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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.

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.
Continue reading “The Strong Right Arm”

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.

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.

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.

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. . . .

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.

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’ ”?

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?

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.”

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!

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 engagement distance us from our immediate allegiance to our God; and partly because our strongest arguments for the God of the Decalogue, against the sacred America, come when our identities bespeak as distinctly and unambiguously as possible, an embodied exposition of God’s identity.

We profess an alternative to Empire’s claim on our lives when we live in a way that our interlocutors cannot make sense of, apart from acknowledging that which sacral America cannot abide: we owe our allegiance only to God. While divinized America can couch its prerogatives in terms of justice, of freedom, it cannot make explicit claim to godliness as a civil virtue. The practice of godliness, of making manifest a persistent allegiance to the unique, aniconic, inutile God of the Decalogue, constitutes the church as an anti-Empire.

Well, it’ll all take a lot of fine-tuning — and it’s not an argument congenial to my many liberal-democratic friends, to the extent that (as much as I admire their steadfast commitment to representative democracy) I remain unable to vest my hopes in the the political process.

I’ll see whether I can record the talk when I give it, and I’ll post both the recording and a rough transcript.