Lose your faith in God. For as the French mystic Simone Weil insisted, there is a kind of atheism that is purifying, cleansing us of idols. Lose your faith in the god that the cross exposes as a no-god, a sham god. Lose your faith in the god who is but the product of your projections, fantasies, wishes, and needs, a security blanket or good-luck charm god. Lose your faith in the god who is there to hold your hand, solve your problems, rescue you from your trials and tribulations, the deus ex machina, literally the “machine god”, wheeled out onto the stage in ancient Greek drama, introduced to the plot artificially to resolve its complications and secure a happy ending. Lose your faith in the god who confers upon you a privileged status that is safe and secure. Lose your faith in the god who promises you health, wealth, fulfilment, and success, who pulls rabbits out of hats. Lose your faith in the god with whom your conscience can be at ease with itself. Lose your faith in the god who, in Dennis Potter’s words, is the bandage, not the wound. Lose your faith in the god who always answers when you pray and comes when you call. Lose your faith in the god who is never hidden, absent, dead, entombed. For the “Father who art in heaven” – this week he is to be found in hell – with his Son.

I am just reviewing James Alison's book Undergoing God: Report from the Scene of a Break-in, and much of what Kim says resonates with Alison's unapologetically Girardian take on theology. While I am not a follower of Rene Girard, full stop, myself, he is insightful and even haunting in the way that his work illuminates Scripture, and helps to expose our own idolatries.

We need more people who are willing to wield the idol-hammer, not out of iconclasm (which, today, is usually more about the hammer-wielder than the icon), nor out of hatred of our images, but above out out of love for God - and, in God, love for humanity.

Blogging the Archbishops

Maggi Dawn has undertaken a process of interviewing the Archbishops of Canterbury and York when they were here in Cambridge a couple of weeks ago. When they were here they gave a series of lectures which were excellent, enlightening and accessible - just wonderful. Now she gives us a chance to see how they responded to our questions posed to them through the interweb. Go and have a look - there will be more postings in the not-too-distant-future.

Quick links for more reflection on the Archbishop's speech

N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, for whom along with Archbishop Rowan Williams I have profound respect, has written an essay on ++Rowan's speech, clarifying what he sees as the essential matters of the speech, offering his appreciation of its importance and regretting its misreporting and misunderstanding. Whilst I respect them both, I find that +Wright has been given a gift of exercising elegant, piercing clarity in his prose in a way which quite often (by his own admission) eludes ++Wiliams. (H/T Steven Harris)

Moreover, Mike Higton continues offering ruminations and insights, this time from a slightly different perspective that before. A great reminder, through ++Williams and via Milbank that the 'secular' itself has a history, and is not simply the obvious or the given, much less the 'neutral' backdrop against which religion may (or may fail to) establish itself, even while there are some good reasons why it arose historically. This is offered not as a means of clearing away secularity, or traditions of universal rights, but to complicate them a bit, in order to open up a future which doesn't look exactly like the past.

Not an end, but a beginning

The Australian Parliament today, by way of the Prime Minister, apologised officially for the mistreatment of the Australian Aboriginal Peoples. (BBC story here.)

Looked at from one perspective, this might be an end, a balm to troubled consciences, a way for the oppressor to move on and forget, to say to himself 'well, that's fixed, no more worries there': a way for nothing to change.

Or it can actually be the beginning of something much bigger, much messier, less manageable, and more troubling. It might not be a balm (in the short to midterm) for consciences, but actually stir up more trouble; it might be the occasion for more stories to be told, more uncomfortable truth to come to light. Any apology, by dint of coming clean about what one has done, always contains the risk of encountering more fully the depth and nature of one's offense

But maybe, just maybe, it will be the beginning of healing and reconciliation - ultimately, for all involved (for the oppressor often forgets how his oppression distorts his own humanity). And that would begin to change everything.

And maybe - just maybe - my own people in America might take a cue.

Jason Goroncy, an acquaintance who is a PhD student at the University of St. Andrews, and an Antipodean native himself, blogs on this new development here (with the text of the official apology) and here (with an extended reflection on guilt and forgiveness - good stuff).

Egads! Shop now and (be) save(d)!

I think I have a book to write about this, but I have something else to write just now, so I'll just supply the link and a little more:

Naomi Schafer Riley reviews briefly and well the book "Shopping for God" by James B. Twitchell in the Wall Street Journal. Twitchell claims, without evident irony, that "Choosing a religion, he argues, is much like choosing any other product - from breakfast food to beer"* It sounds shocking but not surprising - turn the word 'pastorpreneurs' over in your head a bit - and if Twitchell is serious in what he says, this seems a wakeup call for the church in America (not the West as a whole). It poses the serious question of how to imagine our faith and the church in a way which is not wholly compromised by marketing, consumption, and economic metaphors.

It is worth noting, though, that it is not the opposite of such things, and there is a hallowed (?)tradition of combining consumption with Christian faith - purchase of mementos from pilgrimage sites being an early and obvious example. In some ways (not totally) the entire travel and souvenir industries stem from this practice of pilgrimage. This is only one example of a number that could be given. It might be worth looking closely at the practice of consumption - perhaps from a phenomonological perspective - to see, anthropologically and sociologically speaking, what human need is met, and how that might relate to religious faith.

But that aside, it does seem - and here I'm trying to be discerning and make a judgement, an activity which always implies that it could be otherwise** - that this might be one of the major tasks of the church in America (in particular***) in the early twenty first century: how do we imagine Christian faith as something other than business or personal preference? And how, through that, can we imagine genuine human life as something broader and richer than economics and consumption, both of which properly serve human life as a part of it, rather than becoming dominant modes of discourse and imagination?

I think I ought to read Twitchell's book - although I don't know when I possibly can - but I expect it will make me sick to my stomache. (Maybe Christmastide would be good.)


*This is Riley's summary of Twitchell's thesis; I am at the mercy of her summation skills!

**As opposed to, say, an arithmetic equation or logical syllogism, which require no judgement, discernment, or argumentation per se.

*** My experience of the church in England is quite different than this; there is generally a rather different sort of imagination here about such things which is not as easily reduced to these (economic) kinds of metaphors.

Stanley Hauerwas' sermon for Reformation Sunday

Stanley had the, um, privilege of preaching on Reformation Sunday, and here's what he had to say. Go and read it all.

Here's one thing he mentions:

"Reformation Sunday does not name a happy event for the Church Catholic; on the contrary, it names failure. Of course, the church rightly names failure, or at least horror, as part of our church year. We do, after all, go through crucifixion as part of Holy Week. Certainly if the Reformation is to be narrated rightly, it is to be narrated as part of those dark days."

It's hot and heavy - rhetorically freighted (even exaggeratedly so) to prove a point which he doesn't think a more evenkeeled approach would demonstrate.

I think he's maybe on to something here, though, that as a church - and here I mean not just Protestant/Reformed but all of us - we have difficulty naming and marking our failures as a part of our story, of connecting these up to the larger story of the cross. Some of us are able to do it personally, which is great, but as a community/communion/ body we don't seem able to do so. (In terms of the Reformation, even if we would want to mark something good that came from it, it would seem that we need to remember the way in which it rent and continues to rend the body of Christ, and this is so for both the Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic church; for humans to be out of communion /alienated from each other always takes two, and reconciliation always takes two as well.) I wonder if this has anything to do with our decline in public mourning or lament.

Check it out, it's every bit the provocative Stanley, we know and love (or hate, depending), still kicking it. (Also check out the extensive comments.)

Theology and the Built Environment links

I have been finding the interface of theology and the built environment as an area of preoccupation and enduring concern for me. In pursuing this, I have just today discovered a few web resources which seem helpful, and that I hope to make permanent links to in my sidebar in the not too distant future. They are as follows:

Theology and the Spatial Arts, University of Otago, New Zealand; This site aims to encourage work in the area of theology and the spatial arts, notably the built environment. Some great stuff here; I wish they had more information about upcoming conferences, though. Also, the colloquium on theology and the built environment itself has a website.

Of Kirk and Ale, a weblog (which now appears defunct), which deals with questions of urbanism and theology.

Sidewalks in the Kingdom, a site by Eric Jacobsen for Christian New Urbanists. (Jacobsen, author of Sidewalks in the Kingdom, by Brazos Press, is also a PhD student at Fuller pursuing these important issues in his work - respect!) (By the way, I reviewed his book in Reviews in Religion and Theology - it was great, you should read it!)

Streetwise: Rowan Williams on Reading Scripture

First off, let me be entirely upfront that I owe this reference - even down to the post title - to Sean the Baptist. (Thanks, Sean!) Thankfully, the internet allows for (perhaps even encourages) endless iteration, and so it is not entirely beside the point to reproduce a great quote from Rowan Williams on the dynamics of reading (and just as importantly, re-reading) Scripture.

The address as a whole is great and well worth a thoughtful read through. Here are a few quotations from ++Rowan's speech to whet your appetite (including Sean's original quotation):

[B]efore Scripture is read in private, it is heard in public. Those of us who assume that the normative image of Scripture reading is the solitary individual poring over a bound volume, one of the great icons of classical Protestantism, may need to be reminded that for most Christians throughout the ages and probably most in the world at present, the norm is listening. ...the Church in reading Scripture publicly says both (i) that it is not a self-generated reality, created simply out of human reflection and ideals, and (ii) that what is read needs to be read as a communicative act, - that is, not as information, not as just instruction, but as a summons to assemble together as a certain sort of community, one that understands itself as called and created ‘out of nothing’. Whatever we do in private with our reading of Scripture, we must do in awareness of this public character. The Church – a familiar enough point – is in the language of the Bible itself an ‘assembly’, a ‘convocation’: an ekklesia. It declares its basic character when it represents itself as listening to the act of ‘convoking’, calling together.
. . .
what I am trying to define as a strictly theological reading of Scripture, a reading in which the present community is made contemporary with the world in front of the text, is bound to give priority to the question that the text specifically puts and to ask how the movement, the transition, worked for within the text is to be realised in the contemporary reading community. To move too rapidly to the use of the text to make a general point which does not require the reader to be converted is to step outside what I have been calling the time of the text, the process by which it shapes its question. It is to make the text more passive than active, and so to move away from the stance of the listener, from the stance of the Church as trying to be still enough to hear and free enough to respond to God’s summons to be his community. Of course the work of exegesis to establish doctrine and ethics is unavoidable; commentary is always going on. But the first moment of commentary – if this emphasis on the basic character of listening is correct – needs to be the tracing of the ‘time’ of a text so as to chart where it is moving.
. . .
A written text inevitably has about it a dual character. It comes before the reader/hearer as a finished product, and so as something that can in some ways be treated as an object. If we are not careful its written character can be misused by working with the text as if it were passive. In contrast to the event of a voice speaking, it can be abstracted from the single occasion when the hearer has no control over what comes to her or him from outside. At the same time, a written text requires re-reading; it is never read for the last time, and it continuously generates new events of interpretation. It is fruitful of renewed communication in a way that the spoken word alone cannot be. So to identify a written text as sacred is to claim that the continuous possibility of re-reading, the impossibility of reading for the last time, is a continuous openness to the intention of God to communicate. Just as the text itself contains re-reading, is almost constituted by re-reading, so that it repeatedly recreates a movement towards conversion (towards the cross of Jesus, in Christian terms), so the eternal possibility of ‘reading again’ stands as a warning against ignoring the active ‘restlessness’ of the text in summoning the reader to change. The writtenness of the text is from one point of view risky as a strategy of communication: it risks the appearance of passivity, and the re-readability of the text risks the appearance of indeterminacy. Yet from another point of view it can be seen as inseparable from the risk of the communication it itself describes as well as enacts – a divine communication that is never without human speech and narrative, never just an interruption of the created continuum but a pressure upon it that opens up to the divine by the character of its internal relations and connections, the shifting, penitent perspective of a story enacted in time. The writtenness of the text is like the sheer factuality of the historical past as the vehicle of revelation: it is
something irreversibly done, but for that very reason continuously inviting or demanding.

Read the rest here.

This is classic Williams. For all the occasional pains of living in communion with Anglicans, it is truly gratifying to have a primus inter pares archbishop who can theologise well in public.

Credit for the picture of Archbishop Williams and his wife Jane goes to Lambeth Palace. Similar such pictures may be found here.

Katrina, two years on: a reflection

David Knight was a colleague of mine in seminary - although I didn't get to know him as well as I would have liked, I always had a deep respect for him. After seminary, he returned to his home diocese of Mississippi, and more recently became rector of a church on the gulf coast. He was in the thick of it two years ago when Hurricane Katrina hit, and his church's building - and much, much else in the area - took it on the chin. He has been blogging about the effects of living with such devastation, and today, the 29th, he has written a touching reflection on his own response to those two years. Go and check it out. While you're there you can explore around a bit to get a sense of what it has been like "on the ground". And if you or your church or whoever can pitch in, why not plan to do so?

Bible Study

I really appreciated Andy Goodliff's rant screed well thought out concerns about 'Bible study' as it is usually done (although I think it is a re-posting of something from last year). And he implies that his criticism runs out to systematic theology as it is often done (particularly in conservative evangelical circles), as well. I would echo this, particularly as it applies to systematic theology.

One of the greatest ironies for me in doing a PhD in systematic theology,* is that the Bible has come alive for me again. So many people testify that in seminary and doctoral studies the Bible became flat and tiresome or intolerably alien and uninspiring for them. My seminary experience was mixed rather than awful (thanks - for the good - in part to AKMA), but it is really at the doctoral level that I have learned to appreciate the depths and unmasterability of the Scriptures. It is not awful but awesome. Thanks, largely, to my supervisor Dan Hardy for that. I have re-learned to read the Bible not just for scholarship or theology but also devotionally. It seems far far deeper than it ever has to me, and, as with any late realisation, I regret the years that I missed it all.

A major part of this has been refusing to give to the Bible neat and tidy categories; another part has been reading and re-reading and re-reading again.

Andy has written his post almost in a 'ten propositions' format, but there are more propositions, and they're all together. Great stuff; go and check it out. Here is a taster:

The bible is a dangerous, world-changing, life-altering text that is out to transform the reader. The bible wants to shape our imagination to the tune of Christ.

The bible is always fresh and never stale. The bible does not put God or truth into neat statements. The bible is not God's prison.

*or constructive theology or Christian doctrine, depending on what kind of day I'm having.

In Their Own Words

Bracing reading today in the Guardian. Fifty American veterans of the Iraq war were interviewed and talked about the effects of their actions on Iraqi civilians. One quotation:

'For Sergeant Westphal, that night was a turning point. "I just remember thinking to myself, I just brought terror to someone else under the American flag, and that's just not what I joined the Army to do," he said.'

Read it all here.

My Guru

The estimable Kim Fabricius is at it again, with his ten propositions. (Like someone else said recently, in contrast to (say) Carl F.H. Henry, Fabricius has reclaimed for me the value of propositions.) This time he is making propositions about 'spirituality', and he is ten for ten. A couple of excerpts to whet your appetite:

Theology without spirituality is empty, spirituality without theology is blind.

Spirituality has been called theology on its knees, but it is also theology on its feet, in labora as well as ora. “Bread for myself is a physical matter,” said Nocolas Berdyaev, “but bread for my neighbour is a spiritual matter.” Any authentic Christian spirituality will have shalom – peace-and-justice – at its heart.

and, quoting Rowan Williams:

Williams suggests that we understand spirituality in terms of “each believer making his or her own that engagement with the questioning at the heart of faith.” But spirituality is “far more than a science of interpreting exceptional private experiences; it must … touch every area of human experience, the public and the social, the painful, negative, even pathological byways of the mind, the moral and relational world. And the goal of a Christian life becomes not enlightenment but wholeness – an acceptance of this complicated and muddled bundle of experiences as a possible theatre for God’s creative work.”

I worked in hospital chaplaincy for a short time, and have worked alongside enough people thinking about pastoral care using social science models ('all people have a natural spirituality, which is realised in different ways...' e.g.), and so I am glad to see these out there - although of course people such as Edith Humphrey, Mark McIntosh, and Philip Sheldrake have been saying similar things for those with ears to listen. Go and read them all now.

A Few Links for the Week

I am going to be busy at a conference for most of the rest of the week, and so I wanted to post the links before I forget them. They look as if they will be good reading.

D.W. Congdon is writing on the Spirit of the Lord, and in his first post he inveighs against the Sanitised Savior of Suburbia. This Jesus, he writes:

is innocuous, non-confrontational, safe for the consumeristic spirit of Santa. He has no beef with the materialistic society of America. He has no quarrel with the economic oppression of First World countries against the Two-Thirds World. He puts up no nonviolent resistance against the political persecution of Muslims, against the military brutality in the numerous interrogation camps around the world, against the extreme poverty and disease that ravage entire continents. This Jesus is the one who blesses dualism: who only claims a person’s soul and leaves the body up to others, whether to the noncommittal social programs of the governmental or to the oppressive regimes of power which feed off of the subjugation of those lowest in society. This Jesus is the one who blesses suburban complacency, who wanders the urban streets in order to shopbut never to sit and talk and love, who always walks on the other side of the road when there is a homeless person asking for money or a man beat up and left for dead. The SSS is the god of America, and insofar as the SSS is understood as “Christian,” we indeed live in a “Christian nation.”

A bracing start to what sounds like a promising series.

I am particularly intrigued by the proposal of a Pneumatology which will be embodied, public, political, rather than simply internal and private, a matter of 'God and me'. I have been moving in the direction of this kind of account for some time, but simply haven't had the time and opportunity to follow it up in as much detail as I would like. But it seems to me that a biblically faithful pneumatology would be an 'external indwelling', encompassing the 'internal' but also decentering it. Congdon's posts are not specifically a Pneumatology, but a critique of the sort of gnostic dualism which is often found in the church and its preaching, and a constructive account of 'The Spirit of the Lord'. But I think it will be quite interesting and helpful.

Anyway, D.W.'s second post giving the impetus for the project (with the above excerpt) is here, and here is the unfolding index for the project. I hope to read it all soon.

Also, Poserorprophet has a series on Christianity and Capitalism which I hope to read soon. Having skimmed a few of them, it looks as if it will be a good theological critique of the regnant system the world has for ordering, distribution and deserving. First post here.

Links for Later

Hat tip to Alastair for some links: and welcome back after your exams!

Peter Leithart has been every bit as busy blogging as usual, and Alastair calls our attention to a couple gems. Peter's mind has been travelling in a similar orbit to mine with his posts Perichoretic Imagination and Theological Imagination.

And James Jordan, in a guest post, makes some suggestive points as to what the 'yet more' of salvation is -- that is, if the new creation through Christ is genuinely new creation, then what is new about it? Or to put it another way, if redemption is more than just being restored to how we were before the fall, then what is that 'more'?

I think it is the glory of God, which we reflect, inhabit, and hope of sharing in eschatologically. A part of that glory is, of course, God bringing that 'yet more' out of the sin and death which resulted from our wandering. Or, as Jordan puts it, "Jesus gives us more than we lost in Adam. But that extra is not justification; it's glorification." Go read it all.

Resurrection

Seven Stanzas at Easter
John Updike (1932)
(cadged in its entirety from Maggi Dawn's weblog - thanks Maggi!)

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse,
the moleccules reknit, the amino acids
rekindle, the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent; it was not
as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but he vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour,
we are embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Civility on the web

I appreciated Jonathan Freedland's op-ed piece in the Guardian today, entitled "The blogosphere risks putting off everyone but point-scoring males." It makes the (not terribly insightful) observation that the internet, which is potentially an experiment in wide-ranging democracy and exchange of ideas typically is dominated by loud mouths, cranks, and ideological hacks. Too often an exchange of ideas becomes a series of personal attacks (a logical fallacy) and conversations become ideological echo-chambers, with the result that thinking is avoided --seemingly at all costs. Although there nothing particularly new about hand-wringing over civility on the web, there really is a sense in which the potential of this experiment (viz. the internet) really raises the stakes for humanity.

I found this passage particularly interesting:

But that advantage [i.e. instant feedback on matters such as factual errors, etc.] is surely out- weighed by the risk that the blogo-sphere, which could be a new, revolutionary public space, instead becomes a stale, claustrophobic environment, appealing chiefly to a certain kind of aggressive, point-scoring male - and utterly off-putting to everyone else. This is not just bad news for media outlets like the Guardian, keen to build an audience; it means that this great democratic opportunity is lost.

Ah, but this free-for-all is democratic, say the devotees. Any change would be censorship. But imagine that public meeting. Would that constitute a democratic debate, or a shouting match in which the loudest, most intimidating voice wins? Surely the more democratic encounter is the meeting properly chaired, allowing everyone their say and ensuring no descent into bar-room brawl. That's certainly how we operate in the real world, so why should the virtual realm be any different?

Freedland puts his finger on the typical justification for libertarian attitudes towards society and politics (and, in a different way, free market economics): a semi-mythological attitude which insists that any limitation - or, better, any heteronomous limitation - is ipso facto illegitimate. But notice what Freedland notices: that when autonomy and nothing else is the only possible criterion, then the strong - the bullies - win, and life becomes not only oppressive, but also monotonous and excessively dull. The better - in Freedland's terms, the more democratic - alternative is not simply to allow whoever whatever they wish to say, with whatever force, rage and ill-will they can muster, but rather a 'proper chairing', which would allow different voices to contribute to advancing the conversation. It ends up being a collaborative, open-ended project with a measure of competition and contest, but not, I think, dominated by selfishness and abuse of power.

It might be objected that this 'proper chairing' is necessarily value-laden: fine, so is libertarianism. A value-laden ordering of space, time, relationships, and so forth cannot be gotten around. And so the question ends up being not, a specific, value-laden arrangement versus something non-value-laden and 'neutral', but rather which is the best, most just, and in Christian terms, most Godly and most oriented towards God's Kingdom. (And, yes, the criteria for for the judgements, not just the judgements themselves are value-laden.)

Anyway, it is a good essay, go and read the rest.

Hey! Tighten up!*

Although we disagree pointedly (I think) on the subject of Christianity, I always find Barbara Ehrenreich to be wonderfully stimulating reading. She is brilliant and passionate about people and human flourishing, particularly when it comes to the ways that contemporary society squeezes so many of what it considers 'little people': the working poor, the middle class, the jobless. I particularly loved her book 'Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Making it in America'.

So I was delighted to find an extract from her upcoming book in the Guardian's G2 section last Monday, entitled How We Learned to Stop Having Fun. The basic thesis of the essay is that there was a particular historical moment in which we moved away from communal festivity, and moved 'inward', with the rise of self-consciousness and (excessive) introspection, and this correlated to a dramatic rise in depression. She dates the beginning of this to roughly the beginning of the seventeenth century, and finds the proces continuing to the present. This correlated with a number of developments, including increased social mobility (so people became more aware of the image they were putting forth, and it was no longer the case that you simply appeared as who you were); a growing sense of the centrality of the individual (over against the community); intellectual developments within the Enlightenment which reinforced this individualism; and theological developments, particularly Calvinism and its British form, Puritanism.

It is interesting to note that the contemporary analogues to communal festivity in the West - specifically, Carnavale - still continue in Catholic areas (Italy, Spain, France, New Orleans, South America). And historically Anglicans - among whom were some more moderate Puritans - were known for keeping Christmas and other feasts which were associated with revelry with ties to earlier communal celebrations.

There is another aspect to this dynamic which is intriguing. I will introduce it with an excerpt from the essay:

So if we are looking for a common source of depression on the one hand, and the suppression of festivities on the other, it is not hard to find. Urbanisation and the rise of a competitive, market-based economy favoured a more anxious and isolated sort of person - potentially both prone to depression and distrustful of communal pleasures. Calvinism provided a transcendent rationale for this shift, intensifying the isolation and practically institutionalising depression as a stage in the quest for salvation. At the level of "deep, underlying psychological change", both depression and the destruction of festivities could be described as seemingly inevitable consequences of the broad process known as modernisation.

'Anxious and isolated' individuals are not only those people who the competitive market-based economy favours, they are also created by this economy and the world it gives rise to. These are exactly the sorts of people who are needed by consumerism: people who are isolated, with more-or-less vague gnawings of incompleteness and undefined appetite, to whom appeal can be made with some object or other which promises to fill the gap (but which, needless to say, fails to deliver). Purchase follows purchase, the individual's appetite remains unfulfilled (as it needs to be), and the system is satisfied. The system creates the individuals which it needs; in this case the individuals have the added bonus of thinking they are autonomous or 'self-made' (Kant, Marx, and, to some extent, Nietzsche reinforced this in the 19th century), and so cannot acknowledge that they are products of the system - and are, to that extent, unable to change the system.**

This all ends up being a parody of the Kingdom of God, about which I have said more elsewhere. The most salient aspect to mention here is that God does not merely satisfy desire, but creates more, and then satisfies that. With God desire is not frustrated, giving rise to more frustrated acquisition, which then leads to either more frustration or acquiescence - an ultimately nihilistic process - but rather fulfilled, and in the fulfilling given an even greater capacity and desire, which are then fulfilled and increased, and so on. Each is an ongoing process, rather than a finite series. But one is vicious and nihilistic, while the other gives rise to true human flourishing.

* With respect to Zippy the Pinhead.
** ironic, no?

Some theological odds and ends

I know I haven't posted much recently - busy. And likely to be so to the end of March, not that I'm saying I won't post. Just don't hold your breath.

But do go check out Kim Fabricius' 10 Theses on the Holy Spirit at Faith & Theology; especially note numbers 6 and 10. (Hat tip to Alistair.) Good stuff from an estimable theological thinker.

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Also from Alistair, a quotation from Rowan Williams:

Scripture and tradition require to be read in a way that brings out their
strangeness, their non-obvious and non-contemporary qualities, in order that
they may be read both freshly and truthfully from one generation to another.
They need to be made more difficult before we can accurately grasp their
simplicities…. And this ‘making difficult’, this confession that what the gospel
says in Scripture and tradition does not instantly and effortlessly make sense,
is perhaps one of the most fundamental tasks for theology.

(Alistair himself got it from Faith & Theology, so it's really the whole circle of life thing...or something.)

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Also, there is a lot good out there on the whole "Jesus and family tomb" questions. You'll find alot of it at Mark Goodacre's weblog, which will point you towards other great resources, too.

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I had an experience a little while ago of finally reading Colin Gunton and thinking to myself 'why did no one tell me about this guy?! This is great!' Of course, that wasn't completely true. Others had told me, or held forth on his worth - not least Andy Goodliff - and I was simply heedless. And although I found much great, I also think he is limited in some unfortunate ways. I once said to Andy that I would say how I think he is, but this is not that post. I've had a very similar experience recently. But let me back up.

I root for the Chicago Cubs, and for England in international test cricket - I know all about self-loathing. But Calvin takes it to new depths. I have been reading Calvin's Institutes over Lent, along with some friends. There are hints and glimmers of real insight and brilliance. There is also some really wretchedly awful bits. And a lot of banal truth in-between. But he's not who I've 'discovered'.

As a respite from Calvin, to some degree, I have been reading Jurgen Moltmann, namely his Trinity and the Kingdom of God. Before this, I had read extracts from The Crucified God, and on that basis, well, let's just say I wasn't a fan. But Trinity and the Kingdom has completely changed my outlook on him. Why didn't anyone tell me about him before?

That's not to say I am now somehow a 'Moltmannian'. As with Gunton, I find him limited in ways. But he is intensely hopeful, and makes some very interesting moves. Much, much better than Calvin: even if, like Gunton, he works broadly within he same tradition.