ROME (NY Times) — Citing advanced years and infirmity, Pope Benedict XVI stunned the Roman Catholic world on Monday by saying that he would resign on Feb. 28 after less than eight years in office, the first pope to do so in six centuries.
Not six decades. Six centuries! 600 years!$! The last pope to resign was apparently Gregory XII, who left the papacy in 1415 to end what was known as the Western Schism among several competitors for the papacy.
Surprising.
As a Protestant, I don’t have a lot to say on this, other than that I hope his successor is more serious about transparency over the church’s failures (particularly as regards priests and children), more open to the idea of ordaining women, and less dogmatic about maintaining untenable practices and doctrines.
The Pope (or Ex-Benedict, as he’s being called on twitter) was apparently a quite progressive fellow early in his career, but something changed. The New York Times notes:
…he moved theologically and politically to the right. Pope Paul VI named him bishop of Munich in 1977 and appointed him a cardinal within three months. Taking the chief doctrinal job at the Vatican in 1981, he moved with vigor to quash liberation theology in Latin America, cracked down on liberal theologians and in 2000 wrote the contentious Vatican document “Dominus Jesus,” asserting the truth of Catholic belief over others.
When he was Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict was known as “the pope’s Rottweiler” —he was the church’s official doctrinal watchdog. Harvey Cox relates: “He had disciplined and silenced several theologians who, he believed, had strayed over the line… including two friends of mine, the German Hans Küng (side note: I love Küng’s book Does God Exist?), and [he silenced] his own former student, the Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff.”
What was the office that Benedict headed while in this roll? The “Holy Office of the Inquisition.” Only now, since 1965 it’s been officially known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. But with such silencing of needed alternative voices, one doubts whether the church really has moved very far from its past.
And of course, the Times notes, Benedict’s tenure was caught up in “the growing sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church that crept ever closer to the Vatican itself.” And Benedict cannot get off the hook on this:
In one disclosure, news emerged that in 1985, when Benedict was Cardinal Ratzinger, he signed a letter putting off efforts to defrock a convicted child-molesting priest. He cited the priest’s relative youth but also the good of the church.
These scandals will forever mark his legacy, for better or worse. Joe Paterno’s fall from grace at Penn State was surprising and shocking, but at least outside of the church, when the truth finally came out, change was sweeping and serious. One just wishes it had come sooner, and one wishes the church might realize that sometimes you just have to own up to what you’ve done (or allowed to be done).
Will the church ever learn? Hopefully the next pope decides its time to stop living in the past.
— Bryan Berghoef writes and tweets from the nation’s capital. His book: Pub Theology: Beer, Conversation, and God invites you to engage in deep conversations over a good beer. You can follow Bryan on Twitter @bryberg.
Wish you could store those files, photos, music and video but running out of space?
If you’re like me, you’re constantly shifting stuff off of your aging laptop onto a hard drive that you hope will last long enough for the day you’ll need to access it.
What if you could store data on yourself? Like maybe your forearm, or… forehead?
A team of Harvard and Johns Hopkins geneticists has developed a new method of DNA encoding that makes it possible to store more digital information than ever before.
Apparently I’m not the only one running out of space – according to Robert Gonzalez: “Humanity has a storage problem.” He goes on to state that “With data accumulating at a faster rate now than any other point in human history, scientists and engineers are looking to genetic code as a form of next-generation digital information storage.”
In fact, they say the world’s information is “doubling every two years,” which is probably a conservative estimate, based on my own Instagram usage.
Archival storage is where DNA comes in. As storage media go, it’s hard to compete with the universal building blocks of life. At theoretical maximum, one gram of single stranded genetic code can encode 455 exabytes of information. That’s almost half a billion terabytes, or 4.9 * 1011 GB. (As a point of reference, the latest iPad tops out at 64 GB of storage space.) DNA strands also likes to fold over on top of themselves, meaning that, unlike most other digital storage media, data needn’t be restricted to two dimensions; and being able to store data in three-space translates to more free-space. DNA is also incredibly robust, and is often readable even after being exposed to unfavorable conditions for thousands of years.
My question is: when will I be able to tweet hands-free, and device-free? And when I can I take a photo with my eyeballs? My 20-20 vision could use some filter options, however, and perhaps a zoom lens. Clearly I don’t understand the technology, because I tried to write this blog post simply by thinking it.
Can you read me?
But a serious question becomes: what are the ethical ramifications for this, if any? Will we hire people to donate DNA to store data on them? Will people get “DNA storage” tattoos as a way to make some extra cash? Or worse, will we begin cloning mindless beings to simply act as data storage units? Or maybe we could find a way to make cats useful.
In any case, this gives new meaning to the term: “thumb drive.”
“I thought I’d give Mike a listen. I just have one question for when he says that the carnage Newtown experienced this past Friday is due to the systematic removal of Christianity in schools and in the broader society ‘beginning 50 years ago.’ I was struck inwardly by this question: America has always been a violent society; from the near extermination of Native Americans; slavery of blacks; tyranny over woman; and our strong propensity to be exclusionary and violent toward people who do not look like us or live exactly like us.
OK… the question:
“Given your logic Mike is fair to say that given the history of carnage in America and exported by America that America has not really removed Christianity as it has barely tried it?”
Christianity has not been systematically removed, brother Mike. It’s just that we have barely lived it for nearly 300 years, not just the past 50.
_____
And a few later thoughts by Anthony:
“This story is too tragic to become a political handmaiden to a version of Christianity that is nearly almost completely self-deceived [and] amnesiatic about it’s career in the Americas. We need a better story than this. Those small children deserve a better story than this. God have mercy on us.”
Tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012
Heaven on Earth
We need it now
I’m sick of all of this
Hanging around
Sick of sorrow
I’m sick of the pain
I’m sick of hearing
Again and again
That there’s gonna be
Peace on Earth
–U2, Peace on Earth
Some have accused me of insensitivity due to my FB posting yesterday in which I highlighted what had occurred the day before in my home state of Michigan:
“LANSING — Changes to the concealed weapons law passed the state House and Senate late Thursday, allowing gun owners to carry their weapons in formerly forbidden places, such as schools, day care centers, stadiums and churches.”
Some said it was too soon to talk about these kinds of issues.
Some said I was out of bounds for “making this political.”
Some accused me of being insensitive or narrowing this down to one issue. (because a single FB post clearly defines everything I think about a subject)
First of all, let me say that as a parent of four children, all of whom are the right age to attend Sandy Hook, and who just spent their first week in an urban public school, I was devastated to hear of this incident, and I am absolutely sick about it. I have no idea how I am going to drop off my four little precious ones on Monday, and say, “See you soon.” I am sure all parents feel the same way.
Yesterday was a day for grieving. So is today, and the day after that.
But is it not appropriate to begin to wonder: what has to change? How can we avoid situations like this?
I get that people got angry at me. I get that we’re all a bit angry. But seriously, is it really worth getting angry at those who wonder: “What if this guy didn’t have guns?”
Arm Yourselves
Some are sure the answer is not less guns, but more.
We need more people trained to use guns in our schools. Like teachers and school administrators. More guns in our schools.
We ourselves should arm ourselves, because who knows, someone could break into our homes and threaten our own families. More guns in our homes.
The question is: What kind of society do we want to have? What kind of people do we want to be?
The argument that we need more guns, and more people trained to use them boils down to: then we can kill, before we get killed.
They may, in fact, be right. This strategy may well have some level of effectiveness. It may even be the most effective strategy.
Again I ask: What kind of society do we want to have? What kind of people do we want to be?
Perhaps we need to admit that we live in a sick society, and just increase weapon proliferation to deal with the issue. “It’s effective.” “I’ll feel safer.”
But do we really want a society in which there are more of these weapons that can be unleashed across a schoolroom full of unsuspecting children?
And for me the more poignant question is: do I really want to become someone who has to be trained to kill someone else, as the answer to reducing violence?
What happened to making this a broader issue than just guns? (Those who are angry at mention of gun control but turn around and say we need more guns are also talking about: gun control. Just less of it.)
To me, this stems from a lack of imagination, and a lack of hope.
Let’s Talk About Training
I’d rather be trained in being a good parent.
I’d rather be trained in connecting with my neighbors.
I’d rather be trained in getting involved in my neighborhood school, getting to know the kids, the families, the moms, the dads, the challenges, etc.
I’d rather have others who are trained in mental health issues and counseling accessible to those who need their services and expertise.
I’d rather train my kids to deal with emotional and social issues in a healthy manner.
I’d rather train my kids to be discerning consumers of media.
I’d rather be a person who is trained to love, than one who is trained to kill (even in self-defense).
(And this is just me, I get that we do need some folks like that, but I bristle at the suggestion that we all become like that.)
A Question of Efficiency?
Call me naïve on this. Call me ignorant or even Amish when it comes to guns. Not a big fan.
They kill people. Ah, but you say, guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
“Guns don’t attack children; psychopaths and sadists do. But guns uniquely allow a psychopath to wreak death and devastation on such a large scale so quickly and easily. America is the only country in which this happens again — and again and again. You can look it up.”
And also, as I’m sure you’ve heard, there was an outbreak of violence at a school in China yesterday as well, and because there was a knife, instead of a gun, all of those children are alive today. Though, it has been pointed out to me that knives can kill people too. But does anyone seriously want to compare assault rifles to utensils?
Guns make it way too easy. Pulling a trigger can happen with a momentary brain lapse. Killing someone with a knife or spoon takes some serious want-to, and generally hurts one person at a time, not an entire classroom.
But you say, more trained gun carriers will indeed make us safer. It’s the most efficient way forward.
Again, perhaps.
Or perhaps not.
Consider this article, which came out in September:
In the wake of the slaughters this summer at a Colorado movie theater and a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, we set out to track mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years. We identified and analyzed 61 of them, and one striking pattern in the data is this: In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun. Moreover, we found that the rate of mass shootings has increased in recent years—at a time when America has been flooded with millions of additional firearms and a barrage of new laws has made it easier than ever to carry them in public. And in recent rampages in which armed civilians attempted to intervene, they not only failed to stop the shooter but also were gravely wounded or killed.
America has long been heavily armed relative to other societies, and our arsenal keeps growing.
There is no evidence indicating that arming Americans further will help prevent mass shootings or reduce the carnage, says Dr. Stephen Hargarten, a leading expert on emergency medicine and gun violence at the Medical College of Wisconsin. To the contrary, there appears to be a relationship between the proliferation of firearms and a rise in mass shootings.
And armed civilians attempting to intervene are actually more likely to increase the bloodshed, says Hargarten, “given that civilian shooters are less likely to hit their targets than police in these circumstances.”
For the sake of argument, let’s say that more trained gunowners is the most efficient solution to avoiding disasters like occurred yesterday. Are we ceding that violence is the answer? Is efficiency our highest goal? And is becoming potential killers ourselves really the place we want to be?
“We need to become those trained to kill so that others don’t kill us.”
Kill or be killed, isn’t that what Jesus said?
Or was it: “those who live by the sword, die by the sword.” I also seem to recall an ancient prophetic dream that one day swords would be beaten into plowshares, and war and fighting would be no more.
Ah… but you say, “That is way in the future.”
For now, you say, let’s eschew the Psalmist’s call to trust in the Lord rather than in horses and armies (or firearms and munitions), and arm ourselves for the sake of the children.
After all, Jesus was a bit naïve about the whole “sword thing” and the whole “turning the other cheek” idea. Look where it got him.
As followers of his, surely we are much wiser.
Carry the weapons, shoot first, and trust in God later.
“If someone broke into your home and threatened your children, wouldn’t you rather be able to shoot and kill them?”
What kind of society do we want to have? What kind of people do we want to be?
Linger here and reflect
I live in Washington DC. I don’t own a gun. Call me Amish, a wishful-thinker, or naïve… Or maybe just a bad parent. Speaking of which, we went for a walk with the kids last night in an area garden decorated with Christmas lights, and came across a memorial to those who died at the hands of the DC-area sniper back in 2002.
And we saw this stone:
“Linger here and reflect on those lost to violence.
Hope for a more peaceful world.
Seek a reverence for life among all people.”
Amen.
There are no easy answers. This is not a one-issue situation. We all have some long and hard thinking to do about it.
But should that stop us from dreaming?
What if we tried to enact the prophetic dream now, and gave up our obsession with violence? What if we didn’t wait for someone else to beat the pistols into plowshares, but set the example ourselves?
Video created by my new Minnesota friends Tory and Rachel. Reading is an excerpt of Wendell Berry’s “A Native Hill.”
In his interesting book on the collapse of community and the rise of the service industry, The Careless Society: Community and its Counterfeits, John McKnight begins with a story of a different collapse. The following is an excerpt:
The story begins as the European pioneers crossed the Alleghenies and started to settle the Midwest. The land they found was covered with forests. With great effort they pulled up the trees, pulled up the stumps, and planted their crops in the rich, loamy soil.
When they finally reached the western edge of the place we now call Indiana, the forest stopped and ahead lay a thousand miles of the great grass prairie. The Europeans were puzzled by this new environment. Some even called it the Great Desert. It seemed untillable.
The settlers found that the prairie sod could not be cut with their cast-iron plows, and that the wet earth stuck to their plowshares. Even a team of the best oxen bogged down after a few yards of tugging. The iron plow was a useless tool to farm the prairie soil. The pioneers were stymied for nearly two decades. Their western march was halted and they filled in the eastern regions of the Midwest.
In 1837, a blacksmith in the town of Grand Detour, Illinois, invented a new tool. His name was John Deere, and the tool was a plow made of steel. It was sharp enough to cut through matted grasses and smooth enough to cast off the mud. It was a simple tool, the “sodbuster,” that opened the great prairies to agricultural development.
Sauk County, Wisconsin is named after the Sauk Indians. In 1673, Father Marquette was the first European to lay eyes upon their land. He found a village laid out in regular patterns on a plain beside the Wisconsin River. He called the place Prairie du Sac. The village was surrounded by fields that had provided maize, beans, and squash for the Sauk people for generations reaching back into unrecorded time.
When the European settlers arrived at the Sauk Prairie in 1837, the government forced the native Sauk people west of the Mississippi River. The settlers came with John Deere’s new invention and used the tool to open the area to a new kind of agriculture. They ignored the traditional ways of the Sauk Indians and used their sodbusting tool for planting wheat.
Initially, the soil was generous and the farmers thrived. However, each year the soil lost more of its nurturing power. It was only thirty years after the Europeans arrived with their new technology that the land was depleted. Wheat farming became uneconomical and tens of thousands of farmers left Wisconsin seeking new land with sod to bust.
It took the Europeans and their new technology just one generation to make their homeland into a desert. The Sauk Indians, who knew how to sustain themselves on the Sauk Prairie, were banished to another kind of desert called a reservation. And even they forgot about the techniques and tools that had sustained them on the prairie for generations.
And that is how it was that three deserts were created: Wisconsin, the reservation, and the memories of a people.
A century and a half later, the land of the Sauks is now populated by the children of a second wave of European farmers who learned to replenish the soil through the regenerative powers of dairying, ground-cover crops, and animal manures. These third- and fourth-generation farmers and townspeople do not realize, however, that a new settler is coming soon with an invention as powerful as John Deere’s plow.
The new technology is called “bereavement counseling.” It is a tool forged at the great state university, an innovative technique to meet the needs of those experiencing the death of a loved one, a tool that can “process” the grief of the people who now live on the Prairie of the Sauk.
As one can imagine the final days of the village of the Sauk Indians before the arrival of the settlers with John Deere’s plow, one can also imagine these final days before the arrival of the first bereavement counselor at Prairie du Sac. In these final days, the farmers and the townspeople mourn the death of a mother, brother, son, or friend. The bereaved are joined by neighbors and kin. They meet grief together in lamentation, prayer, and song. They call upon the words of the clergy and surround themselves with community.
It is in these ways that they grieve and then go on with life. Through their mourning they are assured of the bonds between them and renewed in the knowledge that this death is a part of the past and the future of the people on the Prairie of the Sauk. Their grief is common property, an anguish from which the community draws strength and which gives it the courage to move ahead.
Into this prairie community the bereavement counselor arrives with the new grief technology. The counselor calls the intervention a service and assures the prairie folk of its effectiveness and superiority by invoking the name of the great university while displaying a diploma and license.
At first, we can imagine that the local people will be puzzled by the bereavement counselor’s claims. However, the counselor will tell a few of them that the new technique is merely to assistthe bereaved’s community at the time of death. To some other prairie folk who are isolated or forgotten, the counselor will offer help in grief processing. These lonely souls will accept the intervention, mistaking the counselor for a friend.
For those who are penniless, the counselor will approach the County Board and advocate the “right to treatment” for these unfortunate souls. This right will be guaranteed by the Board’s decision to reimburse those too poor to pay for counseling services.
There will be others, schooled to believe in the innovative new tools certified by universities and medical centers, who will seek out the bereavement counselor by force of habit. And one of these people will tell a bereaved neighbor who is unschooled that unless his grief is processed by a counselor, he will probably have major psychological problems later in life.
Finally, one day the aged father of a local woman will die. And the next-door neighbor will not drop by because he doesn’t want to interrupt the bereavement counselor. The woman’s kin will stay home because they will have learned that only the bereavement counselor knows how to process grief in the proper way. The local clergy will seek technical assistance from the bereavement counselor to learn the correct form of service to deal with guilt and grief. And the grieving daughter will know that it is the bereavement counselor who really cares for her, because only the bereavement counselor appears when death visits this family on the Prairie of the Sauk.
It will be only one generation between the time the bereavement counselor arrives and the disappearance of the community of mourners. The counselor’s new tool will cut through the social fabric, throwing aside kinship, care, neighborly obligations, and community ways of coming together and going on. Like John Deere’s plow, the tools of bereavement counseling will create a desert where a community once flourished.
And finally, even the bereavement counselor will see the impossibility of restoring hope in clients once they are genuinely alone, with nothing but a service for a consolation. In the inevitable failure of the service, the bereavement counselor will find the desert even in herself.
The professional co-optation of community efforts to invent appropriate techniques for citizens to care in the community has been pervasive. We need to identify the characteristics of those social forms that are resistant to colonization by service technologies while enabling communities to cultivate care. These authentic social forms are characterized by three basic dimensions: They tend to be uncommodified, unmanaged, and uncurricularized.
The tools of the bereavement counselor have made grief into a commodity rather than an opportunity for community. Service technologies convert conditions into commodities, and care into service. [note: this is only one example of a professionalized service industry, and McKnight goes into others in more detail]
How will we learn again to cultivate community? E. F. Schumacher concluded that “the guidance we need. . . can still be found in the traditional wisdom.” Therefore we can return to those who understand how to allow the Sauk Prairie to bloom and sustain a people.
One of their leaders, a chief of the Sauk, was named Blackhawk. After his people were exiled to the land west of the Mississippi and their resistance movement was broken at the Battle of Bad Axe, Blackhawk said of the prairie:
There, we always had plenty; our children never cried from hunger, neither were our people in want. The rapids of our river furnished us with an abundance of excellent fish and the land, being very fertile, never failed to produce good crops of corn, beans, pumpkins, and squash. Here our village stood for more than a hundred years. Our village was healthy and there was no place in the country possessing such advantages, nor hunting grounds better than ours. If a prophet had come to our village in those days and told us that the things were to take place which have since come to pass, none of our people would have believed the prophecy.
But the settlers came with their new tools and the prophecy was fulfilled. One of Blackhawk’s Wintu sisters described the result:
The white people never cared for land or deer or bear. When we kill meat, we eat it all. When we dig roots, we make little holes. When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’t ruin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts. We don’t chop down trees. We only use dead weed. But the whites plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything.
The tree says, “Don’t. I am sore. Don’t hurt me!” But they chop it down and cut it up.
The spirit of the land hates them. They blast out trees and stir it up to its depths. They saw up the trees. That hurts them. . . They blast rocks and scatter them on the ground. The rock says, “Don’t. You are hurting me!” But the while people pay no attention. When [we] use rocks, we take only little round ones for cooking. . . .
How can the spirit of the earth like the white man? Everywhere they have touched the earth, it is sore.
Blackhawk and his Wintu sister tell us that the land has a Spirit. Their community on the prairie, their ecology, was a people guided by that Spirit.
When John Deere’s people came to the Sauk Prairie, they exorcised the Prairie Spirit in the name of a new god, Technology. Because it was a god of their making, they believed they were gods.
And they made a desert.
There are incredible possibilities if we are willing to fail to be gods.
“For over 2,000 years the world has tried hard to erase the memory of the perfect conservative, and His principles of compassion, caring and common sense.”
What do you think? Did Jesus have an uncommon amount of common sense?
I’m pretty sure Jesus’s principles were anything but common sense. In fact, in my recollection, they were the complete opposite. The story of the Gospel is Jesus openly challenging the prevailing norms, social structures, and power dynamics of his day and turning them on their heads with a radical message of humility, non-violence, selflessness and faith in the seemingly impossible.
But what do I know? I have been accused of lacking common sense myself.
Third in a series of posts taken from Wes Howard-Brook’s introduction to his commentary on the Gospel of John, Becoming Children of God: Read the first post here.
Approaching the Gospels
One of the curiously powerful aspects of the gospels in general that stands out for readers familiar at all with other ancient literature is the social context in which their stories are told. Whereas almost all other national epics and myths speak of the important events and struggles in the lives of gods, kings, or other nobles, the gospels’ concern is almost exclusively with the lives of the poor and marginalized.
stories of the unremarkable
Even literature after the New Testament, up until the Romantics’ discovery of the tragic narrative power of stories of street urchins and other outcasts, primarily focused on the trials and tribulations of people of wealth and authority. Lives existing amidst material splendor and social power have always intrigued those who look longingly on what they imagine to be the “good life.” In contrast, the lives of the poor have generally seemed banal and trivial, devoid of interest because of the supposed monochromatic pattern of hard work and routine demands.
If we have relatively lately learned to “enjoy” the stories of the poor and have come to accept the harsh beauty of emotions and minds living on the tense edge of daily despair, such a perspective would have been virtually unthinkable to those of biblical times. The biblical patriarchs were wealthy herdsmen who, with their families, became landowners of distinction in their local communities. If the exodus portrays the desperate struggle of an enslaved people, it is only to show that their imprisonment first in Egypt and then in the desert is but a temporary obstruction on their way to the Promised Land where they will eat their fill and gather abundant land and cattle. The longest continuous biblical narrative is the saga of Israel’s poignantly ironic marriage to monarchy, in which the main characters literally stand head and shoulders above their peers (e.g. 1 Sam 10:23). Even the prophetic promise/threat of exile was of concern primarily to Israel’s elite, as the majority of poor people remained in Palestine even after the Babylonian conquest. And the postexilic narratives of rebuilding are the stories of priests and scribes, the intellectual and cultural leaders of the Persian colonial territory that had once been a great nation.
In this context of national journey from the perspective of the leaders and other powerful figures, the gospels sound a harshly discordant note. Their tales of lepers, blind people, bleeding women, and landless peasants searching desperately for hope are a shocking contrast to their biblical predecessors. For as we know, the New Testament was originally a collection of writings aimed at providing a message of divine love and healing for people who could not hear such a word in the established religious institutions. Although the Christian “Way” amazingly quickly swept across social classes and national boundaries in its first centuries of proclamation, the stories themselves are most easily understood by people who have experienced for themselves the failure of governments and clergy to relieve either physical or spiritual hunger.
John’s gospel, in contrast with Mark and Luke in particular, has little to say about poverty and God’s promise to provide good things for those who have gone without because of injustice. The fourth gospel proclaims not that the poor are “blessed” but that they are “always with you” (Jn 12:8) – although the Johannine perspective is not the cynical acceptance of the permanent presence of an underclass that it might seem to be when heard out of context. In the fourth gospel, characterization and plot focus not so much on economic exclusion as on the social barriers of ethnicity, ritual impurity, and lack of “proper” belief. Those who have been denied privilege in the dominant culture because of their “wrong” birth (e.g., the Samaritan woman and the one born blind) are the ones upon whom Jesus’ compassion centers. At the same time, those who are willing to be reborn, regardless of original birthplace (e.g., Nicodemus and the “Judeans”), are invited into the community to which the gospel calls its readers.
Beyond Reading
And this reality leads directly to the negative and positive poles of my own reading stance. As a “white” male citizen of the United States at the end of the twentieth century, I must engage in strenuous acts of imaginative projection and concrete insertion in order to begin to hear the power of this gospel’s word to those on the margins. It is a twofold task that cannot be done exclusively from the comforts of my warm home.
a context for reading
Each experience I have had in which I have, albeit hesitatingly and feebly, touched the actual lives of the poor in our culture has been a hermeneutical gift of immeasurable proportions. An hour with street people in downtown Seattle metamorphoses the abstraction of “the homeless” into the broken yet still human lives of Junior, Charles, and Althea. A few days in jail transforms one’s vague notion of “criminals” into a perception of ordinary people whose lives have either gone sour along the way or existed on a road of shattered glass from the moment of their births. Many of us are, regardless of our good will, faith, or love, at a huge distance from those in our inner cities or in the Third World to whom the gospels speak clear and almost obvious truths. Only by pushing out from our easy chairs and into the cold darkness of the streets, prisons, public hospitals, and other havens for outcasts can we begin to catch the radicality of the gospel’s word.
If this is true at the level of our personal zone of daily life, it is all the more the case with regard to our political and social privilege. I come to recognize more and more each day how the wealth of our nation has been systemically taken from the mouths of others. Indigenous peoples of North America, Africa, Latin America, and Asia all cry out as just prophets condemning our theft, indifference, and brutality as a nation. The increasing clamor for immigration limits and border patrols bears powerful testimony against our claim of being a just and free land, open to accepting the world’s poor. And, more to the point of the fourth gospel, we have again increased the sickening acceptance of racial and ethnic scapegoating, whether against poor African-Americans or wealthy Japanese and other Asians.
All this puts us as a people squarely on the opposite side from the Johannine Jesus and the community of the fourth gospel. But this brings us to the positive pole in my own prerelationship with the text. Despite my personal and national privilege and responsibility for massive injustice, I believe in a God who invites peoples such as myself to work and pray with others for the liberation of all peoples. While acknowledging my participation in unjust structures and in enjoying the fruit of rotting trees, I trust in the God of all life, who constantly calls me to focus on God alone and the way of shalom. Without attempting to express a complete personal philosophy in this space, it is important to proclaim my commitment to helping to shape a future in which all creation will sing joyously of the God of nonviolent and interdependent love.
Thus, I come to my own reading of John with a dual awareness. My birthplace veils the gospel from me in certain ways, leading me to find new experiences that help penetrate into the place from which the text seems to speak. At the same time, my commitment to a God who breaks down injustice and generates true love and freedom for all people opens me in other ways to hear the text speak its challenges to the status quo.
When is it legitimate to discriminate, if ever? Consider the following two issues, the first via the Grand Rapids Press, the second via the Traverse City Record-Eagle. Post your comments below.
GRAND RAPIDS, Sept 15, 2011 — Cathy and Jefferson Seaver are atheists, and they said they liked the Christian preschool in Allendale Township, where they sent their son.
But when they tried to send their daughter there a couple of years later, they hit a snag.
A Center for Inquiry discussion in GR
The school required them to sign a statement of faith in God. Feeling it would be a lie, Cathy asked if she could opt out. The administrators said if they didn’t sign, the school would not enroll their daughter.
“That was clear discrimination, and it was very disappointing,” she told an audience Wednesday at the Center for Inquiry Michigan gathering at the Women’s City Club.
The nonreligious group caused a stir last month by buying space on a billboard along northbound U.S. 131 near Hall Street SW with the message: “You don’t need God — to hope, to care, to live, to love.”
TRAVERSE CITY — Mary Van Valin grew emotional as she stood at a podium to address the Traverse City Commission.
Van Valin, a Peninsula Township resident who’s building a house on Webster Street in the city, urged commissioners to pass an ordinance that would outlaw discrimination against gays. Van Valin’s comments lasted less than a minute, but her voice brimmed with passion.
“I have a dream that this community will stand on the side of love, not fear,” she said Monday night.
Van Valin got her wish when the commission unanimously approved the ordinance. The packed commission chambers erupted in applause, tears and hugs when Mayor Chris Bzdok conducted the vote after more than an hour of public comment.
The ordinance, among other things, bans employers from discriminating against or firing employees because of their sexual orientation. It also prohibits landlords and housing facilities from turning away renters based on their sexuality alone.
Religious organizations are exempt from the ordinance, as are residents who rent out rooms in their single-family homes.
The vote brings a measure of closure to an issue that’s been debated for more than a decade in the city, though it’s likely not the final chapter. Opponents of the ordinance plan to circulate petitions and force a special election on the matter.
“We’ve already started; we knew this was going to happen,” city resident and opponent Paul Nepote said of the vote.
The city’s Human Rights Commission drafted the ordinance to “close the gap” in existing civil-rights laws. Federal and state laws provide protection based on religion, race and host of other criteria, but sexuality is left out.
Cities across the state and nation are beginning to introduce local ordinances that address the issue. Traverse City’s new ordinance was patterned after a similar measure adopted last year in Kalamazoo.
A huge crowd gathered Sept. 7 when commissioners introduced the ordinance, and many of the same faces arrived Monday. Proponents said the ordinance will make the city more welcoming and provide necessary protection for gays, but opponents charged that such measure is immoral and isn’t needed.
City resident and business owner Jeff Judway said he was harassed by co-workers and eventually fired from a city business not long after they discovered he’s gay. He warned commissioners against believing the ordinance isn’t needed.
“This ordinance, I need it, we need it … nobody should be fired because of their sexual orientation.”
Gay city resident Jacob Hines, 19, suggested the measure is especially important to young gay people.
“I want to be able to grow up knowing my future is protected,” he said.
Opponent Mike Mulcahy previously told commissioners the measure could create headaches for employers, but seemed to focus his comments on religion this time around.
“There’s a lot of people who are opposed to this ordinance who have a good reason to be opposed to it, they’ve got a view of the planet that includes a higher power,” he said.
Bzdok addressed the complaints he’d heard about the ordinance in recent months, including a charge that it would hurt business owners.
“If there’s evidence out there about a negative impact on business in any of the other Michigan cities that have passed these, I would like to see that … the opponents of this ordinance have brought us no evidence that there’s an actual negative impact on business anywhere that’s done this, and I would argue the places that have done this are thriving,” he said before the vote.
Bzdok also said the city won’t be going on a “witch hunt” to ensure compliance with the ordinance and that the measure does nothing more than assure gay individuals the same rights as everyone else.
Commissioner Jim Carruthers, who is gay, spoke strongly in support of the measure and admonished those who sent the commission “violent, angry, ugly” e-mails on the matter. Such a negative response proves that protection for gay individuals is necessary, he said.
“These to me are all reasons why we need to do this,” he said. “There is so much hate and ignorance out there.”
Commissioner Mike Gillman said he remains “unconvinced” of the need for the ordinance, though he cast his vote in support.
“In the face of a unanimous or near-unanimous vote, I sincerely hope that opponents will drop any plans to initiate a petition drive, an act that would be extremely destructive to the reputation of this community as an open and welcoming town,” he said.
The issue spawned a long-running battle about 10 years ago, and that fight ultimately went before city voters.
Commissioners then passed a watered-down and legally nonbinding anti-discrimination resolution after months of discussion.
Opponents later secured a measure on a city election ballot that sought to prevent the city from passing an anti-discrimination ordinance, but voters soundly defeated that measure in November 2001.
After years of talk and the relatively meaningless anti-discrimination resolution, commissioners were ready for real action.
“It’s time,” commissioner Barbara Budros said.
— UPDATE: Opponents to the Traverse City non-discrimination ordinance succeeded in gaining enough signatures to put the ordinance on the ballot this November to the city. A vote of ‘yes’ would keep the ordinance in the books, a vote of ‘no’ would remove it. Read the entire ordinance here.
Post your thoughts on the above issues of discrimination below, and please be respectful in your comments.
Whose idea is it to recap a discussion on theology over beer a week later? Not a great idea.
But here goes anyway.
These were last week’s topics, and I’ll do my best to give a couple thoughts that were expressed:
1. What is your favorite part about summer?
2. How does one move forward after a tragedy? How do you explain it?
3. Is history science or art? (See recent Paul Revere revisionism)
4. “Children are bad at lying for the same reason that adults are. We are born with a conscience (which is God’s voice in our soul) that says it is wrong for us to bear false witness.”
5. The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.
6. “The point of the universe is the hallowing of God’s name.”
Favorite parts about summer: no socks, the beach, SUNSHINE!, garden parties, SUNSHINE! and so on… in short – we’ve waited a long time for summer, and woohoo! it’s here!
Topic no.2 was a much more sobering one, given the tragedy with Carly Lewis, a local teenager who was killed in Traverse City.
How do you move forward after something like this? How do you explain it?
Most said that there is no explaining a tragedy, other than giving the straightforward account of what happened: so-and-so did this, and so-and-so did that, and X or Y was the result. It sucks, but that is what happened. Most felt it was beyond us, or even inappropriate, to try to give any larger philosophical or speculative explanations about the bigger picture.
That said, many felt that what is most important is how one responds to a tragedy. One can wallow in it, perhaps even remain paralyzed by it. One can find something deep inside that they didn’t have before. One can find communal support that he or she wasn’t aware of before. And one can perhaps be a source of help for others experiencing similar difficult situations.
But much of that is down the road. The immediate reality is grief, shock, anger – raw emotion. And no one can tell anyone else how they ought to respond to such things.
Some personal stories were shared around this topic, and I think it was a meaningful and important time to spend together.
Topic no.3: is history science or art? Did Paul Revere ring bells while warning the British about American weapons?
Here’s a re-enactment by Stephen Colbert of Paul Revere’s famous midnight ride:
4. We noted that children are actually quite decent at lying, and adults perhaps even moreso. But what does lying say about someone? And have you ever experienced someone blatantly lying to you and you knew it? What did you do?
5. Everyone agreed this quote was bunk.
6. One person responded: “I don’t think that is the point of the universe.” Then he rephrased, “Or maybe that’s part of it – but it isn’t the whole thing.” What do you think?
TRAVERSE CITY – A high-energy night at the pub, highlighted by good conversation about the death of Osama bin Laden, an excellent selection of beers, and monkeys on the loose – all covered extensively by the paparazzi, who got wind of our topic. Also, the world is ending in 2036.
The evening began with a send off for Rebecca, who left early to catch a flight to Madrid. A week after recovering from her big thirtieth birthday party, she was ready to leave the country. So she bid us all sayonara, lugging her suitcase from the Warehouse district all the way to S. Airport Road.
After recently being blacklisted by the Record-Eagle, we were pleasantly surprised to find they still like us, and we welcomed in Jan-Michael Stump, photographer extraordinaire, who captured the highlight of the evening as first-time guest Sharon Moller explained to her husband Pete and the rest of us her own response to the news of bin Laden’s death. She echoed sentiments carried by many of us, that she was relieved in a way, but a bit troubled by the gratuitous celebrations carried out in the immediate aftermath.
A captive audience
Steve noted that he *would* celebrate if his death meant we could finally wrap up our ‘war on terror’, and realize that having a war against terror is a bit of a ridiculous concept. There was agreement around the table that that would indeed be a good thing.
Others fear that the killing of bin Laden would create more reprisals and backlash than it would actually accomplish any sort of diminishing of terrorism. Does fighting violence with violence really work? The Dalai Lama noted his own sadness at the event, though he said he understood why it happened. He wondered whether killing one man would bring more peace, or just new opportunities for more to step in and fill the void.
It was also asked whether or not this would turn bin Laden into some sort of martyr. Would he now become even more of a hero in death than he was in life for those who followed him?
What meteor?
The second major topic of the night was this: If the human race is wiped out, what will be the reason?
Keith D. felt it would be some sort of pandemic – a medical/disease scenario like a virus of some sort that would wipe us all out. Some felt it would be self-inflicted, such as a nuclear reality, or a longer-term environmental disaster making the planet unsustainable for human life. Brian with an ‘i’ was back and he felt it would be something like a comet or asteroid that would cause a dinosaur-like extinction, and that in fact there may be one already on its way. This caused us all to get another round. I couldn’t find anything on the one Brian mentioned – Xerxes, but did find a story on one named Apophis after the Egyptian god of death and destruction (how comforting!).
Here’s what I found: “There is a large asteroid, made entirely of iron, currently speeding toward earth. Discovered in 2004, it’s called “Apophis,” after the Greek-Egyptian god of death and destruction. And the asteroid named after a god of death will be the largest and closest thing to come near Earth than any other object in recorded history. It will come so close, in fact, that it will actually be closer to the ground than orbiting communications satellites. It will be seeable with the naked eye as a point of intense light burning across the sky.
When will it pass near Earth? April 13, 2029. A Friday.
But that’s not even the scariest part.
Scientists are nearly certain that the asteroid won’t hit when it swings by in 2029. But there’s a possibility that, if Earth’s gravity affects the asteroid’s path enough, it will swing back around the Sun and strike the Earth on April 13, 2036.
So, if Apophis does hit Earth in 2036, where, exactly, will it hit?”
Good question – you’ll have to link to the article to read the rest, though it did note that an impact could ‘start a massive fire that would burn millions of acres, spilling tons of ash and debris into the air and plunging the Northern Hemisphere into darkness’. Also comforting.
monkey see...
The final topic of the night was a doozy – ‘Can God make a breakfast so big he can’t eat it?’ No one jumped on it, so we left the pub with visions of extra large omelets, king-size pancakes, and, to quote Obi Wan, feeling “a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.”
