Category Archives: Notable Quotes

Makoto Fujimura: Beauty and Justice as Companions


The Christian magazine Relevant has posted a short interview with visual artist Makoto Fujimura, founder of the International Arts Movement. About the genesis of this movement, which seeks to create a dialogue between the worlds of faith and avant-garde art, Fujimura says, “I found myself isolated from the creative communities as a Christian and from the Church as an artist. But I became convinced that the ‘gap’ I fell into was actually a culturally significant arena (some call it the ‘critical zone’), a kind of an estuary, a rich mixture of faith-infected cultural waters with many strange, beautiful creatures swimming about.”

I especially liked this exchange toward the end of the interview, where Fujimura responds to the oft-stated objection that art’s traditional concern with beauty is a frivolity that we can’t afford in a world full of injustice:

Relevant: Reading your essay “Why Art?”, I was reminded of Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Five Men,” about five men executed by firing squad. Herbert says at the end of the poem, basically, “I am aware of the men’s execution, so how can I justify writing poems about flowers?” His answer is that the night before the execution, the men under death’s sentence talked about prophetic dreams, automobile parts, girls, vodka—in other words, the everyday things of life. Herbert concludes his poem: “thus one can use in poetry/names of Greek shepherds/one can attempt to catch the colour of the morning sky/write of love/and also/once again/in dead earnest/offer to the betrayed world/a rose.” What is your response to those who have trouble justifying artistic pursuits in a world with so much inequality and injustice?

Fujimura: Art does not necessarily provide answers to inequality and injustice, but provides a vision of the world beyond them. Giving a rose in rebellion against de-humanization is a simple act, but repeated by the thousands, like in the case of Princess Diana’s death, it can be a powerful demonstration of humanity. I do not believe there is a strict dichotomy between artistic pursuits, or of beauty, with justice issues. Both beauty and justice require a foundation of the ethics of love, and are the twin pillars of the City of God. When Mary anointed Jesus with the expensive jar of nard, she was intuitively recognizing, with her act of beauty, the injustice Jesus is about to suffer. The extravagant gesture, and the disciples’ response “what a waste,” was met with Jesus’ commendation that “wherever the gospel is told, what she has done will be told.” Both beauty and justice must be practiced together to truthfully engage in human conflicts, because it is not just about the “rights” of a person only, but about the possibility of human flourishing in general.

I blogged about another interview with Fujimura at Image Journal last year, here. Visit the artist’s own blog here.

An Affirming 4th of July Message from State Sen. Stan Rosenberg


Massachusetts State Sen. Stan Rosenberg (D) represents Hampshire and Franklin counties, including our hometown of Northampton. He sent this July 4th message yesterday to the members of his email list. It also ran as a column in today’s local newspaper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

At the State House, in the House of Representatives chamber, hangs a mural entitled “Milestones on the Road to Freedom in Massachusetts.”

This painting, by Albert Herter, depicts five scenes from our state’s history. For me, the most poignant of these is the image of Judge Samuel Sewall, his head bowed in shame as he seeks forgiveness for his role in the Salem Witch Trials and the execution of 19 innocent people in 1692.

The caption beneath this panel of Herter’s mural reads: “Dawn of Tolerance in Massachusetts.”

We have indeed come a long way since those days, when fear and superstition held sway over our system of justice. But over the centuries many people, far too many, have suffered as our society struggled to fulfill its noblest, yet apparently most vexing, promise – the promise of equality. Our history is replete with examples of how certain groups of people have been defined by the majority and then vilified and subjugated because of their differences. From the execution of “witches” in Salem, to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, from the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans, to the stinging discrimination felt at one time or another by all minorities – blacks, Jews, women, gay men and lesbians, Hispanics, the poor, the list goes on – our efforts to achieve equality have all too often collapsed before the notion that it is somehow permissible to deny justice and equality to those perceived as “the other.”

The good news is that America is, and will continue to be, a work in progress, much like the individuals we encounter everyday. The best news is that the forces for equality eventually, eventually, prevail.

Five years ago, Massachusetts stood alone as the birthplace of marriage equality in America. Today, five states have joined us in providing full marriage equality, while nine others allow some form of legally recognized same-sex union. Such victories have not come easily, or swiftly, or without sacrifice. But they have come, and more will follow if people of fair and open minds persevere. The forces for equality eventually prevail.

I am proud to have been a member of the Legislature that helped start this national movement, not just because it marks the beginning of the eventual end to another form of injustice, but because it marks what I consider to be another milestone on our road to freedom – the eventual end to identity politics. As a foster child who grew up as a ward of the state, as a gay man, as a Jew, I understand what it’s like to be cast as “the other.” I rarely discuss these facets of my character because I don’t practice identity politics. I practice policy politics. And I firmly believe that we will never fulfill our potential as a just society until we embrace the principle of equality for all and adhere to it as fundamental, immutable policy.

Eventually we will. Our past, I believe, is prologue.

When the debate over marriage equality began on Beacon Hill, only about a quarter of the state’s 200 legislators favored extending marriage rights to all adults. Given such a daunting task, the forces for equality might have been forgiven had they chosen to stay silent, to continue to live in the shadows. Instead, scores of non-traditional families, the courageous “others,” shared their lives and their stories and reminded us that any law that violated a person’s civil rights, that crushed a person’s dignity, that tarnished a person’s self respect, would be unworthy of the world’s oldest democratic institution. They reminded us, quite simply, that we’re not so different after all.

In the end, marriage equality won the support of 75 percent of lawmakers, a stunning and remarkable turnaround. The forces for equality eventually prevail.

As we celebrate this Fourth of July and all the freedoms we enjoy, we should pay special tribute to the people whose names are lost to history who helped make our Commonwealth a community, a work in progress, a welcoming place for all good people of good will. We once hanged “witches” in this state. From that injustice, at least according to Mr. Herter, we learned tolerance. Because of what began here five years ago, eventually, eventually, the time will come to add a new panel to his mural, maybe one entitled “Dawn of Equality in America.”

Christian Wiman on Art and Self-Transcendence


No one writes about the interplay of poetry and faith better than Christian Wiman, the editor of the acclaimed literary journal Poetry. In this essay from Image #60, “God’s Truth Is Life“, he explores the similarities between the devotion of the artist and that of the believer, and how they both point beyond the self, paradoxically through the act of expressing a vision that is unique to that person.

It was hard choosing just one passage to quote from his Image essay, since the whole piece is as rich and compact as a poem. Here are two samples to pique your interest:

…I once believed in some notion of a pure ambition, which I defined as an ambition for the work rather than for oneself, but I’m not sure I believe in that anymore. If a poet’s ambition were truly for the work and nothing else, he would write under a pseudonym, which would not only preserve that pure space of making but free him from the distractions of trying to forge a name for himself in the world. No, all ambition has the reek of disease about it, the relentless smell of the self—except for that terrible, blissful feeling at the heart of creation itself, when all thought of your name is obliterated and all you want is the poem, to be the means wherein something of reality, perhaps even something of eternity, realizes itself. That is noble ambition. But all that comes after—the need for approval, publication, self-promotion: isn’t this what usually goes under the name of “ambition”? The effort is to make ourselves more real to ourselves, to feel that we have selves, though the deepest moments of creation tell us that, in some fundamental way, we don’t. (What could be more desperate, more anxiously vain, than the ever-increasing tendency to Google oneself?) So long as your ambition is to stamp your existence upon existence, your nature on nature, then your ambition is corrupt and you are pursuing a ghost.

Still, there is something that any artist is in pursuit of, and is answerable to, some nexus of one’s being, one’s material, and Being itself. The work that emerges from this crisis of consciousness may be judged a failure or a success by the world, and that judgment will still sting or flatter your vanity. But it cannot speak to this crisis in which, for which, and of which the work was made. For any artist alert to his own soul, this crisis is the only call that matters. I know no name for it besides God, but people have other names, or no names.

This is why, ultimately, only the person who has made the work can judge it, which is liberating in one sense, because it frees an artist from the obsessive need for the world’s approval. In another sense, though, this truth places the artist under the most severe pressure, because if that original call, that crisis of consciousness, either has not been truly heard, or has not been answered with everything that is in you, then even the loudest clamors of acclaim will be tainted, and the wounds of rejection salted with your implacable self-knowledge. An artist who loses this internal arbiter is an artist who can no longer hear the call that first came to him. Better to be silent then. Better to go into the world and do good work, rather than to lick and cosset a canker of resentment or bask your vanity in hollow acclaim….

****

…The question of exactly which art is seeking God, and seeking to be in the service of God, is more complicated than it seems. There is clearly something in all original art that will not be made subject to God, if we mean by being made “subject to God” a kind of voluntary censorship or willed refusal of the mind’s spontaneous and sometimes dangerous intrusions into, and extensions of, reality. But that is not how that phrase ought to be understood. In fact we come closer to the truth of the artist’s relation to divinity if we think not of being made subject to God but of being subjected to God—our individual subjectivity being lost and rediscovered within the reality of God. Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God’s means of manifesting himself to us. It follows that any notion of God that is static is not simply sterile but, since it asserts singular knowledge of God and seeks to limit his being to that knowledge, blasphemous. “God’s truth is life,” as Patrick Kavanagh says, “even the grotesque shapes of its foulest fire.”
…

Wiman is currently working on a nonfiction book titled My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer. Visit his Artist-of-the-Month page at Image here.

Postmodernism, Judicial Empathy, and the Bible


Law professor and Milton expert Stanley Fish changed my life one semester in 1995, when he co-taught my First Amendment class at Columbia Law School. By demolishing the liberal-modernist ideal of perspective-free knowledge, Fish showed me that I could commit my life to my nascent Christian beliefs in the absence of airtight intellectual proof. At the same time, his writings on legal interpretation convinced me that I didn’t need to seek another form of false certainty by ignoring the role of personal experience in how the Bible is read.

In a recent New York Times column on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination, Fish makes some important points about judicial “empathy” and multiculturalism that are, as usual, relevant to Biblical hermeneutics as well:

…[I]f a judge’s understanding of the nuts and bolts of the legal machinery is itself interpretive, the sympathies and allegiances she has will be in play from the very beginning of her consideration.

That is what Sotomayor’s critics are worried about. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) complains, “She seems willing to accept that a judge’s rulings may be influenced by the judge’s personal backgrounds or feelings.” But whether this is a matter of concern depends on just what Sotomayor is imagined to be accepting. Is she accepting an account of the way human beings invariably perform? Is she endorsing a psychology? Or is she accepting a view of how judging should be done? Is she endorsing a method? Is she being descriptive or prescriptive?

If Sotomayor is being prescriptive, if she is saying, “I will actively (as opposed to involuntarily) consult the influences that have shaped me at every point of decision,” she is announcing a method of judging that invites Sessions’s criticism.

But if she is being descriptive, if she is saying only that no one can completely divest herself of the experiences life has delivered or function as an actor without a history, she is announcing no method at all. She is merely acknowledging a truth (as she sees it) about the human condition: the influences Sessions laments are unavoidable, which means that no one can be faulted for viewing things from one or another of the limited perspectives to which we are all (differently) confined.

In fact – and this is what Sotomayor means when she talks about reaching a better conclusion than a white man who hasn’t lived her life – rather than distorting reality, perspectives illuminate it or at least that part of it they make manifest. It follows that no one perspective suffices to capture all aspects of reality and that, therefore, the presence in the interpretive arena of multiple perspectives is a good thing. In a given instance, the “Latina Judge” might reach a better decision not because she was better in some absolute, racial sense, but because she was better acquainted than her brethren with some aspects of the situation they were considering. (As many have observed in the context of the issue of gender differences, among the current justices, only Ruth Bader Ginsburg knows what it’s like to be a 13-year-old girl and might, by virtue of that knowledge, be better able to assess the impact on such a girl of a strip-search.)

Book Notes: GLBT Nonfiction in Brief


Back to June pride-blogging with brief reviews of three nonfiction books that offer insightful writing on GLBT themes.

Written from within the evangelical community and addressed to that community, David G. Myers and Letha Dawson Scanzoni’s What God Has Joined Together: The Christian Case for Gay Marriage (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005) makes a welcome contribution to the dialogue about faith and sexuality. Myers is a psychology professor at Michigan’s Hope College, while Scanzoni is a professional journalist and nonfiction author. Her commercial magazine experience is evident in the book’s concise, approachable style.

The book’s argument proceeds in stages: Committed relationships have proven essential to human flourishing. Marriage benefits couples, families, and society as a whole. More and more scientific evidence is showing that homosexuality is a naturally occurring human variation, probably caused by some combination of genetic and prenatal factors, and that sexual orientation is nearly always resistant to change. (The authors document the general failure of “ex-gay therapy” and denounce the suffering it causes.) In addition, the Bible verses most often cited against same-sex intimacy have been taken out of context, when they really refer to specific abuses such as temple prostitution and rape. There is therefore no reason to oppose marriage for committed gay couples on the same terms as straight couples. “Marriage lite” options like domestic partnerships and civil unions actually do more to undermine a culture of marriage, by suggesting that less-committed relationships are equally good for couples and their families.

Readers familiar with gay-affirming theology won’t find a lot that’s new here, but that’s not a bad thing. Seeing the same reinterpretations of Romans 1:26, etc., pop up in many places, one has to conclude that this is no longer a “fringe” viewpoint. It’s a viable alternate view, supported by scholarship, that at the very least deserves to be admitted to the conversation at evangelical colleges, publishing houses, and places of worship. Hopefully, the fact that What God Has Joined Together was written by two straight allies will enhance its credibility in those circles.

I recommend the paperback edition because it includes a dialogue between the authors, discussing reactions to the book and how they themselves came to change their views on homosexuality. Scanzoni observes at one point:

I think when we keep a subject such as homosexuality distant from us, seeing it only in the abstract, it’s easy to believe false information, accept stereotypes, and act accordingly. Homosexual people are then seen as an “out-group,” a category distinctly different from the heterosexual “in-group.” A blind spot makes it hard to see gay people as human beings, as persons who want the same things as straight people do–to love and belong and just go about their lives with dignity, as persons made in God’s image.

But when a heterosexual person learns that what had been only a generalized abstract mental construct is actually embodied in an admired person who reveals his or her sexual orientation, something begins to happen. How can you continue to believe gay relationships don’t last after getting to know Pete and Tom, who have been together 50 years, and have watched Pete tenderly caring for Tom, who now suffers from Alzheimer’s disease? How can you claim that homosexual people are rejecting God when that life-transforming sermon you can’t get out of your mind was preached by a lesbian minister? How can you believe that homosexual people are unfit parents when you see the love and care that Elaine and Laura shower on their baby, or the fun little Joey has as he plays and laughs with his two dads, whom he adores? Meeting gay people replaces an abstract topic with real people and with the universality of human experience.


As Harvey Milk said… “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

****

Whereas one might say that Myers and Scanzoni’s work seeks to integrate gay and lesbian couples into the bourgeois mainstream, Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993) celebrates the deconstruction of social norms in the figure of the transvestite. Tracing the theme of cross-dressing through historical anecdotes, legends, high art and popular culture, Garber argues that wherever it occurs, it signals anxiety about the instability of some other social category, not only gender but (at various times) race, class, religion, or colonial power. “[T]ransvestitism is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself.” (p.17) A little further on, she writes, “there can be no culture without the transvestite because the transvestite marks the entrance into the Symbolic” (p.34) The rest of the book works out this simple thesis at great length.

Garber’s book comes from that mid-1990s postmodernist period when everything looked like a text. She’s a Shakespeare expert, so it makes sense that she’d use the tools of literary criticism to investigate the cross-dressing phenomenon. However, I found myself wondering whether her romance with transgression fits the experience of most trans-people. From what I’ve read on their blogs (and I admit that I’m a beginner here), at least some of them are quite eager to resolve their “third-sex” status into something as close to “male” or “female” as possible. They want to pass for a particular gender, maybe not the one they were born with, but also not some liminal category between.

Bottom line: I wasn’t always satisfied with Garber’s analysis, but I’m still thinking about the book, months after reading it, and that’s enough for me to recommend it.

****

Wrestling with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men, edited by Brian Bouldrey (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), is a profound and heartfelt anthology of spiritual memoirs, with contributors including Mark Doty, Andrew Holleran, Kevin Killian, Alfred Corn, Fenton Johnson, and Lev Raphael. The authors touch on such topics as the connection between spiritual and erotic ecstasy, family secrets and reconciliations, and AIDS as a modern crucible of faith. Several Jewish and Christian denominations are represented, as well as Eastern spiritual traditions.

New Fiction Online: Furuness, Patterson, Yanique


The Internet is full of great short fiction, both in literary webzines and on the websites of traditional print journals. Below are links to a few stories I’ve recently enjoyed.

Freight Stories is a relatively new online journal of literary fiction that publishes good work in a clean, easy-to-read format. I’m working my way through Issue #5 and wanted to recommend two pieces published there.

Bryan Furuness’ “Portrait of Lucifer as a Young Man” is a short magical-realist piece that generates, so to speak, sympathy for the devil–maintaining a delicate balance between tenderness and menace:

Lucifer’s father was a portrait painter for hire. If you mailed him a photograph and a check for four hundred dollars, he would paint your likeness in dark, smoky oils. Not a bad deal for a vintage ego trip and the surest way to make new money look old. It was the nineteen-eighties. His business boomed.

He wasn’t the world’s greatest portrait painter, truth be told, but his clients didn’t complain, and he loved the work. Loved it so much, in fact, that when he was finished with paying jobs for the day, he liked to paint Hoosiers of guttering fame—men like Hoagy Carmichael or Booth Tarkington, men whose names rang a faint bell, but you weren’t sure why, though you thought they might have pitched for the Cubs or served in your grandfather’s platoon.

The idea behind these unpaid portraits was to revive some of the subjects’ former fame, but since no museum or gallery had commissioned them (or would accept them, even as donations), they ended up lining the living room wall in rows, a jury box of befuddled uncles.

Growing up, Lucifer thought portraits were ridiculous, and that his father’s clients were shallow and stupid. But around the time of his twelfth birthday, curiosity began to gnaw at him. If his father could make a grain dealer look like a university president, how dignified would Lucifer look in oil?
…

Victoria Patterson’s “The First and Second Time” takes an unflinching look at the sexual awakening of a teenage girl who is struggling to cope with her parents’ divorce:

…Rosie had once been Daddy’s little princess. Before the divorce, her father had slept in the guest room on the foldout sofa bed. Above the sofa was a crudely drawn picture of ice skaters. Her room was next to this room, and often her father would climb into her bed, on top of her beige silk comforter.

He would fall asleep easily. She never got accustomed to having her father’s adult-size body in her bed, and she would not sleep. It made her feel weird, as if she was the wife and not the daughter, but she would let him stay because she knew he was desperately lonely.

She would become hyper-aware of his breathing, the way it would develop into a snore, counting the seconds between her breaths and his long breaths. She would try to time her breaths to his, but she could not.

He had hair on his arms; his lips parted when he fell asleep; a scar divided his left eyebrow; his mustache brushed against his top lip; his face relaxed. Eventually, he would stir and turn, curling into a fetal position. She would move her body if his arm or leg touched.

Always, he would wake, startled by one of his more resonant snores, or for no predictable reason. She would pretend to be asleep. She didn’t want him to feel guilty about keeping her awake.

Sometimes, smelling of moist sleep, his lips would touch her cheek, his mustache brushing against her skin. He always returned to the sofa bed. She would feel relief when he left, although she would curl into the warm spot his body had created on her bed, and finally drift to sleep.
…

Boston Review is a well-regarded magazine of poetry and progressive politics which offers several annual contests. A lot of their content is available online. Tiphanie Yanique’s lush and haunting story “How to Escape from a Leper Colony” won their 13th annual short story contest in 2006. It’s the title story of her new collection, coming in 2010 from Graywolf Press.

…When I left Trinidad for Chacachacare it was 1939 and I was only 14. I came for two reasons. The first was to bury my father, who had lived there for three years and had just died. The second was because I had become a leper. It was in my arm. The same arm my mother held as she walked me to the dock and left me there. Her cotton sari swishing the ground as she ran back to the main street, to catch a bus that would take the whole day to get her back to San Fernando, way down in South. I thought of her sitting in the bus for hours, her face against the glass, the hole in her nose empty because she had sold the gold to buy me a used sari and a bag of sweets as a gift for my new caretakers.

I also sat that whole day. I was waiting for the nuns to come get me. I pretended I could hear the sounds of the junction that the driver had dropped us off at. It wasn’t Port-of-Spain, but it was the biggest, loudest place I had ever been to. It was like a wedding in my village with all the food laid out for me to stare at. Men crowded around a small stand that sold raw oysters. They dipped the shells in hot pepper sauce before slurping the meat down their throats. Women reached up for brightly colored buckets and brooms that hung on display. My mother and I rushed by, avoiding getting close to people.

During our long walk, the busy road turned into a dusty path. And then we were walking along a wood dock with the sea beneath us. My mother sat me down with my legs hanging over the side and pointed to the small mound many miles out into the ocean. That would be my new home, she told me, where the nuns would take me in and bless me with the sacrament of confirmation when I was older. She did not say, if I lived to be older. Instead she kissed me on the mouth and made me promise not to eat the sweets. And she left. And then it was so quiet, with only the waves and the breeze as sounds of life, that I closed my eyes and pretended that I was back in the junction, eating oysters in pepper sauce, putting them in my mouth with my good hand.

My arm was wrapped and in a sling. Even in my mind I could not forget how my elbow was hurting me in a funny way that wasn’t about pain. Even alone on the dock I was too afraid to touch it, to give that arm the healing power of the other one. It is a dangerous thing when a girl is afraid to touch her own body. I was afraid to touch places on me that weren’t even private. And I was going to die for it. Die for having those places.

…

The Error of Inerrancy


Eric Reitan isn’t inerrant, but he’s pretty darn close.

Reitan is a philosophy professor at Oklahoma State University, and the author of Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers. He blogs at The Piety That Lies Between and is also a regular contributor to the progressive website Religion Dispatches.

Via Elizaphanian’s blog, I discovered this link to the most comprehensive and excellent discussion/refutation of Biblical inerrancy that I have ever seen. The post, on Butler University religion professor Dr. James F. McGrath’s blog Exploring Our Matrix (affiliated with the Christian Century), starts with a quote from one of Reitan’s articles at Religion Dispatches:

[T]he doctrine of biblical inerrancy has the effect of inspiring its adherents to pay more attention to a text than to the neighbors they are called upon to love. Sometimes it even inspires them to plug up their ears with Bible verses, so that they can no longer hear the anguished cries of neighbors whose suffering is brought on by allegiance to the literal sense of those very texts.

Reitan is thinking of the exclusion of GLBT Christians (his cousin Jake Reitan founded Soulforce’s “Equality Ride”), but not only of that issue. His argument, along with the lengthy debate in the comments, clearly spells out why inerrantist theories that pit compassion against obedience are a dangerous heresy that should concern all Christians. What we’re really fighting for, beyond GLBT rights, is freedom from the fears that keep us from drawing near to God. Fear of error stems from fear of committing sins, as if Jesus hadn’t told us that we are worthy right now to call God “Abba”, Father.

The real action on McGrath’s blog occurs in the extensive comments below the post, where he takes on the argument that pro-gay Christians and others who reject Biblical literalism are setting ourselves up as authorities over Scripture. A sample:

James F. McGrath said…
There were Christians on both sides of the debates about slavery. Just ask the Southern Baptists. That’s the reason they exist.

I am very familiar with the Chicago Declaration on Biblical Inerrancy. I simply agree with most Evangelicals outside of the United States in not subscribing to it. I don’t find the term “inerrancy” to mean anything like what it sounds like when defined with so many qualifications.

As for these matters being settled in “the Bible”, you are missing the point that Paul’s letter to the Galatians wasn’t Scripture when the debate between Peter and Paul was taking place. And so presumably in order to get the table of contents of Scripture as inerrant as well, you need to trust the church’s authority at least that far. I suppose the question is why stop there? How do you know that God has entrusted authority to the church only so far as to get a book and then withdrawn in in favor of the book?
April 13, 2009 4:54 PM

Rhology said…
Hello Dr McGrath,

I don’t see any rebuttal so far to my contention that you have set yourself up as an authority over the Bible, and that therefore there is really no good reason for you to read or take into acct any of it at all. I do think interaction with that point would really benefit our discussion here.

Yes, there were Christians on both sides. Yet, the impetus for abolition came from…Christians, not from some other group of different conviction. I should further think that it is obvious to any reasonable mind that the reason a group comes into existence is not necessarily the same reason for which it remains in existence. I don’t think the Anglican Church existS, NOW, just so that the King of England can satisfy his hot pants, after all.

I am glad and sad to hear that you are familiar with the Chicago Statement. Given the strange comments you’ve made that display an ignorance of proper hermeneutical process, I would commend it to your reading again, so that you won’t make the same mistakes an additional time.

True, Galatians wasn’t even written when the Paul/Peter event occurred. Yet Galatians is the only way we know about the event and its outcome TODAY, and that’s what matters. No one is claiming Sola Scriptura for the time before the Scriptura existed, after all.

I don’t trust any church’s “authority” for the Canon. Let me recommend James White’s _Scripture Alone_ for a better idea of what we mean when we discuss the Canon. It’s a popular-level book, but honestly I think it would fit where you are pretty well at this point. In a nutshell, we trust GOD to make His self-revelation known, gradually to the church as a whole, not to any one council or any one body or any one bishop. It is a testament to God’s way of doing it that knowledge of the Canon gradually became known and agreed upon across a wide geographic area despite the long distances and bad communication entailed in such dispersion.

Peace,
Rhology
April 14, 2009 9:02 AM

James F. McGrath said…

Rhology, I don’t believe I’ve “set myself up as an authority” over the Bible. I cannot extract myself from my physical human existence, my cultural, historical, and linguistic context, my Christian faith, and everything else that makes me who I am, and read the Bible without presuppositions, assumptions or influences. And so the claim to treat the Bible as one’s authority is a potentially perilous one, since Christians who clearly have no interest in literally following Luke 14:33 regularly quote other passages to clobber others for not doing “what the Bible says”.

Of course, one can bring in other passages to nullify this one, and while a subject like homosexuality will be met with “the Bible says…” the challenge to have no possessions will be met with “you can’t take that literally, and see here there were people with possessions, and…and…” But the truth of the matter is that, when conservative Christians choose to quote the Bible about homosexuality or some other issue, but ignore its teachings about wealth and social justice, and then object that “you cannot set yourself up as an authority over the Bible”, they are deceiving themselves and often others. The conservative viewpoint uses the Bible no less selectively than any other. It just has a more extensive apparatus in place to make it possible to pretend that isn’t what is going on.

I think I’ve written enough to keep the conversation going, and so we can leave the difficulties involved in claiming that an errant church put together a collection of precisely those writings which are inerrant for another time.
April 14, 2009 9:36 AM

Rhology said…

Hello Dr McGrath,

No one is asking you to read the Bible in a way impossible for a human to do – free from presupps, etc. But one either takes the text and its meaning as authoritative and defining, one rejects it altogether, or one picks and chooses. The text manifestly means sthg, much like your comment and books and blogposts manifestly mean specific things. You are having a discussion on biblical authority etc with me right now, rather than discussing cooking stew on the surface of Mars.

You have already said explicitly that there are teachings of the Bible that you reject, and that means you think you know better (or else you’re a complete idiot, and I don’t think you’re an idiot). If you know better, then you are setting yourself up higher than the Bible. The Bible says do this or that, you say no. It’s as simple as that. I’m just wondering why you bother listening to the rest of it, or better yet, why you would cite it for any moral authority for some other question. Why not just cite yourself, since you know better?

Why follow Luke 14:33, and why cite it? Are you saying I *should* follow it? Why?

You said:
one can bring in other passages to nullify this one

This is another example of your poor understanding of biblical hermeneutics. It is the job of the exegete who takes the entirety of the Bible seriously to understand what a given psg is saying and then to understand it in light of its immediate and wider context. Seriously, this is elementary information. One does not “nullify” a text with another. One can harmonise, one can illumine, etc.
Your misunderstanding about what Luke 14:33 actually *does* mean is at the heart of your mistake here, but your wider unwillingness to take the Bible seriously is the root of the problem rather than a single symptom. Did Jesus give up EVERYthing He had? No. Did Jesus command His disciples to take with them a couple of swords just before Gethsemane? Yes. What does all this mean? Whatever it means, it doesn’t mean what you said it means. The teachings are not in conflict – they are both/and, and the false dilemma you are proposing is just that – false.

There is, however, no alternative psg on the topic of homosexuality that would serve to “nullify”, as you put it, the condemnation of homosexuality in 1 Cor 6, Romans 1, etc. Unless you have one in mind…

And it’s fine with me to leave the church/Canon discussion where it is. I appreciate the time you put into our discussion here.

Peace,
Rhology
April 14, 2009 10:50 AM

James F. McGrath said…

Thanks, Rhology, for your reply. The reason I don’t think it is possible to avoid “sitting in judgment on the Bible” is that the Bible is quite plainly factually inaccurate on some matters, such as whether thinking takes place in the brain or in the heart. Does that affect Paul’s overarching point when he uses such language? Not really. We can still grasp his language metaphorically, but that doesn’t change the fact that in Paul’s time it was taken literally, and he does not anywhere indicate that he meant as a metaphor what his contemporaries understood literally. The same may be said of other details in the Bible: the “firmament” that holds up the waters above, for instance.

I’ve also posted before about the need to “read the Bible ethically”, since that has come up in our conversation.

If the Bible cannot consistently be taken literally when its plain sense indicates we ought to, then we have no choice but to either reject the whole thing or to seek a core message and underlying principles that can be translated or mediated in some way into our own time, culture and worldview. But requiring that modern readers of the Bible accept an ancient worldview in its entirety in order to accept the Christian faith. Some act of translation is required, and if we cannot bypass the question of what to do with Luke’s depiction of the ascension in the context of our current astronomical knowledge (for example), then we have no choice but to make a judgment about the Bible, too. Even those who attempt to maintain some form of literalism make the same judgment – they simply choose to reject modern science because of what they understand the text to say. But that’s different from the ancient authors and readers who simply had this cosmology as an assumption, not something that involved a leap of faith.

In short, I don’t think we can accept the whole package as it comes to us, nor do I think anyone successfully does so today, even if they claim otherwise. And if we say that we can find a way of interpreting the message, interpretation involves judgment on our part – about what is central and what is simply cultural, and about how to re-express what we believe is central today….
***

Further down the page, I was particularly struck by this lengthy comment from Reitan himself:

For even broader context than my RD article provides, it may help to locate the quote within my ongoing work on the nature of divine revelation. Some of that work is summarized in Chapter 8 of my book, IS GOD A DELUSION? A REPLY TO RELIGION’S CULTURED DESPISERS, especially on pp. 175-177. But the full development of my ideas here has yet to be published.

The gist of it is this: a God whose essence is love would not choose, as His primary vehicle of revelation, a static text. We learn most about love through loving and being loved. And it is PERSONS whom we can love, as well as who can love us. And so it is in persons and our relationships with persons that the divine nature is made most fully manifest.

Christianity affirms this when it maintains that God’s most fundamental revelation in history was in the PERSON of Jesus. And Jesus was, if nothing else, a model of agapic love. His core message was love. And He never wrote anything. Instead, He made disciples–PERSONS–whom He sent out into the world.

In this context, a text that collects human testimony concerning divine revelation in history, especially one that reports on the life and teachings of Jesus, is going to be invaluable. But it will cease to be valuable if we come to pay more attention to this text than we do to our neighbors. Jesus Himself declared that He is present in the neighbor in need, and the community of the faithful is called “the body” of Christ, that is, the place where Christ is present, embodied, on Earth today. Not in a book. In persons.

When the biblical witness is treated as the proxy voice of persons who lived long ago, and we listen to the voices of those persons as we do the other members of the body of Christ, then the biblical witness becomes an invaluable partner in our efforts to understand what God is saying to us–that is, what God is communicating through the web of human relationships and the spirit of love that moves within that web.

But when the biblical witness is treated as inerrant in a way that no human being is inerrant, it trumps the voice of the neighbor and is used as a conversation-ender. It becomes an excuse not to listen to the lived experience of the neighbor. Or it becomes a measuring stick for deciding which neighbor should be listened to (their experience conforms with the biblical template) and which should be dismissed (because their experience does not conform).

And since compassionate listening is one of the most essential acts of neighbor love, it follows that a doctrine of biblical inerrancy is an impediment to such love.

Therefore, I conclude (contrary to what Craig argues here) that a God of love would NOT create an inerrant text.

Reitan expands on these points in an ongoing on “authority without inerrancy” on his blog: here, and here. This earlier post responds directly to the discussion on McGrath’s blog. Tolle, lege!

Happiness Is Just Another Feeling


The title of this post is one of the best pieces of advice my therapist ever gave me. How often do we compound life’s unavoidable pains by believing that this shouldn’t happen–that if we’d only managed our lives properly, we would never be depressed? Sadness is unattractive, unless you’re a teenage girl who’s read Wuthering Heights too many times, and unattractiveness makes people stop loving you, which makes you sad. So be happy! It’s your duty as an American. Thus goes the script.

My fellow Harvard Crimson alum Joshua Wolf Shenk has written a stellar cover story for the June issue of The Atlantic. “What Makes Us Happy?” profiles George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist who has spent the past four decades studying the life choices and satisfaction levels of 268 men who graduated from our alma mater in the 1930s.

It would come as no surprise to the Buddha, nor to my therapist, that a person’s resilience and interpretive framework for life’s sufferings are greater predictors of happiness than whether their life is superficially free of obstacles. Is it better to be Case No. 218, wealthy, married for 60 years, but emotionally flat, or Case No. 47, who struggled with depression and alcoholism, but was a creative and energetic activist? The article suggests that a passionate life contains emotional highs and lows that the bland safety of “happiness”, as defined by external success markers, can’t capture. Shenk writes:

The undertones of psychoanalysis are tragic; Freud dismissed the very idea of “normality” as “an ideal fiction” and famously remarked that he hoped to transform “hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” The spirit of modern social science, by contrast, draws on a brash optimism that the secrets to life can be laid bare.

Vaillant, whom Shenk describes as an optimist attuned to the tragic sense, understands that we’re often ambivalent about pursuing happiness in the first place. Dissatisfaction and anxiety have survival value, up to a point:

Last October, I watched him give a lecture to Seligman’s graduate students on the power of positive emotions—awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust (or faith). “The happiness books say, ‘Try happiness. You’ll like it a lot more than misery’—which is perfectly true,” he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

As a
Christian, I wonder what this insight means for evangelism. It’s easier to envision hellfire than grace. Is it really our sinfulness that makes God’s love seem intolerable, too bright, like sunlight in our eyes? Or has the church not done a good enough job of creating a community where it’s safe to let our guard down?

Religion gets little airtime in Shenk’s account of the Harvard study, perhaps reflecting the secularist biases of mid-20th-century psychology. I’m curious about the role of belief systems in supporting or hindering the mature coping strategies that Vaillant deems central to happiness, and how beliefs interact with differences in temperament to either smooth away or magnify pathologies.

For those interested in pursuing this topic further, I highly recommend Jennifer Michael Hecht’s The Happiness Myth, a provocative survey of cultural and philosophical prescriptions for a happy life, which have differed widely from one era to the next. Hecht suggests that historical perspective itself brings happiness by giving us self-awareness and the ability to try new options outside our culture’s standards of value. She argues that there are actually three kinds of happiness, with different time horizons–momentary euphoria, day-to-day contentment, and overall life satisfaction–and that we must make hard trade-offs among them.
 

Laraine Herring on Writing Practice and Self-Knowledge


Kore Press, a highly regarded feminist literary publisher, hosts the Persephone Speaks online forum on women and literature. In April’s entry, author and educator Laraine Herring discusses writing as a spiritual practice and why we resist it:

I’ve had students complain to me that they aren’t writing enough, and when I ask them if they’re writing, they say, “Well, no…” To this I respond: writing begets writing. There is no way to write but to write. There are no tricks, though there are plenty of diversions. One of the points I make in my book The Writing Warrior is that any structure someone provides for your writing, or any structure you create yourself, is only as useful as your ability to work freely within it and to stay centered and focused. The structure or the concept doesn’t make the writing work. Your discipline, practice and flexibility make it work. When structure of any kind (relationship, job, religion, writing, city) becomes a prison, it’s time to move on.

Now, what writing practice does is illuminate. It yanks out into the open everything that the writer has been trying not to look at. And so the writer goes away. This is normal, but a book about writing, or a class about writing, can’t address the nuts and bolts without addressing the real reason writing is hard. It holds up a mirror to your own demons. It dares you to look, dares you further to write about it, then dares you even further to share it publicly. Yeah, is it too late to change majors to something safer like Pyrotechnics in the Middle East?

Writing practice brings up your limitations. This is a gift, not a problem. The more you know about what you do and why, the more room you have to make authentic decisions. Writing practice shows you your belief systems about yourself, your family, your world. It shows you where you need to be right and where you feel invisible.

Writing, for Herring (and for me), has some parallels to meditation. Both practices help us cultivate non-attachment to fixed concepts, replacing them with open-ended interest in whatever actually occupies our minds. And both are made more difficult by the common fear of discovering that our true selves are “unacceptable”.

That’s why, these days, the intentionally Christian aspect of my writing is more about process than content. The two are intertwined, of course, because until the experience of grace and forgiveness becomes more embedded in my consciousness, my novel characters won’t be able to reach that same resolution in their lives. However, I’ve tried to shelve the perpetual question “Is this preaching the gospel?” In an odd way, last year, the agenda of “the gospel” came to feel like a false artifact, a mask of God, no different from the manufactured images that are my fashion-photographer protagonist’s stock-in-trade. He and I despaired of finding The Real. But don’t worry, because we both have a short attention span for sitting on the pity pot, eventually we’ll grow bored with that and commit to some imperfect instantiation of the divine. Or as he would say, get over yourself, girl.

Blog Love for Ariana Reines: Interviews and Readings Online


Ariana Reines. What can I say? If she were a band, I’d follow her around like a Deadhead. I would name a beef-flavored ice cream after her. But that would probably freak her out, so instead, here are some links to her awesomeness online so you can see for yourself.

The poet Thomas Moore interviewed her on his blog in 2007, after her book The Cow was published by Fence Books. Moore says, “To refer to The Cow, as poetry, seems rather reductive – it feels more like a living creature. Using the cold, clinical language of the abattoir, mixed with a fragmented cut-up of various characters – Reines has sculpted a multi-faceted yet cohesive voice that forces the reader into avenues of sex, scat and violence. Words don’t do this thing justice.” Here, Reines speaks about the freedom from self-consciousness that so inspired me in her work:

I want to say something about bad writing. I’m proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston’s bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire’s mamma’s boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which’s something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.

This hour-long video shows Ariana reading at the Holloway Series in Poetry, UC Berkeley, in April 2008:

And this half-hour radio program was first broadcast on KCRW’s “Bookworm” program, also last April.