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July 31, 2005

Facelift

Trevor’s working on a way of refactoring the appearance of the Disseminary — partly ’cause it’s been long enough, partly because we cam up with the old appearance right at the start, and have learned enough to be ready to make some changes, partly because the Moveable Type database that powered the old design melted down last winter and we never rebuilt it.

Trevor sensibly thinks that we ought to solicit feedback for the new design before we implement anything — so, how does it look to you?

Posted by AKMA at 01:31 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Clockwork

Today’s shipment of cards:

39 Polycarp, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

40 Montanus, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

41 Gnosticism, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

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July 30, 2005

Ideas and Time

I appreciate the positive feedback about the Theology Cards; we have another dozen or so in the works, which will dribble out over the next week, I expect. If you have a request, leave a comment — I can’t make any promises, but if a subject would interest you, then it might well be useful and interesting to my class, or to other non-curricular explorers. I will concenttate my efforts on the years from 100 to 600 (roughly, though I’ll stretch the interval to include some early of the missionary saints of the British Isles); though there be worthy subjects for cards outside that window, I just don’t have the time right now to think about a series of “Continental Reformers” or “Caroline Divines.”

In response to Being Shielded’s request for “an idea flow chart,” I like the idea a lot and will try to work such things up for some major theological concepts. Unfortunately, I got a different really great idea while I was mulling that over, a real Tufte-an idea that I’ve spent hours working on already today.

It goes this way: Part of the job of our introductory course in Early Church History involves helping students develop an awareness of the shape of major theologians’ lives, the connections among them, the chronology and the geography of their careers. It occurred to me to follow a character’s life with a line that changes color as the character ages. So a character’s life-line starts out yellow, modulates to red at 25, to purple at 50, to blue at 75, and to green should he or she live to 100. With that visual device, one can both illustrate a character’s life and travels (“Aha! He’s in Gaul at 25, but he returns to Alexandria in his forties”) and point to synchronisms (“So she was in her fifties during the Council of Chalcedon”).

The catch is that my Photoshop/Illustrator chops aren’t immediately up to the task, so I’m going deeper in the applications at the same time I’m working on illustrating (for instance) Athanasius’s exiles. I hope I can produce a nice, clean one in time to take it to the Tufte seminar that Trevor and I will go to in August.

So, life-lines now; idea flow-charts, next. And, if I can get a handle on the stressors that have interrupted my sleep and productivity, I can wrap up my work on the Winslow Lectures publication project, put together the elements for my semi-plenary at the Catholic Biblical Association meeting next weekend, and help Margaret and Pip get ready for their August trip to the east coast. And resume the Lego Church History illustrations. And finish up my syllabus in time to share it with my Church History colleagues. And rework my study guide for the course. And write the books I’m supposed to have written this summer. Etc.

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Card Posts

Latest update on the Theology Cards front (Theological Outlines buffs will have to wait — but aren’t five-plus chapters enough for starters?):

23 Evagrius of Pontus, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

34 Eusebius of Caesarea, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

38 Clement of Rome, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

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July 29, 2005

My Kind of Argument

Phil Windley (Ha! no one thought I even remembered Phil — hi, Phil!) points to a useful argument from Timothy Grayson on the subject of digital identity. It’s the sort of argument I love — he calls attention to the extent to which our frustrations and conflicts over “digital identity” and “privacy” involve conceptual confusions left over from the conditions that prevailed before the advent of digital interaction. The technical problems are aggravated by linguistic confusion.

Three cheers for that good catch! The difficulty arises when you try to attend not only to the changing conditions that require us to redefine our expectations (that’s a tough enough job by itself), but also to the moral intuitions, the social forces that inculcate our sense of identity, and the negotiations by which we mediate these non-personal factors. You can’t just “cahnge the language,” nor should we simply turn the language over to people who assure us they know what they’re doing, even if they’re good guys like Kim Cameron and Dick Hardt and Eric Norlin (well, OK, Eric has that sinister NSA side to him, but you get my point). Our language needs to change and will change, but the right answers for DigID will take when the affordances that the technology offers align with expectations that non-geek citizens are willing to bend in order to enjoy the benefits of comfortable, secure, trustworthy online interactions.

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Like Clockwork

Another series of Theology Cards, another couple of chapters of Hall’s Theological Outlines.

Among the cards, we’ve added

20 John Cassian, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

30 Modalism, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

36 Pachomius, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

Meanwhile, we have Chapter Four (Theism) and Chapter Five (Anti-Theistic Theories) finished, and Chapter Six (Revelation) is under way.

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July 28, 2005

They’re Multiplying

Bwa-ha-ha! More questionae going up in Chapter Four of the Theological Outlines, and four more Theology Cards:

25 Jerome, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

27 John Chrysostom, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

28 Mary of Egypt, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

29 Ignatius of Antioch, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

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July 27, 2005

You and Big Broadband and Me

Yesterday David (evidently on vacation, but blogging up a storm) called attention to what calls itself a Big Broadband Bill of Rights. He urged us to sign on, and I went over to check it out.

I’m a determined user of broadband, so the issue concerns me actively — and I support the premise that the U.S. has adopted (or, more precisely, “allowed to tumble into a mixed-up array”) misguided regulations relative to the distribution of broadband services. If I am correctly informed, other nations offer faster, more readily available broadband at lower prices; that should certainly sound like a desirable circumstances to decision-makers over here, too.

I didn’t sign the manifesto, though, for a couple of reasons. First, I balk at furthering the notion that access to broadband constitutes a “right” (even in a metaphorical sense). Enumerated rights ought to stay few and general, and the more we talk about a right to this and a right to that, the more vulnerable all of these rights become to the argument that “when your rights conflict with mine, something has to give, isn’t that a shame,” etc., blah blah blah — an argument that serves too easily to undermine what ought to be deep, durable, exceptionless civil rights (as near to “exceptionless” as mortal social arrangements can make). In other words, I’d be more sympathetic to seeing this as a sub-instance of “free press” than as a sui generis matter right-to-boradband.

Second, the manifesto’s Article 2, section 3 reads, “2.3 You have the right to trust that others will respect your copyright ownership. In turn, you shall respect the copyright protections afforded to us and compensate copyright owners per their request” — and, given the present complexion of copyright law in the U.S., I can’t endorse that. I don’t have anything against a modest regimen more in line with historic copyright protection, but I just don’t assent to the present megacorp-feeding-frenzy of copyright restriction. To repeat: a sensible business model will benefit artists and those who mediate and distribute their work to customers. That’s no0t just what my observations affirm; that’s what the data suggests, too.

The same applies to Big Broadband. Legislators and business leaders should see the long-term economic benefits to making absolutely sure that the U.S. supports the fastest, least costly, most reliable broadband network in the world. THat’s the basis on which they should be supporting Firstmile.us and Big Broadband — not on the basis of a putative right to online access. Great principle, great vision, great models, misplaced argument.

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Hard at Work

Crossing from repetitive to downright tedious, we’ve got even more of the Theological Outlines online: we have Chapter One (The Science of Theology), Chapter Two (The Dogmatic office of the Church), Chapter Three (Holy Scripture), and about half of Chapter Four (Theism). And we’ve added four Theology Cards:

14 Leo the Great, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

16 Egeria, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

18 Benedict, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

22 Cyprian, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

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July 26, 2005

Offspring of Even Still More Cards

More questions from Theological Outlines blog. More cards. More to come. (Yes, more Lego Church History too, but not this instant.)

15 Constantine, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

17 Augustine, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

19 Ambrose, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

24 Hippolytus, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

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July 25, 2005

More Cards

The work on teaching resources continues behind the scenes at the Disseminary. We’ve uploaded several more questionae to the Theological Outlines blog, and we’ve uploaded three more Theology Cards, available from here:

9 Macrina, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

12 Origen, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

13 Justin Martyr, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

Posted by AKMA at 04:28 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Another Example

The St. Luke’s volunteers came by today to pick up a bed for the Yancuba family, and as I was cleaning out the space where the bed used to be, I found a parish bulletin (location and date withheld) where I had noted that the preacher started by observing, “Today is Father’s Day. Many Christians will celebrate today as the Feast of Corpus Christi. . . .”

That’s the kind of thing that makes me feel feisty and un-American, when a preacher announces that it is Father’s Day but observing Corpus Christi is an optional, “Christian” thing to do.

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July 24, 2005

My Cards

In one of the Ekklesia Project conversations, and again this afternoon, I alluded to the Theologian Cards for my Early Church History class. I checked, and only Anthony, Perpetua, Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Tertullian were available online. So I just uploaded another batch, and will work through the rest of them in my copious free time. And yes, I’ll get back to work on the Lego Church History series.

6 Basil the Great of Caesarea, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

7 Arius, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

8 Clement of Alexandria, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

10 Gregory of Nyssa, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

11 Gregory of Nazianzus, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

It’s not too hard to format and upload these, mostly just a matter of making the PDFs and JPEG from the main InDesign file, so I should be able to get a few more up here soon. (Though I put “My Cards” in the title bar, anyone interested should know that the drawings were executed by extremely gifted artist-philosopher Steve Lahey.)

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Lovely, Lovely

It was a treat to visit the garden home of Scandal of Particularity (after having met her at the Ekklesia Project on Monday), where with her husband she generously hosted Camassia, the AngloBaptist, Liz (who — so far as I know — doesn’t have a website, the horror!), and me for a civilized afternoon conversation about liturgy, theology, sexuality, blogging software, other Blogarians, and the Tour de France — among many other things.

The next time someone tells you that online activity cuts into physical-world interaction, sock ’em in the nose you may correct them based on the empirical data of my experience.

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Ugly, Ugly

I have a hard time even believing that is a dog. Ugly, undoubtedly — but to count as “the ugliest dog,” shouldn’t the connection to dog-dom be a little more obvious?

Either way, Sam will probably be the ugliest dog on Google and Technorati soon — dog tag or no tag.

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July 22, 2005

Next Installment

To relieve the theological humdrum, I’ll call attention to another couple of paintings from Pippa that I uploaded to Flickr.

We made a trip to the art supplies store yesterday, and she’s begun work on the huge canvas — a seaside landscape based on a photo she herself took.

Posted by AKMA at 10:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Correction

David Weinberger is too classy to pout online — or maybe he hasn’t noticed yet — but it must be annoying when The Paper Of Record ascribes a diluted version of his witticism about the Web to one “Scott Williams” (link via Dave Winer).

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July 21, 2005

Dubious

I’ve only just recently found out that anybody cares what I think about the recent sad news from Connecticut. If you don’t care to register with the New York Times, the short answer is that the diocesan bishop inhibited a priest (“suspended” him), took possession of the parish’s buildings and records, changed the locks, and installed an interim rector. It is hard to think that it’s coincidental that the priest in question was one of six clergy who actively resist the consecration of Gene Robinson to the episcopacy (among other vexatious actions taken by the Episcopal Church over the past few years).

Since it’s a matter whose resolution depends greatly on details of the transactions between bishop and priest, I have kept my own counsel — I reasoned that it could hardly help clarify a complicated situation if large numbers of people who don’t know the details take uninformed positions. I’ve been in situations where the presenting issue could not be discussed publicly, which circumstance contributed to an appearance of extreme unfairness on the part of the authority involved; since then, I’ve tried to be especially cautious regarding such situations.

Because this has become a touchstone for determining even-handedness in ecclesiastical commentary, however, and because there’s been plenty of time to make as clear as possible a case for what looks on the face of things like a clumsy power grab, I can without hesitation say that if Bishop Smith has a good reason for the way he handled this situation, he has so far withheld it. The highly-charged atmosphere ought to incline someone who holds power to exercise that power as little and as gently and unexceptionably as possible, with as much explanation as possible. Unless Bishop Smith is in the agonizing position of knowing something very terrible and confidential about the conduct of the Rev. Mr. Hansen’s ministry — something of which no hint of a clue has even been rumored, so one has to consider that option off-the-table — Bishop Smith must be deemed to have mishandled a delicate situation.

In a couple of conversations at the Ekklesia Project, I observed that I increasingly find the pivotal text in Pauline ethics to be 1 Cor 6:7: “In fact, to have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded? ” We demonstrate sinfully constricted imaginations when we concentrate our efforts on prevailing over our sisters and brothers, arm-twisting or out-maneuvering in order to win, to justify oneself.

I can imagine some circumstances that might motivate Bishop Smith to take the actions he did, and I can imagine some circumstances that might motivate Fr. Hansen to have taken the actions that seem to have precipitated the diocese’s foreclosure — but the information circulating in public so far casts the diocese’s side in a pretty grim light. When I wrote “if our charity were not already exhausted,” this dysangelical mess was the sort of sorry outcome I feared.

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July 20, 2005

Closing EP Post

The Ekklesia Project always excites and refreshes me, so it’s not just because I gave a presentation there this year that I have to say what a wonderful gathering they put together for us.

That being said, I was delighted that so many people gave very kind positive feedback on my talk, and that so many people seemed to get the idea of the Disseminary (which Phil mentioned when he introduced me). It’s gratifying, but frustrating, that their feedback suggests that Trevor and I have the right idea — while we’re still having trouble harvesting enough useful material to make the site go.

Thanks, though, to readers from EP who meander over here; it was great to hear from you in person, and I hope you feel welcome to come back electronically fromm time to time.

Posted by AKMA at 02:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 19, 2005

The Strong Right Arm

This morning we all woke up way too early, and Margaret and Pip and I trundled down to DePaul so that we’d be sure to arrive in time for me to give my plenary at the Ekklesia Project Gathering. We were pretty sleepy till partway through breakfast, but by my third cup of coffee I figured I’d be able to keep my eyes open through the whole presentation.

I’ll add the transcript of the whole presentation in the (More) area; PDF available here, and an mp3 from ChuckP3 here. For casual readers and RSS, though, the short answer is that it seems to have gone well. We had some active conversation afterward, and I could spend the rest of the day relaxing and jawing with friends rather than kicking myself.

“Relaxing,” that is, until 7:15, when the presenters and I were called to the front for a panel discussion of our papers, led by Barry Harvey. Barry asked us hard questions, which struck me as decidedly unfair, given how little sleep I’d had. When the EP crowd got tired of hearing us panelists talk, Margaret and Pippa and I hastened back north to Evanston.

Within an hour, I’ll be fast asleep.

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

(Exodus 20:2-7, NRSV)

Thank you, Brent and Rodney, for the invitation to talk with the Ekklesia Project this year. Every year’s Gathering encourages and refreshes me in vital ways, and I hope that by talking through some of the ground that mediates Bill Cavanaugh’s talk about theological dimensions of our imperial situation, from last night and Sylvia’s more comprehensive account of a biblical perspective on Empire, I can clear some ground where we can meet and work out concrete ways of living as godly people as a practice of resistance to an imperial context.

So, to begin a reflection on the how the Decalogue – and specifically, the first three commandments of the Decalogue – might shape us for godliness in resistance to the power of Empire, let’s re-read together the passage that Rodney assigned to me.

First, these commandments are addressed not to a nation-state, but to a bunch of people wandering around in the wilderness. The relevance of the Commandments doesn’t depend on an established civil government enacting these principles into public policy, nor on each individual adopting them as a personal code. The Commandments are addressed to a people, a particular community. And this people hold together as a people in relation to the words we’re reading.

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” God begins by announcing the Divine Name; where our careful translations say “the Lord,” the Hebrew specifies God’s own name – at which, according to the tradition1, all the world stands still, all sound is hushed, the praise of God in heaven and the mysterious wheels of the chariot cease spinning, as God pronounces the unspeakable Name. God announces the Name, and explains that God’s identity is made known in saving this people from slavery – in the words of Psalm 77, “with a strong arm God redeemed the children of Jacob and Joseph” (Ps 77:16). That point bears on a later part of my argument, but for now bear in mind that the Name itself is understood as a command in the Judaic tradition2; the bare fact of knowing God activates an ethical obligation whose details emerge in the subsequent verses.

The Lord emphasizes that this is not a random encounter between nomadic herders and a post-Chaldaic deity. As it turns out, the God who teaches Israel how to live in the Decalogue is the same God who delivered them from slavery in Egypt; God has already extended divine mercy to Israel as a basis for Israel trusting in God. “Deliverance” now constitutes a further revelation of God’s identity, so that everything else we will learn about God should cohere with the this demonstration of freedom.

“You shall have no other gods before me.” The prepositional phrase “before me” could be clearer; it could mean a variety of things, from “over against me” to “in preference to me,” but whatever the precise nuance of “before me,” the across-the-board sense is that any other allegiance must be set aside in favor of our allegiance to the Lord. Here God is not arguing that other deities don’t exist – the next commandment goes on to allow that they’re real in some sense, since God commands that we not bow down to them or worship them.3 Our allegiance to this God takes precedence over any other possible priority; any other god, any other possible rival for our commitment, must give way to the Lord God who brings us out of slavery.
The next commandment, then, goes on explicitly to require not only that the people of God commit themselves completely to the Lord, but that we follow through on that promise of loyalty. God’s unwillingness to allow anyone or anything to come intervene between God and humanity comes to expression in the commandment, “You shall not make for yourself an idol”; we may not participate in any of the plausible, popular, culturally-acceptable practices that infringe on our unique commitment to God. That rules out the obvious – making and adorning statues that depict other deities (golden calves, for instance). It further rules out such representations of the Lord God as might confuse us into worshipping the created instead of the creator, or such as satiates our imaginations with definitive details on topics where God has not seen fit to supply knowledge. Our God specifically does not want us to think that God looks like a white guy; Moses is the only person in Scripture who gets a direct glimpse of God, and even then he only sees God’s hinder parts. (Not that God’s hinder parts wouldn’t look divine.)

In a theme that resounds through all of Scripture, God consistently condemns any human endeavor that encroaches on God’s unique self-representation. The Golden Calf episode stands out as an example, not only because it displays the chosen people indulging in a festival of idolatry while Moses is on the mountain, receiving the Torah, but especially because Aaron assures the people, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” – to which God responds, “No way, Moshe.” however much the God’s people demand God on their terms, we may not arrogate to ourselves the prerogative to characterize God as suits us; we may not devise domesticated deiti-ettes to solace our longing to lay hold of holiness for our own ends with emblems of the Lord.

Sometimes the basis for our exclusive commitment to God is read as “jealousy,” as though God were a suspicious, envious figure, hiring sleazy detectives to catch us in a motel with strange gods. The jealous zeal of which Exodus speaks here is not expression of a lack – as though God were the Ricky Ricardo, calling, “Israel, you got some ’splaining to do” – but this zeal identifies God as “utterly ardent, uncompromising,” as unwilling for anything or anyone to come between God and the people God loves.4

Finally, the third commandment forbids us to invoke God for ungodly purposes. The commandment may be directed specifically against lying in general, or for swearing by God’s name in a false cause. The sense of this commandment, though, permits a broader interpretation – and its proximity to the commandment against bearing false witness in 20:16 suggests that this verse concerns something different, something more pertinent to the preceding verses. In context, that difference seems to entail claiming God’s authority for purposes that are not God’s. We are not free to profane God’s name by ascribing to God’s will, God’s wisdom, that which we intend for our own aims. Just as God won’t allow us to revere the Golden Calf or to honor it as our deliverer, so God rejects false prophets who claim “Thus says the Lord” when they themselves have devised the prophecies. Indeed, the church has appropriately discerned a further sense to this commandment in forbidding any magical use of God’s Name – whereas in many systems, possession of a god’s or a spirit’s name gives one power over that subject, the God of the Decalogue cannot be compelled by such devices.5

To summarize, then, the first three commandments articulate a theology by which we align ourselves with a God who claims priority over all other interests or motivations, whom we may not draw down from heaven in the tangible, visible form, nor may we substitute for this invisible God a more congenially accessible champion. We may not dress up our intents and purposes by wrapping them in God’s radiance. The God of the Decalogue is uniquely authoritative, cannot be fashioned after our own image (pace Feuerbach), and cannot be controlled: God is absolute, aniconic, and useless.6 God does not exist for our use. We cannot honor this God by soft-pedalling God’s uncompromising will, or by painting God in our image, or by bossing other people around in the name of God. We honor the God who brought us out of slavery into freedom by the practice of godliness, of standing firm for God.
As you may have ascertained from this description, the characteristics of the Decalogue’s God comport poorly with priorities of an empire. Whether or not, one construe the present U.S. regime as an imperial pretender, recent events point to ways in which a nation formed with a powerful ideology of the state can modulate from general respect for civil authorities to veneration of numinous national entities in a mode that challenges these commandments. The transition from dutiful respect to misplaced reverence is facilitated by a several factors. In part, people understandably long for a more available God, a God whom one can rally to urgent causes. In part, such a transition serves the interests of the state. Some part of the transition serves other interests. However one distributes the causes, they combine to engender an atmosphere in which the state draws to itself allegiance, iconic sanctity, and effectuality that properly pertain only to the Lord.

I’ll concentrate on the U.S. in the following examples. That’s not because I think the U.S. is unique, or that this is the worst offender; it’s because I’m better acquainted with public discourse in the U.S., and the illustrations are so poignant.

So let your memories drift back to 2002, when a panel from the 9th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in the case of Newdow vs. the U.S. Congress. The 9th Circuit determined that state-sponsored recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools violated the establishment clause; it’s impossible, they reasoned, to identify the U.S. as a nation “under God” without promoting a religious agenda. Politicians of almost every stripe rushed to demonstrate their pious patriotism by insisting that professing loyalty to “one nation, under God” need not conflict with the Constitution’s insistence against any “law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Positions ranged from the embarrassing de minimis claim that such a short phrase couldn’t do any ideological harm – it didn’t mean much of anything (which provokes the question, “Why then include it?”) – to overwhelming votes in the House and Senate to the effect that the words “under God” ought to be retained in the Pledge, anyway.

My theological complaint doesn’t rest on any of those grounds (though I’ll admit to being grieved that anyone would argue that public affirmation of a transcendent God doesn’t mean enough to give offense to an atheist). Rather, I want to call attention to the oddity that so many Jews and Christians were advocating a pledge of allegiance to a national flag. The U.S. flag stands in a direct line of descent from the insignias, emblems, and standards by which nations invoked totemic deities in battle, so that two millennia ago, faithful believers were willing to lay down their lives rather than venerate, or even tolerate, these representations of rival gods. Tertullian rejected the regimental standards as “rivals of Christ”7; and when a Roman procurator brought flags that honored Caesar into the city of Jerusalem – not into the Temple, mind you, but just in the city limits – a crowd of Judeans staged a five-day demonstration to have the standards removed; and when that procurator threatened to execute them, they volunteered to be killed, rather than permit these idolatrous emblems to remain within the city of Jerusalem.8

Now, we concede without hesitation that the policies of the Roman Empire entailed a pervasive paganism inimical to Judaism and Christianity. Nonetheless, Pontius Pilate was not asking the Jerusalemites to pledge allegiance to the standards; yet the people resisted the very existence of the iconic representation of imperial power within the holy city. In the twenty-first century, on the other hand, a unanimous vote of the U.S. Senate affirmed the premise that U.S. Christians ought to pledge their allegiance to the flag, and to the republic for which it stands.

Several weeks ago, as though our legislators were afraid that I wouldn’t have sufficient material for this talk, the House of Representatives passed a proposed amendment to the Constitution that reads, “The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.” I want to call your attention to the one word “desecration,” for that word distinguishes the amendment from merely debatable prohibitions of unwelcome political expression. This amendment, however, presupposes that the flag of the United States is in some sense sacred; and that claim of sanctity stands diametrically opposed to the teaching of the Decalogue, as the citizens of Jerusalem knew, as Christian conscripts into the Roman army knew.

It will be said that the flag’s sanctity is figurative: “Of course no one regards the flag as the symbol of a transcendent divine national entity, and the flag doesn’t signify the genius of the President or the totemic protector of an army division.” But a figure of speech is never simply a figure, never just a metaphor. As it turns out, the vehemence with which politicians leapt to defend the state’s interest in inculcating obedient allegiance to the flag, and to define the flag as a sacred object that one might be punished for treating impiously, bespeaks a more than merely metaphorical sensitivity at this point. One need not alter the Constitution to justify a metaphor.

As the priorities of civil powers have permeated U.S. Christianity, it becomes harder and harder to make a theological case against the imperial ethos. The church feels a powerful temptation to accommodate, indeed in some quarters even embrace, the image of the United States as an visible, effective anointed agent for realizing divine purposes. In the name of realism, in the name of deference to honoring those who bear the effects of war (effects that our everyday language reveals that we regard as a sacrifice9), strident voices demand that Christians profess their loyalty to a national ensign, and observe the festivals that the government establishes as though they were feasts of holy martyrs. The combined interests and sensitivities – often innocent, often commendable – of state power, of patriotic citizens, of injured families, and of corporate advantage converge in an ambiance I will call Sacramerica.10 In Sacramerica, the national pride of the United States blossoms into a displaced messianic hope that subordinates the God of the Decalogue to the sentimental consolations and pragmatic policy interests of a vast congregation of baseball fans, apple-pie eaters, and fireworks admirers.

Lest you think that my rhetoric has carried me too far, and lest the tone of this presentation grow too grim, I’d like to call your attention to a handout from a century ago. This handout richly rewards our critical attention, and vividly illustrates my claim that Sacramerica constitutes a spiritual alternative to the God of the Decalogue.

This illustration comes from an advertising campaign originated by Artemis Ward, one of the pioneers of the modern advertising industry. Ward made Sapolio a brand name second only to Ford in popular recognition and cultural currency11 by publicity stunts, jingles, mass-transit placards, and full-page advertisements in literary magazines. One such advertisement found its way into Margaret’s and my private collection several years ago.

How does this advertisement serve my point? Let me count the ways. Being a biblical student, I’ll start by commenting on the words. First, then, “the strong right arm that holds for peace” in this poster belongs not to the God of peace who redeemed the children of Jacob and Joseph, but to Lady Liberty. The ad seems to identify the inhabitants of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico at the turn of the twentieth century as “dark,” “dirty,” and “uncivilized” relative to the United States; Sapolio and the U.S.A., it suggests, will take care of that with their cleansing, civilizing imperial mission. The copy warns us that “imitations disappoint,” or as Moses might have said, “Thou shalt have no soap before me.”

The iconography of the advertisement speaks even more emphatically of Sacramerican displacement of God. Here Lady Liberty, carrying a sword, draped in a flag, enlightens the world with her bar of soap. The world as Sapolio imagines it constitutes only the U.S. and three of its colonies – Mexico (which is almost the same area as Cuba) vanishes into the ocean, and Canada doesn’t exist (not to mention Europe, Asia, or Central and South America). This American idol portrays the self-image of the U.S. projected to a heavenly scale; this is the god that Feuerbach and Durkheim warned you about. Lady Liberty wears a Phrygian cap, the vestigial signifier of the Mithraic mysteries. Any other features of the advertisement strike you?

If anyone thinks that the religious infrastructure of this ad is simply incidental, they may want to consider such other Sapolio advertisements as that placed in the Century magazine of 1904 which links Sapolio with the “very peculiar, very strict” 6,000-year-old ceremonial law of the Hebrew race. Thus it declares Sapolio “kosher” – in English and in Hebrew characters.12

It’s a measure of how thoroughly Sacramerica is ascendant in our culture that an advertisement that represents a superhuman figure that bestows light and health to a chosen people while attired in the garb of a participant in a mystery cult doesn’t strike us as odd. The point isn’t that anyone would explicitly endorse a claim that the personified ablutionary regime of U.S. commercial imperialism should be worshipped as God. The point is that an advertiser could confidently invoke an image that comprehensively displaces the God of the Decalogue, without fear that U.S. Christians would take offense, without expecting that displacement to hurt his sales.13 In an atmosphere like this, how can one proclaim the Decalogue so as to bring into focus the antithesis of Sacramerica with God’s unique, aniconic, useless identity?

Whatever else we do – and this project certainly brings together intensely creative, ingenious cultural activists – we need to take seriously the extent to which Sacramerica names not just a set of pernicious assumptions about the U.S.’s role as liberator, law-giver, and commercial agent to the world. More than that, Sacramerica names a signifying practice, a repertoire of premises and especially actions that express, affirm, reinforce, and disseminate particular sorts of meaning. To the extent that our lives do not differ perceptibly from the lives of convinced advocates of U.S. exceptionalism, the rest of the world will justifiably number us among those advocates.

What do I mean when I use the term “signifying practice”? I’m drawing that term from the disciplines of semiotics and cultural criticism, where it points to ways that people express important claims about themselves and the world not only by talking or writing, but by the ways they behave, by the ways they interact with others. It’s what we called “living signs” in our worship yesterday afternoon. Cultures, subcultures, dominant and resistant groups articulate their identities in the ways that people dress, the ways that people address one another, the type of cars they drive or their decision to ride a bicycle or take the El. We can take the example of religious vocations as a highly-visible signifying practice, wherein every article of clothing, every meal, every prayer, every gesture combine to express a particular kind of life given over to the praise and service of God. More often, though, we participate in signification less self-consciously, more by elective affiliation, with much less formal expectations and obligations; in so doing, we float along with the significations made available by mass culture and socially-dominant institutions.

Thus, when I say that we should recognize Sacramerica as a “signifying practice,” I mean that it amounts to more than a set of explicit verbal claims about the U.S. and its manifest destiny. As a signifying practice, it entails a certain confluence of patriotism, political theory, messianic hope, personal and corporate interest, and historic loyalties that go beyond arguable claims that this nation should exercise its wealth and military power in this or that way; it includes the axiom that one must vote, that liberal democracy constitutes a political order unexceptionably superior to other alternatives, that the way to resolve all conflicts is to hold a vote of some sort, hence that being right in the world should be correlative to winning, and since winning depends on out-numbering the wrong people (as Bill pointed out yesterday, the God of the Bible seems almost always to favor the smaller number), we get a persistent fascination with the number of members in churches, the number of votes for or against the denominational legislation Lillian mentioned in her sermon yesterday, and so on.

In this sense, then, I suggest that we need to take Sacramerica seriously as a cultural system. People really commit themselves to live (and die!) for the American Way. We don’t undermine that whole system of assumptions and the practices that express and reinforce Sacramerican beliefs simply by talking. To return to the Decalogue, it’s all very well for those of us who preach to devise fine sermons about national idolatry, on corporate idolatry, and on our sinful proclivity to suppose that we can sanctify our mortal purposes by invoking God’s Name over them often enough. But leaders who put their trust in the size of their armies, who believe they will be delivered by their great strength, don’t think of themselves as worshippers of Mars; they aren’t likely to acknowledge that they’ve put their faith in a god of war. And besides, when one of the most popular shows on television is candidly named “American Idol,” who’s going to balk at a little idolatry in a good cause?14 (When Margaret and I were at a conference last summer, we saw a cosmetics poster urging shoppers to “Be Your Own Idol.” It’s hard to think that’s promising sign.)

In order resist the signifying system of Sacramerica, I propose that we need to begin the work, the practice, of imagining our discipleship as an antithetical signifying practice, a practice of living in a way that throws Sacramerica off-step, out of balance.15 Now we could undertake a practice of resisting the dominant culture in the name of a new, better dominant culture – but that’s a trap. That invites us to construct Sacrekklesia or Sacramergent in the place of Sacramerica. Instead, I want to suggest a placeholder for signifying practices in resistance, and that placeholder rubric is “godliness.” I suggest that we aim at godliness (partly, of course, in response to Sapolio’s offer of cleanliness, but also) partly because this catches some of the pivotal importance of God’s identity as it’s revealed in the Decalogue; we ought to live in ways that bespeak the uniquely authoritative, aniconic, useless God of whom the commandments teach. Moreover, “godliness” gives us a target that’s harder for Sacramerica to explain away. If we target “justice” or “freedom” or “openness” as the characteristics of our people, the dominant culture can comfortably ignore us; they know all about justice and freedom and openness, and our protests that “that’s not what we mean by justice” or “that’s not true freedom” will fall on deaf ears. But godliness names a characteristic that the nation-state cannot as readily simulate and co-opt; we have a few more seconds of a fighting chance to define our own terms.

The number of possible syncopations we could throw at the imperial ethos of the commercial U.S. mission obviously exceeds my capacity to catalogue this morning, and (less obviously) exceeds my imagination. Moreover, if I were to propose one or two practices, probably practices at which I have some experience, I might make myself out an exemplary resister – but in the interest of binding this theoretical account to more concrete realizations of it, I’ll venture that risk here.

How might we activate a signifying practice of godliness? I’ll throw out a few suggestions, not expecting that my suggestions carry any authority just ’cos I’m standing up front of the gathering, but hoping that you’ll call up better, more winsome ideas. So here are some ways we might enact our signifying practice of Decalogical discipleship:

+ Not voting. Suggest not voting to a Sacramerican, and watch the explosions.

+ Home schooling, only not because you’re worried about evolution

+ Holy dying, to learn how gracefully let go of that gift in hand that we will eventually have to exchange for an inconceivably greater gift

+ Sell your cars. All of them.

+ Eat intentionally – vegan, vegetarian, eating only local produce perhaps

+ Other ideas that you all will suggest in the conversation time16

Life under Empire gets disorienting and disheartening. The Decalogue helps remind us why, because in the light to the Decalogue we see more clearly the differences between God and idols, between the empty Shrine and the empty tomb. If we keep covenant with the God of the Decalogue by shaping our lives to testify to the God of the Decalogue in contrast to Sacramerica or any other rival deity, we will have done what God requires of us – and we can gather, an imperfect but faithful body, to pray together the words of Thomas Cranmer: Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.

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I’ll add notes later; tomorrow, maybe.

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Ekklesia Talking

I’m mostly set to go for this morning’s talk, although I’m not quite sure I’m awake yet (if I fall asleep in another session, please excuse me). I will post a full version (with notes!) as soon after the presentation as I can get back online.

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July 18, 2005

Canavaugh’s Empire

Bill Cavanaugh begins a talk about theology and empire by citing Michael Novak’s observation that democratic capitalism has constructed for religion an empty shrine — not out of hostility, he says, but of reverence. The difficulty is that the empty shrine ends up excluding the God of the Decalogue, and that the emptiness and openness that lie at the heart of empire lend themselves to expansionism and imperialism.

In the U.S. liberalism has been wed with corporate and state imperialism.

The reluctant empire: in order for the U.S. to have an empire, it must constantly deny that it has one. Since the democratic ethos that the U.S. sponsors lies at odds with the actual practice of dominating the world with military and economic power, we need to demur from the appearance that we might be willing actually to exercise that power.
And our modesty and reluctance confirm our worthiness to exercise dominant power.

The policy of pursuing “openness” serves the exploitative ends of developed capitalism: the U.S. needs “open” foreign markets for the export of our surplus; and now, we need cheap industrial goods bought on loans from foreign banks.

The openness of our system, the emptiness of the shrine ensure freedom and happiness for everyone: we’re the “universal nation.” American values are a sort of universal solvent for the flow of freedom and wealth — if we force others to accept our way. Because we are the truly universal nation, we’re unlike any other — the same rules don’t apply to us. In the emptiness of the shrine, the absence of an absolute end, the American way of life itself becomes the absolute end of the system.

American idealism and American selfishness both derive from the idea of limitlesss expansion. Bill combines Voltaire’s “I may not agree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it” with the cinematic George Patton’s “Nobody ever won a war by dying for his country; you win a war by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

At the very moment when peace was supposed to arrive, as liberal democracy and free-market capitalism triumphed over communism, our very “openness” turns out to put us at ever-greater risk. National defense is supplanted by national security.

So, empire is understood as an attempt to see and act as God sees and acts, without limits; it stands at the point of universality, overcoming all particularities. The national God of the U.S. replaces

Exodus 19:5-6 — God instructs Israel that God encompasses all the earth, but makes a covenant with a particular people. The particularity of Israel won’t be effaced, because God has made a covenant with this people. The problem with transferring this covenantal relation from ancient Israel to the modern U.S. is (among other things) that the correct complement of Israel is not the U.S.A., but the church.

Exodus 20:2-6 — If the empty shrine has been filled with a national God, then we’re obviously breaking the first commandment. But “openness” doesn’t make a functional candidate for “idolatry.” But the invisibility of the national god shields it from critique. The empty shrine becomes the new Holy of Holies.

Exodus 20:13 — The state determines for itself whom it may kill — you can profess faith in any god you want, so long as you’re willing to kill for the American way of life. You may not kill, because life and death belong to God.

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Those were my notes. I may have gotten some things wrong, because Bill was talking faster than I can type — so if anything’s amiss, blame my stenographic skills, not Cavanaugh’s thinking.

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EP Today

I’ll spend most of the day at the first day of the Ekklesia Project Gathering — will blog some notes, at the end of the day if not sooner. Phil Kenneson tells me that all the presentations will be digitally recorded and posted online; that’s great to hear, because the other speakers (I’m thinking of William Cavanaugh and Sylvia Keesmaat, right off the top of my head) should be terrific.

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July 17, 2005

Potter Query

Has anyone noticed an oddity on page 485 of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince? Pippa observes that on that page, Prof. Slughorn tells Harry that he “had a house elf taste every bottle after what happened to your poor friend Rupert,” after an incident in which Harry’s friend Ron (played in the movies by actor Rupert Grint) was nearly poisoned. . . .

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Pointer Institute

Jordon is beset with pain, but not so limited that he can’t turn up tons of instructive links. Forty Things That Only Happen In Movies will satisfy readers such as I who are unwilling to suspend their disbelief (Pippa’s refrain: “Daddy, it’s a movie!”). SF writer C. J. Cherryh offers helpful tips for writers (directed mostly to writers of fiction, but helpful also for attentive expository writers). My students have heard the first two from me countless times. That reminded me of the Poynter Institute’s 50 Tools for Writers, by Roy Peter Clark — whose first tools likewise resonate with my counsel.

Wednesday’s healing mass at St. Luke’s was offered with special intentions for Jordon and for my dear sister-in-law. Take care, and get better and better, y’all.

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Shapely Discourse

David gracefully acknowledges that he didn’t think up the term “Public Relationships” himself (he cites EdelmanPR) — but did he devise the more delightful, “adding ‘hips’ to ‘public relations’ ”?

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July 16, 2005

Design Frustration

I’m working on the the final draft of my Ekklesia Project presentation, which I had been composing in typeface that Trevor and I had bought for the Disseminary, Scala by FontFont. It’s a handsome typeface, sturdy at small sizes, distinctive without being idiosyncratic. I have only one complaint: the foundry produces the various members of the family as entirely distinct typefaces, so that one can’t invoke the italic style simply by a keyboard command, or from the style menu of the application. It’s a small nuisance, but a real nuisance, and will be an even bigger nuisance if I were to decide to set the presentation in some other typeface.

Why does a leading type foundry deliberately distribute its products in a less-usable format?

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July 15, 2005

I Liked Sufjan Stevens Before I Knew

From the Onion AV Club section:

I go to a kind of Anglo-Catholic church now that I've been going to for the last three years, but I haven't really been raised that way. I'm definitely entrenched in the tradition now. I kind of admire it for being so traditional and sort of unchanging and unwavering in a lot of its doctrine, but also very sort of open and broad in its understanding of human nature. I like that it's kind of open to the discussion about the tensions between those two things.

I’m tickled, so I won’t kvetch about the part where he says, “Maybe [my faith] really shouldn't be a part of public discussion, because, you know, it really is about personal relationships.”

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Uncanny Sensation

Margaret and Pippa have gone for an overnight with friends.

Si is off to Justin’s wedding. I am alone in the house (well, Bea is here, but she doesn’t count.) It feels so unnervingly quiet!

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July 14, 2005

Roughly What I’ll Say

I shook together the bits of what I expect to say Tuesday at the Ekklesia Project Gathering, and this is what came out.

The title of the talk will be, “ ‘The Strong Right Arm That Holds For Peace’: Godliness as an Alternative to Empire.”

I’ll begin by walking through the first three commandments (working from Ex 20:2-7). I’ll read through and paraphrase them, with observations on the Hebrew and Greek, but I won’t emphasize the technical aspects — just give a sense of the diction and expression.

Then I’ll expound these words as an expression of God’s identity, from which we derive our way of life. We acknowledge God alone as the determinative premise/context for orienting our lives; we repudiate any mediatory representation of or alternative to God; we can not invoke God as leverage toward proximate ends. In other words, God is unique, aniconic, and inutile.

I’ll then sketch the ways that U.S. culture effects a displacement of the unique, aniconic, inutile God by intervening as complementary unique savior — but one that you can see, that does stuff for you. I’ll differentiate this from “idolatry” in the way that preachers conventionally characterize our captivity to capital, to entertainment, to achievement. The sacralized American way of life has displaced God, not presented itself as an alternative — but the God who addresses us as our unique, aniconic, inutile source of identity cannot be displaced without denying that God.

In case this all sounds too dramatic and too abstract, I’ll introduce a case study that shows one way in which Imperial America supplants God.

I’ll argue that the church does not fittingly testify to the God of the Decalogue (and resists the imperial American supplanter) by arguing over just what constitutes idolatry, or whether this or that constitutes an appropriate policy direction for the U.S. government. Partly, that’s because the very terms of the engagemen