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April 30, 2006

The Ambiguous Legacy of St MacGyver

or, “Why White Men Can’t Do Theology”

Theological deliberation has for a long time benefited from leadership by White Men*; their privileged cultural position has offered them access to learning, to leisure, to others’ complementary service, to the critical interaction of other privileged scholars. Some of these privileged White Men have put their advantages to the service of the church’s self-understanding, a laudable self-offering (when they might pursue so many more rewaarding activities), and we may not underrate the extent to which their efforts have clarified and illumined the Truth to which the whole church strains with eager longing. Well done, good and faithful servants!

All the same, White Men’s theology involves a deeply problematic architectonic flaw. This flaw affects both “conservative” and “liberal” theologies. Indeed, some of its most devastating effects arise in “liberal” theological discourses; the “conservative” inclination to minimize the importance of gender and privilege as categories of theological thinking keep their Whiteness as the prominent visible characteristic, whereas the “liberal” interest in remedying the pernicious effects of White Men’s dominance ironically perpetuates and more deeply embeds the White presuppositions in their theological endeavors.**

But I have put off too long my characterization of the constitutive flaw of White Guy theology. The problem I have in view involves the relation of White Men’s cultural privilege to the theological standing of justice and grace. In a few words, when culturally-dominant figures speak about either “justice” or “grace,” they almost necessarily presuppose the practical possibility of effecting a just situation, or an appropriately gratuitous gift of Truth. But observation suggests that human efforts to bring about “justice” tend to incorporate elements of [well-intentioned] coercive power, and coercion itself militates against “fairness” (and is antithetical to grace). In other words, when White Men (and their allies) try to fix things, to bring about just social arrangements, the very gesture of fixing entangles them again in the coercive use of privilege that constitutes the White problematic.

This is why I invoke St. MacGyver in the title of the post. I never watched the TV series, but the general premise has seeped into cultural currency. Resourceful hero, trained in covert operations by a national security agency, goes from place to place getting into dire predicaments in his efforts to Do the Right Thing, and he always manages to set matters straight with the clever manipulation of two or three ordinary household implements (and his Swiss Army knife).*** The figure of MacGyver epitomizes the White Man’s impulse to fix things and the White Man’s capacity (and resources) actually to make things right. And not everyone has access to those resources, to those capacities, as White Guys do.

If you don’t have access to the means of “making things right,” though, the whole question takes on (we might say) a different complexion. If you know in advance that important, effective forces stand to prevent your making things right, fixing things, you have a very different relation to the prospect of fixing. Sure, you still hunger and thirst for righteousness — but you know that effection righteousness lies outside your power. The dominant forces in culture, the ones that limit and constrain you, have made that lesson inescapably clear. By the same token, the more ardently one hangs onto the prospect of fixing, the more clearly one identifies with the White Guy’s power.

In order truly to apprehend grace, one must move out of the world in which our striving constitutes the effective power by which God’s justice becomes manifest in the world. In this sense, one more truly accepts God’s grace as a gift when one adopts a practice of patience rather than an impatient determination to attain right answers, correct social practices.

I say this not out of lack of concern about injustice, but (so far as it’s given me to know) out of a particular grave concern. I fear that our appropriate vexation at evident, appalling injustices tends to compound these problems by instituting a new “improved” situation that itself entails new unfairnesses, but with the aura of sanctified immunity that derives from its status as a deliberate step toward justice. “Conservative” participants in social processes may experience the injustice of the loss of their cherished way of life, the disregard of the authorities upon which (and whom) they rely. Those who experience a different sort of injustice from that which is being remedied may experience the unfairness of having their trials disregarded out of triumphal confidence that “justice has been done.” Certainly many have observed (in others, of course; never in oneself!) the way that well-intentioned justice-doers can be more resistant than anyone else to perceiving glitches in their plans to fix the world.

So, on the terms I’m setting out, our response to injustices that we perceive is neither a determination to remedy them (tacitly: “at any cost”), nor passively to say, “well, the poor will be with us always,” but to endeavor to live in ways that (imperfectly) bespeak God’s equity and truth: within the ambit of our capacities (patiently), subject to criticism and correction (humbly). To the extent that we attain such a life, we do so not through the power of our own wills or intellects, not through the purity of our intentions, not through the guaranteed inerrancy of our authorities, but solely through a grace that does not originate with us, that refuses coercion, that invites correction and cooperation (even when these involve a departure from the corrective program we devised).

In all this, then, it’s time to recognize that White Men have given great gifts to the church — but inasmuch as they participate in privileges that inhibit their realization of the actuality, the humility, and the patience of grace, they need to step back a few paces and not try to tell the world how God wants things run. St MacGyver’s legacy is ambiguous, because White Guys really do accomplish some good things, they often have their sights set squarely on justice. Nonetheless, God’s grace wants spokespeople who know that sometimes you can’t get the justice you want, that coercion institutionalizes un-freedom, that God’s justice is greater and truer and more reliable than human justice, better even than White Guys’ justice.****

This claim, of course, enmeshes me in a performative contradiction. I can’t very well persuade you that I’m right without arrogating to my claims about justice an authority that my argument rules out. And if you point out that a White Man shouldn’t be talking as I have, your resistance tends to affirm the thesis of my argument above. I have no wisdom by which to rectify this, unless it be: By saying this out loud, I may lend some measure of the dominant culture’s power to similar arguments made by people who don’t have the full panoply of privilege that I’ve enjoyed.

Or not. I’d be interested to learn from interlocutors by exploring this premise together, though.

* For casual purposes, I’ll say just “White Men” or “White Guys” here, though a more precise analysis of power and privilege would take account of class distinctions, of sexuality, of a variety of inflections of “whiteness” and masculinity. My point is not that these are irrelevant, but that the nuanced account depends first on naming the structural problem with White Guy theology. Once we reach that point, we can begin tracing the various manifestations of, resistances to, and correlates of that problem.

** I don’t exclude this short essay from the category — though, as I will try to show, it occupies its problematic status self-consciously, deliberately, and patiently, tentatively, with the hope that such an intervention provides the occasion for corrective responses.

*** I’m uninterested in arguing here over whether I’ve got MacGyver right — I would be interested to learn more, but he’s functioning as a metonym here, not as the invocation of the Actual Fictive-Historical MacGyver.

**** I don’t think this involves an advantage to “left” or “right”; I know plenty of “conservative” people outside the sphere of White Men’s privilege, along with plenty of “liberals.” And if we suppress the noisy clamor of White Guys who think they have the correct answer, we may begin to undo some of the stereotyping that results when Others get squeezed into the roles and positions that a dominant discourse constructs for them.

Posted by AKMA at 02:59 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

April 29, 2006

Delight

You may not have noticed, but I love my daughter very much. I usually make her pancakes on Saturday, but this morning she apologetically asked if I would make French Toast. I allowed that I’d do anything for her, so she volunteered to walk the dog while I cooked, and she fished out our battered copy of The Joy of Cooking to help me with proportions.

“Hey, look at how you make Garlic Bread,” she said, and headed off to leash the dog.

“I don’t understand why you want Garlic Toast for breakfast,” I observed, “but I’ll make it if you want.”

“No, no, I want French Toast,” she emphasized.

“French Toast with Garlic sounds strange to me, honey, but I’ll make it for you.”

“French Toast! French Toast! Anything with garlic is banned!” she called, as she headed out the door.

Posted by AKMA at 09:59 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Perfect Match

Dave points (with surprisingly little comment) to the disheartening convergence of two corporate interests both of which think that the next business model involves control, control, and more control.

No one should take what I say as though I were an MBA from Kellogg School (where I had a cup of coffee this week, and felt as though I’d entered the Bizarro-World opposite of the tech conferences I’ve been to: almost all ThinkPads, with an occasional rare iBook). On the other hand, my ideas aren’t peculiar to me — people who’ve best-selling business books will tell you the same thing.

The next business model may not be located in the sun-shine-y, mellow, free, oh wow, give-it-away, “We’re all feeding each other” territory that I envision, but the path toward the next business model passes through there.

And it surely doesn’t lie in the highly-controlled environment where MSFT and the NYT are building.

Posted by AKMA at 09:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 27, 2006

Query to the Ether

Does anyone have any suggestion relative to a collaborative scheduling/task-process application that’s OS X compatible? Is there a way to use iCal to construct a shared calendar?

Posted by AKMA at 12:45 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Headline News

My friend Hope pointed me to this story about the upcoming da Vinci movie (which will begin a new cycle of Adult Forum appearances); I imagine that the advertisers didn’t expect the poster to stay up, that they were only interested in the publicity in the first place.

Kevin pointed me to this Fresh Air interview with biblical-scholar rockstar Bart Ehrman, and (while we’ at it) Mark had pointed to a link to the Daily Show interview a while back. I’ll check them out, too, if I have time.

Posted by AKMA at 11:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 26, 2006

Authenticity and Sincerity

Once upon a time, in the days when they ran the Internet on an engine salvaged from a defunct 1967 VW Beetle, a number of us got into a running brouhaha about “authenticity.” I was an “authenticity skeptic,” reluctant to allow more than ideological content this usage. The topic comes up frequently enough that our debates never quite faded from memory, nor even from on-going currency among us discussants, and this morning I fell to thinking about what I might say to stand in for the abused term “authenticity.”

I wonder whether we might get any traction on the disagreement between me and the defenders of authenticity if we were to compare authenticity with sincerity (another term that's suffered a lot of abuse). I’m willing enough to commend sincerity, in a way that I hesitate to buy into authenticity.

“Sincerity,” I think, invokes the correspondence of the outlook one expresses with one’s actual convictions and sentiments. If I were to say, “I’m terribly sorry that the Baltimore Orioles dominated baseball in the early 1970’s,” that apology would be insincere inasmuch as I’m a devoted (and nostalgic) Orioles fan. “Sincerity” involves one element of what most people seem to want “authenticity” to do, but it falls short; one can imagine a blues performer who sincerely performs “Hellhound on My Trail,” but who has never known poverty, bigotry, or profound romantic disappointment — as sincere as she might be, there’s a strong chance that her performance would lack something that many people would identify as “authenticity.”

Here, though, I respond: I agree that her performance misses the point, but do we advance our understanding of what’s wrong with this picture by saying that she’s “inauthentic”? Might we not more helpfully call her interpretation unconvincing, or shallow, or glib? My students often have to read Henry Louis Gates’s essay “ ‘Authenticity,’ or the Lesson of Little Tree” (it would be great if I could link to the New York Times Book Review November 24, 1991 — but alas, that’s not possible), in which Gates clearly tracks numerous occasions when presumably “authentic” expressions were commended and acclaimed until their authors were revealed. The point of departure for Gates’s reflections is Asa Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, which many praised for its depiction of Native American wisdom, until they learned that it had been written by a white man (with a long history of racist writing and action).

When I fret about the value of “authenticity” in discourse, I’m more concerned about ways we can clarify the basis for our praise and derogation; I’m still not sure “authenticity” contributes much to that end.

Posted by AKMA at 02:17 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 25, 2006

Creating Passionate Liturgy

When I hear about the importance of the church engaging popular culture more richly, I usually hear the subtext “and ditch all that out-moded, incomprehensible stuff that nobody who likes The Simpsons or listens to rock and roll or spends a lot of time online would ever believe. Sometimes they throw in the canard about “speaking in code,” as though any complex endeavor that has lived and developed for decades (much less centuries) doesn’t develop its own in-house terminology. Here’s a message, pop-cultured despisers: I like the Simpsons, I listen to rock and roll, and I spend more time online thasn all of you (as the Apostle would say). And I believe those things, and the church’s particular ways of expressing itself are not inconsequentially dispensable.

So I doubt that many people read the recent posts by Dylan Breuer and and Kathy Sierra and thought, “Hey, that’s the kind of thing AKMA would say about liturgy.” Well, it’s not, exactly. But though these are not the precise perspectives I would bring to bear on liturgical planning, I think that Dylan and Kathy are quite right in what they say on their respective topics, and their observations tend to confirm my very Anglo-Catholic perspective on liturgy. I’ll spell out a more detailed account of the convergence some other time — I’m drafting a series of posts on Enriching Our Worship, the Episcopal Church’s compilation of authorized liturgies, and I probably ought to articulate my liturgical theology in greater detail first — but for now, I want to offer an appreciative link along with a promissory note toward further comment.

Posted by AKMA at 06:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 24, 2006

That Time of Year

I keep reminding myself that Reading Week is pretty soon, and the end of the term comes soon after that.

Posted by AKMA at 08:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 22, 2006

Survivor

Just a word to say, I finished the paper, it went just fine, I need to burnish it a little bit, but Ill post it here soon. [Sound of his head falling onto the desktop.]

Posted by AKMA at 09:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 21, 2006

Week End Update

The friendly manager of CVS exchanged my dysfunctional beard trimmer for one that turns out to work just fine, and I am no longer threatening to be mistaken for a member of ZZ Top.

Pride In The Name Of Family

It’s all pretty much confirmed — Nate will graduate from Eastman School of Music in a couple of weeks, magna cum laude, and after finishing his thesis (on Steve Reich and minimalism) will move from Rochester to Ann Arbor, where he has accepted a Regents Fellowship to study music theory in the doctoral program at the University of Michigan. We’re monstrously proud of him, as of all our children, and thrilled that doing the things he loves is working out so well for him. <parents phosphoresce with delight>

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April 20, 2006

Learning Curve

The first electric beard trimmer that I remember buying came from a store in Northgate Mall in Durham; that one lasted through my doctoral program and my jobs in Florida and New Jersey, about twelve years. I had to buy a new one two or three years ago here in Evanston; that one quit about three weeks ago. I bought a replacement at the drugstore on Monday, and it never even started.

If I seem especially shaggy for the next interval, it’s because someone seems to be trying to tell me something.

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April 19, 2006

Buy Before Midnight Tonight

Baker Academic’s summer catalog arrived today, with a full-page promotion of Reading Scripture With the Church, the title they’ve given to the published version of last spring’s Winslow Lectures at Seabury. They’ll make great trick-or-treat goodies, when they’re actually printed this fall, so be sure to get enough to go around.

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April 18, 2006

That's "A. K. M. Adam," Not "Scott Adams"

I have neither the time nor the foolishness to devote a lot of time to responding to Scott Adams’ recent forays into the field of theory-of-religion; a comprehensively prudent blogger would just say, “Discuss among yourselves.”

Lacking that degree of prudence, I may simply observe that mockery doesn’t constitute the acid text of sound teaching; humor depends to a very great extent on the observer’s unquestioned premises. A clever humorist ought to be able to wangle some absurdity out of almost any worldview — provided it’s one that neither s/he nor their auditors take quite seriously. By the same token, the unwillingness to see this or that as funny doesn’t necessarily make an audience “humorless” or over-serious. We can devote serious attention to the claims that [other] religious stances entail, but japery won’t be our best guide to evaluating the characteristics that our inquiries bring to the surface. (One may plausibly doubt that there’s a shared array of criteria by which we could reach judgments more useful than “That’s close to what I already believe” — but that’s not the point just now.) I share some of Adams’s distaste for a “respect” that precludes critical analysis, but I doubt that he has demonstrated the keen insight into religious phenomena that would warrant our taking his proposals as a guide to what we might do by way of mutual criticism.

My confidence in Adams as a thoughtful interlocutor diminishes inasmuch as his comments on scholarly rock star Bart Ehrman’s latest book suggest that he’s not the most attentive reader on the block. While I have not read Ehrman’s book, I would be surprised if he ascribed the vast range of transcriptional errors we see in the manuscript history of the New Testament to “semi-literate opinionated morons” (Adams’s report on Ehrman). If Adams wants to know “what the real argument is” relative to doctrines of Scripture and textual transmission (and the relation of biblical texts to factual error), he might begin by reading contemporary sources more carefully.

Posted by AKMA at 12:35 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 17, 2006

This

I’m trying to map out my forty minutes for Saturday’s Chicago Society of Biblical Research meeting. I know I can fill the time; the key (as I learned last spring, in the difference between a presentation at Notre Dame and my Winslow Lecture) boils down to organization, as Seabury’s Writing Group veterans can testify.

Some points I want to make:

• Some perspective on controversies over “legitimacy” and “illegitimacy” in biblical interpretation, especially in light of Michael Fox’s recent essay on “faith-based scholarship”
• My [still-too-casual] angle on semiotics and interpretation
• How my angle affects the ways we think about theological interpretation
• Main point of talk: The same way of thinking about semiotics/interpretation that helps me make sense of “theological interpretation” also helps me understand and articulate the value of secular interpretation of the Bible. I’m at home in that discussion, not because I believe less what the church says of the Bible, but because I respect and know the rules of the signifying practice of technical biblical scholarship (and academic discourse in general). One doesn’t need a totalizing rationale for the nature of Truth and textuality to warrant secular biblical interpretation — one need only the rare virtue of good, close reading. One doesn’t need to assent to the latent premises of literary discourse in order to admire and to interpret them well; one need not unite oneself to a theological tradition in order to read that tradition’s texts well.
• Also helps explain our dowdy clothes (a professional colleague whom I shouldn’t quote without permission has referred to the Society of Biblical Literature as “the society of middle-aged white men who can’t dress themselves”) and unbearable ugliness of Volvos

That’s the basics of what I want to propose, perhaps even ending with the offensively utopian suggestion that we let go of feuding over whether biblical interpretation requires or proscribes theological commitment for its legitimacy. Rather than dressing up personal antipathies in disciplinary garb, we work toward enhancing the quality of one another’s readings on their own terms, and let God, or Time, or Nemesis, or who- or whatever adjudicate the legitimacy of our work.

Of course, I also have to write out all the stuff in between, and prepare for Wednesday’s and Friday’s classes. At least I’m not preaching in the next few days.

Posted by AKMA at 01:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Shaloha to You, Too

We knew Alex Golub way back when his prestige appointment was Professor of Melanesian Hermeneutics at the University of Blogaria, when he used to keep Seabury wired and was still working on his dissertation. Now, though, he’s stepped onto the larger stage of academic stardom not only with his participation in the hip anthropologists’ Savage Minds blog, but also from his featured appearance in Inside Higher Education. I don’t have his autograph, I don’t think, but I have a copy of his book and am reading his next one (and was a bit player in the prequel).

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April 16, 2006

Absorta Est Mors in Victoria

I am a man of frail, faint faith — ὀλιγόπιστος, oligopistos, as Jesus frequently calls his disciples in Matthew’s Gospel — and spending a Lent in reflection on death has not engendered an efflorescence of unwavering confidence in me. In hymn, Death no longer can appall, but once the hymn is over I’m as appalled as ever.

What I lack in faith, though, God provides in a generous abundance of the lives around me. Last night, Margaret and I felt the radiance of the reverent faith of the servers at St. Luke’s; they enacted the church’s believing through their unornamented observance of the ceremonies of the Easter Vigil. A moment-and-a-half’s reverent kneeling, a careful step, a creed in motion.

And several weeks ago, when Lent was new, Seabury gathered around the altar for a Friday midday mass, and someone had brought Elizabeth, a year-old child, along. Elizabeth was dressed in marvelous, brilliantly colorful clothing; and at the beginning of a season I had committed to spend in reflection on death, I was moved to tears by the glorious human gesture of dressing up our ephemeral, vulnerable mortality with all the bold grandeur that craft can muster. I will soon die, Elizabeth will soon die, but for these few days we can defy corruption with love, can defy gray ash with vibrant color, by God we can live!

My feeble faith doesn’t matter that much, in the end. A faith deeper and stronger, fuller and wiser, truer and more durable catches me up and bears me beyond the bounds of what my hobbled imagination can posit, to Truth that I cannot comprehend. Unlimited by the horizons of my judgment, faith surrounds and inhabits me, and John’s reverence, Elizabeth’s luminous attire, my weak faith, these provide a staging-ground for God’s invincible grace. Here I kneel; I can do no other.

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April 15, 2006

Done Is Enough

I filed my taxes electronically this afternoon. Though I have lots to say about my paper for next Saturday and Easter and stuff, today I'm just purging the tax experience from my mind. Thanks for the helpful advice — we’ll definitely take it once the trauma has abated.

Meantime — beginning at sundown — Happy Easter!

Posted by AKMA at 04:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 14, 2006

Not Funny, Either Way

Betsy Devine is a very funny woman, but she’s also an implacable enemy of political fustian. She’s sunk her teeth into the New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal and serves up all the details that more conventional news sources don’t think fit to print.

Posted by AKMA at 10:57 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

What's Up

If you noticed my recent reticence online, I can explain that this year I’m having a particularly acute case of my annual tax-phobia-stress. Every year, I resolve to track down an accountant to do them for me; every year, I put it off till too late. I’m going public with this year’s panic so that there’s no chance that my irrational dread be a secret, and that anybody can ask me, “Have you gotten your accountant yet?”

I think I have all the information I need to get my taxes out this weekend without filing for an extension. I am really, really determined to not do this next year.

Posted by AKMA at 10:53 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 12, 2006

Rolls Eyes, Smacks Forehead

The Secretary of the Chicago Society for Biblical Research has been after me for a long time, to read a paper at one of the meetings we hold (meetings that I hardly ever have time to go to, so why I should be reading a paper at one escapes me). The papers I remember typically concern Chicago-school sorts of interpretive questions — detailed social and litarary analyses of texts, good stuff — so when he emailed me a few weeks ago, I said that there’s really nothing I’m working on now that would answer. “Well, what are you working on?”

At this point, most of my readers would have had the common sense to cough, or change the subject, or lose his email. I, however, am simple enough that I just told him what was on my present work agenda (kneading some of the ideas from my last year of lectures and papers into a preface for the Fortress Press book) — not at all the usual run of CSBR fare, more broadly hermeneutical. “We can take a hermeneutics paper,” he said. “Plus, it would be really rough; it’s work in progress,” I apologized. “We assume that all these papers are work in progress,” he assured me, and I had no polite way out.

So a week from Saturday, I’ll be presenting a paper on the legitimacy of academic biblical interpretation, a sort of mirror-image consideration of the questions concerning theological interpretation that I’ve been chewing on for the past year. Few in the audience will have heard my previous talks, so I can reuse some of that material, and I’ll bend it around to confront a different set of questions, but I still have to come up with a formal academic paper for the scholars of one of the world’s most theologically-sophisticated cities, in ten days.

More later. Rolls eyes, smacks forehead, again.

Posted by AKMA at 08:21 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 11, 2006

Dads

Prayers and heartfelt sympathy to Jeneane and Halley. We’re holding your hands, wiping your eyes. We love you and we’re with you. You too, Joey.

Posted by AKMA at 07:23 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Climate Control

It’s seventy degrees outside — and the heat has finally come on in my office.

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April 10, 2006

Non-Entry

At the end of a busy day, I wish I had something short enough and weighty enough to blog. There are plenty of topics about which I have long pieces to write — but they come in second to doing taxes and writing the preface to one of the books coming out this year. I have been reflecting a lot about death this Lent, and I expect to write down some of the cosmically-inconsequential, but personally important, nexuses of what I’ve been trying to think out.

Margaret’s coming home Wednesday; they’re actually getting near the end of classes, and she’ll be home for some of the summer. That’something I haven’t even vaguely dreamed of: being together every day.

But now it’s time to go to sleep.

Posted by AKMA at 11:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 09, 2006

You Never Miss Your Water When The Sump Pump Overflows

Show me someone who doesn’t care much about sump pumps, and I’ll show you someone whose basement never flooded, and who doesn’t have a hole in her or his basement floor isn’t filling up with ominously murky-looking water.

Our hard-working emergency maintenance guy put in a new sump pump for us yesterday, and let me tell you, I am intensely interested by sump pumps, and delighted that ours is working fine.

Posted by AKMA at 12:53 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Pondering

I’ve heard newscasters refer to the Italian premier as a “tycoon” or “media tycoon” so often that it usually just wafts by me — but this morning, I wondered how audiences would react if our news sources typically referred to the U.S. president as “oil tycoon George Bush” (or more precisely, “heir to oil wealth”). Maybe he doesn’t have enough money to qualify as a tycoon (how much?), or doesn’t have a sufficiently extensive array of holdings. What makes Berlusconi a “tycoon,” while Bush is simply an extraordinarily wealthy just-plain-American guy?

Posted by AKMA at 12:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 08, 2006

Parallel Thought

Several weeks ago, I chafed at some folks’ tendency to make an idol of “justice”; this morning, Margaret sent a quotation from officially-important theologian Johann Baptist Metz, who spoke about “emancipation” in similar terms: “

“There is a real danger of ideologizing. Hardly any other word seems so excessively used, so hyper-legitimate, and so emotionally charged in present discussions.”
Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, Johann Baptist Metz (transl. David Smith) (New York: The Seabury Press, 1980).

That’s the kind of point I was trying to make.

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April 07, 2006

Judas, Jesus, Dan Brown, and Friday's Sermon

I don’t have very much to say about the Gospel of Judas that isn’t summed up in Stephen Carlson’s posts and comments; at a cursory reading, it looks to me like a predictable Gnostic gospel, with nothing especially sensational nor anything likely to change scholarly opinion on any major issue.

The Holy Blood, Holy Grail sensation-mongers have lost their court case that the da Vinci sensation-monger plagiarized their bogus sensational ideas. I suppose that the whole story could develop more recursively bizarre developments, but my imagination doesn’t work that way.

And in the more humdrum world of daily life in the church, I preached this morning on John 10, the scene where Jesus’ interlocutors threaten to stone him. The effort it took to eke this sermon out inhibited both tax preparation and course prep for this morning, but the sermon came together at long last (it’s in the “extended” portion of the post). I’ll tackle the taxes tonight or tomorrow.

“I have shown you many good works from the Father.
For which of these are you going to stone me?”

In the name of God Almighty, the Holy Trinity on high — Amen.

So evidently, you are not the first ones who have had trouble with your Commissions on Ministry. Jesus has turned water into wine, multiplied loaves and fishes, healed, exorcised, and preached life-changing sermons — but his examiners found a deficiency in the area of systematic theology. They accused him of blasphemy, and they set out to stone him to death.

The comparison doesn’t work perfectly. Relatively few of us have had that bad an encounter with their commissions. Relatively few of us can claim the legitimation of having been with God in the beginning, and having all things come into being through our participation. If we compared even our own worst experiences of examination and discernment with the threat that Jesus, co-creator of all worlds, might be executed for his dissident theology, we have to admit that our insults and frustrations come in a few notches to the safer, more comfortable side of Jesus’.

Jesus gave offense to many in his generation. He bothered people, at least in part because the gospel he proclaimed drew richly on the traditions that had formed his people and yet reached conclusions that weren’t already on the index of licit theological claims. The would-be stoners included brothers and sisters who love God, some who prize Scripture and know that you can’t just set it aside, some who had been cleansed from sin by John the Baptist, some who had eaten the bread that Jesus provided. They cared about theology and Scripture, and would not casually set aside their inheritance from their fathers. Nonetheless, we believe that they had not recognized the truth of what was happening in their midst.

“Midsts” are confusing places, and when we’re in the midst — as, for example, in the midst of an ordination process or in the midst of a seminary education or in the midst of a General Convention — we face the temptation to hunker down, to tune out any information that might aggravate the tumult. It’s simpler just to insist that we know in our hearts that we’re right, that we don’t need the commissions or professors or delegates or world-wide Communion that disagrees with us. That impulse coheres with the prevailing culture’s notion that religion should be a private matter, an incorrigible choice of each individual in her or his solitude. That impulse echoes in the Gospel of Judas — “I know the secret, it’s just you and me, Jesus” — and it helps account for the enduring popular fascination with Gnostic teachings. Our weary, frail selves shore up their certainty by sealing out the possibility that we may be mistaken.

In the midst of the discernment process between Jesus and his Judean neighbors, Jesus answers the accusation that his good news amounted to blasphemy by arguing on the basis of Scripture. He points to God’s power at work in his ministry: healing, transforming, fulfilling, proclaiming the truth. Those of us who do not share Jesus’ ontological unity with God can best address the truth we discern by binding our hearts and ministries ever more carefully to the Scripture that cannot be broken. We can share in pursuing the works of the Father. We can remember to persist in the mutual discernment of the truth with those who think we’re blaspheming. And if we stick strong to the Word, to the work, to the Spirit of discernment, and if they still want to stone us, well, I would not feel so all alone.

Posted by AKMA at 04:26 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 06, 2006

To Do List

I had been planning to do the family taxes tonight, when it came into focus that I’m preaching tomorrow morning — so I have a sermon to compose, along with a handout for tomorrow morning’s New Testament Intro class, a grocery trip. So if I seem busy, you’ll understand, I’m sure.

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Proud Papa

At the end of Greek reading group this week, Beth gave me an odd look and asked, “Did any of the prospective students [on whom Seabury spent three days making our best impression] seem at all confused about you?”

I hadn’t noticed anything, but the question was peculiar enough that I pressed Beth for some follow-up. This is what she told me:

“Your daughter was sitting with Lauren and me at the check-in table, and when prospective students signed in, we introduced ourselves. Pippa said that her father was the janitor, but he liked to pretend that he was the New Testament professor.”

She delivered this explanation with so solemn an expression, evidently, that Lauren was a little worried about what the prospective students would think, and some of the prospies asked Beth about it later.

Beth was a little uncertain about filling me in, but it was so spectacularly delicious a notion, and Pippa evidently spoke her lines so convincingly, that I could do nothing but roar with laughter and beam with pride. A father can impart only a few gifts to a child, and her capacity to deliver arrant absurdity with deadpan seriousness counts as a great inheritance from me (and my father and grandfather).

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April 04, 2006

Morality 2.0

Doc helpfully nudged me to take a gander at his comments on morality in the Web 2.0 business environment, and I had a great time observing his thoughtful, critical readers work with his account of the various sorts of morality, and of their implications for business in the be-webbed ecology. I’m in an odd position with relation to Doc’s essay, since I have plenty to say — as usual, more than enough — but from a variety of positions and with different degrees of weightiness.

So, most important to me, I believe in the kind of interactions that Doc describes as a “morality of generosity,” to the extent that I’d want to call into question the propriety of calling the other approaches “morality” in the truest sense. As a theologian, I affirm the priority of grace (generosity, gratuity, giving) over other modes of interaction. “Balancing books,” an economy of interaction grounded in equal action (Doc’s “morality of accounting”) has going for it an intuitive sense of the fairness that matters deeply to U. S. ideological history — but it enmeshes us in an endless series of struggles over the nature of fairness, who gets to decide, and so on (struggles that constitute an economic drag as well as a practical impediment). “Self-interest” doesn’t even approximate a morality, as far as I’m concerned; even when “enlightened,” self-interest rarely approaches the degree of ethical grandeur of animal life. More often, it devolves into an appallingly degraded struggle of the rich and powerful to protect and extend their sphere of power at the cost of others’ livelihoods and lives.

So when Tim O’Reilly chides Doc for suggesting that Web 2.0 makes altruism central to business success (misreading Doc, as Doc points out), I have little worth saying. Sure, I root for companies to demonstrate the generosity that Doc commends, but I know less than zero about the balance sheets behind the people I know in The Industry. Maybe Tim’s right, such that altruism (which is not just the same as “grace”) bears no reliable connection to success in the Web 2.0 market. That’s not the point. Doc invokes the theology of grace to encourage business operators to show the same generosity that Flickr (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo) does — but I invoke the theology of grace because it’s the right thing. Do it, eh?

After all, what does it profit someone to rake up a windfall on Web 2.0 and lose their soul?

Posted by AKMA at 07:12 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 03, 2006

Sweet Home Chicago

An odd weekend — some very wonderful elements, some very frustrating elements, very tiring, and now with the usual delay getting back to Chicago.

The wonderful: spending some time with my sweetheart Friday and Saturday nights, and Sunday morning. As Margaret draws nearer and nearer to the end of her graduate program, and as she sees that she’s done well at the tasks assigned her, the outcome of her program comes clearer and clearer, and it’s a blast to see that realization in her eyes. Likewise, we had a delicious evening with Pascale, who led us around the Dupont Circle neighborhood, chose a fantastic Chinese restaurant for us, found the nearest late-night coffee shop (all right, that wasn’t so very hard, since coffee shops are pretty thick on the ground in that neighborhood) and returned us to our hotel, full, happy, and now with more fond thoughts of an online friend.

And my meeting at the Human Rights Campaign brought together a number of my favorite people in the field of biblical studies, and others whom I hadn’t known before. Academic provides an odd variety of sporadic friendships based on conferences and occasional correspondence; any time we can spend in general conversation makes for deeply refreshing nourishment to the soul.

At the same time, I feel some conflict about my role in the project (online biblical commentary geared toward the HRC’s readership). I expected that I was on their list because the HRC envisioned a shared effort at articulating biblical interpretations that embraced LGBT identity in a theological reading that was determined by common interests; in such an enterprise, I have plenty to offer. As it turns out, the HRC and the leading LGBT scholars among us had a more specific view of the project as oriented toward a distinctly LGBT-oriented interpretive practice (“queering the text” without necessarily accommodating hetero readers). I have no question that that’s a legitimate thing to do — I’m not calling the integrity of the idea into practice — but I have a very difficult time finding a useful role for myself in the outworking of the project. I spent most of Saturday feeling even more catholic and more Victorian than usual (and some people thought that was impossible!).

There’s nothing wrong with my feeling disprivileged for once; I don’t need to rule the world, or even to participate in every discussion on an equal basis. No discussions need my input. On the other hand, when someone wants to hold a conversation to which I don’t stand to make a useful contribution, we all may as well save time, energy, and travel money by leaving me at home. No hard feelings, honest, and a more sensible stewardship of resources (I can think of numerous LGBT scholars who weren’t there, who actually could make a substantive discussion to the HRC project).

That being said, everyone was very patient and polite to me, and weekend in Washington was wonderful. I’m just eager to get back home.

[Later: When I wrote those words in the DC airport, I didn’t realize what I was getting into. My plane left DCA at 7:00 EDT, already an hour late. We got to Chicago on schedule, but couldn’t land because of the thunderstorms. After an hour holding, we landed in Detroit (by now, it’s 10:00 EDT). We sat on the runway in Detroit for a half hour while they solemnly assured us that they’d get us to a gate, then when we got a gate, they kept us on the plane. At 12:30 EDT, we took off again, and we landed in Chicago at 12:30 CDT. But that’s not all! We had to wait twenty minutes to reach a gate, and once we disembarked — the first time I’d unfolded from my window seat since I got on the plane — we had to wait a half hour for bags. I arrived at home a little after 2:00 CDT, and am having a snack, and blogging, before I collapse in a smoldering heap of exhaustion.]

Posted by AKMA at 02:32 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack