Ruminations about hermeneutics, theology, theory, politics, ecclesiastical life… and exercise.
I’m drafting my rotisserie-league baseball team today, after last year’s heartbreak. If I weren’t re-acquainting myself with the worthwhile players in the American League, I’d be explaining why I was thinking about rhetorical questions and burying your lede; but that will have to wait. Worst comes to worst, I kept Johan Santana and Travis Hafner from last year’s team, so my roster won’t be a total washout.
Continue reading “Nightmare League”
Judging by the referrer logs, a great many people have been combing the series of tubes for ideas for Good Friday sermons. I’m not sure what about my site attracts those readers, and it’s too late for most preachers (I hope), but here’s some ideas about what one might or might not say on Good Friday.
First, last, and every point in between, Christian preachers should preach on Good Friday as though they knew that the congregation were packed with our Jewish neighbors. Opprobrious observations about Judaism — and I’ve heard oceans of them, often as not from “liberal” preachers who wouldn’t dream of insulting the rabbi in the clergy group — not only insult people who had no role whatsoever in the events of Good Friday, not only reactivate the prejudices that engender Christian cruelty to Jews, not only [usually] originate in ignorance about Judaism and first-century cultural politics, but they also falsify the Gospel. The Gospel comes to the world proclaiming release from slavery, freedom to grow in holiness, and a grace that overcomes the innumerable obstacles that human sin persistently erects. There’s just no way that Judaism per se stands against any of this — which should come as no surprise, since the faith that Jesus proclaims depends on its Judaic roots. The church has been grafted in to Israel; it has no business derogating the roots and the trunk.
Second — go back and reread “First.” It’s that important. Romans held the power of crucifixion. If you cannot say anything on Good Friday without blaming someone, blame Romans. But better far not to point fingers on a day such as today; it’s a day to confess our complicity, not to scapegoat Others.
Third, the message of Good Friday involves the suffering and grief Jesus bore — but suffering and grief are not themselves the message. As Mel Gibson proved a few years back, the lurid appeal of grotesque misery offer a perverse attraction; yet if we preach so as to play on that perverse interest, we becloud the vital theological point that the depths of human cruelty to one another have been overridden in the name of kindness, forgiveness, patience, and reconciliation. If our preaching embeds the horror of Jesus’s suffering more vividly than it conveys the beauty of the Gospel, we amplify the effects of sin more than the opportunity to escape from it.
Fourth, to the extent that we do attend to the barbaric tortures to which Jesus was subjected at the behest of the imperial power of an occupying army (and its compliant quisling clients), we ought to look around for possible examples of such state-sponsored torture in the contemporary world, and resist it. That’s not the point of our preaching itself, but it should be an inescapable consequence of the Good Friday gospel; we can’t express the truth about grace if we soft-pedal depraved indifference to our neighbors.
Fifth, have you forgotten “First”?
Sixth, there’s a point at which Good Friday’s grim outworking of human opposition to grace — an opposition no less terrible, all the more terrible when cloaked in the well-intentioned motives of religious leaders — itself begins to reveal, in the unique identity and work of Jesus, the power of God. That point is “sublime” in the sense Lyotard deployed the term: it surpasses and overwhelms our capacity to give an account of it, to explain it [away]. We can turn away from it, or we can trivialize it, or we can refuse to acknowledge it, or any of a variety of other very plausible, sound responses. Or we can recognize in that sublime witness to God’s non-coercive, patient, generous, forgiving love for all people that we too have been invited into a loveliness we could never attain on our own, we could never even imagine on our own. In that loveliness we have to give up much that we would cling to (starting with our autonomy), but the beauty of holiness will catch us up and draw out from us those elements of our identities that edify, complement, intensify, elevate the truths that God draws out from everyone else who steps out onto this thin ice.
Thin ice, but it’s here that we’ve been called. We’ll hang on tight to one another. We will sing, we will pray, we will wipe away the tears in our loved ones’ eyes, we will remember and forgive, and come what may — we will turn our hearts ever toward God. Because we have beheld God come in flesh, full of grace and truth.
If there’s a two-hundred fifty dollar 3D figure modelling program that makes photo-realistic human avatars, you might think there would be a fifty dollar figure modelling program that produces very basic cartoon-like shapes. (Poser Figure Artist is about $99, and specifically excludes cartoon figures).
Continue reading “You Would Think”
It’s been snowing today. Lightly, just isolated flakes, but snow.
In this morning’s mail, I received formal notification from the Episcopal Church’s Conant Fund that I had been granted the amount requisite to support my four hitherto un-funded months of leave time next spring. Woohoo!
Continue reading “It’s Official”
I was delighted to observe in James Darlack’s blog a transcription of some of the mandates inscribed in cuneiform tablets in the libraries of the Ancient Near East. You just have to sympathize with librarians who faced the problem of people spilling coffee on their clay tablets, though few of us would think to pray that “all [the deities] curse him with a curse which cannot be relieved, terrible and merciless, as long as he lives, may they let his name, his seed, be carried off from the land, may they put his flesh in a dog’s mouth.” I am tempted, however, to design bookplates that say, “He who fears Anu and Antu will return [this book] to the owner’s house the next day.”
The diligent newshounds at CNN have rolled back the curtains of ignorance and misinformation in the Kathy Sierra death threat controversy. I found the link thanks to Dave, who points to Norm Jenson’s blog. Apart from the clip reporting mostly what everyone who read Kathy’s post already knew more than a week ago, it only got a few things wrong. For instance, sensible as Harvard would be to attract David Weinberger as a professor there, he’s a Fellow of the Berkman Center — but they didn’t make do to his words any of the terrible things he feared (I don’t think). And Chris Locke came of relatively benign, making a plausible point about the amount of human energy and cost that it would take to patrol an internet that was insulated from malignant sociopathy (I mean, we aren’t doing so very well in that department in the physical-space world). They didn’t mention Kathy and Chris’s joint statement (on which, good job, friends), but granted the volatility of the topic, CNN successfully avoided playing to hysteria.
On the other hand: I feel sorry for Kathy having been called a “cute kitty” on international news TV. Although she won’t get thousands of messages decrying this form of misogyny, the media digesters did not blaze any new bold paths in egalitarian journalism when they compared an endangered woman to a small, fuzzy, defenseless feline. No, it’s not as bad as a death threat — but if we’re going to open the topic of malignant effects on women, we should speak clearly and directly about androcentric condescension and “protection.”
Continue reading “Thank Heaven For Mainstream Media”
Chapel Hill, NC – Researchers at the Dean Smith Center for Interspecies Cooperation have released a report that should be required reading for every dog owner. Their preliminary findings suggest that the thin plastic bags that many owners use for cleaning up after their dogs transmit some of what they’re expected to contain.
“We ran a series of initial tests at the request of a public health department,” said Prof. Herb Eagle, “and observed right away that the two main bacterial contaminants — around the lab, we were joking around and called them ‘poop’ons — can’t pass through the plastic barrier. One kind, the white poopons, cause more of a smell than the black ones, but both black and white have a gross molecular structure that will stay inside all standard plastic containers.”
Prof. Eagle went on to say that one afternoon they noticed that bags that were supposed to be tied off and sealed were nonetheless emitting an unpleasant odor. Further analysis revealed that among the samples in the test, not only were there the expected black poopons and white poopons, but a third and rarer bacterium with some characteristics of each. This third sort of contaminant has a tighter structure that enables it to pass through the thinner plastic bags that some dog owners use — the bag that protects the Sunday New York Times, for instance, or fresh produce bags, especially the semi-porous green bags often used at up-market organic grocers.
“We called this third kind of contaminant the ‘grey poopons,’ ” explained Prof. Eagle.
Officials at the Smith Center expressed appreciation for the importance of the discovery and advised dog owners to stick with heavy-gauge plastic refuse-removal conveyances. They referred inquiries about the formal name of the newly-found hazard to Prof. Eagle, who admitted that “no one wants it named after them.” For the time being, it will presumably be identified with the research center that first isolated it.
