Category: Uncategorized

Vanity prompts me to note with appreciation that David has a generous review of Faithful Interpretation up at his site. Of course, I tend to think the best of any favorably-disposed reviewer, but I take particular satisfaction that David has such an encouraging response to my arguments: he’s a sophisticated reader of philosophy, one who subjects “postmodern” theory to critical scrutiny (our first exchange of links — the response he cites was emailed — involved his having criticized Foucault), without any predisposition to favor Christian theological claims. He’s a tough reader, and (though we’re friends) I trust him to be an honest reader, and impressing him delights me no end.

This makes the second positive response — Jamie Smith offered appreciative remarks on the book and on my work in general over at the church and postmodern culture site. As I appreciate David’s review from outside the official target audience, so I appreciate Jamie’s response from squarely within my expected readership — he describes my work just as I might hope a “church reader” would: “[AKMA] winsomely argues that ‘postmodern’ interpretation will be faithful, Catholic interpretation.” Jamie’s characterization of my proposal as “Catholic” sounds odd next to David’s suggestion that “you don’t have to be Christian to appreciate the care with which AKMA approaches his topic,” but my hope was that by describing interpretation carefully and respectfully, I might arrive at an account that encompasses variety in interpretation while at the same time advancing criteria for assenting to (or dissenting from) particular proposals. To that extent, the distinct comments from Jamie and David suggest that I succeeded, at least in addressing them.

Thank you very much, David and James! When the negative reviews come, I will revisit your pages, often.

I see in The Living Church that newly-consecrated Bishop Beisner said, “At this moment in our Church there are two seemingly contradictory principles. On the one hand we are seeking to strengthen the understanding of our baptismal covenant and on the other we want to practice open commensality. I don’t believe these two need to be in conflict.” I’m glad to see him put these pieces together; the apparent contradiction has been grating on my nerves as well.

I’d be interested in how the high doctrine of baptism explicit in contemporary “baptismal theology” can be reconciled with communion of the unbaptized. If “baptism” constitutes a defining sacrament of identity, is not eucharist appropriately understood only in relation to baptism? And if baptism “doesn’t matter” relative to the eucharist, what makes it matter so much in other spheres of church life?

“Open communion” looks to me like a weightier issue of theology and tradition than do the more visible controversies over sexuality, though it has drawn far less public attention. I admit to a certain ambivalence about the soundness of “open communion,” but until such time as I have seen arguments that treat patiently and respectfully the monumental warrants from Scripture, tradition, and reasoning through a consistent theological account of baptism, I can’t see a responsible basis for disregarding the canons on this one (especially when those who practice that disregard ever wish to enforce other canons on anybody else).

This morning, Seabury’s first-years reminded me that it’s customary that they wear cassocks to classes on the day after Matriculation. They all looked charming, and today was a good day for wearing an extra layer because the heat isn’t fully reliable yet. One among them impressed me by sporting a biretta, an ecclesiastical cap distinguished by its absolute lack of any conceivable practical basis. It’s an item I’ve been casting sidelong glances at whenever the liturgical haberdashers spread their wares at Seabury, but they run more than a hundred bucks a pop, and I wouldn’t have occasion to wear one nearly enough to make it worthwhile.
 
What burned my toast, though, was that the first-year in question allowed that it wasn’t her own biretta, but belonged to a middler who is possibly the lowest of the low-churchmen presently studying at Seabury. The biretta was given him as a joke (!), and he had simply offered to share it with his friend.
 
So there we are — I, the arch-Anglo-Catholic, notorious hat-wearer, without a biretta — and he, the whale’s-belly-low-church seminarian, maybe puts on a baseball cap and probably wears it backwards, having a gift biretta. God hath indeed a rich sense of irony and poetic justice.
 
Pictures were taken of me wearing the doubly-borrowed biretta, and my esteeemed colleague Ellen Wondra wearing a Canterbury cap (Archbishop Laud example here), but they’re safe behind a password-protected barrier.
 

A while back, someone used the “email a comment” function to ask me, “You write, ‘Our response to terrorist attacks should always be, “How can we conduct our collective affairs in such a way as to make terrorism pointless?” ’ I was wondering how you would answer that question, and what you consider to be the terrorist’s point.” (I’m not posting it as a comment, since it wasn’t quite clear to me that the commenter intended the message that way.)

All along, my short answer has been something like, “Figure out what a war would cost in dollars and energy, and devote those resources to building up the economies and infrastructures of the nations where terrorist sympathies run highest. Don’t try to suppress violence and terror by answering it with terrifying violence; do good to those who hate you.” I do not claim that this would solve the problem of terrorism, but it would at least be an admirable course of action, and subsequent suffering and casualties would be inflicted in spite of the U.S.’s generous aid, not in response to the U.S.’s campaign of conquest and torture.

It doesn’t make a significant difference if the recently-published estimates of Iraqi death toll are off my 100%. The fact remains that the U.S. government chose to pursue a course of action that resulted in vastly more deaths than would have been the case if they had chosen differently. The fact that people are haggling over how many tens of thousands of Iraqis have died in a war that has not brought a higher degree of peace and security, that has evidently increased the amount of terrorist activity in Iraq, illustrates how the policymakers in the U.S. government have gone off their hinges. (Don’t let’s get started about their blaming the Clinton administration, during which there were no nuclear weapons in North Korea, for the recent nuclear tests there.)

Diana Butler Bass, a classmate of mine from olden times at Duke and a speaker coming to Seabury in a couple of weeks, said it vividly in a column at beliefnet. That’s what I meant; that’s what I hope that I would have done.

It’s snowing.

The Homeland Security people haven’t made any headlines about this, so I’ll break the scoop myself: it turns out that the Transportation Security people have discovered evidence that the next strike against our nation’s infrastructure will involve turtleneck jerseys.

Margaret was absolutely sure she packed a turtleneck jersey when she flew north to spend a week with her daughter and husband. When she arrived here at home, however, the turtleneck was nowhere to be found in her luggage. Presumably, an alert defender of our nation’s airways spotted the turtleneck as a potential double-use object, and confiscated it to protect everyone from the dire consequences of allowing Margaret to wear a turtleneck. So beware, everyone — leave your turtlenecks at home, or empty them into the convenient “turtleneck collection bins” at security. Fly smart, fly safe!

(Either all that, or she forgot to pack it. We’ll find out soon, cause Margaret’s flying back to Durham tomorrow.)

I’m preparing for tomorrow morning’s Gospel Mission class, and in our reading (chapter 4 of Darrell Guder’s Missional Church) I saw an interesting footnote (p. 94, n. 22). Guder observes that although the NRSV that he relies on uses “kingdom” to translate the Greek basileia, he uses “reign” “because it better captures. . . the dynamic meaning of basileia, which refers to the reigning itself and thus secondarily the realm incorporated under such reigning.”

I don’t have a beef with a permissive reading of that note — “sometimes ‘reign’ better captures the sense of basileia as an abstract noun for ‘kingship’ rather than a term for a geopolitical entity.” A less elastic reading of Guder’s note, though, suggests that basileia “really means” something dynamic and non-spatial, rather than something spatial and political.

I have several objections to that less elastic reading. First, I can cite a goodly number of cases in which basileia seems manifestly to refer to an earthly geopolitical regime, rather than to a disembodied activity of “reigning.” In many more cases, the sense could go either way. Since I attribute meaning more to usage than to etymology or association, I’m impressed with the likelihood that basileia — which could clearly be used to indicate a political unit — tends in colloquial writing to refer more to “where So-and-so is in charge” than to “So-and-so’s condition of majesty.” Neither is excluded, but I see many more uses for the former than the latter in the literary ambiance of the New Testament.

Guder himself devotes fair attention to the spatial aspect of the basileia, and discusses at length the relation of the two aspects of the term. Since he’s quoting texts that refer to the “kingdom,” I don’t quibble with his choice to use “reign” where he’s not quoting. Still, the better solution would identify cases in which basileia refers to a kingdom, and those in which basileia refers to “reign” or “kingship” or “majesty,” and translate each accordingly.

Hey, Jeneane, feel like coming over for a visit?

I often harrumph about not participating in the quiz-game-thingummybobs that propagate on the Web — you know, “Where was your first kiss?” “What’s your favorite Perry Como single?” and “If you could be a species of grapevine, which would you be?”

I nonetheless participate from time to time, either because it seems to involve actually important information (quizzes involving music, for instance) or because the fancy strikes me, or because a personal or political link to the person who tagged me outweighs my general antipathy to quizzes.

So when I noted that Beth had tagged me for a “Five Things Feminism Has Done For Me” quiz, I winced a little. There’s a worthwhile political impulse involved, and Beth’s a terrific student assistant, wonderful friend to Pippa and Si, and all-around commendable person, and it was her birthday Friday. Still, I might have resisted answering, since her post itself provided the escape clause “(who I don’t expect will actually take it up, but whose response I’d love to hear).” But out of idle curiosity, I clicked around to see what her other correspondents said — and not one of them had taken up the challenge. “What Feminism Has Done For Me” seems worth at least one response, so I’ll take it up (and see if that motivates the other slackers to get going).

First, I’d say that feminism has played instrumental role in making the world a more humane place by bringing to explicit awareness the extent to which social systems tend to produce and exploit categories of less-privileged people who contribute much more labor, commitment, and vital energy than the society itself recognizes — so that more-privileged categories can enjoy the benefits of exploitation. The exploited need not be women (we could fill in the blank with “untouchables,” illegal immigrants, of course African Americans, or children). Still, since so many societies cast women into that category, and women constitute a part of every society, feminism calls to our attention to men’s exploitation of women as a paradigmatic case of this phenomenon.

Second, I’d cite the impetus that feminist scholars gave to the critical study of ways that language and social organization affect one another. In most cases, you can call me a traditionalist and I’ll be proud of the epithet, but I thank feminist social critics for teaching me to be more careful about how I use pronouns such as “he.”

Third, feminism has raised to prominence a bracing array of vigorous, challenging, sharp-witted and sharp-tongued and sharp-penned writers, speakers, personalities. Luce Irigaray (my favorite), Julia Kristeva, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, bell hooks, Judith Butler (despite her writing style), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sarah Coakley, A.-J. Levine, Mary McClintock Fulkerson, and Mary Daly: I don’t by any means always agree with them, but their participation enriches our discourses immensely (and if our society were so organized as to stifle their participation, that silence itself would shout aloud a damning indictment).

Fourth, the prominence of such figures as I named above brings about great good for us all, by encouraging women to write out loud, by opening doors for further women to rush in through, by showing subsequent generations of women what it might look like for women to occupy a stage set by and for men, without accepting men’s terms for how and why they might be there. Because they’ve gone first, Pippa may have a surer sense of where she wants to go, and why, and how it may differ from the courses they took.

Fifth, feminist critics (along with critical scholars of race) stand to remind me (and most of us) how very eager we are to let ourselves off the hook for the persistence of sexism and racism. When I wrote about “White Guy Theology, the emphasis should have fallen as heavily on the “guy” part as on the “White” part — though if readers felt the impact of the latter more than the former, it may be a reminder of how urgently we need to keep listening to feminists.

I wince when people use the term “post-feminist”; even people who dissent from the arguments that characterize feminist criticism benefit from thoughtful engagement with feminism. Hard as I might try, I do not envision a day when any culture with which I’m acquainted will be able to dispense with its feminist challengers.

In honor of Margaret’s impending return to the family home from her (congenial) exile in North Carolina, I’m pointing today to a favorite song of our family. The Abe Lincoln Story (watch out for annoying Flash pop-up), Silverlake’s premiere swing punk soul band, performs a song entitled “I Don’t Need a Bag,” protesting the hyperbolic overpackaging of America’s groceries. (I’m listed as its only fan on last.fm.)

It’s not only witty, but catchy and impressively-played as well; it reminds me of the early, jazzy phase of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (though with safe-for-work lyrics, in this case at least). The website suggests that they offer free downloads, but I don’t see any — just gird up your loins for some Flash, start the jukebox, and select “I Don’t Need a Bag (Live at KXLU).” And just you try not to think about it next time you go to the store.

While I was at McCormick on Monday, Bob Cathey raised an interesting question related to Margaret’s conversation with me about Bultmann and Barth. “What if,” asked Bob, “the continental philosopher who had so pronounced an influence on New Testament studies had been Wittgenstein, rather than Heidegger?”

It’s an interesting speculative exercise, especially since it’s not outrageously unthinkable. Neither Heidegger nor Wittgenstein was an explicitly theological thinker (though each has found theologically-committed exponents). Both were recognized as extraordinarily important during their lifetimes. Wittgenstein’s position at Cambridge would certainly have situated him propitiously to affect the biblical faculties there (if they had been so inclined).

I’m not cut out for this sort of counterfactual supposition, but were providence to have preferred Wittgenstein to Heidegger as the 20th century’s philosopher-of-choice for biblical studies, the discipline would surely look very different now. (And I might be writing about ways that Heidegger’s philosophy could clarify problems bequeathed to us by Wittgensteinian theological epigones.)