Worshipping at the Church of Non-Realism

Stories of Gay Love

2012-01-21T12:21:00.002-05:00

The latest issue of Out magazine features 26 gay love stories, telling of couples who’ve found each other and formed a loving relationship (http://www.out.com/). Each of these stories is inspiring, but I was particularly moved by the story of Samuel Colt and Chris Porter, who are gay porn stars. They have sex for a living, yet they say that they are faithful to one another.
On Gay.com, Colt explains: “"The heterosexual view of being faithful is so outdated.” “We don’t have to have sex only with each other to be faithful. I’m completely faithful to him, emotionally and with my heart. I can still get gang-banged and want to go back home to him."
Porter adds that they didn’t want a monogamous relationship because it didn’t fit their lives. That said, he adds that they have rules they both follow. "We don’t hook up with someone if we’re in the same city without the other one being involved,” he explains. “But if he’s out of town, I’ll hook up with someone. I’ll call and be like, 'Is that OK?' We’re honest and communicate."”
This is a refreshing antidote to the poison Paul spewed out in last week’s second reading (I Cor. 6:12-20), denouncing fornication and prostitutes. Not all fornication is evil, and God loves prostitutes. The Bible is filled with stories of prostitutes who saved the day. We should stop letting Paul’s repression and nastiness define sexuality.

Those People at That Church

2012-01-19T18:37:00.003-05:00

My friend David Townsend writes on his blog, Anchorho(http://anchorholder.blogspot.com/):

Just north of Market Street, and across Church Street from probably the cruisiest supermarket in San Francisco—recall that it was in the Church and Market Safeway that Mary Ann Singleton tried to pick up Michael Tolliver at the beginning of Tales of the City—stands an unassuming little brick gothic church, built by Danish Lutherans in 1906. As the Castro came to be the Castro, the congregation could hardly fail to see that the neighborhood around them was changing. But more importantly, and perhaps more surprisingly, its pastor and members recognized that life meant embracing change, and they chose life, opening their doors to the burgeoning LGBT community that flourished around them, as to the marginalized and often homeless population along a very down-at-heel street.

In 1990, the congregation called Ruth Frost and Phyllis Zillhart as its pastors, lesbian graduates of a Lutheran seminary who had been disqualified from ordination on the grounds that they refused to pledge abstinence from sexual relations. (First United Lutheran in San Francisco at the same time called an irregularly ordained out gay man.)

Keep in mind that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America presents itself as heir to the radical ecclesiastical disobedience of Martin Luther, when I say that nothing, nothing freaks the Lutheran hierarchy out like a refusal to capitulate to its authority. Years of wrangling led eventually to a classically Lutheran judgment. A commission struck to address the unsanctioned ordinations found that the congregation had acted in accordance with the dictates of the Gospel, and recommended that the ELCA in fact ought to reverse its position; but because St. Francis had failed to comply with good church order, the congregation had until January 1, 1996 to revoke its call to Ruth and Phyllis or else would be excommunicated from the national church—unless the national church in the meantime reversed its policy forbidding the ordination of out gay and lesbian seminarians who refused to pledge celibacy.

On the night of December 31, 1995, the congregation walked the walk by celebrating what they dubbed the Feast of the Expulsion with a big party in the church basement. As the congregation’s website (www.sflcsf.org) puts it in describing the next chapter of its history, “In the face of this judgment against us, we, along with our companion congregations, continued to stand by our decision, and continued to celebrate our diversity as part of our everyday journey with Christ.”

I first walked into St. Francis in 2000. There were maybe thirty-five people in a sanctuary that a hundred and twenty would pack to near capacity. As the Gospel book was carried in a very short procession into the middle of the congregation, everyone turned to face the reader, business as usual in “high” Lutheran congregations. Not so business-as-usual was that as people turned, they also crowded from the pews into the central aisle, hands laid on shoulders in a web that knit the whole assembly into a single body with a living voice at its center. And I lost it.

I was a mess all over again after Mass, when I walked out into the columbarium garden that flanks the church to the south, where the ashes of dozens of members rest—most of them gay men who died of AIDS in the 80’s and 90’s, when this church was a place of refuge from the complacent indifference of denominational hierarchies.

But long before I’d walked through the door of St. Francis—and long before I’d made the decision to reclaim the flawed, problematic inheritance of the faith I was reared in—I knew Those People at That Church: The St. Francis Lutheran Cookbook. It’s long out of print. If you can find a copy, grab it. This isn’t a volume of jello salads and tuna casseroles. It’s got the best broiled polenta recipe I’ve ever made, a wickedly spicy and variously flavored corn salad, and the cookies baked for Bill Clinton’s inaugural gala.

But far, far better, its cover sports a collage of the campiest, most joyful parish photo album imaginable: octogenarian matrons offering strawberries to the viewer, middle-aged guys wearing colanders as Easter hats, a lesbian couple standing back to back and crossing turkey drumsticks as they look over their shoulders to the camera, buff shirtless gymboys in barbecue aprons, smiling eight-month-old babies holding cupcakes. (Oh--and heterosexual couples. Did I mention heterosexual couples?) Sidebars flanking the recipes tell the story of the congregation and its witness, up to the date of publication in 1994, when expulsion from the ELCA loomed.

The lumbering behemoth that is the institutional church finally caught up to St. Francis Lutheran in 2010, and the congregation was readmitted to the ELCA. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s the ELCA that was finally reunited to St. Francis Lutheran Church. I know where the promise of freedom and grace lay, for me and people like me, during those intervening years that this quirky, outrageously brave little community went its own way for the sake of Truth and Love.

“Of Gods and Men”

2011-03-30T15:07:00.002-04:00

Last night, we saw the new movie, “Of Gods and Men.” More than any movie I’ve seen, it illustrates Bonhoeffer's concept of “the cost of discipleship.” Eight French Cistercian Trappist monks living in an abbey in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria in the 1990s became pawns in that country’s civil war after the French colonialists left. Although the monks have the goodwill of the people in the area, tending to their medical needs, the monks are a reminder to the militant groups, vying for power, of recent European oppression. The local authorities are keenly aware of the militants’ feelings and repeatedly urge the monks to leave because the authorities will be unable to protect them from the violence that is an everyday occurrence. Much of the movie is devoted to the monks’ often anguished discussions about leaving or not. Some think it prudent to leave; others feel the need to continue their peaceable presence as friends to the people nearby who have endured continual bloodshed for so long. Their discussions and daily monastic tasks are interspersed with beautiful sequences of their singing the Mass and the Hours. Many of the psalms seem achingly pertinent to their debate, such as this excerpt from Psalm 91 (verses 5, 6): “You will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day, or the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday.”
Eventually, even as the possibility of their death becomes more likely, they all decide to stay. Soon, of course, the terror arrives in the night in the form of an insurgent group opposed to the Algerian government, and the monks are taken hostage to be negotiating tools with the French government. But to no avail; as the film ends, the monks are led off into the winter mist never to be heard of again. They are killed; their killers unapprehended.
The monks choose to stay – a very unwise choice. They could have been helpful elsewhere if they had lived. They choose to stay, because, as the prior says to one of the wavering monks, they had already died in Christ (Romans 6:4), and frightened as they were, their life in Christ was at the Abby. They were “fools for Christ,” as Paul writes in I Corinthians 4: 9, 10: “For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, as though sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to mortals. We are fools for the sake of Christ, ….”
The monks’ death was folly, but it wasn’t useless. They “become a spectacle to the world” (the movie was a sensation in France) and, as Tertullian wrote, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”
Their deaths – and their lives – challenge us, especially those of us in the Church, to follow the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 and Jesus, the Gospels’ writers’ embodiment of the Suffering Servant. If we follow him into a life of peace and service, some will see the wisdom of our folly and find their life in Christ.
If, after you see the movie, you want to learn more, “The Monks of Tibhirine” by John Kiser is “A richly detailed and moving account of (the prior’s) life and the fate of his abbey,” writes A. O. Scott in his “New York Times” review.

“'The Kids Are All Right' and 'Sex at Dawn'”

2011-02-09T15:09:00.002-05:00

We saw the new movie, “The Kids Are All Right,” the other night on DVD, and I thought of “Sex at Dawn,” the book I’ve been blogging about lately. The movie is about a lesbian couple, Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) with two teenage kids, Joni (Mia Wasikowska), 18, and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), 15. Joni searches for the man who was their sperm donor; she finds him nearby, and the plot thickens, mainly around Jules. She is the stay-at-home mom, who begins to work as a landscape designer for the donor, Paul, (Mark Ruffalo), and also begins to have sex with him. Jules is horrified by what her body is doing. She doesn’t love Paul; she doesn’t even like him very much, but she can’t stop. But, of course she does stop, and abruptly, when, at Paul’s during a dinner party with the whole family, Nic confronts Jules after finding Jules’ red hair in Paul’s shower and bed. With much weeping and gnashing of teeth, Jules admits her affair, but also blames Nic for being busy at work and distant.
At this point, I yelled at the TV, urging Jules to get in touch with her inner ape and proclaim that she came from female ancestors who had multiple partners and who called for more by their female copulatory vocalization (FCV) (The sex scenes were fairly noisy). Not surprisingly, she didn’t do this but continued to apologize and seek forgiveness from the family. Also, not surprisingly, they were very angry at her and furious at Paul, who is portrayed as a guy just going along for the ride. Although in the end, Jules and Nic seem to reconcile, Paul apparently is thrown into outer darkness and will never again be included in the family despite his reaching out to the kids. So, we’re left with a bruised quartet, rather than a possible quintet that might have included Paul. How sad.
And how sad that the five didn’t have insight into their ape natures, as discussed in “Sex at Dawn.” If they had realized that Jules was behaving naturally, they might have acknowledged similar feelings in themselves, understood, forgiven both her and Paul, and have begun a tentative search for an expanded family that included him.
Perhaps the moral is that we don’t always have to act out of our biology, but if we don’t know and accept our biology, we are likely to act, like Jules, without understanding and with much grief.

“A New Great Story”

2011-02-08T12:20:00.002-05:00

Humans are story-telling apes. We tell each other stories to share our “world” with one another. Sharing our stories and experiencing others’ helps us understand, explain, and change our stories, which are our realities, our lives. The most useful stories are those that take our existing narratives and re-tell them with new information and new insights so that we are compelled to re-examine our old stories and to change them to accommodate the new material. In making these changes, our “world” changes, and we experience it in new ways. Leaving our old “world” behind may be painful, but if we are to move forward with life, we must accept the pain and let the new insights create a new “world” for us.
I’ve recently read two “stories” that have caused me to re-examine my “world” and to begin to create a new story and a new “world” for myself. One is “Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality” by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, which I discussed in my posts on December 11 and 18, 2010 and on January 18 and 25, 2011. The other “story” is “A New Great Story” (Salem, Ore: Polebridge Press 2010) by Don Cupitt who writes: “In this book I aim to set before the general reader a fully-modern alternative to the traditional “Grand Narrative” theology of Latin or “Western,” Christianity…” (p1) This traditional narrative, which guided the West from the time of Constantine in the 4th century to the Enlightenment in the 18th, was set forth most notably in Augustine’s (CE 354-430) “The City of God.” It was “… a huge story of Everything that began and ended in eternity…” (p1) It tells of God’s creation of our world, our fall and redemption, the Last Judgment, and the triumph of the blessed. The Creeds summarize this story.
However, with Newton, Galileo, and Darwin we have new stories that, as the mathematician LaPlace said to Napoleon, have no need of God as a hypothesis. We are still coping with these new stories. Cupitt writes: “… the West found it extremely painful to relinquish its old faith, and extremely difficult to state its new faith with full philosophical clarity. Even yet, we have still not been able to settle into a lucid, confident and paradox-free secular-humanist world-view.” (p5) A major reason for this is our loss of “Objective Truth.” These new stories, specifically Darwinism tell us that “…our cognitive abilities are just survival-skills…” “…we cannot distinguish between ‘real’ truths and biologically useful fictions.” “All our knowledge is practical or ‘applied,’ and none is ‘pure.’” (p5) We are painfully learning that “There is no ready-made Real World, out there and fully independent of our language. There is only the historical succession of world-views, and of understandings of human nature, within the ceaseless motion of our language.” (p75)
Cupitt’s new grand narrative is based on these ideas. It “…will be a secular story about the whole process by which we have come to be what we are now are.” It will try to show how the world in our heads “…is made up of linguistic usages, myths, deep cultural assumptions, Gods, spirits, saints, our parents and our mentors, commandments prohibitions and valuations.” (p8) For most of human history our stories were predominantly religious, and they guided our progressive development. However, with the Enlightenment and the new scientific narratives, “…how are we to understand the queer fact that in the modern period religion seems to have led us beyond itself and become redundant?” (p9) As a result of this strange situation, Cupitt wants “a Christian narrative, and a story that makes religious sense, about the birth, the life, the death, and the afterlife of God.” (p9)
This new story is not about Fall and Redemption “… but the strangely-roundabout story of how we have become ourselves. It starts in the violent chaos of animal experience. Language irrupts, lighting up the chaos and beginning to make things intelligible and to shape life. The history of religion then develops as the story of how through language a world can be built, its law laid down, values posited, and long-term plans of action devised and carried out. Everything is first worked out at the supernatural level: the gods pioneered everything for us. Eventually, the fully developed Bronze-Age religious system produces a new breed of ‘enlightened’ individual critics – prophets, philosophers – who criticize it all and bring it all back down into the human beings for whose sake the whole process has been going on. The Grand Narrative then culminates in the Galilean preaching of Jesus, and the launch of a new divine-human way of living. The whole story is then surprisingly repeated into the history of Christianity, which also goes out into mediaeval elaboration, and then through its criticism in the Reformation and the Enlightenment gradually returns into the individual modern human being who at last feels able to accept contingency and to build a life of love without any remaining fear or bitterness.” (p9)
This progression of human religious development parallels to a remarkable extent the evolution of our sexuality described in “Sex at Dawn,” which outlines the evolution of our ancestors over the millions of years when they lived in foraging bands with multiple sexual partners. The rise of agriculture about 10,000 years ago led to, at least for women, monogamy. Monogamy grew out of agriculture, because a farmer wanted to be sure that his son, who was to inherit the farm, is indeed his son. To ensure this, the son’s mother had to have only the son’s father as a sexual partner. She must be kept from other men and to accomplish this, the father takes her as closely guarded property.
With agriculture, religion also changed. It became centralized and mediated by priests. Before agriculture, foragers and hunters moved about looking for food, with no fixed abode. Their gods moved before them, leading them into the future. In contrast, farmers settled down and needed markets for their produce. Markets developed into cities with the god’s temple on one side of the marketplace and the palace of the King, anointed by the god, on the other side. “By the priests, agriculture, religious cult, and culture were all woven together. And in particular, God invented markets, money and fair trade. God invented ‘centred’ life, and the city-state: politics, routine, law, and taxation. The first taxes, tithes, were paid to God the first landlord.” (p35)
The rigid hierarchy of this state religion could not completely eliminate the “…older type of religious professional – the charismatic, imaginative individual shaman or prophet …” (p61) We know best Israel’s prophets, who “…looked back to the simplicity and freedom of the old nomadic way of life…” (p63) These prophets sought “… a return of some form of religious immediacy. This in turn required democratization: God must decentre himself, coming down from heaven and distributing himself as spirit into human hearts…” (p64), as in hunter-gatherer times. This movement of our perception of God “…from the external socially-constructed world…” (p65) into ourselves comes to be known as “the Kingdom of God…”, and “…the old mystical yearning for union with God was also a demand for the disappearance of God as objective being, as Other. Instead, God becomes at last fully and completely internalized.” (p65)
Of course, this is the core message of Jesus: “… ‘the Kingdom of God’ was near, or had already arrived. The ancient prophetic hope was fulfilled. The divine world and the human life-world were at last coming together and becoming one.” “…God ceased to be an objective being. He had emptied himself out into human hearts. God and the human self were no longer two; they were now concentric. It followed that the difference between the pure and the impure, and between good and evil, was no longer imposed upon human beings ‘heteronomously’ – that is, in the form of a code of divine laws revealed to Moses and received thenceforth from tradition – but depended solely upon the autonomous human heart. Living well was not a matter of keeping rules: on the contrary, rule-morality does not produce and never could produce the kind of person Jesus wanted to see. No: for Jesus – who in moral philosophy was a straight emotivist and expressivist – you live well if you live in a ‘solar’ way, out from the heart, without any duplicity, so that your expressive life pours out upon a current of open, direct, generous and affirmative feeling. Jesus makes his point here by insisting that law-morality makes us mean-spirited. We are forever looking sideways at our neighbors, and feeling aggrieved if they are doing better than we think they deserve. He insists, paradoxically but brilliantly, that unless you are ready to go beyond mere justice and perform acts of ecstatic, excessive generosity, you are not a truly moral person at all.” (p68) In at least some of the sayings of Jesus, we can see: “…The superior human being (who) lives without resentiment or reactive feeling: he is purely affirmative. He does not nurse any kind of grudge or ill-feeling.” (p69) My post of Sept. 15, 2009 on Cupitt’s “Jesus & Philosophy” discusses this further.
Some of those who heard Jesus must have liked his message. “Otherwise, his memory and some of his words would not have reached us at all.” (p69) Of course, the synoptic gospels also preserve much sharp criticism: He was crazy, in league with the devil, kept bad company, lax about ritual purity and keeping the Sabbath, and he enjoyed feasting. He was eventually charged with being an all-out blasphemer and executed by the state. Cupitt thinks that the charges are historical; no one would have a motive for inventing them. He also thinks them justified. “Jesus was after all announcing the end of (his hearers’) world, and in many cases their livelihoods. St. Matthew tries, rather absurdly, to claim that Jesus endorsed the Mosaic Law in full (Matthew 5:17-19), but the fact is that not long after Jesus’ death the early Jewish Church did resolve not to impose the Law upon Gentile converts.” (p70)
“…the ethical teaching of Jesus in Galilee, approximately – and perhaps best preserved in Q/Luke … is Act Four of our new Grand Narrative theology and completes the main story. The plot is complete: everything has come together and there is only the endless, purely-contingent flow of things in our language-formed human life-world. … After Galilee there is no further or greater reality for us to aspire to.” The 1980 years since Jesus have seen repeated circular movements: a going out into catholic elaboration and the return into immediacy. “So, in a certain sense, we made God, and then God made us, completing his work by dying into us. Religious thought has been a laborious business, but it has somehow brought us a very long way. We are only a lot of dumb apes who have somehow been able to dream strange dreams that have lifted us out of the relative darkness of animal life, and made it at last possible for us moderns to say a whole-hearted Amen to our world, and to our own lives in it.” (p 75)

Nicholas Kristof, Don Cupitt, and the Sermon on the Mount

2011-01-27T14:42:00.011-05:00

Nicholas Kristof writes in his “New York Times” column today of the differences between the Roman Catholic bishops and Catholic hospitals around the country which are sometimes not as strict in their abortion policies as the bishops would like.
As I read his column, I was struck by this passage:
“To me, this battle illuminates two rival religious approaches, within the Catholic church and any spiritual tradition. One approach focuses upon dogma, sanctity, rules and the punishment of sinners. The other exalts compassion for the needy and mercy for sinners — and, perhaps, above all, inclusiveness.”
This echoes almost uncannily Don Cupitt’s reading of the Sermon on the Mount in his “A New Great Story” (2010), which I quoted in my post on January 25th. He points out that The Sermon on the Mount is a mixture of passages that call for the “…almost existentialist ethic of open whole-hearted expression, and freedom from anxiety or calculation” (Matthew 5:13-16, 38-48, and 6:25-34). and others that “…take for granted the value of a strictly-interpreted religious Law, and a piety of secret good works and hidden inwardness which pursues and expects a heavenly reward after death.” (5:17-33, and 6:1-20 and 24) (p81, 82)
In Kristoff’s interpretation, the actions of some leaders of the Catholic hospitals could be seen as existentialistic and whole-hearted with anxiety and calculation taking the hindmost. While the bishops’ position values a strictly-interpreted religious Law with heaven as a reward for obedience to this Law. Cupitt writes of the Sermon on the Mount: “The difference is astonishing. In the two groups of sayings we find two entirely different, indeed opposite religious personalities.” (p82) He also points out that these different approaches are “…deeply embedded within the best texts we have”. (p81) What Cupitt calls “Church Christianity” had begun, by the year 50, shifting the focus “…from Jesus’ teaching to his person – and in particular his exalted status in the cosmic hierarchy”. (p79) It is this latter position that the bishops are defending today. Kristof writes about one such instance of “Church Christianity”: The bishop of Phoenix demanded that St. Joseph’s Hospital there never again terminate a pregnancy to save the life of a mother. In contrast, Linda Hunt, the president of St. Joseph’s responded, “St. Joseph’s will continue through our words and deeds to carry out the healing ministry of Jesus.” Two starkly different positions each rooted in different parts of the Sermon on the Mount. You pays your money, and you takes your choice.

My Response to David T.'s comment

2011-01-25T14:42:00.002-05:00

David T. has commented on my post on January 18th. Below is my response to his comment.
David,
Thank you for your comment. Monogamy and the nuclear family are often bound together in our culture, and, as you point out, children’s loss of stable relationships within the fragile nuclear family can be very hard on them. Of course, the more complex webs of adult relationships you write of are a good remedy for the shortcomings of the nuclear family and probably reflect to some extent the relationships within our ancestral foraging bands. In the case of my own family, my children had extended relationships. This was especially true of my younger son who found great strength within the family of his best friend, whom he met in second grade. My son and his friend initiated this relationship, and all that the rest of us needed to do was to encourage it. I think that families would do well to be on the lookout for the possibilities of such ad hoc extended families and then to foster them.
What can be said about fundamentalists? Not much except to emphasize that if you start with a false premise, you get a bad outcome. The rest of us have to keep on offering other positions in contrast to this lust for certainty. One good alternative is Cupitt’s solar living: Give yourself away like the sun, shining for all, doing your best without regard for reward or the assurance of success. This is difficult, but it is a lot of the reason why Jesus is such a compelling figure. As Cupitt points out, his “…almost existentialist ethic of open whole-hearted expression, and freedom from anxiety or calculation” (p82 in “A Great New Story,” 2010) can be found in some of Jesus’ sayings in the Sermon on the Mount, (Matthew 5:13-16, 38-48, and 6:25-34) but not in other passages (5:17-33, and 6:1-20 and 24), which are mixed in with the other sayings. These “…take for granted the value of a strictly-interpreted religious Law, and a piety of secret good works and hidden inwardness which pursues and expects a heavenly reward after death.” (p81, 82, “A Great New Story”) Cupitt draws attention to the fact that “…the conflict between the original outlook of Jesus himself and the remodeled Jesus of the emergent Church is already deeply embedded within the best texts we have, making it very difficult in all periods for people to hear Jesus’ own voice. (p 81, “A Great New Story”) Obviously, these two opposing views are still with us. No wonder we struggle to follow Jesus. It’s either extremely difficult or just a matter of “faith.” May the Spirit be with you in your struggle.

My Response to Bob Y’s comment on “Sex at Dawn”

2011-01-18T13:42:00.002-05:00

Bob,
Thanks for you comment on my post on "Sex at Dawn" (December 18, 2010). Here is my response.
Yes, modern sexuality is complex and bewildering, because, as “Sex at Dawn” maintains, we don’t recognize that we are apes, or, more to the point of your comments, we are still apes. Sexually, we tend to act like apes, specifically our closest ape cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos, and we chafe at the restrictions of monogamy. We and these two other species evolved to live in foraging bands, in which all is shared: food, sex, and the perils in the environment. Before the rise of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, our ancestors had to depend for survival on the other members of the band with what Ryan and Jethá call fierce egalitarianism. Nothing like that exists today in our agricultural or post-agricultural world. We left interdependent foraging bands behind for the advantages of agriculture, namely a steady food supply and a settled existence that in some ways was less dangerous than foraging, which necessitated fending off predators.
However, agricultural societies have features that can be viewed as disadvantages, especially compared to the dynamics of foraging bands. Perhaps most important is the loss of equality between the sexes. Although equality in the bands is not complete, males and females have sex with many partners within and outside the band. As a result, the paternity of offspring is both not known and not an issue; the offspring are members of the band and are raised communally by the band.
However, with agriculture came the concepts of paternity and of private property. Farm land is possessed and passed down from father to son. The land becomes the most important possession the father has, and he wants to be sure that it is passed down to the one who is without doubt his son. Paternity must no longer be unknown, as in the band, and, in order to insure that the son has one father, known without doubt, the mother must have only the father as a sex partner. In order to enforce this arrangement, the woman becomes the father’s property, controlled as strictly as the land.
Also, with agriculture, came produce. With excess produce came trading, and with trading came trading centers that became cities. Cities developed a ruling class of administrators to regulate trade and priests to mediate between man and a distant, exalted God who was worshipped in the hope of ensuring good crops and peace. Or not. Because land was of ultimate value, agriculture also led to armies that waged war to defend property or to gain more. So, agriculture has much to answer for: patriarchy, monogamy, private property, cities, armies, and war, for starters.
However, as you point out, today most people live in post-agricultural, urban societies, but these are still defined to a large extent by private property and war. Although you’re correct that in many societies, especially outside the U.S., traditional extramarital arrangements have eased the strictures of monogamy, this easing chiefly benefits males without much disturbing the primary monogamous marriage. What clearly threatens monogamy, as you also point out, is the rise of women’s sexual liberation. At least in theory, women need no longer be dependent on men for support, nor do they need husbands to have children. Moreover, as with men in modern urban societies, their work outside the home can become their primary focus, and their relationships with their colleagues may become more important to them than their relationships with members of their families. With these changes, the important question today becomes how do these changes affect children? Most studies point to the advantages to children of parents who are present for their children throughout their lives. How do we insure continuity for our children while the traditional structures of patriarchy and monogamy are disappearing, and while wars continue unrelentingly? Going back to foraging bands clearly is not the answer, but in our post-agricultural, “liberated” societies, what is the way forward?

Bob Y.'s comment on my post on "Sex at Dawn"

2010-12-18T23:57:00.002-05:00

Below I'm showing Bob Y's comment on my post on "Sex at Dawn", because I can't get it to go into the comment box. I'll comment on his comment as soon as possible.
PeteM

Dear Peter,
I read your blog while taking a break from a major task/chore. You have certainly put a great deal of effort and thought into it. And that sti9mulates serious thinking on the part of the readers. I think, however, that sexuality particularly in the modern context is a much more complex and bewildering subject. Let me share my impressions albeit it is from the perspective of male-female interactions.
Culture: this is perhaps one of the most important variables in defining sexuality. In many societies in Asia and the Mediterranean, sexuality can occur in two different contexts. One is directly linked with marriage, family, and social stability. That sexuality is monogamous and is directed towards having children. At the same time, and socially acceptable, there is sexuality that exists outside of the marriage and is cemented by emotion, personal feelings, and a broader freedom in selection of mates. And it may turn out to yield a true companionship, but does not have to lead to children.
Modernity and change. There are major trends that affect how sexuality is expressed. Among others:
Urbanization: your thesis is grounded on the ideas of an agricultural society. However, UN statistics indicate that this year, more than 51% of the world's population will be urban and that this will increase rapidly beyond that. Besides that, multimedia technology now has introduced rural communities to the values of an urban society. So increasingly, the definitions of sexuality will be increasingly that which exists in the cities.
Science: we have done well in expanding the frontiers of reproductive medicine. For one, we can now routinely make use of contraception to avoid having children, i.e., self-standing yuppie couples. Alternatively, you can have children without necessarily having a relationship or even intercourse - in vitro fertilization, surrogate parenthood. So sexuality can be detached from the bearing of children.
Workplace: the explosive growth of women in the skilled and professional workplace. This allows women to be financially independent which can lead to the choice of being single mothers. Again we see the separation of a sexual relationship from having children. But perhaps what I find most interesting is the development of workplace relationships where a man and a woman will spend most of their time and a great deal of their emotional and intellectual energies in shared efforts to the degree that they have more in common with each other than with their formal partners. This can occur even in the absence of a sexual affair which makes it interesting that it can be seen as sexuality without sex.
So changes in sexuality are likely to accelerate driven by the forces sketched above. Yes, Peter, sex and sexuality are a complicated business.
Best, Bob
________________________________________

“Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality”

2010-12-11T12:52:00.006-05:00

God wants abundance for all, says Isaiah: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear.” (25:6) Luke tells us Jesus says that the basis of abundance is sharing: “Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.’’ (6:38) Sharing also precedes the feeding of the multitude in all four Gospels (Matthew 14:13–21, Mark 6:31-44, Luke 9:10-17 and John 6:5-15). In these stories, Jesus takes the disciples’ little bits of bread and fish, blesses them, and, lo, everyone has more than enough: “And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full” (Matthew 14:20).
In other words, sharing is God’s way. At least when it comes to food, but most definitely not when it comes to sex, according to the Bible. For example in Matthew 19:4-6, Jesus is quoted as saying: “…Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” No sharing here. As the traditional marriage ceremony says: “…and forsaking all others, (will you) be faithful to him (her) as long as you both shall live?” According to Christian tradition, monogamy in committed relationships is God’s way.
But, it is not evolution’s way. As Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá write in their new book, “Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality”, “We didn’t descend from apes, we are apes.” And we are closely related to two other apes, bonobos and chimpanzees, because just five million years ago (an evolutionary blink), they and we shared a common hypersexual ancestor, making bonobos, chimps, and, yes, us, horny and ready for sex with multiple partners all the time. Remember, a genius is someone who thinks about sex only 95% of the time.
Up until about 10,000 years ago, we, like bonobos and chimps in the wild, lived in small foraging groups of about 100 to 150 individuals who moved around to find food and who shared almost everything, including food, shelter, protection, child care, even sexual pleasure. (p6) Although romantic love was not unknown in prehistoric communities, with or without love, a casual sexuality was the norm for our prehistoric ancestors.
However, about 10,000 years ago, human life changed profoundly. We discovered farming and we settled down to farm and raise domesticated animals. We no longer foraged over large areas, but settled down and farmed. Agriculture could, in good seasons, produce food surpluses and allow more people to survive, but it also led to: “…hierarchical political structures, private property, densely populated settlements, a radical shift in the status of women, and other social configurations that together represent an enigmatic disaster for our species: human population growth mushroomed as quality of life plummeted. The shift to agriculture, wrote author Jared Diamond, is a ‘catastrophe from which we have never recovered.’ (p9) Before agriculture, our “…ancestors lived in groups where most mature individuals would have had several ongoing sexual relationships at any given time. Though often casual, these relationships were not random or meaningless.” (p9) “An individual male’s parental investment,…the core element of the standard narrative (supporting monogamy), tends to be diffuse in societies like those in which we evolved, not directed toward one particular woman and her children…” (p13) Instead hunter-gatherer societies are characterized by their fierce egalitarianism. “Sharing is not just encouraged; it’s mandatory. Hoarding or hiding food, for example, is considered deeply shameful, almost unforgivable behavior in these societies.” (p11)
Sharing, however, became a casualty of agriculture. “…it became crucially important to know where your field ended and your neighbor’s began. Remember the tenth commandment: ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house; thou shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is thy neighbour's.’ (Exodus 20:17) Clearly, the biggest loser (aside from slaves, perhaps) in the agricultural revolution was the human female, who went from occupying a central, respected role in foraging societies to becoming another possession for a man to earn and defend, along with his house, slaves, and livestock.” (p14) “Land could now be possessed, owned, and passed down the generations. Food that had been hunted and gathered now had to be sowed, tended, harvested, stored, defended, bought, and sold. Fences, walls, and irrigation systems had to be built and reinforced; armies to defend it all had to be raised, fed, and controlled. Because of private property, for the first time in the history of our species, paternity became a crucial concern.” (p 14, 15) So, perversely, agriculture, which increased food production, also restricted access to food and, because women became property, to heterosexual sex as well. Furthermore, Ryan and Jethá quote Timothy Taylor, author of “The Prehistory of Sex”: “While hunter-gatherer sex had been modeled on an idea of sharing and complementarity, early agriculturist sex was voyeuristic, repressive, homophobic, and focused on reproduction.” “Afraid of the wild, farmers set out to destroy it.” (p 14) Farming, which increased food supplies for those lucky enough to own land, also introduced scarcity for all those who were landless and poor.
Also, the focus on paternity and keeping the private land in the family in agricultural societies set us on the road to monogamy, always unlikely, because we evolved to want multiple partners, which minimizes the genetic perils of interbreeding. Even today, which after all is only 10,000 years since our foraging days, many men and women want multiple sex partners. However, “…the true story of human sexuality (is) so subversive and threatening that for centuries it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized by physicians, studiously ignored by scientists, and covered up by moralizing therapists.” (p2)
Monogamy is difficult and usually boring. The “bloom is off the rose” too soon, and many husbands and wives stop having frequent sex. Men can develop a roving eye and indulge in extramarital activities, leaving their wives neglected and angry. It’s not that men no longer love their wives, but rather they begin to love them as their “best friend” or “sister,” a sure sign that the incest taboo has become active. Furthermore, male and female orgasms are very different. Men can usually be aroused and ejaculate quickly. Too quickly, women complain. They often take longer to become aroused, but once they are, they want many more orgasms. And often they let anyone in earshot know their desire for more by their female copulatory vocalization (FCV). These sounds in other primates are invitations to males outside their own troop to come and mate, thus increasing the chances that their eggs will be fertilized by sperm from males unrelated to the males in the female’s group. (p257) It’s a good bet that these sounds in women evolved to serve the same purpose. Ryan and Jethá write: “This symmetry of dual disappointment (of men and women in monogamous relationships) illustrates the almost comical incompatibility between men’s and women’s sexual response in the context of monogamous mating.” If men and women evolved to be monogamous, why are they so incompatible? Ryan and Jethá suggest: “…isn’t it time to accept that our ancestors evolved along a sexual trajectory similar to that of our two highly social, very intelligent, closely related primate cousins (who evolved in promiscuous groups)?” (p245) They continue: “Perhaps the far-fetched denial of our promiscuous sexual prehistory expresses a legitimate fear of social instability, but insistent demands for a stable social order (based, as we’re often reminded, upon the nuclear family unit) cannot erase the effects of the hundreds of thousands of years that came before our species settled into stable villages.” (p246)
Furthermore, whether we’re for or against monogamy, it is failing, and with this failure, “the nuclear family unit” is disintegrating. Ryan and Jethá write: “In 2008, almost 40 percent of the mothers who gave birth in the United States were unmarried.” However, two parents are better for children than only one. Ryan and Jethá quote Caitlin Flanagan in Time magazine: “On every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households.” The outcomes included longevity, drug abuse, school performance, dropout rates, teen pregnancy, criminal behavior, and incarceration. (p302, 303)
The village that Hillary Clinton writes about in her book, “It Takes a Village,” can help relieve the pressure on the nuclear family and provide needed support for single parent families, but it wouldn’t restore us, our families, and our sex lives to Edenic bliss, where food and sex partners were readily available for all. A village is basically an agricultural settlement, and with the rise of villages, our foraging days ended. Moreover, improved agriculture has increased the earth’s population to unsustainable levels. In just the last 2000 years, population has grown from 170 million to nearly 7 billion. (p156) With all these people, there is no longer room to roam and forage.
We need to discover new ways to be sexual and familial in this post-foraging, post-monogamous world. As we struggle with the knowledge of our sexuality and the failure of monogamy, will the church help or hinder our efforts? It’s all too easy to dismiss the church as an impediment to sexual progress, but the Gospel is ever calling for us to be true to ourselves and thus to God. Remember John 8:31, 32: “Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’” One “word” attributed to Jesus, quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18b, is: ‘“…you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”’ (Mark 12:31, 32) If we embrace the “truth” that we are sexual beings who seek multiple partners, we may also begin to experience these partners as “neighbors.” It worked for our foraging ancestors; can it work for us, their descendants?
To read more comments on “Sex at Dawn,” go to: http://www.google.com/search?q=Sex+at+Dawn+%2B+reviews&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8

The Bullying of Gay Youth: What Can be Done to Stop It?

2010-10-07T11:59:00.017-04:00

What can be done to stop the bullying of gay youth? The horrible deaths of the young men reported recently in the media are very disturbing. What can we do to stop this bullying? Below are some suggestions.

1) Keshet (http://www.keshetonline.org/), the organization that works for full inclusion of sexual minorities in Jewish life, suggests:

Ten Things You Can Do Today to Strengthen Our (LBGT) Community

1. Find truth in the Torah. Ask your rabbi to give a Dvar Torah (or write your own) about the tragic events of the past month and our responsibility as Jews to speak out and work to end homophobia and transphobia. Here's a beautiful example from Rabbi David Mitchell, Radlett & Bushey Reform Synagogue, UK.

2. Speak out. The next time you hear someone say "That's so gay," tell that person why those words are hurtful and can have disastrous consequences.

3. Make your support visible. Post a Jewish GLBT Safe Zone sticker in your synagogue, classroom, camp bunk, office, or website.

4. Take action for equal rights. Contact your legislator to support ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that prevents people from being fired or discriminated against at work for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.

5. Keep youth safe and supported. If you are a Jewish educator or administrator at an educational institution, provide training and resources for your staff on how to create safe, inclusive spaces for GLBT and questioning youth. Help start a Gay-Straight Alliance.

6. Come out as an ally. October 11 is National Coming Out Day. If you are a straight Jewish community leader, let people know that you are an ally to GLBT people and keep the messages of support coming.

7. Come out. If you identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and/or queer, come out and keep coming out. This simple act will help others.

8. Talk to your children. Middle and high school students witness homophobic and transphobic bullying and teasing every day. Tell your children you support them and that all kids deserve to be treated with respect and kindness.

9. Tell your story. Whether you are queer or a straight ally, upload a video to the It Gets Better Project" and share your story with young people who need to hear your message. Visit the Make it Better Project to see powerful stories about what young queers and allies are doing right now to improve their schools and communities.

10. Seek support/give support. If you or someone you know is struggling with issues around sexual orientation and/or gender identity, know that you are not alone. Crisis support is available 24/7 through The Trevor Project, 1.866-4.U.TREVOR.

Do Not Stand Idly By: A Jewish Community Pledge to Save Lives. Go to the Keshet website to sign it Now!

2) From the news website, 365Gay, John Culhane suggests many avenues of action. See his column at: http://www.365gay.com/opinion/culhane-what-can-be-done-about-bullying/

May we find truth in the Torah!

"A Huge Loss of Belief in the Fundamental Narratives of Christianity and Judaism"

2010-08-17T08:57:00.004-04:00

The letter below, published in the "New York Times" on August 14th, describes in a few words the challenge facing all religious organizations today: How do people view the relationship between divinity and humanity? Our search today is for a way of talking convincingly about this relationship, if it exists.
In his latest book, "Theology's Strange Return" (London: SCM Press, 2010), Don Cupitt writes about how talk about that relationship is evolving. He points out "... that a surprising amount of traditional Christian belief - including a new Grand Narrative, and a non-metaphysical theology - is currently returning to us in secular form." How will this play out? Our search continues.

Re “Congregations Gone Wild” (Op-Ed, Aug. 8):
Although G. Jeffrey MacDonald’s essay about the congregational ministry is on the mark in many ways, the real issue is much deeper than “congregational pressure to forsake one’s highest calling.” It is a huge loss of belief in the fundamental narratives of Christianity and Judaism, the biblical concepts of divinity in relation to humanity. The crisis of the ministry is theological.
During the many years I served in the congregational rabbinate, I witnessed the radical changes taking place in the beliefs or nonbeliefs of both professionals and congregants. Nothing will solve this problem except radically revised theological perspectives in response to radically new conditions, if that is even possible.
Jack D. Spiro
Richmond, Va., Aug. 8, 2010

History Ain't on Your Side

2010-08-03T10:24:00.005-04:00

I found the Blog post below on CCBlogs. It's by Marvin Lindsay whose blog is called Avdat. The URL is: http://marvinlindsay.typepad.com/avdat.
I'm glad someone else has read Peter Brown. I wrote about his treatment of sexual renunciation on my blog in a post called, "The Curse of Virginity." It's at: http://churchofnon-realism.blogspot.com/2007/09/curse-of-virginity.html

27 July 2010
History Ain't On Your Side
by Marvin Lindsay
My next contribution to the peace, unity and purity of the church will be to teach a course on early Christian sexuality. If we're condemned to fight over sex ad infinitum, I want both liberals and conservatives to know that neither has history on its side.

Imagine a time when substantial numbers of Christians regarded procreation as a great evil. Imagine a time when the counter-cultural "left" practiced sexual renunciation. It's not some science fiction future. We've been there and done that.

As part of a directed study on monasticism I read Peter Brown's The Body and Society and Susanna Elm's Virgins of God. Both are excellent historical works. Brown's book could just as easily been titled All the Reasons Why Primitive Christians Quit Having Sex.

There were practical reasons, to be sure. Given the appalling levels of infant and childhood mortality, Roman women needed to give birth to six children just to maintain the population level. The Caesars pressured them to do just that, for the ruling class needed offspring to inherit all that upper crust wealth. Patriotism asks a lot of its soldiers, but Roman patriotism asked even more of its women. Six kids! In fourth world squalor! No wonder many Christian women found celibacy appealing.

But a purely materialist explanation won't suffice. It was the power of an idea that drove many Christians, male and female, to renounce sex.

Origen's ideas, especially. Origen theorized that before we were born, our souls had rebelled, and we fell into material bodies. Origen did not regard the body as evil, as Gnostics did, but as God's tailor-made tool to instruct the soul on how to return to God.

Sexuality then, was not part and parcel of our identity, for sexuality belongs to our material existence in this world. Didn't Jesus say that in heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels? Origenist thought held out the possibility that here and now one could transcend one's embodied and thus sexual nature.

Renouncing sex was one means. Fasting was another. A diet of one loaf of bread a day will, over time, cause your period to dry up and your breasts to shrivel. Women went into the Egyptian desert and passed for male monks. Origen's notorious act of castrating himself did not prevent him from having sex, but it did diminish his secondary sexual characteristics, most notably the philosopher's beard his competitors would have grown in Alexandria.

For other Christians, celibacy was tinged with apocalyptic fever. Tatian's disciples in Syria wondered why anyone would have children, because procreation just fed the death machine. Quit reproducing, and the kingdom will come.

The non-canonical Acts of Thomas, to which we owe the legend that Doubting Thomas preached the gospel in India, contains a similar idea. On the way to India, Thomas ruins a royal wedding when he convinces the bride and groom make a chaste marriage because kids are more trouble than they're worth. The King was not amused when he realized this stranger had cheated him of grandchildren.

In the early fourth century, this stew of ideas had generated bands of mixed sex, wandering prophets whose women cut their hair short, ridiculed marriage in general and married clergy in particular, and showed no interest in settling down and leading orderly lives, much less begetting offspring for the good of the Empire.

Other Christians were appalled, and as the fourth century unfolded, it would prove to be a decisive one not only for doctrine and church-state relations, but for sexual ethics. The misogynist Jerome and monastic architect Basil insisted that the body could not be transcended but only transformed. They developed a two-tired system of clerical celibacy and strictly monogamous lay marriage, with monastics separated into male and female houses--not over against pagan hedonism, but over against celibate Christian "extremists," whom they regarded as the real enemy.

This is why I love history; it scrambles your categories.

If conservative means preserving the past, then today's conservatives are holding on to a rather thin slice of it. Where are the conservatives who dare to proclaim the old time religion of: celibacy good, childlessness better, androgyny best?

Likewise, while critiques of empire are here, there and everywhere on the Christian left, I am unaware of any that make celibacy a core practice of imperial resistance. Today's feminists would liberate women from gender discrimination and for orgasm. But the feminists of old secured the former by turning their backs on the latter.

Neat, huh?

Hiding Lorenz Hart

2010-07-26T10:44:00.005-04:00

Last night at Guild Hall in East Hampton, we attended “Heart to Hart,” another performance in the American Musical Theatre series, hosted by Lee Davis. The program sung beautifully by the cabaret stars Anna Bergman and Malcolm Getz, highlighted the funny, sad, insightful lyrics of Lorenz (Larry) Hart, set to the music of Richard Rogers, his longtime collaborator. They wrote many of the great classics of the ‘20s and ‘30s, including “There's a Small Hotel,” “I Wish I Were In Love Again,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Where Or When,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” “Spring Is Here,” “Falling In Love With Love,” “Sing For Your Supper,” “This Can't Be Love,” “I Didn't Know What Time It Was,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “I Could Write a Book,” and, of course, “Way Out West on West End Avenue.”
Lee Davis outlined Hart’s life in his usual amiable style, pointing out that Hart, as productive as he was, struggled all his adult life with alcohol, which led to long disappearances and erratic behavior that frustrated Rogers who had very regular work habits. Unfortunately, Davis didn’t mention the signal aspect of Hart’s life that helps explain much of that difficult, sad life: He was a closeted homosexual. As far as is known, Hart never formed a loving relationship with either a man or a woman. Although Davis said he never got the girl, it seems unlikely that he tried very hard. One of those “girls” was Vivian Siegel, the star of “Pal Joey,” a Rogers and Hart hit in 1940. She turned him down when he proposed, saying she already had a difficult husband.
Instead of women, Hart had sex with men, primarily compliant chorus boys and male prostitutes. However, according to “Musicals 101” (http://www.musicals101.com/gay5b.htm), “…Hart found little enjoyment in his homosexual liaisons. Terrified of intimacy, he would wait for sex partners to fall asleep, then creep out of bed and curl up on the floor of his bedroom closet to get some sleep.” And as “glbtq Arts” points out (http://www.glbtq.com/arts/hart1_l.html), “…despite having written lyrics as witty as any sung on the Broadway stage before or since, Hart is best remembered for his songs of unfulfilled desire and failed romance.”
So, as with so many artists, his sad homosexual life was a major source of the art that has given us words to express our joy and our sadness. Too bad that Lee Davis hid this major aspect of Hart’s life. In 2010, we and those we love, including Larry Hart, don’t have to be in the closet.

“Lulu”

2010-05-11T11:44:00.001-04:00

Although ostensibly set in the late 1880s, in my mind, Alban Berg’s opera, “Lulu,” which I saw Saturday at the Metropolitan Opera, reflects, instead, the time when it was written: the 1920s and ‘30s in Austria and Germany. Its keyless, 12-tone, atonal music is compelling and conveys both the sexual and political freedom as well as the uncertainty, of the Weimar Republic, which was struggling with hyperinflation and widespread unemployment, leading often to poverty, misery and despair.
Lulu is representative of the period. An urchin abandoned on the street, she is taken in by Dr. Schön, a wealthy newspaper publisher, who raises her and eventually, as if by right, takes her as his mistress. Her beauty and allure soon bring her husbands, including Dr. Schön, and many lovers, even as she seems uninvolved with and unaffected by their passion. Also, Lulu and her circle, like so many during this giddy time, lived extravagantly, often speculating in risky stocks, hoping to keep their high life going. For example, during the first scene of the third act, set appropriately in a casino, many present have invested everything in a railroad stock. Just before it collapses, an investor, asking if it is safe, is told that, “We bankers know our business, dear.” This elicited a knowing laugh from the nearly full house.
Like the stock, Lulu’s life collapses when she escapes to London to evade a blackmailing pimp at the casino who threatens to tell the police about Lulu’s murder of Dr. Schön. With no money, she becomes a common whore and is herself murdered by Jack the Ripper, mourned only by her faithful lesbian admirer, Countess Geschwitz.
Lulu’s unhappy, wasted life reminds me of the paintings of rich women and the wretched street prostitutes of Germany painted by the great Expressionist, Otto Dix. The Neue Galerie in New York has mounted the first major retrospective of his work in North America. You can see these powerful paintings through August 30th, but you have only two more chances to see “Lulu”: Wednesday, the 12th at 8 PM and Saturday, the 15th, at 12:30 PM. The principal singers, Marlis Petersen as Lulu, James Morris as Dr. Schön, and Anne Sofie von Otter as the Countess Geschwitz are all superb, conveying the power and fascination of Lulu as she rises and falls. I urge you to see this wonderful work. You will never forget “Lulu.”
And to get a compelling picture of Wiemar’s sexual demimonde and the conditions that brought Hitler to power, read “A Trace of Smoke” by Rebecca Cantrell. In it, a female reporter in 1931 Berlin learns that her transvestite brother has been murdered, and she sets out to find out who did it. As she searches, we get a vivid picture of the desperation and corruption that bred Nazism. It will keep you reading to learn what happens.

“Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life”

2010-04-30T12:31:00.000-04:00

“Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life” is a new DVD (2009) from the BBC and from their premiere naturalist, David Attenborough, who has produced many nature programs, all of which have amazing photography. This latest program also has stunning visuals, but it is a more intimate approach aiming at understanding the process by which Darwin developed his theory of evolution by natural selection. At the center of this development was Darwin’s struggle with the religious outlook of most of the western world. This outlook not only maintained that God created each species separately, but also that humans were created to be above the natural world. Humans were created to “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:28) This passage has given license to all those who have exploited the world for selfish gain, leading most recently to the biggest oil spill in history.
Darwin not only put forth evidence that species changed with natural selection, but that humans were just as much a part of the natural world as were all the other organisms. Thus, he saw that his ideas would challenge not only given religious positions, but also the established hierarchy of humans above the animals and plants. None of this sat well with Britain’s very class conscious movers and shakers. So, Darwin’s continual bouts of illness may have had an organic basis, but they were likely exacerbated by his anxiety about the reception of his ideas.
Despite his anxiety, he was forced to publish his great book, “The Origin of Species,” sooner than he had planned as the result of receiving an essay from another naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, who presented the idea of evolution by natural selection independently. So, Darwin promptly wrote “Origin” with the general reader in mind, and, at its publication in 1859, as he predicted, it was not received well. Of course, we are still dealing with the objections of those who don’t share Darwin’s vision. This vision not only presented a world at odds with the biblical account, but, perhaps even more important, it placed humans among, not above, other organisms. The copious evidence he assembled in the book to support his ideas, as well as the mountains of evidence that has come forward since, has not changed the minds of those unwilling to be convinced by evidence. A recent instance of this has been the hearings of the Texas Board of Education, where evolution was presented as being against the established order of a “Christian nation.”
Attenborough does a masterly job of presenting, not only the facts on which the concept of evolution is based, but also Darwin’s struggle to bring this idea to the consciousness of the world. I hope you watch this program.

“After God: The Future of Religion”

2010-03-29T17:15:00.001-04:00

Don Cupitt summarizes “After God: The Future of Religion” (1997. New York: BasicBooks) as follows: “Although the point is obvious, it remains curiously difficult to recognize that we made it all up. We evolved the entire syllabus. We have slowly evolved our own languages, our values, our systems of knowledge, our religions, and our world views. We evolved even our subjective consciousness, because the brightness, the consciousness, of conscious experience is a by-product of language.” (p 126)
It is curiously difficult for us to grasp this simple idea, because we still believe, or want to believe, in the Real. Plato with his ideal forms out there, not here, was the source of idea of the real, and, as Cupitt writes, “…Western philosophy was oriented mainly toward knowledge of the Real. Objective knowledge was priced high, with top standards of certainity, evidence, and lucidity; and the Real, in the sense of something other than ourselves and overwhelmingly bigger than ourselves, was something very powerful, beyond time and change.” (pp 39-40)
Of course, the most Real is God, but with the enlightenment and the work of “…critical philosophers, (Descartes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Derrida), the old assumptions of Western or ‘platonic’ metaphysics have been brought to light and have crumbled away, so the credibility and even the very intelligibility of God have steadily faded away.” (p 62)
The platonic God has faded away in modern life because, as these philosophers made clear, our “real” God is a product of our language. It is our language that is “real” to us. Given that, Cupitt puts forward a new linguistic theory of religious practice and religious objects, as follows:
1. “As both philosophy and religion have in the past taught, there is indeed an unseen intelligible world, or spirit world, about us and within us.
2. The invisible world is the world of words and other symbols.
3. The entire supernatural world of religion is a mythical representation of the world of language.
4. Through the practice of its religion, a society represents to itself, and confirms, the varied ways in which its language builds its world.” (p XV)

But the major religious traditions are coming to an end. Some religious art may survive but not the doctrine. As Cupitt points out, most of Christian theology has been lost. Today, who can explain how Christ’s death made atonement for our sins or the nature of doctrine of the Trinity? (p 81) Most people haven’t got this vocabulary, and they certainly can’t use it to explain these ideas. Cupitt suggests that religion can still be useful, however, if we pick out certain religious concepts that we can use to express our religious ideas and feelings. He discusses three ideas that may be helpful: the eye of God, the blissful void, and solar living.
The belief in God can survive and can be defended if it is seen as involving a certain form of consciousness and practice of selfhood. The eye of God idea is the practice of looking at oneself and one’s world as if through the eye of God – that is, from the universal and ideal standpoint. Doing this heightens consciousness, provides a conscience, and helps in seeing oneself and others with a greater clarity of moral vision. (p 85) It’s a God’s eye view of the Golden Rule, and, as such, may help us make our behavior more humane and kinder.
In discussing the blissful void, Cupitt calls our attention to the cool sublime as exemplified by Barnett Newman’s “Day One” (1951-52) in the collection of the Whitney Museum of Art in New York. It is an unframed plain scarlet rectangle about twelve feet tall and four feet wide, like a swimming pool. The eye dives in and the painting swallows the viewer up. As Newman declared, “The Sublime is Now.” Cupitt writes that it is “…the disappearance of the self into immanence, objectivity, and nothingness.” (p 88) He suggests that we use “…the Discipline of the void, the meditation upon the underlying universal emptiness and nothingness, as a background against which to set and see the flux of our life.” (p 89)
Solar living calls for an awareness of this continual flux. We are to live like the sun, giving our all all the time. The sun gives life by dying all the time, heedless of its own existence in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. “Solar ethics is a radically emotivist and expressionist reading of the ethics of Jesus.” (p 90)
These three ideas, Cupitt maintains, are “…what is most worth preserving from the old religions, and perhaps offer a starting point for the religion of the future. We give up the notion of religion as a system of reassuring supernatural beliefs; and we adopt instead the idea of religion as a toolkit.” (p 90)
This is, of course, just the barest outline of Cupitt’s engaging take on the state of religion today. I hope you seek out this short book (128 pages) and read for yourself. I have an extra copy that I will give to anyone who wants it. Just let me know.

Body Language: Jesus and Benedict XVI

2010-03-28T14:57:00.001-04:00

In today’s “Times,” Frank Bruni concludes his article about the sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church by writing, “The persistence of the child sexual abuse crisis, intensifying once again, suggests that the church’s defensive posture may in fact be a self-defeating one.” Today is Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy week. The first reading for today describes a figure, from Isaiah’s Servant Songs, who does not assume a defensive posture: “I gave my back to those who stuck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.” (Isaiah 50:6). The note in the insert containing this reading notes that “…Christians have often recognized the figure of Christ in these poems.” And indeed, the Gospel writers portray Jesus in his passion as being open to everything his accusers and tormenters heaped upon him. He went to his death without assuming a defensive posture.
Even as the church has lost credibility, the figure of Jesus still attracts many. They see in the Gospel portraits of him, a man who turns the other cheek, who is not violent in the face of hatred. We say this is not realistic, we must defend ourselves. And yet his example still beckons from our warfields and our torture chambers and in our hearts, even as we turn sorrowfully away from his example.
Mark Twain wrote that Christianity is the greatest religion; too bad it’s never been tried. Too bad for us; too bad for Benedict XVI.

“The Ghostwriter”: Polanski’s Thumb in the U.S.’s Eye

2010-03-27T11:38:00.001-04:00

Last night, we saw Roman Polanski’s new film, “The Ghostwriter.” It operates on two levels, as an exciting, scary thriller, and as Polanski’s indictment of U.S. foreign policy, particularly the Iraq war, and the C.I.A.’s role as enabler of torture.
Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), a recent British Prime Minister, has retired to Martha’s Vineyard with his American wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams). The ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) is hired to revise and finish Lang’s memoirs after the unexpected drowning off the ferry of the first ghost, who was also one of Lang’s employees and a confidant. Lang is clearly meant to be seen as a Tony Blair stand-in, and his troubles and those of the ghostwriter soon increase as Lang is targeted by the International Court of Justice as a possible war criminal for aiding the C.I.A. in its rendition and torture of terrorism suspects. The ghostwriter soon finds that his predecessor had acquired damning evidence of the C.I.A.’s connection to Lang, but, of course, as soon as the ghostwriter learns this, his life is endangered by the C.I.A.’s shadowy thugs, who, on orders from higher-ups, wish to keep Lang’s nefarious activities secret.
Polanski’s unhappiness with America has, of course, been much in the news lately with his resistance to returning to the U.S. to be sentenced for his guilty plea of “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a 13-year-old girl. This movie seems to be his reaction to this experience of “the American Way of Life.” The movie indicates that the U.S.’s leading role on the world stage is enabled by war, murder, and torture. After watching this all-too-believable thriller, it’s hard not to agree with him. Indeed, even paranoids have enemies.

Emmaus: Key to the Church before Paul

2010-03-22T13:36:00.004-04:00

I had a dream a while back about the Emmaus story (Luke 24:13-35), where the disciples meet a stranger on the road as they walk to this village on Easter afternoon. When the stranger, whom they don’t recognize, asks them what they’re talking about, they sadly tell of the death of Jesus who they believed would redeem Israel. My dream was in the context of my talking to people about a fundamentalist tract that came in the mail addressed to me or “Current Resident.” The tract presented literal interpretations of Bible passages and was fishing for new adherents. I wouldn’t be one because, as I asked the people in the dream, “Why do people take the Bible literally?” The Emmaus story is certainly one that shouldn’t be taken literally. It’s too important for such a reductive interpretation. It seems to me that in shorthand it’s the history of the Church before Paul who was the first to write a part of the New Testament probably in the early 50s C.E. So for about 20 years from the death of Jesus in about 33 C.E. to I Thessalonians, Paul’s first letter, we have no written records from the Church.
So what was happening with the followers of Jesus during these 20 plus years? Most likely, they were trying to understand their experience of him and going through the process of grieving, which has a number of stages, including, to start shock and denial, then pain and guilt, the stage apparently the disciples are in as the Emmaus story opens. The disciples’ sadness is a sign that they were probably moving beyond shock and denial into painful sadness about what didn’t happen, namely, Jesus’ political salvation of Israel from the Romans. So they remain under Roman rule, which is not good.
In the Emmaus story, after the disciples tell the stranger about the women’s tale of the empty tomb, he chides them for not understanding what the prophets have declared, namely, “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” The passage continues: “Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (verses 26 and 27). This interpretation attributed to Jesus is what the late Michael Goulder pointed out was "haggadic midrash." Bishop Spong in his essay of March 18th pays tribute to Goulder and his work, particularly in two books, “Midrash and Lection in Matthew” and “The Evangelists' Calendar.” In these, Goulder argues that haggadic midrash took place over the many years after the crucifixion when the followers of Jesus spent time in the synagogue searching the Hebrew Scriptures to find Jewish stories about other people that could be retold about Jesus. Thus, Jesus’ followers felt that his spirit was guiding them to understand the meaning of Jesus’ death by interpreting the Scriptures in a new way. This is how the stranger was guiding them through scripture in the Emmaus story, which can be read as an illustration of haggadic midrash.
The revelation of Jesus to the disciples in the Emmaus meal is a sign of the central importance that the Eucharist must have had from early on as a way of experiencing the resurrected Jesus. As Jon D. Levenson has pointed out in “Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life,” resurrection is a deeply Jewish idea that permeates the Hebrew Scriptures and the commentaries. It is through resurrection that the disciples shaped the last stage of their grief: acceptance and hope. So, just as death brings us sorrow, the recollection of the Resurrection can bring us acceptance and hope. Happy Easter!

Bible Study

2010-01-22T11:32:00.001-05:00

ON BEING GAY

On her radio show, Dr Laura Schlesinger said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The following response is an open letter to Dr. Laura, penned by a US resident, which was posted on the Internet. It's funny, as well as informative:

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination... End of debate. It’s in the Bible - end of argument!

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Laws and how best to follow them.

1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is, my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?

6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination - Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there 'degrees' of abomination?

7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wriggle room here?

8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?

9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev.24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I am confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your adoring fan.
James M. Kauffman, Ed.D. Professor Emeritus,
Dept. Of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education
University of Virginia

“Reading Jesus”

2010-01-04T11:39:00.003-05:00

I’ve just read “Reading Jesus” by Mary Gordon. It’s a readable, odd book. She’s obviously familiar with biblical scholarship, but because she values the Gospels as narratives and wants to read them as she imagines an ordinary reader might, she brings very little of that scholarship to her interpretations of the Gospel stories she chooses to write about. She wants them to be encountered as stories without, for the most part, considering the history of their composition. For example, she always writes about similar passages starting with Matthew and then going on through Mark, Luke, and John. She never points out that most scholars think the Mark was the basis for Matthew and Luke. She even writes at one point that Mark borrowed a passage from Matthew, even though Matthew was composed 10 to 15 years after Mark. Also, she seems to put all the sayings of Jesus on an equal footing without regard for which might be early and perhaps attributable to Jesus himself and which might be later and most likely the product of the communities that were struggling with conditions after the time of Jesus. She does discuss Raymond Brown’s work on the Gospel of John, because this Gospel lends itself most easily to anti-Semitic interpretation, and she struggles with the way these stories should be viewed today.
She seems to will herself to be naïve, as if she were still seven years old. Indeed much of the book is devoted to how she heard the stories when she was a child. She doesn’t bring much adult critical thinking to the stories, nor does she try to enter into post-critical naïveté, as she might when attending a play. However, she’s very good at pointing out that many of the stories upend our conventional notions of justice, as in the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16). Or how some of the stories seem cruel and inexplicable, as in the withering of the fig tree (Matthew 21:18-22; Mark 11:12-14, 20-25). And she points out, in a series of chapters, the many problems encountered in reading the Gospels: miracles, asceticism, perfectionism, apocalypticism, contradictions, conundrums, paradoxes, the anti-Judaism, and the issues around the possible divinity of Jesus. However, many of these problems are the result of her non-historical reading of the stories, which gives every story equal credence without regard to the historical circumstances of their composition.
I finished the book thinking that it is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of reading the Bible without a historical perspective. This intensifies all the problems she identifies. I think that if Gordon had read Don Cupitt’s “Jesus & Philosophy,” (See my blog post on this at: http://churchofnon-realism.blogspot.com/2009/09/jesus-philosophy.html) it might have helped her distinguish earlier Jesus sayings from later ones. If we do this, the outlines of a more coherent message might be attributed to Jesus.

Saved by Faith

2009-12-02T12:13:00.001-05:00

My congregation, Saint Peter’s (http://www.saintpeters.org/), an ELCA affiliate in Manhattan, New York, is sending daily Advent devotionals to its email list this year. Today’s devotional starts out: “When we have something major coming up, we take inventory of where we are and what we need to do to get there. The coming of Christ invites us to the same kind of reflection. Of course, we don't need to worry about saving ourselves - we're saved by virtue of our faith.” This last idea, it seems to me, encourages us, as so many other devotionals do, to “just believe.” That is, we should exert an act of will to somehow accept a series of propositions necessary for our salvation. This, of course, places us in the center of the action; we are dependant on ourselves for our salvation. God demands that we believe, and we struggle to comply.
I think what this devotional should have said is: We are baptized. We don’t need to worry about saving ourselves because we’ve been baptized. Baptism is done for us; we don’t do it ourselves. It’s a gift.
But what is salvation? I bet most people immediately have the mental picture of getting into heaven after we die. That’s not wrong, but it’s hardly right either, because it’s about saving me, and, by implication, what I have to do to save myself to get into heaven. I have to be good. Not bloody likely. I know what I’m like.
Baptism’s gift, the salvation given, is freedom from fear. We have nothing to fear, because God loves us and is with us always. Freedom from fear can give us strength to do what is right. The fact that we so often do wrong is a sign of how fearful we remain, even while God remains with us and loves us. God always calls us to accept the gift of baptism: to live without fear. As we accept and live fearlessly, we are saved. Living fearlessly requires that we become conscious of our fear and let go of it. Our consciousness is our great ally. Pray to be granted the gift of consciousness.
But what about the unbaptized? Are they saved? Lots of ink (and blood) has been shed over this question, and the answer is of course. Of course, they are saved if, like the baptized, they live without fear. They just haven’t received the sign of baptism as Christians have, but the opportunity to live without fear is available to all.

ELCA decisions explained

2009-11-04T11:12:00.004-05:00

The video below answers all your questions about the ELCA sexuality decisions. It's funny and very, very Lutheran.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpP8svZqR4A

“Eternal Life: A New Vision”

2009-10-14T12:38:00.000-04:00

Metaphor and analogy are the only ways we can think and speak about the great questions of religion. Traditionally, the metaphor of God as the focus of religion is external and separate from us humans. We say that God is not us. God is in heaven, above us, other than us. Alternatively, Moltmann has written that God is ahead of us, leading us into the future. In any case, God is the word we use to try to express that which is beyond our experience bound always by time and space. In “Eternal Life: A New Vision” (New York HarperOne 2009), John Shelby Spong employs another metaphor, one often used by mystics. God is within us; the divine can be experienced as an aspect of the human if we look inward.
Thus it seems that Spong in “Eternal Life” and Cupitt in “Jesus & Philosophy” are aiming at much the same idea: true religion is motivated from within, not imposed from without. Further, true religion is transformative. The truly religious are in the process of being possessed by the Eternal, slowly leaving behind concerns for security and punishment that stories of heaven and hell encourage. God is ceasing to be the judge above, but rather becoming the light within that guides our thoughts and actions. Freed from concerns about our welfare, we are free to work to help bring the Kingdom on earth.

“Jesus & Philosophy”

2009-09-15T18:28:00.002-04:00

In “Jesus & Philosophy” (2009 SCM Press, London), Don Cupitt assesses the place of Jesus in the history of ethics. Biblical scholars, particularly those in the Jesus Seminar, maintain that, starting about 20 years after his death, Jesus was made into the personification of his teaching and given an exalted cosmic status. After a few decades, a supernatural superstructure was built around him obscuring his own sayings, producing instead mostly fictionalized narratives of his life, as well as material pertinent to his followers’ current concerns.
Using the ranking system of the Jesus Seminar, Cupitt finds that the sayings most likely to reflect closely Jesus’ own teaching (coded red or pink) reflect a major innovation in ethics with a shift from realism to emotivism. The moral standard is brought down from heaven, thought to be real, and relocated in the world of human feelings and relationships, or, in Cupitt words, the world of ‘the heart’.
For Cupitt, Jesus stresses the moral importance of a high level of critical self-consciousness: Get the beam out of your own eye, calculate, and then be extravagantly generous, because that is what melts the heart, unfreezes human relationships, and breaks the culture of ressentiment (Cupitt’s emphasis). Ressentiment is the French word that Nietzsche uses to sum up the whole range of reactive or negative emotions, including scorn, disgust, dislike, envy, lust, disapproval, repugnance, contempt, impatience, malice, irritation, anger, rage, fury, fear, terror, hatred, boredom, indifference, recoiling, seething resentment, begrudging, outrage, indignation at, despair of, and many more. When they surge up in us in reaction to another, we want to separate ourselves as far as possible from that person.
In contrast, the positive emotions do not cloud or block our relation to the other person. These emotions are mostly very cool and transparent and not numerous. They include regard, attention, interest, sympathy, pity, respect, admiration, allegiance, friendship, and love. Usually the positive emotions don’t present moral problems, but the negative ones are often violent and a threat to social peace. To overcome them, we must often be almost supernaturally “big” and generous, going beyond justice.
To help us do this, the Jesus of the red or pink sayings urges us to choose a new moral world where everything is clear and brightly lit, completely open, explicit, bright and clear, not continuing with ill-feeling which is often double-feeling, such as malice, deceit, deception, and duplicity which imply a certain doubleness that maintains a gap between our displayed feelings and real but veiled feelings that are hidden behind them.
Because of his emphasis on feelings between people, Jesus values people more than the religious law. Stories like the healing on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:9-14) imply the end of the rule of religious law and the appearance of a human who is more radically free and autonomous than ever before. Thus, Jesus radicalizes Jeremiah and Ezekiel who proclaim that the law will be written on people’s hearts and God will take away people’s hearts of stone and give them instead hearts of flesh (Jeremiah 31:33; Ezekiel 36:26). Jesus becomes anthropocentric and emotivist, changing ethics profoundly by secularizing ethics, historicizing it, and humanizing it. However, to question the Divine Law is to question God, especially God who is “outside” us. Thus, these sayings may be some of the reason for Jesus’ troubles with the authorities.
Jesus’ teachings are difficult for individuals to follow, and, of course, threatening to the religious establishment. It is no wonder that an overlay of supernatural narrative was quickly put onto Jesus’ radical sayings. It is easier to worship than to follow and emulate. “Go and do likewise” is a difficult command; it is easier for us to leave the changing of the world to God. However, if the law is written on our hearts, we become God-like agents of change.
At the end of the book, Cupitt addresses this dilemma of direction from “outside and above” us and motivation from within, writing that ethics has two different faces or dimensions, corresponding to the doctrines of creation and redemption. “Creation” ethics would have us support existing reality: be loyal to the system as it is, obeying the rules, playing our parts, and raising the next generation. In contrast, “redemption” ethics would have us keep alive and spell out the Dream of a better world. If the Dream is sufficiently vivid and attractive, it will shape our values and the orientation of our lives. The Dream present in Jesus’ sayings has only recently, with the collapse of external religious sanctions, begun to be recognized and grasped as the way to the Law within us. Cupitt concludes by suggesting that the rediscovered historical Jesus might become the way to the reform and renewal of Christianity.

Apology for the treatment of Alan Turing

2009-09-11T19:10:00.005-04:00

Today, the Associated Press reports that Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister of Britian, has apologized for Britian's treatment of Alan Turing. See the news item below.

September 11, 2009
UK Gov't Apologizes to Gay Codebreaker Alan Turing
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:58 a.m. ET

LONDON (AP) -- British Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered a posthumous apology Friday for the ''inhumane'' treatment of Alan Turing, the World War II codebreaker who committed suicide in 1954 after being prosecuted for homosexuality and forcibly treated with female hormones.

The mathematician helped crack Nazi Germany's Enigma encryption machine -- a turning point in the war -- and is considered a father of modern computing.

In 1952, however, Turing was convicted of gross indecency for having sex with a man and offered a choice between prison and ''chemical castration'' -- the injection of female hormones to suppress his libido. His security clearance was revoked and he was no longer allowed to work for the government.

Two years later, he killed himself at age 41 by eating an apple laced with cyanide.

As Britain marks the 70th anniversary of the September 1939 start of the war -- remembered as its ''finest hour'' -- Brown said Turing ''deserved so much better'' than the treatment he received from postwar society.

''It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War II could well have been very different,'' Brown said. ''He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war.''

Brown said Turing was ''in effect, tried for being gay.'' Homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967.

''The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely,'' Brown said. ''We're sorry, you deserved so much better.''

Brown's apology follows an online petition that drew more than 30,000 supporters, including novelist Ian McEwan, scientist Richard Dawkins and actor and comedian Stephen Fry.

Computer scientist John Graham-Cumming said he started the petition campaign because Turing ''wasn't as well known in Britain as I think he deserved to be, as a hero of the Second World War and a great mathematician.''

Working at the wartime codebreaking center at Bletchley Park, Turing helped crack Germany's secret codes by creating the ''Turing bombe,'' a forerunner of modern computers, to help reveal the settings for the Enigma machine.

Turing also did pioneering work on artificial intelligence, developing the ''Turing Test'' to measure whether a machine can think. One of the most prestigious honors in computing, the $250,000 Turing Prize, is named for him.

Graham-Cumming said Turing had a strong claim to the title ''father of computing.''

''He was thinking about what it meant to have a computer long before they existed,'' Graham-Cumming said. ''He laid out the fundamental science of it.''

Turing was among a motley group of mathematicians, cryptographers, crossword puzzle aficionados, chess masters and other experts assembled at a mansion called Bletchley Park, northwest of London, to wage a secret war against Nazi Germany. Their goal: cracking Adolf Hitler's supposedly unbreakable codes.

The team uncovered the secret to the Enigma machine and other ciphers used by the Nazi high command, revealing details of the movements of Germany's U-boat fleets and handing victory on the seas to the Allies.

Their work also provided crucial information in the desert campaign against German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and the preparations for the Allied invasion of France.

''It is doubtful whether the D-Day landings would have happened, let alone succeeded,'' without Bletchley Park, said Kelsey Griffin, a director of the Bletchley Park museum.

She said Turing ''stands alongside (Winston) Churchill as one of our great Britons.''

Secrecy about the work at Bletchley Park, maintained long after the war was over, meant that for decades the role played by Turing and thousands of other codebreakers was not widely known.

Brown's apology, published on his office Web site, was seen as rare. The British government has resisted previous calls to apologize for historical events. In 2006, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed ''deep sorrow'' for the slave trade, but stopped short of saying sorry.

Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said Brown's apology to Turing was ''most welcome and commendable,'' but didn't go far enough.

''A similar apology is also due to the estimated 100,000 British men who were convicted of consenting, victimless same-sex relationships during the 20th century,'' Tatchell said.

------

On the Net:

Gordon Brown's apology: www.number10.gov.uk

Bletchley Park: www.bletchleypark.org.uk

Rethinking Basic Christian Concepts in the Light of Charles Darwin

2009-09-03T14:47:00.004-04:00

Below is Bishop John S. Spong's mediation today on the revolution in theology that the work of Charles Darwin has wrought. It outlines the task ahead if Christianity is to enter the 21st century with anything like intellectual rigor.

The Study of Life, Part 6
Rethinking Basic Christian Concepts in the Light of Charles Darwin
As I retraced Charles Darwin's steps through the Galapagos Islands, I contemplated anew his impact on traditional Christian thinking. I had been working intensively on Darwin for about three years in preparation for my book on eternal life. Darwin, more than anyone else, had shaken the foundations of belief in eternal life by defining human beings as animals with more highly developed brains, removing any sense of immortality from them. By the time we arrived in the Galapagos the time for any rewrites on this book was over. My manuscript was at my publisher, HarperCollins. The next time I will see this book will be in its published form. This book had been for me a grueling task since it drove me almost against my will to come to a new understanding of my faith. I discovered first that I could no longer make a case for life after death until I had journeyed to a place that was, as my subtitle suggests, "beyond religion, beyond theism and beyond heaven and hell." That was a direct result of my deep engagement with Darwin's thought. It is fair to say, however, that in the writing of this book I also became aware that Darwin's thought had also helped me to arrive at a new vision of what I believe will be the future of Christianity. Through this column I seek to share that process with my readers.
My struggle began with the recognition that the primary titles that we Christians have given to Jesus all carry with them a particular definition of what it means to be human. To call Jesus "savior" implies that human life needs to be saved from something. The same is true about the titles "rescuer," "redeemer" and "reconciler." This negative definition of humanity is why the traditional telling of the Jesus story focuses on Jesus' suffering, which was the price that Jesus had to pay for our salvation. The traditional Protestant mantra, "Jesus died for my sins," and the Catholic definition of the Eucharist as "the sacrifice of the Mass," both reinforce the assumption of human depravity that is a major theme filling Christian theology and history.

These distorting images began in a mythology that assumed that human life was a special creation, made in the image of God, and suggesting that human life originally shared in the perfection of God's finished creation. Falling from that status into what came to be called "original sin," however, quickly became the major focus of Christian theology. Starting with Paul, it has been the "fall" and its resulting distortion of God's creation that has been the bedrock of the way we have told the Jesus story. It was our sinful status that mandated God's divine rescue operation "for us and for our salvation." The heart of Christian theology, including such core doctrines as the Incarnation, the divinity of Christ, the Atonement and even the concept of God as a Holy Trinity, were all attempts to spell out the Jesus story in terms of this definition of what it means to be sinful. Human beings were those creatures who in an act of disobedience had destroyed the beauty of God's original creation and had plunged the whole world into sin. Charles Darwin's understanding of human origins ran directly counter to these assumptions. If Darwin was correct then this whole theological system, which featured the account of Jesus' sacrificial death to save us from our sins, was doomed to become inoperative.

If human life, as Darwin suggested and as modern science keeps verifying, is the product of millions of years of evolutionary history, then none of these theological formulas remain valid. Without an original, perfect and complete creation, there could never have been a fall from perfection, not even metaphorically. Original sin has thus got to go. Without that fall from perfection there was no need for God's rescue and no reason for Jesus to come to our aid. The idea of God as the punishing parent organizes religious life on the basis of the childlike and primitive motifs of reward and punishment. The cross understood as the place where Jesus paid our debt to this vengeful God becomes not just nonsensical, but it also serves to twist human life with guilt in order to make this system of thought believable. That is why Christian worship seems to require the constant denigration of human life. Christian liturgies constantly beg God "to have mercy." Our hymns sing of God's amazing grace, but the only reason God's grace is amazing is that it "saved a wretch like me." This theology assumes that God is an external being, living somewhere above the sky, whose chief occupations are two: first to keep the record books up to date on our behavior, thus serving as the basis on which we will be judged; and second to be ready to come to our aid in miraculous ways either to establish the divine order or in answer to our prayers. Darwin was only one part of the explosion of knowledge that rendered these ideas not only irrelevant, but unbelievable. Copernicus and Galileo had destroyed God's dwelling place above the sky by introducing us to the vastness of space, suddenly but not coincidentally rendering this God homeless. Then Isaac Newton discovered the mathematically precise and immutable laws by which the universe is governed, leaving little room in it for either miracle or magic, which rendered the miracle-working deity unemployed. One well-known English theologian, when he finally embraced these realities in the early 1980's, abandoned his Christian faith, pronouncing himself "a non-aggressive atheist." When asked why he was no longer a believer, he replied quite simply "because God no longer had any work to do."

It was Darwin, however, who applied the coup de grâce both to religion and to the belief in life after death, at least as traditional Christianity had proclaimed these things. To Darwin human beings were merely a work in progress. Far from being created perfect we had evolved into our present form like every other creature by "natural selection" over more than three billion years. Salvation built on the three premises of a perfect creation, a fall into sin and a rescue from above that was achieved on the cross became an exercise in fantasyland. Indeed the story of the sacrificial death of Jesus by crucifixion began to look bizarre. This theology made God appear to be a deity who required a blood offering and a human sacrifice in order to forgive. Jesus began to look like a perpetual victim, perhaps even a masochistic person who willingly endured, even welcomed, suffering and death on the cross. Human beings looked like guilt-ridden creatures whose sinfulness made the death of Jesus necessary. Finally, Christianity became a religion of guilt, which was encouraged liturgically. There was nothing about this scenario that could be called good news or "gospel," yet it persisted for centuries. These distortions in the Jesus message began to wobble under the impact of Galileo and Newton, but it was Darwin who made it clear that the Christian world could no longer go on pretending that nothing had changed. The foundations on which the Christian message had been erected had collapsed.

When I embraced what this meant existentially I came to the conclusion that if Christianity was to have a future, then I must find a new point of entry and a new way to hear and to believe the Jesus story. That was the challenge I had to meet before I could ever address the possibility of life after death. I began that reconstruction task in my book Jesus for the Non-Religious and now I had to complete this task by spelling out a new way to view eternal life.

I was delighted to discover that the greatest of the New Testament scholars in the 20th century, Rudolf Bultmann, regularly spoke of Jesus not as the "savior," but as the "revealer." That shift was not subtle. Bultmann was suggesting the Jesus "revealed" a new dimension of what it means to be human and in the process opened a new window into what it is to experience the presence of God. Suddenly I had found a whole new way to look at what divinity is in human life. Underneath the focus on sacrifice revealed in the gospels I began to view Jesus as one who was so deeply and fully human that whatever it is that we experience God to be could be seen in him and experienced through him. A new way to view the cross next began to come into view. The cross was not a sacrifice to placate an angry God, but a living portrait of a human life that was no longer controlled by the innate drive to survive. Here was a life free to give itself away, a life with no need to build itself up at another's expense. This was a new dimension of what it means to be human, what it means to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that life was meant to be. When I got beneath the level of later explanation, which dominates the gospel narratives, and began to ask what was the Jesus experience that compelled his followers to stretch the words available to them to an infinite degree to enable those words to be big enough to capture their Jesus experience, I heard them saying we have met and encountered in the life of this Jesus everything that we mean by the word "God." It was that word "inflation" that gives us virgin births, wandering stars, miracles, parables, physical resuscitations and ascensions into heaven. They were trying to say that in his humanity, which seemed to break all human barriers, they had found a doorway into the meaning of transcendence, the reality of God. The way into divinity became for me the pathway of becoming fully human. It was to affirm that we are still evolving into we know not what. Jesus was a new dimension of life for which we may all be headed.

So I had to begin my quest for life after death by going into the depths of the mystery of life itself. Just as we now know that life evolved out of lifeless matter, that consciousness emerged out of life and finally that self-conscious life has emerged out of mere consciousness, so perhaps the day is now arriving when we will experience the possibility of entering a universal consciousness that is beginning to emerge out of self-consciousness. We are thus part of the oneness of life, bound together by a common DNA and that oneness makes us part of God. It also suggests that we are linked to eternity since God is found at the depth of the human.

These words can only scratch the surface of the thought I try to develop in my book on eternal life, but they do presage the path I walk. Charles Darwin, who for me made a new Christianity necessary, turns out to offer the clue to that new direction. This vision now stands before me. I invite you to join me in entering it.

Pardon Alan Turing

2009-08-31T23:23:00.004-04:00

Alan Turing was one of the fathers of computer science and a homosexual. Because of his sexual orientation, he was hounded to suicide. The article below describes how many in Britain want this injustice recognized and amends made. David Leavitt's biography of Turing, "The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer," is a good place to start learning about his life and work.

BBC NEWS: Published August 31, 2009

Thousands call for Turing apology

Thousands of people have signed a Downing Street petition calling for a posthumous government apology to World War II code breaker Alan Turing. Writer Ian McEwan has just backed the campaign, which already has the support of scientist Richard Dawkins. In 1952 Turing was prosecuted under the gross indecency act after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself.
The petition was the idea of computer scientist John Graham-Cumming. He is seeking an apology for the way the young mathematician was treated after his conviction. He has also written to the Queen to ask for a posthumous knighthood to be awarded to the British mathematician.
Alan Turing was given experimental chemical castration as a "treatment" and his security privileges were removed, meaning he could not continue work for the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
"This added insult and humiliation ultimately drove him to suicide," said gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, who also backs the campaign. "With Turing's death, Britain and the world lost one of its finest intellectual minds. A government apology and posthumous pardon are long overdue.”

National legacy

Alan Turing is most famous for his code-breaking work at Bletchley Park during WWII, helping to create the Bombe that cracked messages enciphered with the German Enigma machines. However he also made significant contributions to the emerging fields of artificial intelligence and computing. In 1936 he established the conceptual and philosophical basis for the rise of computers in a seminal paper called "On Computable Numbers", whilst in 1950 he devised a test to measure the intelligence of a machine. Today it is known as the Turing Test.
After the war he worked at many institutions including the University of Manchester, where he worked on the Manchester Mark 1, one of the first recognisable modern computers. There is a memorial statue of him in Manchester's Sackville Gardens which was unveiled in 2001.
"I kept reading about potential funding cuts at Bletchley Park and I suddenly felt really mad about it," said Mr Graham-Cumming. "I felt Turing was getting overlooked as being a British genius and that there was a blindspot in the public eye about an important man."
He has so far collected more than 5,500 signatures. He admits that an official apology to Alan Turing is "unlikely", as Mr. Turing has no known surviving family, but he says that the real aim of the petition is symbolic. "The most important thing to me is that people hear about Alan Turing and realise his incredible impact on the modern world, and how terrible the impact of prejudice was on him," he said.

Uncommitted

2009-08-29T17:08:00.007-04:00

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) recently voted to allow gays in "life-long, monogamous" relationships to serve as clergy and professional lay leaders in the church. Although this is good news, it still imposes a “work” on clergy, and by implication on all church members, to be monogamous or in a committed relationship. The only other choice is to be not sexually active or chaste. As John Shuck writes in his blog “Shuck and Jive”
(http://www.shuckandjive.org/2009/08/sexual-ethics-for-rest-of-us.html):
“The inherited (and largely unexamined) ethic (in the church) is that all sexual activity outside of marriage is wrong and sinful. This is hardly an ethic. It is simply a rule. It says nothing of the quality of sexual activity within marriage including issues of power and consent, and it says nothing to the millions of people who are not married but (believe it or not) have sex. There is no guidance for them from the church except be celibate or be silent. The church can and should do better.”
He goes on:
“We need to have discussions about what is good, ethical, just, and life-affirming. As Rev. (Debra) Haffner (director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing [http://www.religiousinstitute.org/]), points out…:
“The Religious Institute has long called for a new sexual ethic to replace the traditional "celibacy until marriage, chastity after." This new ethic is free of double standards based on sexual orientation, sex, gender or marital status. It calls for sexual relationships to be consensual, non-exploitative, honest, pleasurable and protected, whether inside or outside of a covenanted relationship. It insists that intimate relationships be grounded in communication and shared values. And it applies to all adults -- even those of us who are called to ministry.”
So the battle for enlightened sexual ethics and responsible sexual freedom is far from over. I pray that the ELCA will hear the call for these next steps and help us on the road to good sex. Will you join me in my prayers?

Afghanistan and the Drug War

2009-08-29T12:23:00.002-04:00

America’s war in Afghanistan is getting bloodier. In August, so far, 45 Americans have died in that war, more than in June or July. So far, as editorialized in today’s “New York Times,” over 8 years of war more than 5000 Americans have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we have spent more than $900 billions to achieve “victory” in those countries. Indeed, although our leaders tell us we will win the Afghan war, the chance of victory and our reasons for being there at all are murky. The English and the Russians before us tried and failed to impose their will on this country, but our government sees no reason why we shouldn’t succeed where they failed. How will our success be measured? In large part, we believe we’ll be successful if we engineer a “democratic” government there not enmeshed in the drug trade, which is Afghanistan’s main source of income.
Why is the drug trade so lucrative? Primarily, because opium-based drugs are illegal, and when drugs are illegal, a great deal of money can be made on the street. The U.N.’s drug czar, in the July 31, 2009 “Newsweek,” says about $52 billion of street drugs were sold retail worldwide last year. Of the $3 billion wholesale value, he estimates that the Taliban is raking off about 10% and is actively involved in the drug trade itself, as part of its terrorist activities. He also says that the Afghan government eradicated only about 3% of the poppy fields last year at the cost of 70 Afghan military deaths and at least two hundred million dollars. Three percent is hardly enough to deter growers.
This also is an example of the failures of the U.S. drug war, which continues unabated, wreaking havoc everywhere. From drugsense.org comes the news that so far in 2009 alone, we’ve spent over $33.6 billion on state and federal anti-drug efforts, while arresting more than 1.2 million people for drug offences. Many of those arrested will end up in prisons, which are breaking down under the load. This is all in the name of prohibiting drug sales. However, many addicts recruit others to finance their habit, so the number of addicts grows and sales increase. So, like the prohibition of alcohol, the prohibition of drugs is a failure, but prohibition is a moral crusade for the U.S. government because drugs, it is said, are bad. Perhaps a better way of thinking about drugs is that addiction is a medical problem that should be treated, rather than a crime that should be punished. If addicts could receive the drugs they crave from a clinic, rather from street sellers, they would have no cause to commit crimes to support their habit.
As long as drugs are prohibited in a moral war on drugs, the worse the drug problem will be. Our war in Afghanistan will not eradicate drug sales, only decriminalizing drug sales will do that. Does the U.S. have the moral courage to stop our crusade against drugs? Stay tuned.

Angry White Men lose one

2009-08-22T12:46:00.002-04:00

Now gay Lutheran ministers can acknowledge their same-sex spouses in church. This is obviously the end of the world (as we know it), and God must be rolling over in his grave as a result.
So the angry white men are not getting their way in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), a white male organization if there ever was one. Gun-toting, Fox-News watching white men have been very successful in other areas like derailing health care reform, so how did they drop the ball with the Lutherans? I attribute it to the first Lutheran commandment: “Be Nice.” For Lutherans being nice is more important (most times) than justice or truth. We only have to cast our minds back to the Lutherans’ role in Nazi Germany to remember that not making waves and looking the other way were more compelling actions for them than standing up for the Jews. By the way, German Lutherans didn’t stand up for homosexuals, either, and many perished in the camps also.
So, 68% of this year’s church wide assembly voted to allow congregations to call clergy in same-sex relationships. Although, not to be cynical, I’m sure many voted for this because it’s right, I’m also convinced many voted for it so it would go away and we wouldn’t have to talk about sex anymore. Talking about sex really isn’t nice; no Lutheran does it unless pushed to the wall. After all, Lutherans’ greatest theologian, St. Paul, told us how nasty sex is. Why would nice people want to talk about it, much less do it?
So now at least for a while we don’t have to talk about sex. The angry white men will plot and maybe eventually leave the ELCA, but for now, no more sex talk. Who’s bringing what to the next potluck supper in the church hall?

A Comment on "Brueggemann's swing and a miss”

2009-08-19T15:10:00.002-04:00

I have left the comment below on the August 5, 2009, post, “Brueggemann's swing and a miss,” on the blog, “Cyber Spirit Café”
(http://cyberspiritcafe.blogspot.com/search/label/Walter%20Brueggemann).

Walter Brueggemann is the most respected Old Testament scholar active today, so his comments carry great weight, but his ambivalent crusade against historical criticism of the Bible gives the appearance of floundering: He writes that historical criticism undermines the church’s “textual memory.” However, it’s not going away, even if we bury our heads in the sand. The question is how should the church deal with historical criticism?
The presence of historical criticism in the life of the church has long been a preoccupation of Brueggemann’s. I was particularly struck by this in an otherwise magisterial review of Jon D. Levenson’s, “Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life” in the February 6, 2007, issue of “Christian Century.” In the review, Brueggemann writes that Levenson makes three main points. The first is “…faith in resurrection, when we have the courage to overcome the intrusiveness of Enlightenment rationality, is vigorous and central to both Jews and Christians.” I was so struck by this idea of overcoming the Enlightenment that I wrote a letter (unpublished) to the “Christian Century” about it. In it I ask, “How do we overcome the intrusive Enlightenment?” I go on to assert that, “Surely, we won’t by going down the dead-end road of fundamentalism.” I then offer a method by which moderns can embrace the frankly supernatural resurrection without abandoning rationality. This is the idea suggested by Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutic circle” in “The Symbolism of Evil.” He suggests that we moderns have lost our immediacy of belief, but we can aim at a second, post-critical naïveté in and through critical thinking. By interpreting, we can hear again. In hermeneutics, the symbol’s gift of meaning and the endeavor to understand by deciphering are knotted together. In the circle: “We must understand in order to believe, but we must believe in order to understand.”
Another idea may amplify this. Don Cupitt, the English theologian, has written in “Radicals and the Future of the Church” that the church is needed because “It is a theatre in which we solemnly enact our deepest feelings.” In the theater we usually naturally and easily suspend disbelief to enter into the world of the actors who by speech and action on stage in turn evoke in us actions, feelings, experiences and thoughts. So, likewise, during a religious service we may also suspend disbelief, and have religious feelings and experiences. In fact, following Schleiermacher, it is via our feelings aroused by worship that the Holy Spirit comes to us and guides our actions. This is in keeping with the classic Christian idea that Word and Sacraments are objective. We have the promise that if we attend to them, God is present to us through them. So, those worshipping should be intentional about entering the realm in which the Spirit is promised to be available to us. In worship we should seek the Spirit’s presence to strengthen us in our lives. So the questions to ask about the Biblical narratives are not about their historicity, albeit these questions are fascinating, but rather about whether these narratives are vehicles for the Holy Spirit to enlighten and enable good works in our lives. Of course, the Holy Spirit is Other. When we enter into worship, we are following the Spirit’s lead; we cannot control what happens. It is this very lack of human control that permits us to glimpse fleetingly and incompletely something of God. Thus we trust the promise of God’s resurrection knowing full well that it cannot be accommodated within rational thought. Like everything important in life, we trust the promise often with only the dimmest comprehension or certainty.

“The Evolution of God”

2009-07-17T12:00:00.000-04:00

"For I am the LORD, I do not change; therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob.” (Malachi 3:6)

God does not change; God does not evolve. Yes? Maybe not, writes Robert Wright in his new book, “The Evolution of God.” Maybe God does change and, surely, people’s understanding of the concept of God changes. We can’t know with certainty, but Wright sees a trend in the history of the Abrahamic God: the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, toward heightened moral imagination: our ability to imagine ourselves from another person’s point of view, to be empathetic. Wright calls this a “non-zero-sum relationship.” The more expansive your moral imagination, the more you lend your support to the other’s cause. He writes: “(This) can be self-serving (and besides, it’s part of the implicit deal through which they support your cause).” In other words, one hand washes the other. He detects a pattern of the change of the Abrahamic religions: “The tendency to find tolerance in one’s religion when the people in question are people you can do business with and to find intolerance or even belligerence when you perceive the relationship to be instead zero-sum” (or I win; you lose, rather than, we both win.) In reviewing the histories of Abrahamic religions, he senses a trend toward more non-zero-sum relationships and counsels that for the sake of the planet, we should be conscious of any evidence of this trend and to work to enhance it. He also rather gingerly proposes that these trends might be taken as evidence of the guiding God of Abraham.
He doesn’t mention Jürgen Moltmann, but such a trend seems in line with Moltmann’s idea of God calling us into the future, a future containing many changes. Moltmann, writes about God not up there but out in front calling us into the future. Moltmann understands Christian faith as essentially hope for the future of human beings and for this world as promised by the God of exodus and by God’s resurrection of the crucified Jesus. Thus, an attitude of expectancy underlies all of faith. An active doctrine of hope gives hope for an alternative (my italics) future to the oppressed and suffering of our present time (adapted from The Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Modern Western Theology [http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/WeirdWildWeb/courses/mwt/dictionary/mwt_themes_855_moltmann.htm]).
I recommend “The Evolution of God” as a very helpful introduction to the history of Abrahamic religion and as a source of ideas about how they might play a useful role in making the world a better place.

“Charles and Emma”

2009-07-13T12:30:00.000-04:00

Charles Darwin and Emma Wedgewood Darwin built a close and happy 43-year-long marriage despite serious religious differences. Deborah Heiligman discusses their marriage and family life in her new (2009) Young Adult book, “Charles and Emma: The Darwin’s Leap of Faith.” In Heiligman’s telling, Emma was very traditional, if not fundamentalistic, in her Christian beliefs, believing literally in heaven and hell. Her belief was particularly strong because her sister Fanny, with whom she was very close, died early in Emma’s adult life leaving her bereft. Believing that she would be with Fanny again in heaven, gave Emma great comfort, and, conversely and anxiety producing, she also believed that if a person did not believe in eternal life, that person was doomed to hell forever.
Although Charles was baptized in the Church of England, the Darwin family had long been part of the church’s free-thinking, nonconformist, Unitarian wing. However, when Darwin went up to Cambridge in 1827, he did not doubt the literal truth of the Bible and was planning to become an Anglican clergyman. He received his BA in April, 1831, and in December of that year, he sailed as the naturalist on the H.M.S. Beagle. Although at the beginning of the voyage, his religious views were quite orthodox and literal, during the voyage, he began to develop his ideas on biological evolution and started to think that species could change, thus undermining his literal belief that all life was created at one time in the form of fixed species.
When in 1836, he returned from the voyage, he began to think about marriage, and in true Darwinian logical fashion, wrote two columns on a paper: Marry? And Not Marry? He decided on marriage, and soon he was courting Emma, his first cousin, whom he had known all his life. In 1839, he and Emma married, but not before his discussing with her his now unorthodox religious views. In this, he went against his father’s advice, who had counseled concealment of his views from Emma for the sake martial concord. These open discussions between them were, however, important in making their marriage strong and happy in spite of the many trials and miseries they encountered.
Perhaps chief among their personal sorrows was the death, in 1851, of their beloved child Annie who among their children was particularly close to both of them. Her death was particularly cruel for Charles and dealt the final blow for him of a traditional conception of Christianity, which at the time of Annie’s death was being shaped by his reading of Francis Newman’s book, “Phases of Faith or Passages from the History of My Creed.” Throughout his life Charles read widely in religion, and although Newman, like Darwin, did not believe in the literal truth of the Bible, he did believe in heaven and for him the way to heaven was by accepting the teachings of Jesus. Newman wrote that Christianity taught that people deserve punishment for offending God, and he concluded that in Christian belief, “the fretfulness of a child is an infinite evil!” Newman continued, “I was aghast that I could have believed it.” Charles in reading this thought of his brave Annie, pleasant during the day and crying herself to sleep at night. How could he adhere to a religion that saw a child’s fretfulness as evil? It was Annie’s illness and death that more than anything else turned Charles away from the orthodox Christianity of his day and, not incidentally, the religion of his wife. However, or perhaps because of their religious differences, their marriage bond grew stronger as they coped with this tragedy and the deaths of their other children, all of whom they loved dearly and indulged in a very un-Victorian way. Throughout their lives, particularly during times of tragedy, Charles and Emma continued to discuss their differing views. Furthermore, Emma was always Charles first editor, even though, because of her conservative religious views, she had serious reservations about natural selection, which Charles put forth as the basis for the evolution of life into many ever-changing species. This idea is the basis of “The Origin of Species,” Charles’s landmark book, and during the course of its development, Emma worked closely with him to improve his arguments.
Throughout her life, the hope of heaven remained the principal way that she coped with life’s disappointments, primarily the early and seemingly inopportune deaths of those she loved most dearly, including her sister Fanny and her children who died in her lifetime. Charles came to take a more stoic, agonistic view of life’s blows. Interestingly after Charles died and Emma grew old, her anxieties about the afterlife seemed to fade. Perhaps she found at least a portion of “The Peace that Passes Understanding.”

“Next Fall” and “The Tempermentals”

2009-07-03T11:51:00.000-04:00

This past Sunday, we saw two very interesting gay plays: “Next Fall” (http://www.nakedangels.com/nextfall/) and “The Temperamentals” (http://thetemperamentals.com/home/), as part of my 75th birthday celebration. I wouldn’t, as a rule, see two plays in one day, but this was the only time we had, so we did it.
“Next Fall” describes what happens when a gay man is in a serious auto accident in Manhattan and his family from the hinterland descends on the hospital without knowing he is gay and meeting his lover for the first time. The gay man is a born-again evangelical and his boyfriend is your typical wiseacre atheist New Yorker who keeps trying in flashbacks to get his boyfriend to explain and defend his beliefs. The Evangelical is cowardly for not coming out to his family long ago, and the New Yorker is irritating for his continual badgering, but they clearly love each other. The gay man dies and the play ends without the audience knowing if the family ever got it that their son was gay. The play is a good commentary on the cost of being in the closet.
The play in the evening, “The Temperamentals” was about the cost of being out of the closet. The main characters are Harry Hay and his lover Rudi Gernreich, the fashion designer, who in Los Angeles in the 1950s started the Mattachine Society, one of the first, if not the first, Gay liberation organizations in America. At a time when even being suspected of being gay was a cause for arrest, they proclaimed that homosexuality was not a perversion, a sickness, or a crime. Hay and the Mattachines organized one of the first trials of a gay man, who entrapped by the police in a sexual encounter, pleaded not guilty. Usually, gay men in such sting operations pleaded guilty and avoided the publicity of a trial. The man was found not guilty because the jury was hung, but interestingly, there was a conspiracy of silence with no reports of the trial or its outcome in the press. As a result of this silence, Hay founded the “The Mattachine Review,” a magazine, to publicize the trial and to provide other news of interest to the “Temperamentals,” which was Hay’s name for homosexuals. It was probably the first publication of its type in the U.S. The play is a little talky, but consistently interesting and clearly shows how brave it was to be out in the ‘50s. Also, for us the day demonstrated why New York is so essential to America. Only in New York would two plays like this find audiences, and both were sold out. “Next Fall” closes on July 11th and “The Temperamentals” on August 23rd. Go see them for yourself.

Revelation via Feelings: My discovery of Schleiermacher

2009-06-20T13:06:00.004-04:00

What is revelation? Does it exist or is it merely a pious fiction? John Shuck’s recent post on “Religion without Revelation” (http://www.shuckandjive.org/2009/05/religion-without-revelation.html) got me thinking about this, and, as you can read below, I wrote a comment on the post. In it, I wrote that feelings are our revelation, however ever unreliable they are.
In thinking about feelings and revelation, I was led back, via Google, to Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the father of modern liberal Christian thought. The Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Modern Western Theology has a helpful set of papers on Schleiermacher (http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/WeirdWildWeb/courses/mwt/dictionary/mwt_themes_470_schleiermacher.htm). For example, John Tamilio III points out that “Schleiermacher begins by distinguishing the cognitive from the visceral: knowing God intellectually and experiencing God affectively. The latter is the foundation of Schleiermacher’s systematics. Religious experience is grounded in a feeling of absolute dependence on God. Absolute dependence is both the ‘primary datum of religion’ and the way in which we are ‘to be in relation to God.’ This is a precognitive experience.” Tamilio continues: “…for Schleiermacher, faith is not the experience of isolated individuals, but rather the lived experience of a faith community.” So, for Christians, revelation is most likely to come from the experience of worship. The acts of worship and the behaviors involved in worshipping produce the feelings that led to revelation.
In the same set of papers, Holly Reed writes, “Schleiermacher is accused of being anti-intellectual in his emphasis on piety and feeling over reason. Schleiermacher, however, would not deny the need and value of “knowing:” he simply would not give it primacy over feeling. His concern was to enforce the fact that human knowing is limited and does not have access to all there is to know. We are not God, and our abilities are not as broad or deep.”
So, I guess that my emphasis on feelings as conduits for revelation goes back at least as far as Schleiermacher. File this under “Nothing new under the sun.”

A Comment on Religion without Revelation

2009-06-10T10:46:00.004-04:00

I enjoyed John Shuck’s post on "Religion without Revelation" at his blog, “Shuck and Jive,” (http://www.shuckandjive.org/2009/05/religion-without-revelation.html). Here is my comment on that post, slightly edited:

Religion is a human activity. We humans have feelings and experiences that we name religious. We are often passionately convinced of the truth of our religion because our feelings about it are so strong. Such strong feelings must make right, yes? However, feelings are unreliable. They are fleeting; they are often gone before we can bring them fully to consciousness; they change; we can’t reproduce them at will. So we try to find a way to hold on to them, to preserve them. We are much like Peter in the story of the Transfiguration wanting to build booths to preserve the moment. Our booths are the institution, the doctrines, and the supernatural. These are all designed to hold on to and reproduce the feelings at the core of all religions. However, as Jesus pointed out to him, we must move on, even to death. Life and its feelings can’t be stored but must always be poured out until we too pass away.
So, far from there being no revelation, our religious feelings give us a sense of the Spirit moving in us. They are our revelation. If others have similar feelings and share them with us, we can arrive at a consensus as to what the feelings mean. It is from consensus that doctrines are developed: “Believed by everyone, everywhere, at all times” is a definition of orthodoxy.
Some feelings can lead us to “Delight in the law of the Lord” and to “Conform our lives to his.” Of course, these feelings are sometimes there, sometimes not and they can be overwhelmed by other more self-serving feelings. Regular worship can on occasion summon forth those feelings that, it is hoped, are more in keeping with a God of love, and we can leave worship remembering these feelings with the aim of acting upon them.
In “Radicals and the Future of the Church” (1989), Don Cupitt still thought that the church was needed because “It is a theatre in which we solemnly enact our deepest feelings.” With the publication of “The Meaning of the West” in 2008, he announced that he has left the church, because, in the West, Christianity lives on most vitally in secular society, while the churches have become weak or irrational. Although I agree this assessment, I think that it is possible to imagine churches that can be useful to people. Most importantly, churches must embrace their role as vehicles for managing feelings.
I write more about this in my post of March 17, 2009, “The Church of the Afterlife,” which is below. I would appreciate your comments.

The Church of the Afterlife

2009-03-17T13:40:00.005-04:00

Background

In his new book, “The Meaning of the West,” Don Cupitt writes, “…I can at last finally leave the old religion behind, not just because what is left of it has now become so weak and irrational, but much more because the afterlife of Christianity has now become so much bigger and more interesting than its earlier period of existence as a great world religion. The British Labour Party, for example, has done far more to build the Kingdom of God on earth during the past hundred years than the Latin Church achieved in the same territory during the whole millennium AD 600-1600.
He continues: “Christian supernatural doctrine has not been public truth for centuries. Jane Austen, for example, is a profoundly Anglican novelist. In her world clergymen abound, and many of her characters are very serious about religion. Christian ethics -- at least in the form of an acute awareness of and sympathy for the feelings and the misfortunes of others -- is everywhere presupposed. But nobody in the entire Austen canon seriously advances a proposition of revealed theology, or even so much as mentions the name of Christ. We cannot imagine any of them doing so. In brief, even in Jane Austen’s world Christian theology is already dead. The Anglican Church is still around, but Christianity is in reality already well into its afterlife period. (My emphasis.)

The Churches Today

Can today’s Church be part of the afterlife of Christianity? Cupitt thinks not. As he writes, what’s left of religion is weak and irrational. It’s weak because most churches, particularly of mainline Protestant denominations, are unwilling to proclaim the old supernatural dogmas with conviction, while fearing to preach new messages to their “base” that is perceived as clinging to the old ways for support. The price these churches pay for their weakness is that most people find them unnecessary to their lives. The churches say nothing helpful to most people, and they live in Christianity’s afterlife without missing these churches.
The churches that today are not weak are instead irrational. These, of course, are the fundamentalists; right-wing Ratzinger Roman Catholics (the latter most clearly seen in Opus Dei and Society of St. Pius X with its Holocaust denier); and the Evangelicals. The Evangelicals are now ascendant in the United States, a religious bloc that constitutes a quarter, perhaps a third, of the population (“Christian Century” editorial, January 27, 2009). Rick Warren, an Evangelical, was anointed by Obama and is, as a result, now the most powerful religious leader in the US. Although not a thoroughgoing fundamentalist, Warren’s invocation for the Inauguration showed him to be in the tradition of Church Christianity’s theological realism. Namely, God is a supernatural theistic being, not of this earth, who deigns to hear the prayer of us lesser, earthly beings but only if we pray in the name of Him who has sole access to God. The implication of the prayer was that others should get with this program or be left out. Such arrogance, of course, sets up a conflict between the saved versus the unsaved, and, many people I spoke to resented that this theism was given a national seal of approval.
Especially since the 18th century, theism has no longer held sway among either Christian clergy or people, and yet many people, even though they no longer identify with theistic language, expect to hear theistic language from Christian preachers. Thus, in the churches, both clergy and the people who still attend are using language that no longer moves them. As a result, the church has little effect on peoples’ lives. Of course, many people have already drifted away from the churches because what they’ve heard is meaningless to them. So except for the right-wing churches offering certainty for the timid, the churches are fading away.

The Afterlife of Christianity

Although the churches are fading away, Cupitt maintains that the postmodern West is secularized Christianity. Rejecting Christian dogma and leaving the church does not disconnect people from Christianity. He writes, “We remain what Christianity has made us, and in many respects the post modern West is more Christian than ever. If you are a Westerner and are committed to Western values, then you are a Christian.” In fact, Cupitt points out that the West is indelibly Christian. “…Much or all of what is most important in Christianity has become so deeply assimilated that we are no longer aware of it, and nobody has yet studied it in any systematic way.” No one has even thought of writing a theology of the indelible (Cupitt’s emphasis), namely all the vital cultural material of Christian origin that post-Christians have not and cannot throw off. The central example is the typically Western form of individual selfhood, specifically selfhood as anxiety and the consciousness of sin, derived directly from the seventh chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (see particularly verses 16-25), which leads to critical thinking, the basis of Western philosophy and science.
Other indelible ideas Cupitt identifies are the driving force behind Western humanitarianism:
1. The belief in the uniqueness and the unique value of each individual
2. The ethic of mutual love and forbearance
3. The principle that the weakest and most vulnerable members of society have a moral claim on our love and care. This, of course, comes directly from the Jewish requirement, as in Deut. 14:29, to care for resident aliens, orphans, and widows.
Many will see in these ideas the essence of the Gospel, which proclaims that this is what God wants and, therefore, God’s followers should “go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37).
Another “indelible” is ‘the uniformity of nature,’ a narrative picture of the world governed by universal natural laws accessible to us. This belief originally was strongly theological and is rooted in the covenant with Noah (Gen. 8:20-9:17) and in the belief in the faithfulness of God. Biblical theism has produced the indelible conviction that the uniformity of nature can produce reliable scientific knowledge and technologies.
The belief in progress is another indelible. It starts with the belief that God seeks the betterment of creation and that humans are God’s agents in this improvement. As humans act in God’s stead, power is gradually transferred from God to humans and with the irreversible transition of humans from innocence to experience we become more ‘God-like.’ Today, we are indeed burdened with our God-like destructive powers that can destroy the world, but we have yet to find the will to act fully as God’s agent for good. This one fact points to the urgency of our identifying how the Kingdom has already come and to work to bring it to earth more fully.

Society Without God The persistence of the indelible ideas from Christianity has been documented in the book “Society Without God” by Phil Zuckerman, even though he does not use the indelible concept. For 14 months, he talked to Danes and Swedes about religion, and his findings are discussed by Peter Steinfels in the February 28, 2009 issue of the “New York Times.”
Sweden and Denmark are among the least religious nations in the world, as measured by responses to poll questions about belief in God, the importance of religion in their lives, belief in life after death, or church attendance. And yet in these countries, the quality of life, as measured by life expectancy, child welfare, standard of living, and other categories, is among the highest in the world. Furthermore, these countries, Zuckerman found, were “moral, stable, humane and deeply good.” In addition, although they don’t seem to fear death very much and spend little time pondering the meaning of life, they were not “despairing nihilists,” but were “for the most part, a happy, satisfied lot.” Their Christianity is generally cultural with “little to do with God or creed,” but centered on “holidays, songs, stories and food.” Although not believers, many Scandinavians remain in the national, Lutheran church, and this cultural religion helps explain aspects of Denmark and Sweden that Zuckerman admires. One nonbeliever responded to a question about the sources of Denmark’s very ethical culture by saying, “We are Lutherans in our souls – I’m an atheist, but still have the Lutheran perceptions of many: to help your neighbor. Yeah it’s an old, good moral thought.” And, we might add, it is one of the indelible ideas from Christianity present in this no longer religious society.

Characteristics of the Church of the Afterlife

Cupitt believes that churches should be allowed to wither and die, as they are doing. However, I hope that if some of them can recognize the vigorous afterlife of Christianity already in western society, they could work to promote the coming of the Kingdom of God more fully here on earth, and thus have a role to play and be useful for people. The Church of the Afterlife’s main contribution can be to call attention to the afterlife of Christianity in signs of the Kingdom already here and to energize people to work to expand the Kingdom.
How would the Church of the Afterlife accomplish this? What would be its characteristics? Here are a few: Afterlife congregations will be explicit about religion as a vehicle for feelings aroused by experience. Also, these congregations will be forthright in discussing religion as myth, evolution as a new source for life-guiding myths today, and sex as a central human activity to be managed, not suppressed.

Religion as a Vehicle for Feelings We often think of religion in terms of doctrines: written statements of belief that characterize a religion. But doctrines are far from the basic stuff of religion. Rather, religion most profoundly is about our feelings, including our thanks, happiness, fear, love, hate, disgust, and surprise. In “Radicals and the Future of the Church,” Cupitt wrote, before he lost his faith in the church, that the church is needed because “It is a theatre in which we solemnly enact our deepest feelings.” The theatre analogy points to what happens in church. When we go to the theater, we usually naturally and easily suspend disbelief to enter into the world of the actors who by speech and action on stage in turn evoke in us actions, feelings, experiences and thoughts. So, likewise, during a religious service we may also suspend disbelief in the words and actions, and have religious feelings and experiences.
Charles Darwin contended that all humans everywhere have the same basic set of innate and constitutive emotions that are expressed by two kinds of muscular action: facial expression and bodily movement. We communicate these emotions to others often quite involuntarily as the result of instinct, rather than by learned behavior. Everyone worldwide recognizes and “reads” them similarly. Thus, we and those observing us may sense particular emotions while performing particular actions in worship, such as standing, sitting, kneeling, speaking, and singing. Joseph Ledoux in “The Emotional Brain” writes that emotions can produce conscious feelings, which, in turn, can lead to belief.
Religious rituals can bring meaning, a hallmark of belief, into focus. God can be the name and the marker for the meaning we find together in worship. God, as meaning, appears horizontally among worshipers while we understand that God in the vertical, supernatural direction is an exciting special effect produced as we together find God in our church, our theater of feelings.
Organized religion has usually been suspicious of feelings, because they are unreliable and not easily codified. Feelings are indeed erratic and fleeting, i. e., they are often over before they are identified or named. They come and go; they are conscious, but represent only some of our emotions, most of which are unconscious and not subject to our control. Thus, feelings, and more so, emotions, can be dangerous, which can heighten our anxiety. Furthermore, feelings can be hard to conceptualize, verbalize, and understand. They, like emotions, are virtually impossible to stop or control while happening and, once gone, may be hard or impossible to summon up again. Thus, feelings are like life as Cupitt describes it: finite, time-bound, contingent, unpredictable, transitory, and impermanent. Our feelings, quick, acute, and intuitive, tell us we are alive, and as insubstantial as feelings are, they are the basis of our life, our experience. They suffuse our experiences, including our religious experiences. However, if our awareness of God comes from our feelings and experiences, we soon learn that supernatural ways of thinking “improve” our God experiences, preserving them perfectly and unchanging, as Peter would have done on the Mount of Transfiguration when Jesus’ light shone before the disciples. But, of course, as Jesus knew, experiences can’t be preserved, but must be lived, even to death.

Religion as Myth Myths are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of and to interpret our feelings and experiences. Religious stories are myths; they are narratives we appropriate or develop to give meaning to our feelings and experiences. Religious narratives are not literally factual, but today’s dying churches usually assume that everyone is mentally seven years old and needs to be shielded from that knowledge. The influence of Fundamentalism, especially in America, is so strong that even mainline congregations are silent on the mythic nature of Bible stories and doctrines. Many of the people who remain in churches are either complicit in this deception or wishfully hoping that these stories are literal after all. They look for a return to childhood certainty. Of course, most people, even in the church, are past such pre-critical naiveté (this is Paul Ricoeur’s formulation) in which all stories are factual. However, people grow up; leave pre-critical naiveté behind, and sometimes embrace critical thinking, the next stage of maturity, as the best way of coping with life. However, few people in our culture, which demands certainty, move in their religious understanding to the third stage: post-critical naiveté. At this stage, we are able to apprehend the truth of myths, while embracing the knowledge that they are not literally factual. In Cupitt’s terminology, they are non-real. Non-realism is discussed on his website (http://www.doncupitt.com/realism/aboutnonrealism.html). Here is an excerpt:
“In religion, the move to non-realism implies the recognition that all religious and ethical ideas are human, with a human history. We give up the old metaphysical and cosmological way of understanding religious belief, and translate dogma into spirituality (a spirituality is a religious lifestyle). We understand all religious doctrines in practical terms, as guiding myths to live by, in the way that Kant, Kierkegaard and Bultmannn began to map out. We abandon ideas of objective and eternal truth, and instead see all truth as a human improvisation. We should give up all ideas of a heavenly or supernatural world-beyond. Yet, despite our seeming scepticism, we insist that non-realist religion can work very well as religion, and can deliver eternal happiness. Cupitt sees his religion of ordinary human life as the "Kingdom theology" that historic Christianity always knew it must eventually move to, after the end of the age of the Church and the arrival of a religion of immediate commitment to this world and this life only.”
So, the Church of the Afterlife can become an aid for people immersed in the flux of life and in the struggle to make sense of their feelings and experiences. The classic myths of Christianity, including God, Heaven, Hell, etc, can be experienced not as timeless Truths handed down from above, but as shorthand explanations of feelings and experiences we find ourselves coping with, such as awe, gratitude, bliss, love, hate, guilt, fear, etc. However, the classic church language generally is so antique and the approach so realistic that most people just tune out, often muttering, as they leave the church, “How can you believe such stuff?”
The “church as theatre” idea is important, because it gives us a way of seeing that post-critical naiveté may yet work in church, in spite of Cupitt’s pessimism, in much the same way as in the theatre. People still flock to movies, plays, operas, TV programs, and video games to be entertained, yes, but also to enter alternate worlds where various possibilities are presented for living our lives. In the theatre, people suspend their critical faculties to enter a make-believe world, and, if the show is good, the feelings of the characters resonate with the viewers and ideas come to them on how they might cope with similar feelings in their lives. Of course, this process goes back to the ancient Greek theatre where plays, whether tragedies or comedies, were religious. Aristotle pointed out that viewers of tragedies may achieve catharsis, the purging of the emotions of pity and fear. Similarly, a liturgy, a sermon, a class at church is good if these activities touch us and help us manage our feelings wisely.
Notice that in this formulation, religion is not about abstract doctrines concerning grand religious concepts, but rather about the feelings our experiences arouse. Religious language and activity can help us put these feelings and experiences in perspective, but there is nothing everlasting about religious formulations. They change as peoples’ needs change. So the Church of the Afterlife will reformulate old myths and develop helpful new ones.

Evolution as a new Source of Myths The concept of biological evolution can be a rich source for new and re-worked myths. Evolution, in Darwin’s formulation, is the idea that all living things are descended from a common ancestor and change by natural selection into new species. Of course, the idea of evolution has been resisted mightily by the churches, both because it is not in accord with the Genesis account of creation, but also more importantly because, as Darwin saw, and biologists after him have confirmed, natural selection, the mechanism of evolution, is random, opportunistic, and purposeless. Or rather, the only purpose possible to assign to natural selection is that it ensures that the most fit organisms reproduce, insuring the appearance of the next generation. Natural selection allows for no Guiding Hand from above. The action is strictly down here on earth where the struggle for existence and reproduction is intense. The only conditions needed for evolution are chance (contingency, randomness), a very long time (billions of years), and natural selection. Darwin came to the idea of natural selection out of his experience of humanly guided breeding, in which humans select and breed plants and animals for certain desired characteristics, such as disease resistance in wheat or speed in race horses. Darwin reasoned that selection of organisms most likely to survive and reproduce is constantly occurring in nature, where there is no one guiding the process.

The Theology of Evolution Few Christian theologians have embraced evolution as a source of theological insights. John F. Haught is an exception, and he writes in “God after Darwin” (2000), that Darwinian evolution is a gift to theology. Although Haught’s argument is nuanced, certain points stand out as bases for new myths derived from evolution.

Accept chance as part of life New species arise as the result of chance events called mutations. Although most mutations are useless or harmful, a few give organisms a reproductive advantage. Out of such random and unpredictable events more reproductively fit organisms then arise, while other organisms, less able to compete for resources and mates, die out. Thus, new, fitter organisms arise because of contingency. Contingency is not a mask for a hidden necessity dictated by past events, not yet understood. Rather, it can be interpreted as a new myth. It is the way the cosmos breaks out of subordination to habitual routine and opens itself to the future.
Note that two popular catch phrases, often offered as explanations for events, are at odds with this understanding of contingency: “Everything happens for a reason” and “It is God’s will.” Often, no compelling reasons can be adduced for events, nor can God’s will easily be discerned in them. Notably, Jesus is recorded as sidestepping such reasoning in Luke 13:4-5, where he asked if those killed by the fall of the tower of Siloam were worst offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem. He answers no, implying that some events occur by chance or by unknown causes, and God’s will need not be put forth as a reason. The acknowledgement of contingency as a common feature of life can be the basis for myths that are more helpful than the anxious demand for reasons for events. A better catch phrase is “You should play the hand you were dealt as best you are able.”

With novelty, evolution moves toward the future Because unpredictable novelty is a central feature of evolution, the future is unknown and not merely the working out of past conditions. As humans contemplate the future, they can both acknowledge their ignorance of future events and carefully plan to minimize the harmful consequences of certain human activities. Our acknowledgement of evolution and of our profound, often unintended, effect on our survival and that of other species leads to new myths centered on the need for us to take care of the earth if it is to flourish. Our Garden of Eden has been ravaged and needs our help. Are we wise enough to provide it? This is the new narrative, the new myth we can step into now.

God “lets the world be,” permitting evolution Cupitt calls for “solar ethics.” This ethics presupposes a new myth about the future: We are to shine in the world for others like the sun. The sun does not grasp but empties itself, living and dying at the same time, and in so doing serves us all. Such solar language recalls the great hymn to Jesus in Philippians 2 that starts in verse 5: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” Jürgen Moltmann argues that the creation of the universe itself can be thought of not so much a display of divine might as a consequence of God’s self-restraint. In order to create heaven and earth, God emptied Godself of God’s omnipotence, and as Creator, took the form of a servant.

God opens the future Further, Moltmann maintains, God can be viewed as the God of the future, and this suggests possibilities for a new myth, namely, God is not “up there,” but rather “up ahead,” drawing the whole creation forward into the future. In being the God of the future, God does not “micromanage” as a designer, but rather gives the world room to be itself. The world emerges as separate from and uncontrolled by God. This metaphysical and theological framework provides a way of bringing meaning not only to our bewilderment about our broken world and our individual suffering, but also the apparent struggle, waste, and suffering occasioned by evolution through natural selection. Calvin wrote that the world is a theater with God as the audience. This vision of God’s emptying is as if a “theater” has been provided where the drama of creation could take place. Like all good dramas, this play has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Science has sketched the outlines of the beginning of the world and the middle, our current time, but the future only God knows.

Sex: Central to Life Since St. Paul, the church has sought to suppress sex, imposing the myth that sex is bad. Unlike Judaism, which views sex as essential for its survival, the church depended frequently on conversions, often forced, as a main means of growth. As opportunities for conversions waned, heterosexual marriage was seen as a second best source of growth.
Paul set up a distinction between the flesh (a major source of sin or evil in our bodies) and the spirit (the presence of God, thus goodness, in our bodies). Although many of the works of the flesh that Paul compiles, as in Galatians 5, seem nonsexual (idolatry, sorcery, enmities, etc), these come in the list after obviously sexual ones (fornication, impurity, licentiousness), thus leaving the impression that sexual activity is bad or at least leads to bad activities.
Whatever Paul actually thought about sex, his lasting legacy in this area for the church has been that our sexually inclined flesh is at war with God, and we should mortify our flesh and deny our sexual nature to become the people God wants us to be. Sexual renunciation became the sure path to spiritual holiness, and as Peter Brown documents in “The Body and Society,” some in the church became “spiritual athletes” by becoming seemingly totally nonsexual and thus, it was thought, pure and acceptable to God by their heroic efforts. This accounts, of course, in the church for the high regard in which virgins are held. They are venerated not so much because of their martyrdom for the Faith, but because they are biologically intact. These heroes, of course, were a source of guilt for the ordinary church members who were not so subtly reminded of their own impure, often nonvirginal state.
It is difficult to overestimate the damage that this “just say no” myth about sex has caused. Just one example is telling. Homosexual teenagers are 3 to 7 times more likely to commit suicide than heterosexual teenagers. It’s likely that many of the gay teenagers who kill themselves couldn’t live with the knowledge that they were an abomination to be put to death (Leviticus 20:13).
However, this misery has been very good for the church. People’s guilt about their sexual sinfulness kept them coming back to church for absolution granted with the proviso that the sinner renounce the sin of sex and promise to be “pure,” meaning nonsexual. Now, of course, more and more people are accepting their sexuality as part of their lives and not something to be excised. However, they are getting precious little help from the churches in their efforts to become responsible sexual persons. People attending church learn that sex is evil, unmentionable, or both. The fundamentalists are still denouncing sex, while the liberals make great efforts to say as little as possible about sex as they can. The contortions of the mainline Protestant denominations over the gay question demonstrate this. The major impression from these discussions is that the churches fervently wish that they didn’t have to discuss sex, gay or otherwise. Because of the demand for sexual renunciation by the church, most people are embarrassed by sex and often can’t cope effectively with their sexual feelings and experiences, nor can they talk freely about sex with others.
So, the Church of the Afterlife will preach and teach to replace the “just say no” sexual myth of traditional Christianity with a “just say yes” sexual myth that celebrates sex as a central feature of our humanity. This “just say yes” sexual myth has a number of important aspects: Sex is central to life, sexual feelings are common and natural, sex is not only for reproduction, everyone is sexual, People are different sexually, and in sex, as in all of life, love your neighbor as yourself.

Sex is central to life For most multi-cellular organisms, sexual reproduction is necessary for the survival of the species, and therefore sex is as important as eating, sometimes more so. This simple fact needs be the main message of “just say yes,” namely, we are sexual people.

Sexual feelings are common and natural Further, many of our feelings and experiences relate to sex, relationships, and love. These feelings should be celebrated, not quashed. A church that requires its members to suppress sexual feelings because they are bad leaves people with shame and guilt for feeling sexual. If the Church of the Afterlife can help people recognize and accept their sexual feelings as good, it will make a useful contribution.

Sex is not only for reproduction As important as sex is to reproduction, that is not its only function. Sex gives pleasure whether for reproduction or not. Sex can build relationships and be the basis for companionship and bonding, as in the connection between sex and love, but sex can also be friendly. Sex can help establish hierarchies in primate bands, so much the same dynamic may play out in human relationships. Aggressive power relations can be sexualized, accounting for the often homoerotic nature of male bonding and competition.

Everyone is sexual From birth to death, sex plays a major part in human life. Often only sexually mature, young people are thought to be sexual, but infants, children, and older people also are sexual. Thus, infants and children are not “innocent” in the sense of being nonsexual, but, they have sexual feelings, thoughts, and behaviors appropriate for their age. The “innocence” of children in sexual matters is often invoked in relation in instances of sexual abuse or exploitation. In such cases, it is the abuse or exploitation that should be prevented or stopped. Children should not feel guilty about their sexuality, and abused children should receive help, if needed, in understanding that the abuse was not their fault.

People are different sexually Everyone is sexual, but not everyone is sexual in the same way. Peoples’ sexuality develops at different rates, sex plays a bigger part in some peoples’ lives than in others, people develop different ideas about appropriate sexual behavior, and, of course, not everyone is heterosexual. Current studies indicate that 5 to 10% of the population is sexual minorities, including male homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people. Children in sexual minorities would be particularly helped if early in their life when they normally ask questions about sex, the presence of these minorities were discussed with them. If this happened, many a gay kid would be spared the misery of being “all alone with no one to talk to” about his or her sexual feelings.
In sex, as in all of life, love your neighbor as yourself The second great commandment is, of course, a call to push back on our self-centered impulses. Evolutionary biologists suggest that altruism is an effort toward group cohesion. Protect the person who needs your help today; you may need it tomorrow. However, the second commandment is more radical. Do right by anyone who crosses your path, even though you don’t know what he or she might do in response. This can be dangerous. After all, the cynic’s motto is “no good deed goes unpunished,” but nevertheless we are called to treat others as we want to be treated. The union sex seems to promise may not always be realized. Sometimes, extending ourselves into sex can be punishing, filled with pain and heartbreak. As a result, we may go at sex warily, if at all, or become takers, rather than, sharers of sex. The second commandment is a good guide for us sexual beings, because as we try to follow it, we begin to see the situation from the other’s point of view.

Conclusion: The Trinity or Can God be Saved?

So, church is to become a place where expositions on myth, evolution, and sex take center stage? No, but churches should use these ideas to give people better tools to engage the world with a broad religious vision. The small, static vision of the world presented by most churches will make them even more weak and irrational, serving no need but their own survival.
Churches should be religious organizations, helping people apprehend and appropriate the “more,” in Williams James’s terminology, into their lives, so they might see the “big picture.” Of course, this “more” or the “big picture” is traditionally called God. However, “God” is rarely compelling in people’s lives. When people do make a forceful case for God it is usually because they are pointing us to the highest moral or spiritual values they can imagine. Nigel Leaves in his book, “The God Problem” writes of Feuerbach’s concept of a loving God as the human ideal of love projected onto the universe: “God” is love deified. God may become “real” when the feelings expressed about God strike us as real. Such a moment occurred for me watching Dustin Lance Black’s acceptance speech for his Oscar for best screenplay for “Milk” (http://www.couragecampaign.org/page/s/ThankYouForMilk), in which he assured gay teenagers that God loved them for who they were. Black’s obvious passion made God real in that moment. When we feel deeply, our use of God language to express our feelings can ring true, and God can become real.
From the record of the New Testament, something like that appears to have happened as people encountered Jesus or perhaps more accurately the post-Easter Christ. They began to experience him as God in human form. Bishop John Spong in his essay of November 20, 2008, entitled, “MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, Deepak Chopra and Biblical Illiteracy,” points out that it is possible to trace this divinizing trend in the New Testament from the writings of Paul in the 40s to the 60s of the first century CE, through the synoptic gospels in the 70s and 80s to the Gospel of John in the 90s with John’s writings clearly forming the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity. One way to explain this trend is to imagine people in worship listening to the Bible stories and having feelings for Jesus that could be best expressed in God language. Such language would lead to the idea of Jesus as God, embodied. The doctrine of the Trinity is an attempt to put such feelings into words, while maintaining the monotheistic understanding. However, words are never adequate to describe feelings. Without the feelings that first prompted the doctrines, they are lifeless. No one cares; they are but relics.
Such changes in our understanding of God are ongoing. In “Radicals and the Future of the Church,” Cupitt writes that some of us are coming to “... believe in an historically-evolving, human, and culturally-established God.” Further, “...we now have become responsible for our God. We’ve got to appraise him, update him, rewrite him continually.” Cupitt points out, following Hegel, that the doctrine of the Trinity is an obvious beginning for reinterpretation: “The co-equality of the second person (Christ, the Son) with the third person (The Holy Spirit) is an invitation to demythologize, because the full coequality and coeternity of the Son means that everything the Father is, the Son is also. And when the Son completely and irrevocably commits himself to becoming human then God has become human, without remainder. So everything that God is, this fellow human being beside me now is.” Also, “... the God of Pentecost (The Holy Spirit) is a postmodern God who has ceased to be a substance and has instead become the interrelatedness of everything.... the medium in which we live and move and have our being, the dance of signs.” Therefore, we humans can be God incarnate, expressing the Spirit through (as the old prayer has it) “our life and conversation.” The challenge lies in whether we can express God in our lives so that our words and actions will be in keeping with the ideals that we can envision.
By recognizing that religion is an attempt to make sense of and to share feelings, the Church of the Afterlife could revitalize old formulations in ways that capture peoples’ imagination anew. The power of their feelings could help them and those they touch to lead truly religious lives here, as they continue to help bring in the Kingdom on Earth.

(“The Meaning of the West” was published in 2008 in England by SCM Press. I bought my copy from www.blackwell.co.uk for $22.49, including postage.)

Lenten Posts from CCBlogs

2009-03-10T12:29:00.002-04:00

There are over 30 Lenten post recently posted on CCBlogs. You can access these at http://ccblogs.org/lent09.

Marriages for Gays in the Lutheran Church? Maybe in Sweden

2009-01-31T14:40:00.002-05:00

The Jewish Mosaic (http://www.jewishmosaic.org/) of January 30, 2009 reports a Swedish proposal on gay marriage presented to parliament on Jan 21, 2009.

STOCKHOLM (AFP) — Sweden may allow homosexuals to wed in the Lutheran Church or civil ceremonies as of May if parliament adopts legislation presented to parliament Wednesday, the prime minister's party said.
"The main proposal in the motion is that ... a person's gender will no longer have any bearing on whether they can marry. The marriage law and other laws concerning spouses will be rendered gender neutral according to the proposal," a statement from Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt's conservative Moderates said.
The proposal has wide backing in parliament and is expected to be adopted, though a date has yet to be set for a vote.
While heterosexuals in Sweden can choose to marry in either a civil ceremony or a church ceremony, homosexuals are currently only allowed to register their "partnerships" in a civil ceremony.
Civil unions granting gays and lesbians the same legal status as married couples have been allowed in Sweden since 1995.
If the new legislation is adopted, Sweden, already a pioneer in giving same-sex couples the right to adopt children, would become the first country in the world to allow gays to marry within a major Church.
In 2007, 74 percent of Swedes were members of the Lutheran Church.
The Lutheran Church, which was separated from the state in 2000, has since January 2007 offered gays a religious blessing of their union.
It has previously said it wants the word "marriage" reserved for heterosexual unions, and a Church synod late this year is expected to take a formal decision on Wednesday's proposal.
According to the proposal, pastors who do not want to perform a same-sex wedding ceremony would have the right to refuse, something gay rights' activists criticised.
The Swedish Association for Sexuality Education said that gave "authorities a legal right to discriminate", and suggested that all religious communities' right to perform marriage ceremonies be withdrawn.
Sweden's four-party centre-right government has been split on the issue, with the junior partner Christian Democrats also opposed to the use of the word "marriage" for homosexual unions.
However the three other coalition members, the Moderates, the Liberals and the Centre Party, as well as the opposition Social Democrats, the country's biggest party, are in favour of a gender neutral law and would together garner enough support to adopt the legislation in parliament.

“The Meaning of West”

2009-01-20T15:09:00.004-05:00

In the modern West, we are in transition between two versions of Christianity. The first is the old ecclesiastical version that ended in the early nineteenth century and is now slowly passing away. The second is our late-modern or postmodern civil society, which, with its liberal-democratic humanitarianism is the “Kingdom on Earth” version of Christianity. This is the thesis of Don Cupitt’s important new book, “The Meaning of West.” Liberal-democratic civil society is, he suggests, Quakerism writ large. Christianity is now becoming purely this-worldly and human. People are just leaving the clerical hierarchy behind. Cupitt calls these the officer-class of religious professionals who would control everything. One need only look at the collapse of the church in, for example, Spain, Ireland, and Italy to see the truth of this. In these once actively Christian countries hardly anyone goes to church and hardly anyone listens to, much less obeys, church pronouncements. The division between the sacred and the profane is gone. Now, we know only one world, our secular, human world. The entire divine realm has become scattered or disseminated into human beings.
Notwithstanding, the West is indelibly Christian. We are what Christianity made us. The modern Western-led international ethic is simply a continuation of Christian ethics. The proof of the ascendancy of the new “Kingdom" version of Christianity in the West is the fact that civil, secular society is now more consistently Christian than are the churches. The Church holds onto discrimination and injustice, as with its own employees, women, and gays, fighting inclusion and equality at every turn. Thus, the church is obsolete, and, Cupitt writes, we should leave it and commit ourselves with full religious seriousness to the best of our contemporary secular cultural life. Doing so, we would become better Christians. Of course, it hardly matters what the few people in the churches do. They are seen rightly as outdated anachronisms.
But even without the churches, Christianity is the active heart of the modern West, even though, as Cupitt points out, both religious dogmatists and Enlightenment scientific rationalists err because both are “realists,” wanting us to believe that the special bodies of knowledge out of which they earn their bread are objectively and permanently true. This isn’t so because any knowledge is always conditioned by our own human vantage point, our place in history, and the language we think, speak, and write in. And, because our language is always changing, our reality is also always changing since we have only our language to describe it. As a result we are learning to live without eternity, without foundations, without any absolute knowledge or reality.
Cupitt argues that this attitude helps us glimpse the long-awaited Kingdom of God on earth. This nihilistic religious-humanism-for-a-world-that-knows-it-is-passing-away, was, as far a we can tell, he writes, the original message of Jesus. Because he came to a dreadful end, his followers couldn’t see how his vision could be realized unless he were to return. He thus became a heavenly figure who would return one day to set the world right. This hope persisted, and ironically, drove the Faith toward working for the Kingdom here, because believers felt that Jesus was with them in this world. Cupitt calls this Faith’s own self-secularization. As Jesus emptied himself for us, so we in the West continue to recognize opportunities to empty ourselves into the world to help bring the Kingdom ever closer.

(“The Meaning of the West” was published in 2008 in England by SCM Press. I bought my copy from www.blackwell.co.uk for $22.49, including postage.)

Gay Children: Treating their families as allies not enemies

2009-01-08T13:04:00.001-05:00

An article today at the website, 365gay (http://www.365gay.com/living/treating-families-as-allies-not-enemies/5/), makes an important point: “When families reject their lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) adolescents by telling them the way they act is shameful, excluding them from family activities, or similar behaviors, the young people are more likely to have health and mental health problems in early adulthood.” This point has now been quantified in a paper published this month in the journal “Pediatrics” by Dr. Caitlin Ryan and her team at the César E. Chávez Institute of San Francisco State University. They report that LGB young adults who reported higher levels of family rejection during adolescence were:
* 8.4 times more likely to report having attempted suicide;
* 5.9 times more likely to report high levels of depression;
* 3.4 times more likely to use illegal drugs;
* and 3.4 times more likely to report having engaged in unprotected sexual intercourse, compared with peers who reported no or low levels of family rejection. The study was based on a survey of white and Latino young adults, ages 21-25, recruited from diverse venues in and around San Francisco.

Carolyn Laub, executive director of California’s Gay-Straight Alliance Network, explained why Ryan’s research breaks new ground. “For too long, we’ve served LGBT youth without involving their parents, often because we have feared the parents would reject their child. But to insure that LGBT youth develop into healthy adults, we need to involve parents, teaching them how their acceptance of their child impacts their health outcomes,” she said. She added, “Caitlin Ryan’s research changes the paradigm for how we think about serving LGBT youth in the context of their families, and will have a profound impact on the safety and health of LGBT youth. These findings need to be shared with everyone who works with youth and their families.”

This, of course, includes churches: their members and their clergy. For too long churches have acted as if sex doesn’t exist, and if it does exist, it’s bad, at least until heterosexual marriage. Church people must begin to talk about sex with each other, including sex practiced by the sexual minorities in their midst. This means that sermons should discuss sex and that discussion groups should work with sexual issues. As the 365 gay article points out, “Dr. Ryan realized early on that the very process of being interviewed was therapeutic for the families, very few of whom had ever talked about having LGBT children before. Even parents who were rejecting of their LGBT children and reluctant to participate would end up talking for hours. After completing the research, she also went back to the families that had participated in the qualitative study, as well as families from other ethnic groups, to share the findings. “We were having a dramatic impact on their behavior,” Ryan observed. “For the very first time, they could see how their specific words, actions, and behaviors were affecting their LGBT child.”

So the lesson for churches is clear: Recognize that LGBT people are in your congregations; talk to them; let them talk with the people of the congregations. Maybe together as we talk, we’ll hear the Gospel.

“The Scarlet Empress” and “The First Christmas”

2009-01-08T11:49:00.001-05:00

“The Scarlet Empress,” Josef von Sternberg’s surreal mediation on the rise of Catherine the Great of Russia, was a box-office flop when it opened in 1934. Even the seductive charms of Marlene Dietrich as Catherine could not endear this exercise in realpolitik to American audiences who wanted, at least at the movies, that good should triumph over evil and that love be without self-interest. “The Scarlet Empress” instead shows Catherine fully realizing that to avoid being killed by her crazy husband, the Grand Duke Peter (Sam Jaffe), she must give up on love and use the only weapon she has: sex. Her shedding of her humanity is chillingly portrayed in the banquet scene, in which the Archimandrite Simeon Tevedovsky (Davidson Clark), one of the few clergy at court sympathetic to Catherine, conducts the ritualistic alms collection for the poor. Of course, begging for charity is an inadequate substitute for standing up for justice for the poor, but such thoughts are far from the minds of the court clergy, who clearly relish their positions and are content to be subservient to the royal power. As the alms bowl is passed, Catherine puts in much of her jewelry, while Peter’s mistress (Ruthelma Stevens) contemptuously throws in a crust of bread. Peter shows his scorn by slapping the Archimandrite in the face. With that, we see a change in Catherine. Catching the eye of her current lover, the young officer Orloff (Gavin Gordon), who was standing behind her chair, she viciously knots a scarf. Orloff understands his mission, and after the banquet, we see him strangling Peter, thus ensuring the throne for Catherine. As Robin Wood writes in the notes for the 2001 Criterion Collection edition, which we saw, such a perversion of reciprocal love into sadomasochism within a culture built upon power relations is one of the recurrent themes of the films von Sternberg made with Dietrich.
The scene and indeed the movie itself also illustrate the theme that Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan develop in “The First Christmas,” their groundbreaking book. They write that following Jesus is a political decision, an alternative to following Caesar. Christian disciples are called on to be committed to peace through justice, in contrast to peace through victory, the way of the Caesars of the world.
Victory, of course, is won through violence: war; injustice; and, in Catherine’s case; murder. In contrast, justice almost always requires nonviolent resistance to unjust power. In the movie, neither the clergy nor Catherine is willing to resist power with nonviolence, because they themselves want power.
The movie climaxes and ends with Catherine’s ecstatic assumption of power. She ruled for more than 34 years and helped open Russia to enlightenment values, but she is remembered more for her victory than for justice. As von Sternberg’s movie emphasizes, She was not a virtuous fairy-tale princess. She was heroic, not sympathetic. This was not a recipe for box office success in 1934 or now, but the movie is a fascinating look at how power corrupts.

A Question for Bishop Spong

2009-01-02T12:25:00.003-05:00

I subscribe to Bishop Spong's newsletter. I think the Q&A from this week's newsletter is particularly important. What do you think?

Dr. Ray Schofield, from Waukesha, Wisconsin, writes:

I subscribe to your letters, and I have read most of your books and have found them helpful in my personal search for truth and in the search for my own identity as a Christian. I am 75 years old and retired from a busy practice of family medicine. I consider myself a second-commandment Christian. On both counts, human suffering has been one of my primary concerns. Early on as a physician and caring human being, it seemed clear to me that, of all the causes of human tragedy and suffering, there was no greater cause than that of people having children they didn't want or couldn't take care of. Therefore, potentially we had no more effective weapon than family planning against it. So I became an advocate of family planning. In the mid 1960s, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, there was and still is a religious bias against birth control, and not just from Catholics. Vasectomies were not done openly in the state of Wisconsin, as they were considered both immoral and illegal, so I was referring my patients to a urologist in Rockford, Illinois. After determining that vasectomies were not illegal in the state of Wisconsin, and having failed to persuade my urologist colleagues to do them, against all advice and in the face of religious criticism I decided to do them myself. Over the next few years I did thousands of them, as many as ten between morning hospital rounds and noon. I carried a surgical kit and did them on the road. Within five years, the practice of vasectomies was accepted and widely practiced in the state of Wisconsin. I continue to be an advocate of family planning. Based on polls taken by our local health department and my own experience, I believe the majority of people favor making contraception and sex education available to all women of childbearing age, including sexually active teenagers. So my question is this: Why the deafening silence from our Christian churches — conservative, mainline and liberal — regarding this humanitarian issue? Why the absence of family planning from all organized religious outreach programs? I have interviewed pastors and elected officials and concluded that religious leaders fear being seen as condoning sexual promiscuity, and both elected and religious leaders fear being divisive. They both dodge the issue by touting education and economic development, already long accepted approaches to the problem of poverty. But come on, that's not the issue. It's easy to support popular charities. I've always liked this somewhat obscure quotation of Emerson's that might apply here. "Your goodness must have some edge to it." You've never been afraid of controversy, so I'm interested in your take on this issue, particularly if you can think of ways to change the thinking of the broad Christian community in a way similar to the way it changed regarding the specific issue of vasectomies a half century ago.

Dear Dr. Schofield,

What a terrific letter and what a powerful witness your life has made. Thank you for that. The question you raised is daunting and powerful. Before trying to address it may I say that you are obviously part of the Christian Church, a "second-commandment Christian" as you call yourself — so the Church spoke loudly and eloquently through you. What you are asking about is why institutional Christianity has been so silent on things like family planning. There are at least two things that I think can be said, not to excuse, but to help us to understand. First, institutional Christianity has always been tied up over and repressive to issues of human sexuality. This stemmed from its move into a dualistic Greek thinking world in the second century that identified flesh and bodies with sinfulness while extolling souls and spirits so pure and holy. In time denying the flesh or the desires of the body came to be identified with Christianity. Later the Church declared that the holy life was the sexless life and so virginity was the pathway to holiness and celibacy was the mark of the holy or priestly life. A wide variety of negative things flowed out of this, including the negativity toward family planning, negativity toward a married priesthood, negativity toward women who were defined as "temptresses" if they were not virgins and the sense that sex was somehow dirty or unclean. For years women had to go through a ceremonial cleansing after childbirth before they could return to the Church. During the Middle Ages, cathedral choirs were normally made up of men and boys because menstruating women in the choirs might pollute holy places with their unclean menses. I think it is also fair to say that institutional Christianity's negativity toward homosexual people and even the outbreak of priestly abuse of young boys that has drained the resources of many part of the Roman Catholic Church in paying off lawsuits is one more illustration that unhealthy and sometimes violent expressions of sexuality always result from the repression of healthy sexuality. Once these negative attitudes are present in institutional Christian life, any attempt to change the cultural attitude is defined as immoral. So nations and states have made it difficult to oppose laws that when they were enacted reflected that distortion of the dominant religious perspective. Today, efforts to teach sex education in public school are opposed by an unholy alliance of traditional Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestant fundamentalists. The current administration in Washington, bowing to the pressure of its "religious right" supporters, had advocated the teaching of abstinence instead of sex education. It has been a colossal failure, as statistics reveal. It has been about as effective in curbing sexual activity as the "Just say No" campaign was in controlling drug use. This administration has also refused to fund international family planning clinics around the world for the same reason. Perhaps your letter will give people new courage to act. I do see a new day dawning in America on these and many other issues.

Rick Warren, Obama, and the ELCA

2008-12-18T10:47:00.002-05:00

“There is no need to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population.” Thus said Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Church, one of California’s largest megachurches, and a major supporter of Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage in the state. Warren knows that small minorities, such as gays, generally have no clout. President-elect Barack Obama knows this also. Right wing Christians are much more numerous than gays, and, so, the olive branch is extended to Warren, who will deliver the invocation at Obama's inauguration.
So, too, in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), anti-gay conservatives are much more numerous than gays. This reality is reflected in the political calculation that is its “Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality” (http://www.elca.org/faithfuljourney/draft/draftstatement.pdf). In this document, the ELCA stated that “Marriage is a structure of mutual promises between a man and woman blessed by God (Mark 10:7-9) and authorized in a legal arrangement required by the state.” (lines 1005 - 1007) The draft continues: “After many years of study and conversation, this church does not have consensus regarding loving and committed same-gender relationships.” (lines 1116 - 1117) And, further, “This church recognizes the historic origin of the term “marriage” as a life-long and committed relationship between a woman and man, and does not wish to alter this understanding.” (lines 1151 - 1153).
Like Obama, the ELCA is bowing to the clout of the “consensus” of religious conservatives who definitely want is keep marriage “traditional.” If gays leave, the ELCA won’t be losing many people. It’s better to see them go, so thinks the ELCA, than to upset the “base.”
So, Mark 15:15 comes to life again. Obama and the ELCA “wishing to satisfy the crowd,” like Pilate, find it expedient to sacrifice the gays. However, one reason to be a Christian is the clear biblical witness that the “crowd” and leaders who pander to them are, in God’s view, often wrong. We hope, as Christians, that the “crowd” will not always hold sway. One way of lessening the impact of the “crowd” is for people of goodwill to identify publicly with people who are demeaned and ostracized. Lutherans Concerned/ North America (LC/NA) has introduced a new program, “Reconciling Lutherans” (http://www.lcna.org/reconciling_lutherans.shtm) that invites all Lutherans to publicly witness to their call for a church and world that welcomes and includes all:
People of every age, class, color, and ethnic origin….
People of all sexual orientations and gender identities….
People who are single, married, divorced, separated, blessed or partnered….
People who are temporarily-able, disabled, or of differing abilities….
As the press release for “Reconciling Lutherans” points out: “Each name added to the list of “Reconciling Lutherans” will strengthen the call to the church for change. For too long, many Lutherans have presumed that there is simply not enough support for the church to proceed with changes in teaching and policy. By revealing the true depth and breadth of support for change, the “Reconciling Lutherans” roster will give courage to all members and leaders, bringing closer the day when all are truly welcome.”
Rick Warren heads up one of the world’s largest megachurches. If enough people show their solidarity with the gay minority, his “crowd” will have less power to discriminate.

Today is World AIDS Day

2008-12-01T11:54:00.006-05:00

Below is the press release from Lutherans Concerned/North America concerning World AIDS Day, which is today. The release contains good advice, particularly, "...to lift prayers for those suffering from HIV and AIDS."

Monday, December 1, 2008

Today is World AIDS Day

From: "LC/NA Database"
(www.database@lcna.org)

Today is World AIDS Day, a day set aside to raise awareness of the disease. Though the state of affairs is undeniably better than it was 10 or 20 years ago, the situation is clearly not good. Across the globe there are between 30-36 million people living with HIV. The most recent annual toll was 2 million deaths. New cases of infection declined from 3 million to 2.7 million in the same period. The overall number of people living with HIV continues to rise as new infections add to the total, people live longer in treatment, and new infections outnumber deaths. The percentage of the population infected has stabilized since 2000.

Women account for half the people living with HIV. Young people, 15-24, account for 45% of new infections - 45%. There are an estimated 1.2 million people living with HIV in the United States; in 2001 that number was 1.0 million. In 2007, 22,000 people died from AIDS. In Canada , there are an estimated 73,000 people living with HIV; there were 49,000 in 2001. Around 500 died in 2007.

Executive Director Emily Eastwood suggests that "whether or not you are able to attend one of the many worship services to be held across the country, please set aside a few minutes of today to lift prayers for those suffering from HIV and AIDS; for the researchers who seek more effective treatment, a vaccine, and a cure; for doctors, caregivers, family members, and especially for those at highest risk, our young people and those in poverty. We have lost so many dear friends. Please take good care, get tested, and act for the health and safety of yourself and others."

Keep awareness of the disease, the simple but effective means to prevent being infected and prevent spreading it, its devastating effects on health and quality of living, and its death toll before everyone, but especially those who could place themselves more at risk than others. Among those are the young, who may make poor spur-of-the-moment decisions. It takes only one careless act to be infected by this life-altering and -threatening disease. There are no do-overs.
Show leadership. Get tested, even if you know there is no way you could have contracted the disease. Lead by example. At the next meeting of the ELCA Conference of Bishops, the Bishops will be tested, to demonstrate that AIDS prevention and remediation is everyone's concern and that there is no stigma to getting tested.

Make sure that correct information is provided, errors corrected immediately, so that those who live with the disease are not ostracized, demeaned, or shunned. People living with HIV need to be encouraged, loved, and uplifted for their courage. And, do not forget those closest to those living with HIV/AIDS, who can be driven down, debilitated, and hopeless in the face of the relentless onslaught of the disease and by the fear of loss.

Phil Soucy
Director Communications LC/NA
(www.database@lcna.org)

"Milk"

2008-11-30T16:16:00.001-05:00

“My name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you.” This was the signature declaration of Harvey Milk, who in the ‘70s, was a force in San Francisco politics and probably the most influential figure in U.S. gay liberation yet. In Gus van Sant’s movie, “Milk,” Sean Penn, playing the title character, enlists us as enthusiastic foot soldiers in the movement for freedom and justice, not only for gays, but for anyone who values personal integrity and truthfulness. For Milk, truthfulness was central. Many of the people in his circle were still in the closet (Milk himself had long been out), and he knew that the only way to defeat Proposition 6, which would require the firing of homosexual teachers, was for everyone to come out of the closet to family, employers, and friends, so that the supporters of Prop. 6 could no longer talk credibly about “them.” There would be no “them,” no “other,” when almost everybody had a son, daughter, father, or mother who was queer. His approach worked; Proposition 6 was defeated, but not before he had appealed to many conservative groups, many of them church people, to defeat Prop. 6.
If there is a villain in the movie, it’s not just Dan White who assassinated Milk and Mayor George Muscone, but rather, the nasty, mean-spirited churches that made their hatred of gays more than clear. In the movie, the Gospel is not proclaimed in the churches; instead it is proclaimed in the bedrooms, the streets, and the voting booths of San Francisco, where gay men found love, joy, and fun; where they marched to demonstrate that they were equal to anyone; and where they helped build a society in which the contributions of gay men are valued.
In contrast, the churches continue, even today, on their road to irrelevance. Even as they triumphed with the passing of Proposition 8 this November, the spirit of Harvey Milk will not be crushed. Nor will the Gospel be crushed. Rather, it will lead people, gay and straight, to equity, justice, and fairness.
A few Sundays ago in church, we heard a passage from Amos 5 that could be a description of God’s reaction to the hateful churches that Milk contended with:
“I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
These could be the words of the God who created Harvey Milk. He helped justice roll in San Francisco; it’s now up to us to increase the flow so that God’s righteousness comes to all.
I hope you see “Milk.” When you do, I hope you hear the Gospel.

Thank You, Miss Manners

2008-11-27T03:56:00.005-05:00

Indeed, Miss Manners has come to believe that the basic political division in this country is not between liberals and conservatives but between those who believe that they should have a say in the love lives of strangers and those who do not.

-- Miss Manners (Judith Martin)
Courtesy of "The Daily Slab"
(https://www.blogger.com/blogin.g?blogspotURL=http%3A%2F%2Fdailyslab.blogspot.com%2F)

The ELCA can Learn from the Mormons

2008-11-22T06:05:00.001-05:00

The Mormons spent 25 million dollars in California and, with the help of the black churches, “saved” heterosexual marriage, as Proposition 8 passed. They also got what they probably see as a PR disaster. They are now firmly associated with bigotry, division, and discrimination, the very opposite of the Gospel.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) would also “save” marriage for heterosexuals, as it tries to get its “Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality” approved. I pray that the ELCA will take the Mormons’ experience as a warning. If the ELCA approves the draft statement as it now stands, it can expect the same public derision that the Mormons are now receiving. The ELCA will be seen, not as a source for the Gospel, but as an enemy of the Gospel.

Holy Cross Lutheran in Newmarket Disciplined for Calling Openly Gay Minister

2008-11-17T18:32:00.003-05:00

I just received this email from Lutherans Concerned/North America. It speaks for itself. I'll just say that everyone must work to stop the prejudice.

On November 15, 2008, Pastor Dawn Hutchings and the Congregational Council of Holy Cross Lutheran, Newmarket, Canada, were informed that the Bishop and Synod Council of the Eastern Synod, Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, had suspended the congregation for having called the Rev. Lionel Ketola to be Associate Pastor. The congregation was informed on Sunday the 16th. The synod clergy and the media were informed this afternoon.

Bishop Michael Pryse said in his letter that the congregation could not send delegates to conference, synod or national meetings, could not vote on any matters before such meetings, and could not have any of its members hold elective office within the ELCIC above the congregational level. The suspension is to remain in effect for as long as Lionel remains in his position or until the ELCIC changes its policy and recognizes Lionel's ordination and call to ministry. The congregation and its members, however, can continue to participate in the programmatic and worship life of the ELCIC.

Lionel was called by Holy Cross Lutheran as Associate Pastor and Ambassador of Reconciliation, ordained on that basis on May 16, 2008, and installed on May 18. These acts violated the policy of the ELCIC not to "ordain or recommend for call a self-proclaimed homosexual" in that Lionel is open and public about his sexual orientation. Lionel is married to Stephen, a marriage legal in Canada but not recognized by the ELCIC.

In his letter to the congregation, Bishop Pryse, widely known for his progressive thinking and support of LGBT issues, said that he wanted the strong relationship with Holy Cross to continue, that the Synod Council took no joy from the discipline decision it made, and that the Synod Council would continue to "responsibly work toward changing policies that preclude the full participation of all God's people in our ecclesial life."

In her letter to the congregation, Emily Eastwood, Executive Director, Lutherans Concerned, lauded the congregation for having "courageously enacted the church as it should be in the present. You have taken a great risk for the sake of justice, for the sake of the Gospel. You have embraced Luther's freedom of the Christian. You have acted on your beliefs. The ultimate outcome is assured. Only the time is in question."

In the press release that has just gone out, Pastors Hutchings and Ketola and Emily were quoted as follows:
Pastor Dawn Hutchings, pastor of Holy Cross Lutheran, said, "While we all knew that such a judgment was possible, it still hurts. To be suspended by our church for doing what we have felt called to do for the sake of the Gospel, is painful. Our sadness is tempered by the knowledge that we have acted together as a congregation and together we will continue to seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit as we respond to the Eastern Synod's failure to live up to its professed desire to be a church "In Mission for Others." We will do all that we can to encourage, help, and challenge our Bishop and Synod Council to live up to their "expressed desire to responsibly work toward changing policies that preclude the full participation of all God's people in our ecclesial life." As faithful members of the ELCIC we shall continue to work and pray for the day when all God's children enjoy the freedom of equal opportunity in God's holy church."

Pastor Lionel Ketola said, "It is especially difficult to hear of the suspension of this vibrant Lutheran congregation for their decision to call me, while just one day earlier hundreds of people had gathered with the city's mayor in nearby Oshawa, Ontario, in support of a lesbian couple who were the victims of anti-gay violence. We yearn for the day that our church's calls for justice for all are matched with deeds embodying a commitment to equality for all. Our church must become one of full inclusion of all in the life of the church, following the teachings of Christ. I, along with the people of Holy Cross, remain committed to working in partnership with our ELCIC to see this dream become a reality."
Emily Eastwood, Executive Director, Lutherans Concerned/North America, said of this action, "Once again the authorities of the church have failed to demonstrate leadership, failed to follow the lead of the Christ and Holy Spirit, and, instead, have endorsed a policy of oppression and discrimination based on dusty prejudice and ignorance. Holy Cross has chosen to live life as Christ's church should. One day, and soon, the rest of the church will follow the example they have set - recognizing that LGBT people have always been part of the wondrous diversity of God's creation and Christ's redemption."

Phil Soucy
Director Communications LC/NA
communications@lcna.org

Same-Sex Marriage and the Down Low

2008-11-11T12:59:00.006-05:00

The success on November 4th of ballot initiatives preventing same-sex marriage in California, Arizona, and Florida has left most gay people feeling angry, and some are directing their anger at black voters, 60% to 70% of whom voted to keep marriage only between heterosexuals. Gay people say it’s a civil rights issue and why don’t blacks, who have been through so much discrimination, help gays fight the discrimination directed at them?
Many blacks voted against same-sex marriage because their pastors, as well as the Mormon Church, encouraged them to. This encouragement was often couched in terms of the need to “save” marriage. Gays often respond that their marriages didn’t threaten heterosexual marriage, so there is no need to “save” marriage from legal same-sex marriage. This, I think, is to miss a major concern of the black community about the health of marriage in that community: Same-sex marriage between black men could make the shortage of eligible bachelors in the black community even more severe than it is now. Whether this concern is well founded is open to question, but, by many measures, the pool of marriageable black men in the US is smaller proportionally than the pool of marriageable white men. American white racism, although it also oppresses black women, comes down particularly hard on black males and makes it harder for them to be the strong providers often envisioned for traditional heterosexual marriage. For example, compared with the general population, they have less education. Only 52 percent of public high school students in the fifty largest US cities (where many blacks live) graduate after four years; the national average is 70 percent. (http://www.inteldaily.com/?c=144&a=5861). Black men are more likely to be unemployed than the general population. For example, unemployment in August, 2008, was higher among blacks (10.6%) than in the country overall (6.1%), and unemployment among black men was 11.2%. (http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_econindicators_jobspict_20080905 and http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_econindicators_jobspict_20080905b)
And black men are more likely to be in prison (4,789 per 100,000 residents) than white men (736 per 100,000). (http://drugwarfacts.org/cms/?q=node/64).
But there is another concern in the black community that makes the discussion of same-sex marriage even more difficult. It is life on “the down low.” “The down low” refers to black men who have sex with men, and it is a term often used by black men who are sexually active with men, but who don’t consider themselves gay. I first learned about the down low from an article in the August 3, 2003 “New York Times” magazine by Benoit Denizet-Lewis called “Double Lives On The Down Low.” (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9F0CE0D61E3FF930A3575BC0A9659C8B63&scp=1&sq=Double%20Lives%20On%20The%20Down%20Low.%94&st=cse)
The article’s title tells the story. As Denizet-Lewis writes: “Rejecting a gay culture they perceive as white and effeminate, many black men have settled on a new identity, with its own vocabulary and customs and its own name: Down Low. There have always been men -- black and white -- who have had secret sexual lives with men. But the creation of an organized, underground subculture largely made up of black men who otherwise live straight lives is a phenomenon of the last decade.”
Further on, he continues: “...the black church -- like many in white America -- is careful not to condone homosexual behavior. 'Some gays want a flat-out, standing-on-the-tower affirmation from the church that the gay lifestyle, or the lifestyle of whoring around with men, is acceptable,' says Kelvin Berry, the director of the (Cleveland Antioch Baptist Church AIDS) program. ''And that's not going to happen.'” And in fact, the black churches are fighting the legalization of same-sex marriage, because they see the down low as dishonest and dangerous to black women and the black community.
And who can disagree? So, gays like me who support same-sex marriage need to step back and understand better the concerns of the black community on this issue. We need to understand that same-sex marriage can seem to pose a threat to traditional marriage in the black community and in society at large, because of many men’s duplicitous behavior. Living a lie – in the closet, on the down low – is not a good life, however sexy and attractive. Coming out of the closet, out of the down low, is the better course however difficult.

Under the Huppah

2008-11-07T16:23:00.002-05:00

Walter and Darrel got married a few weeks ago. After nearly 48 years of being together, they decided it was time. They called a friend in California, and a room was found for the ceremony in the courthouse at the L.A. airport. The friend also arranged for another friend to be a deputy marriage commissioner for the occasion. And so they were married.
Walter and Darrell invited us to look at their marriage certificate and the pictures of the wedding. In one of the photos, Walter and Darrell, standing under a garland of flowers, are looking tenderly at each other. When I saw this, I said, “It’s a Huppah!” and cried a little and hugged and kissed them.
Darrell is Australian and loves opera. Walter is Jewish, tells awful jokes involving rabbis, and is religious not at all. And yet in the photo, I saw a Huppah, and Walter didn’t disagree.
As one website has it: “A traditional wedding Chuppah (often spelled Chuppa, Huppah, chuppot (pl) huppot (pl)) is the canopy under which the bridal couple says their wedding vows. Chuppah means "that which covers or floats above". It is open on all four sides, recalling the tents of the Jews’ nomadic ancestors, and must be a temporary structure. The Huppah canopy represents G-d's presence at the wedding, and is a symbol of the home. In this sense, the chuppah is often viewed as the couple's first home.”
It certainly looks to many as if God was on the side of those who voted to outlaw gay marriage in Arizona, California, and Florida. But in the picture, there are Walter and Darrell together under those insubstantial, perishable flowers - under the Huppah - to start this new phase of their life together. I think G-d was present at the wedding of Walter and Darrell, and I say mazal tov to them both! And G-d bless!

The ELCA wins

2008-11-05T13:14:00.001-05:00

Gay marriage ended today in California. Gay marriage is now prohibited by the Florida and Arizona constitutions. In those states, “normal” people no longer have to endure the presence of gay people married to each other.
This is a resounding victory for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the denomination to which I belong. In its “Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality” (http://www.elca.org/faithfuljourney/draft/draftstatement.pdf), the ELCA stated that “Marriage is a structure of mutual promises between a man and woman blessed by God (Mark 10:7-9) and authorized in a legal arrangement required by the state.” (lines 1005 - 1007) The draft continues: “After many years of study and conversation, this church does not have consensus regarding loving and committed same-gender relationships.” (lines 1116 - 1117) And, further, “This church recognizes the historic origin of the term “marriage” as a life-long and committed relationship between a woman and man, and does not wish to alter this understanding.” (lines 1151 - 1153). So, in California, Florida, and Arizona, the ELCA’s understanding has been carved in legal stone. Not only is there no consensus for gay marriage, the consensus, at least in California, Florida, and Arizona, is against it.
You’ve got to give the ELCA credit. It put its finger in the air, found the direction the wind is blowing, and the ELCA is going along with the wind, which will blow gay people back into their place. That place, the ELCA hopes, will be a very quiet closet.
As in Mark 15:15, the crowd has been placated. The ELCA has stood primly by and let it happen. A scapegoat has been found and sacrificed and peace will reign. Until the next time. Which minority will the ELCA let be sacrificed then? The Lutherans in Germany let the Jews be sacrificed in the 1930s. In photographs of the period, the Lutheran clergy look very happy in the presence of Hitler.

“Doctor Atomic”

2008-10-22T13:16:00.002-04:00

We saw John Adam’s opera, “Doctor Atomic” last night at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The opera is a compelling and very disturbing work about the implications of the first detonation in 1945 of the atomic bomb. The story centers on J. Robert Oppenheimer (sung beautifully by Gerald Finley), the lead physicist of the Manhattan Project, which developed the bomb in New Mexico. Oppenheimer is presented as a Faustian figure, agonizing over his desire to unlock the power of the atom and his fear for the destruction of the world now possible with the use of the bomb. The climax of his crisis is his aria, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God”, a sonnet by John Donne. The horrible destructive potential of the bomb is invoked in his second major aria, the terrifying vision of Vishnu in the “Bhagavad Gita,” “At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous, full of mouths and eyes ... terrible with fangs... when I see you, Vishnu ... with your mouths agape and flame-eyes staring -- all my peace is gone; my heart is troubled.”
The climax is not the test detonation in New Mexico, but the evocation of the devastation of Hiroshima, with the voice calling for water in Japanese. The work is both solemn and exhilarating, a very unlikely combination. I left the opera house knowing how god-like we humans are: like Vishnu, we can destroy the world. I also know that as yet we don’t use our God-given power to give peace. When will we “little Christs” follow his example?
“Doctor Atomic” will be performed again on October 25th and 30th, and on November 1st, 5th, 8th, and 13th. I hope you see it. A DVD of a Dutch performance is also available.

The Gospel in Connecticut

2008-10-11T10:57:00.001-04:00

Yesterday the Gospel was proclaimed in Connecticut. Not in the churches, God knows, but in the Connecticut Supreme Court, which ruled that same-sex marriage was constitutional in that state. The court ruled further that Connecticut’s civil union law violated the constitutional guarantees of equal protection under the law. The court echoed the Gospel in affirming that justice requires equality. This aspect of the Gospel has been clearly proclaimed in Peter’s speech in Acts 10:34, where he says “I truly understand that God shows no partiality...” While many churches are working hard to restrict the rights of homosexuals to same-sex marriage, as in California, Florida, and Arizona, the majority on the Connecticut court clearly stated that without equality there is no justice. As Justice Palmer wrote: “Interpreting our state constitutional provisions in accordance with firmly established equal protection principles leads inevitably to the conclusion that gay persons are entitled to marry the otherwise qualified same-sex partner of their choice.” To decide otherwise would require us to apply one set of constitutional principles to gay persons and another to all others.”
“The New York Times” in its article, on October 11th, about the ruling stated: “Striking at the heart of discriminatory traditions in America, the court — in language that often rose above the legal landscape into realms of social justice for a new century — recalled that laws in the not-so-distant past barred interracial marriages, excluded women from occupations and official duties, and relegated blacks to separate but supposedly equal public facilities.”
As I wrote in my blog post of July 12, 2008, “Same-Sex Marriage: The ELCA and California, Compared”: “Equality and justice are hallmarks of the Gospel. In “Reforming Christianity" (2001), Don Cupitt points out that as the Church loses influence because of its ridigity and fear, signs of the Kingdom often appear 'on earth' in secular society.” As in California, a Connecticut court has proclaimed the Gospel, while the churches either oppose the Gospel or stand by mute, unwilling to take the risk of proclaiming God’s love for all.

High School Homophobia

2008-10-08T10:21:00.004-04:00

I’ve submitted a letter to the editor of “The Christian Century” in response to an article, called “Relationship Smarts,’’ in the September 9th issue. The author, Amy Frykholm, notes that at least one student in a high school class about relationships, called “Connections,” had difficulty in seeing marriage and family as applying to his life, but she doesn’t suggest possible reasons for this. I write in my letter that one reason why he might be reluctant to participate in the class exercise in which the students can “marry” someone of the same sex is that he is gay. Perhaps he feels that such a “marriage” would reflect his true desire too accurately for all to see, and he might be unwilling to expose himself to possible homophobia if he were thought to be gay.
I assumed that high school homophobia was so well recognized that it was self-evident. Be that as it may, as reported in today’s “New York Times,” evidence for homophobia among teenagers is now available from the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, or Glsen (pronounced glisten). (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/business/media/08adco.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin)
Glsen is introducing a public-service TV ad campaign to call attention to the derogatory and hurtful nature of the common phrase “That’s so gay” as a putdown. The theme of the campaign: “When you say, ‘That’s so gay,’ do you realize what you say? Knock it off” points to the harm such comments can cause and urges people to become aware of the possible effects of their language. This is enforced by the name of the website for the campaign: http://www.thinkb4youspeak.com.
But what harm can such comments cause? To answer that question, the introduction of the campaign will be accompanied by Glsen’s release of the 2007 edition of an annual report, the “National School Climate Survey.” The survey will report that 9 in 10 teenagers who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender said they were verbally harassed during the last school year. Almost half said they were also physically harassed because of their sexual orientation.
So evidence is available that high school homophobia exists and that it can cause real harm. It’s no wonder that gay students may be reluctant to come out. They can be verbally and physically abused by fellow students and maybe even teachers. I hope that Glsen’s campaign will reduce the abuse and help gay students to be open about their sexual orientation.

Sex Education

2008-08-26T12:30:00.002-04:00

At “Theolog,” the blog of “The Christian Century,” Bromleigh McCleneghan has posted a piece on Purity balls, which, she writes, are “...events to which conservative Christian fathers take their daughters for dinner, dancing and promise-making.” (http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/08/purity-balls.html).
Below is the comment I posted on her piece:

Sex education is obviously necessary if we are to become responsible sexual beings, but it is not a one-time thing. Sex education must start early and continue onward – until we die, because everyone is sexual from birth to death. Because we are always sexual, all our relationships, overtly sexual or not, are part of our sex education. What do we learn in our relationships? Are we even aware that our relationships have something to teach us about sex and life?
Perhaps the basic lesson in sex education is that sexual desire is with us always, and it is not bad or sinful. The purity movement would counter desire with the denial of desire. However, among young people, this clearly doesn’t make them sexually abstinent. One study showed that those who took virginity pledges preserved their technical virginity about 18 months longer than teenagers who didn’t pledge, but they were six times more likely to engage in oral sex than virgins who hadn’t taken a pledge. They were also much less likely to use condoms during their first sexual experience or to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases. Disease rates between those who pledged and those who didn’t were actually similar (“Students of Virginity,” “New York Times” magazine, March 30, 2008.)
It seems to me that a better approach to sex education and the sexually responsible life is to teach that sexual desire should be managed, not somehow eliminated. Of course, managing sexual desire is a tall order, especially for young people, but there are helpful approaches: Be as conscious as possible of the presence of desire. The goal is for the person to be in charge of the desire, not the reverse. Attempt to envision the outcomes of various courses of management. Be aware that not to act is to make a decision. These approaches can be more easily implemented if possible options can be discussed with trusted, nonjudgmental family members and friends. It follows that family and friends should listen and help clarify options, rather than demand courses of action or threaten dire consequences. Of course, Paul (or someone writing in his name) describes this approach beautifully in I Corinthians 13. Too bad that Christians so often fail to heed this advice.

A review of "Reforming Christianity"

2008-07-25T11:48:00.005-04:00

A few posts ago in “The New Yorker,” Theodicy, and Don Cupitt, on July 2nd, I mentioned "Reforming Christianity" by Don Cupitt (Polebridge Press, 2001). Below is a review by Graham Warren from November 2001 of that book on the blog, "Sofia, Sea of Faith in Australia" (http://www.sof-in-australia.org/blog.php?blog_id=140). I think the review provides a good overview of Cupitt's ideas and a challenge to us church members to move out of church Christianity into Kingdom religion, because for me the saddest idea in Warren's review is "The Church has condemned itself to the sideline of history." This is because the church refuses, as Jesus did, to stand with "God facing up to nihilism."
By the way, "Radicals and the Future of the Church" is another wonderful book that I recommend highly.

Here is Warren's review:

Don Cupitt's latest book "Reforming Christianity" is a post-script to his 1989 reformation book, "Radicals and the Future of the Church." His proposals for and sketches of a church of the future - how it will be organized and what it will actually do - were mocked. Now, sadly, he portrays himself as a man who does not mind losing the church and its version of Christianity. However, he fears the loss of Jesus - a serious blow. Jesus may not be rescued as a divine saviour but we may be able to do something with him as an ethical teacher - provided we don't mind seeing him not as a god who can't be wrong but as a man who might be right.

My first acquaintance with Don Cupitt was a life-altering reading in 1988 of "Sea of Faith - Christianity in Change" (1985). I then read backwards "Taking Leave of God" (1980), "Jesus and the Gospel of God" (1978), "The Leap of Reason" (1976), "Christ and Hiddenness of God" (1971). Somewhere along the way I read "The Long-Legged Fly" but I have lost my copy and with it the memories and thoughts evoked in the reading.

Don Cupitt prefers plain speech. He refuses to be an ecclesiastical apologist. He is a philosopher of religion and an heir to the Enlightenment exploring Kant's insight that we fabricate our world. Like Hegel he believes that reality emerges in our encounter with historical developments. Don Cupitt follows the critical path of Schopenhauer, Freud, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida. Cupitt does a more complete draft of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer intimated - religionless Christianity. He asks 'do we want to grow up?' Do we want to join the global shift away from authoritarianism and traditionalism? Are we prepared to move away from the assumption that the world is ready-made and all we are required to do is to be enthralled.

Can Christianity be reformed? It is a given, is it not? Only if one has a belief system which is immutable - “deposit of faith” as it is known in the Roman tradition wherein all is revealed from above. Contrast this with a voluntarist view where autonomy and responsibility are balanced one against the other.

This book may scandalize the faithful. With each new book Don Cupitt adopts a more urgent iconoclastic polemic with the church as a “deposit of faith” squarely in his sights. One constantly hears echoes of the forebears of Cupitt's ideas: "…faith as an act of will", "…religion is an attempt to familiarize the terrible" - Soren Kierkegaard; "…man’s last and highest parting occurs, when, for God's sake, he takes leave of god" - Meister Eckhart. This book is an urgent call to throw off "the painted veil", a metaphor as old as Plato, to describe that which hangs between the eternal world and us. This is not new material from Don Cupitt but it is the most urgent and latest call to act. As Church Christianity melts away there is an urgency: don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Don’t lose sight of what Jesus represented!

The Church has condemned itself to the sideline of history and Cupitt has analyzed the reasons for this over a lifetime of writing. But now we are in danger of losing the voice of Jesus - not the Christ of faith constructed by the church since first they puzzled over the delay in the parousia - but the Jesus as the original caller to the Kingdom. Don Cupitt preaches kingdom theology, kingdom values.

Jesus preached the Kingdom and we got the church. Now that the church has reached its use-by-date, we need to rescue core teachings.

Don Cupitt argues that reformation and renewal of Christianity are possible. Church Christianity, as we have received it, is handicapped in its view by two great errors – the mistaken interpretation of Jesus Christ as being co-equal Son of God incarnate, and a mistaken belief that there is a controlling supernatural place beyond this world.

To escape we need to start again with the message of Jesus about the Kingdom of God on this earth. In honest reflection on this message Don Cupitt argues for a religion that is immediate, beliefless and entirely based on the here and now. Religion is no longer how we relate ourselves to the supernatural realm, but rather how we relate ourselves to life. To reject the church is to reject a mediated view of God.

What power had the old mediated view? It promised reward later! History and maturity have stripped us of this as a credible belief and we stare in the face of nihilism. Don Cupitt embraces nihilist Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer but shows us God facing up to nihilism. This is the voice, resurrected after two millennia, of Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus preached the Kingdom. Don Cupitt preached Kingdom religion. This is a combination of "solar spirituality" and humanitarian social ethics. It is autonomous and responsible. It embraces the end of belief in life after death. Why did Jesus express such eschatological urgency? Perhaps it is, and was, here and now. We need to embrace it. We are not called to prepare for it. It is now. "Solar spirituality" is lived not explained. If Jesus had so much trouble being understood, small wonder that Cupitt likewise does.

This is not a secular humanist rebellion against God nor a repudiation of Christianity. On the contrary, we see it as Christianity's own struggle to advance from its warped ecclesiastical stage to its final Kingdom stage of development. The church has always prayed "…thy Kingdom come (but not yet please!)”.

The church very early became locked into the view of Jesus as portrayed in John's gospel - a divinised Jesus Christ. This is in stark contrast to the human Jesus of Nazareth portrayed in the other gospels. Why do church theologians in seminaries not cross the corridor to listen to their colleagues in scriptural study? New hermeneutical tools and analyses have given us a chance to hear the muffled voice of Jesus. Why has the institution remained deaf and mute to these new understandings of their founder?

Policing: A Middle Way between War and Pacifism

2008-07-24T13:57:00.002-04:00

An international police force may be a way between war and pacifism that can reduce violence in the world. This is the thesis of a new book of essays, “Just Policing, Not War: An Alternative Response to World,” reviewed by Donald W. Shiver Jr. in the July 29, 2008 issue of the “Christian Century.” Ivan J. Kauffman, an author of one of book’s essays, points out the defects of both the just war tradition and pacifism. The former assumes that violence can achieve justice, while the latter assumes that opposing violence is the way to justice. However, merely opposing violence does not produce peace. Peacemaking is a larger effort, in which policing can play a major part. Policing, Shiver points out, is unlikely to eliminate violence in the world, but policing can diminish violence, subject it to judicial restraint, and treat life as worth preserving, and thus lead us toward a world that deserves the name “civilized.”
I haven’t yet read the book. Shiver’s review makes me want to read it, but more broadly, I’m drawn to reconsider the role of policing in the world, especially as undertaken by international organizations like the United Nations. I hope these essays lead our policy makers to see policing as an important alternative to both war, which is rarely if ever just, and pacifism, which often seems merely oppositional rather than actively peace seeking.

Same-Sex Marriage: The ELCA and California, Compared

2008-07-12T12:06:00.002-04:00

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in its Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality (http://www.elca.org/faithfuljourney/draft/draftstatement.pdf) maintains the tradition that “Marriage is a structure of mutual promises between a man and woman blessed by God (Mark 10:7-9) and authorized in a legal arrangement required by the state.” (lines 1005 - 1007) The draft continues: “After many years of study and conversation, this church does not have consensus regarding loving and committed same-gender relationships.” (lines 1116 - 1117) And, further, “This church recognizes the historic origin of the term “marriage” as a life-long and committed relationship between a woman and man, and does not wish to alter this understanding.” (lines 1151 - 1153)

Compare this with the opinion of Chief Justice George of the California Supreme Count who, in May, 2008, wrote in the majority opinion overturning the ban on same-sex marriage that “The right to marry represents the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with a person of one’s choice and, as such, is of fundamental significance both to society and to the individual.” Like the ELCA, Chief Justice George conceded that “as an historical matter in this state marriage has always been restricted to a union between a man and a woman.” But, unlike the ELCA, he maintained that “tradition alone” does not justify the denial of a fundamental constitutional right. Furthermore, when lawyers for the state identified two interests to justify reserving the term marriage for heterosexual unions - tradition and the will of the majority. Chief Justice George said neither was sufficient. (“New York Times” May 16, 2008) Apparently Justice George thinks that equality and justice are more important than tradition and consensus.

Equality and justice are hallmarks of the Gospel. In “Reforming Christianity" (2001), Don Cupitt points out that as the Church loses influence because of its ridigity and fear, signs of the Kingdom often appear “on earth” in secular society. Justice George’s ruling is such a sign. In contrast, the ELCA, fearful of losing its conservative base, has forsaken the Gospel in regard to same-sex marriage and is hiding behind “tradition and lack of consensus.” If Jesus had based his ministry on tradition and consensus, he would be long forgotten. As equality and justice prevail for gay people, the ELCA will be ignored and then forgotten. The ELCA should hear the Gospel and proclaim it, because the Gospel is to way to life. If the ELCA proclaims the Gospel, it will live. Otherwise, it’s dead.

“The New Yorker,” Theodicy, and Don Cupitt

2008-07-02T12:00:00.002-04:00

“The New Yorker” didn’t publish my letter, below, so I’m posting it today:

Although James Wood cites Nietzsche at the beginning of his article, “Holiday in Hellmouth” (June 9th & 16th), he seems to yearn for the return of the theistic God, whom Nietzsche so famously declared dead, to solve the problem of theodicy. Such a supernatural, otherworldly, almighty God no longer captures the imagination of many people. Rather, as Don Cupitt writes in “Radicals and the Future of the Church,” some of us are coming to “... believe in an historically-evolving, human, and culturally-established God.” Further, “...we now have become responsible for our God. We’ve got to appraise him, update him, rewrite him continually.” Cupitt points out, following Hegel, that the doctrine of the Trinity is an obvious beginning for reinterpretation: “The co-equality of the second person (Christ, the Son) with the third person (The Holy Spirit) is an invitation to demythologize, because the full coequality and coeternity of the Son means that everything the Father is, the Son is also. And when the Son completely and irrevocably commits himself to becoming human then God has become human, without remainder. So everything that God is, this fellow human being beside me now is.” Also, “... the God of Pentecost (The Holy Spirit) is a postmodern God who has ceased to be a substance and has instead become the interrelatedness of everything.... the medium in which we live and move and have our being, the dance of signs.” Therefore, we are not passive bystanders in God’s world waiting for God to overcome evil, but rather we humans can be God incarnate, expressing the Spirit through (as the old prayer has it) “our life and conversation.” We know all too well that we have the ability to bring about evil. The challenge lies in whether we can express God to foster good.

This letter is an outcome of my re-reading “Radicals and the Future of the Church,” which, I think, 19 years after its publication, is still an excellent description of what the church could be like if non-realism were adopted. It is out of print, but Amazon has 6 used paperback copies from $7. It’s well worth the read.

My Response to the ELCA’s Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality

2008-04-15T11:05:00.007-04:00

On March 13th, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) published a draft of a “Social Statement on Human Sexuality” and asked for responses. The draft is available at: http://www.elca.org/faithfuljourney/draft/draftstatement.pdf. My response to the draft is below. My response is best understood in conjunction with the draft, but I think that my comments are understandable by themselves.
I hope you will read the draft and my response and provide your own responses to me, to the ELCA, or to me and the ELCA. Thanks.

A Response to the ELCA’s Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality

This response comes from an individual.

Overall Rating

1. How well does the Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality provide a useful and adequate framework to help this church discern what it means to live faithfully with our neighbors in the increasing complex sphere of human sexuality?

1 - Not Very Well (I checked this option.)
2
3
4
5 - Very Well

General Comment:

Overall, the draft continues the traditional church practice of demanding sexual renunciation of many of its members, specifically those not in a heterosexual marriage. As a result, it reinforces the heterosexual domination system by privileging heterosexuals. Thus, the draft does not proclaim the Gospel.

2. How helpful is each sub-section in Section II in explaining how Lutherans approach ethics?

I did not find the rating system helpful.

What if anything is a specific strength of Section II?

The draft recognizes that those participating in sexual activity should be responsible.

3. How helpful is each sub-section in Section III at interpreting why Lutherans regard our sexuality as one of the contributing blessings of God's good creation while acknowledging the complexities and difficulties that people experience in the sexual dimension of their lives?

I did not find the rating system helpful.

What, if anything, would you hope to see added to Section III?

An acknowledgement at least that sex is not always so fraught, solemn, frightening, and exalted as this section would have us believe. Although sex can certainly lead to all the miseries that are cataloged in this section, sex can also be pleasurable, fun, silly, frivolous, and romantic. Sex is not as grim as the draft would have it.

How helpful is each sub-section in Section IV in exploring matters of sexuality and relationships?

I did not find the rating system helpful.

What, if anything, would you hope to see added to Section IV?

Line 773 states that “Children are targets of sexual bullying, destructive language, and vicious humor.” This statement does not go on to point out that many bullied children are gay or perceived to be gay. Bullies justify their bullying by calling upon heterosexual privilege, as in “Queers deserve to be beaten up.” Persons in authority, such as teachers, principals, school boards, and legislators, often participate in or are afraid to go against the implicit heterosexual privilege in the community. Therefore, they do not work to stop bullying. Because the draft endorses heterosexual privilege, it also shies away from the truth that gay children are often the targets of bullies. The draft aids and abets gay bullying.

Line 797 indicates that violent and degrading pornography is a threat to children and adults. It should be obvious that it is the violence and degradation in such pornography that has potential for harm, because violence and degradation are usually harmful. Whether sexually explicit images and writing that are not violent and degrading are harmful is much less certain. Sexually explicit material that shows care and concern for people of the same sex can, in my opinion, be very helpful, particularly to gay people who are told that homosexuality is unacceptable. This, of course, has been the traditional Christian message for centuries, as expressed pithily by Fred Phelps: “God hates fags.” The church’s constant emphasis on “purity” has made many a gay child hate his sexuality and try to hide it and change it. With the advent of the internet and the sexually explicit material available there, children can see and experience a different perspective on their homosexuality. They can learn that it is not bad and sinful as the church has taught, but good, beautiful, and life-affirming. I say: “Thank God for the sexually explicit material on the Internet.” Such material is a way of envisioning the future when people are not hounded and ostracized because they don’t conform to the church’s version of “purity.” I wish that as a 13 year old boy in 1947, I could have seen on a computer men making love. If I had, I wouldn’t have felt so alone, abandoned, and evil. Even now the disapproval of sex coming from the churches, as in this draft, is a good part of the reason that sexually explicit material is watched “obsessively and in secret” (lines 799 and 801). Society is obsessed with sex because it is forbidden and church people are the principle forbidders. As long as the churches have an influence in society and use that influence to make people feel “impure” about their sex lives, people’s interest in sex will be obsessive and secret. The draft should encourage a view of sex that is neither so exalted that no one could ever have “good” sex nor so base that anyone who has sex outside of heterosexual marriage is branded as a sinner. Sex feels good, which is why people have sex and why they should have sex. There is enough misery in the world; sex can be a way of finding some happiness in a messy world. That said, not every sexual encounter is a sacred union, nor does it need to be. Likewise, not every sexual encounter is bestial exploitation. In fact, the litany of miseries in the draft has very little to do with sex, but rather the exploitation that is possible when sex is seen to be bad by the watchdogs of society. Someone is always available to make money on perceived sin.

Line 814 indicates that sex education should emphasize responsibility, mutuality, and abstinence. Responsibility and mutuality are, of course, are necessary in any sexual or for that matter, nonsexual, encounter, but abstinence may be more of a problem than a solution for sexual issues. Here is an excerpt from “Students of Virginity” in the March 30, 2008 issue of the “New York Times” magazine that shows that abstinence is not a sex-free zone, nor necessarily a way for people to exercise responsibility and mutuality:
“Millions of teenagers have since pledged to remain sexually abstinent until marriage, mainly on the grounds that premarital sex is sin.
At the same time, Congress and the Bush administration have directed hundreds of millions of dollars toward abstinence-only education in the public middle schools and high schools — classes that have been roundly criticized for blurring the line between science and religion. A 2004 report issued by Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, found that 11 of 13 abstinence curriculums that his government-reform committee examined were rife with scientific errors and false and misleading information about the risks of sexual activity. Many states are now rejecting federal financing for such classes, on evidence that they fail to limit sexual behavior or reduce teen pregnancy.
In a follow-up study to a 1995 national survey of close to 12,000 students in grades 7 through 12, two sociologists, Peter Bearman at Columbia University and Hannah Brückner at Yale, found that while those who took virginity pledges preserved their technical virginity about 18 months longer than teenagers who didn’t pledge, they were six times more likely to engage in oral sex than virgins who hadn’t taken a pledge. They were also much less likely to use condoms during their first sexual experience or to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases. Disease rates between those who pledged and those who didn’t were actually similar. The authors, who published their findings in 2005, concluded that the emphasis on premarital abstinence was insufficient to fend off disease and ‘collides with the realities of adolescents’ and young adults’ lives.’”
My guess is that the writers of the draft were pressured by the right to include the mention of abstinence.

5. How helpful is each sub-section in Section V in understanding matters of sexuality related to life in society?

I did not find the rating system helpful.

6. How well does the Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality balance the need to speak to issues in intimate personal relationships with the need to address social issues that are broader and structural?

1 - Not Very Well (I checked this option.)
2
3
4
5 - Very Well

7. How well does the Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality helpfully address the needs and questions of all people in this church?

1 - Not Very Well (I checked this option.)
2
3
4
5 - Very Well

8. The proposed social statement on human sexuality will have a series of implementing resolutions. Such resolutions provide an opportunity to commit the church to the development of additional resources or programs relevant to the concerns of the social statement. Please list up to three topics you think it would be essential to include among the implementing resolutions for this social statement.

Resolved: Sexual renunciation, as advocated in the ELCA’s Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality, is a form of works-righteousness.

9. If there is anything else you particularly want to share with the Task Force for ELCA Studies on Sexuality, please use the space below:

The ELCA’s Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality is cowardly, cynical, and political.

First, the draft is cowardly because it is not the long-hoped-for announcement of a new sex ethic for the church. Instead, the draft attempts to reinforce the old, failed, discredited sex ethic that, probably more than any other single factor, causes people to leave the church. The old sex ethic would require people not in heterosexual marriage to renounce sex. This approach to sex is profoundly non-Lutheran. We Lutherans say that we cannot win God’s approval by what we do; God loves us unreservedly. However, the history of the church, including the Lutheran church, shows that there is one work traditionally required for acceptance into the church family: sexual renunciation, which is often encoded in Christian scripture, liturgy, and hymns as: “purity.” The flip side of purity, in this view, is fornication and impurity. St. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, denounces fornication and impurity without defining either (Galatians 5: 19). The draft quotes Paul’s angry words without any interpretation, stating that St. Paul writes that fornication and impurity shred the bonds of trust (Line 1222).
The draft asks no questions about this passage, such as: What was happening in Galatia that led Paul to write these words? Or: Why was Paul so hostile to sex? In contrast to Paul, Webster’s dictionary defines fornication as “consensual sexual intercourse between two persons not married to each other.” This seems quite nonjudgmental, particularly the “consensual” part, but it hardly seems to fit with Paul’s condemnatory tone.
One website, “Liberated Christians” (http://www.libchrist.com), takes a different approach toward Paul and “fornication,” suggesting that “I Corinthians 6:9 badly mistranslates ‘porneia’ as fornication. English translations use ‘fornication’ for Paul's original Greek word ‘porneia,’ which means to sell and refers to slaves bought and sold for cultic prostitution. In Corinth, farmers would visit the temple priestesses who represented the fertility gods. By having sex with these prostitutes, the farmers believed that their fields would be more fertile. This wasn’t simply going to prostitutes, but pagan cultic worship. So, perhaps fornication in the Bible is not “consensual sex,” but religious sex with gods (or their representatives) who are not the God of Abraham.
The traditional Christian message has not considered possibilities like this, rather, as in the draft, it has condemned any sex, in thought, word, or deed, outside heterosexual marriage as sinful. Augustine went further, claiming that even within heterosexual marriage, sex was sinful if not entered into with the intention of procreation. The idea that fornication might refer to idolatry is lost on most Christians, and, because of this, church teaching, reinforced in the draft, states that in order to be good Christians, acceptable Christians, church people should renounce sex outside of heterosexual marriage. They have been asked, since the church began, to perform this work, this obviously very difficult work, to be good Christians and, it follows, to gain salvation.
Where did this emphasis on sexual renunciation in the church come from? In “The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity” (1988), Peter Brown traces the development of the thinking and practice of men and women in late antiquity, starting with Paul and concluding with Augustine, as they defined and sought sanctity. The result of their frequently very strenuous efforts at ascetic renunciation was that it moved to the center of Christian life early in the church’s history. Brown shows that the church, from its early period right into the Middle Ages, opted to make sex and contact with sex one of the main benchmarks of the hierarchy of the Christian life. Celibacy for men and virginity for women took on great importance.
We church people live with this works-righteousness (the idea that our works will save us) even today. Although celibacy and chastity for men have always been important, it is women’s virginity that is emblematic of sexual renunciation. It is only a translator’s slip that has given us Mary, the mother of Jesus, as a virgin. Isaiah 7:14, the passage in the Hebrew Bible that speaks of the mother of a deliverer like Jesus, uses the words, “a young woman” not “virgin.” However “virgin” was the word chosen in the Greek translation, and virginity very early in the church became the ideal state for all. Of course, the cult of virginity brings the concept of purity to its fullest flower (to use a sexually fraught metaphor). The Virgin Mary is revered not so much for her role as the mother of Jesus, but as an exemplar of virginity and, thus, purity. Mary becomes the exemplar of virginity, rather than, as in the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), the servant of God, who, while noting her lowliness, is quite assertive, presenting a quite liberal, if not socialist, vision of a world where the poor are fed while the rich are pulled from their thrones of privilege. This is not the traditional virgin, meek and mild, but a strong woman with a radical program for social change.
Virginity, or, more precisely, what it implies, is the curse of Christianity, making us, as sexual beings, always guilty and never “pure” enough. Rather than being guilty about our sexuality, we should embrace it, and learn how to be responsible sexual people. The draft is cowardly in that it embraces renunciation and works righteousness, giving no guidance on how all of us, not just married heterosexuals, can be both actively sexual and responsible.

Second, the draft is cowardly because it does not abide by the second great commandment that the draft cites as foundational (line 8). The draft refuses to go where the Gospel is always leading us: To the conviction that God loves all creation and, in response, we are lead by the Spirit to love all people without partiality (Acts 10:34). Instead, the draft implies that God is partial to heterosexuals, blessing their marriages (line 1005), but not those of same-sex couples (line 1117). The draft claims that the church does not have consensus regarding same-gender relationships (line 1117). Without this consensus, the draft refuses to proclaim the Gospel: God calls for fairness and equality for all people and this should be without regard to their sexual orientation. Instead the writers of the draft, politically and cynically, have put their fingers in the air to determine which way the wind is blowing, and, lo and behold, they have discovered that the right wing is blowing to keep marriage for heterosexuals only, thus attempting to maintain and strengthen the heterosexual hegemony build into traditional society. The possibility of gay marriage challenges this hegemony, eliciting strong, often violent, reactions against those who name and oppose heterosexual privilege. The draft upholds heterosexualism when it merely recognizes controversy without providing leadership toward a position of sexual and marriage equality.
The plight of the Anglican Communion today should be instructive for Lutherans. Archbishop Rowan Williams has consistently tried to placate the Communion’s right wing by shunning gays, notably Bishop Gene Robinson. If, at Robinson’s election, Williams had welcomed him as a fellow bishop, a message would have been sent to the right that gays are not to be made scapegoats in the church to “satisfy the crowd” (Mark 15:15). Now that openly gay people are being shunned in the Anglican Communion, violence and hatred against gays have been released because they are seen as convenient scapegoats. For example, in 2006, Nigerian Archbishop, Peter J. Akinola supported a proposed Draconian law in Nigeria that would have effectively banned the "promotion" of homosexuality - punishing violators with up to five years imprisonment. (Wayne Besen: 365Gay.com, 2008).
So, for the ELCA to deny gays church marriage because popular opinion seems to be against it, is to fall into the same trap as the Anglicans have. Homosexuals in the ELCA may not marry in the church because some in the church might object. The draft appeases these objectors in a manner similar to Williams’ appeasement.
It wouldn’t work, because the point of Christ’s passion is that his scapegoating is called out and pointed to as wrong. That is why Christians “proclaim the Lord's death until he comes” at communion (I Corinthians 11:26): To proclaim publicly that scapegoating is wrong and God wants people to stop it. Christians should be saying: “Don’t satisfy the crowd, don’t throw the crowd another scapegoat in an attempt to avoid controversy, but proclaim the Gospel that God loves all people equally.

Thirdly, the draft is cowardly because, by privileging heterosexuals, it makes it harder for homosexuals to embrace their sexuality in the face of social hostility. This cowardice has real life consequences, particularly among gay youth. The Rev. Dr. Janet L. Parker of Rock Spring Congregational United Church of Christ has provided evidence concerning the hardships faced by gay youth. On June 10, 2007, she wrote that: “Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender children account for up to 40% of the youth living in homeless shelters and foster homes in our nation’s cities. Gay, lesbian and bisexual youth are three times more likely than heterosexual youth to attempt suicide. Queer youth are much more likely to run away, end up as teen prostitutes, attempt suicide and suffer beatings and abuse inside and outside of their homes than heterosexual youth.” (http://www.rockspringcongucc.org/html/sermons.html). In the face of these findings, the draft goes along with heterosexualism making the lives of gay people harder than they need to be.

Because there is no consensus, the draft takes the easy way out and satisfies the crowd. The draft accomplishes nothing but the reinforcement of the status quo. It provides no leadership; it does not proclaim the Gospel.

Understanding Resurrection

2008-03-16T14:18:00.003-04:00

Below is an article from yesterday's "New York Times" about resurrection. Next Sunday, March 23rd, is, in the Western Church, Easter, the Feast of the Resurrection.

Beliefs

Resurrection Is Often Misunderstood by Christians and Jews

By PETER STEINFELS

Published in the "New York Times" on March 15, 2008

As Christians in most of the world approach the celebration of Jesus’ Resurrection, it is startling to find three distinguished scholars, all known for scrupulous attention to theological tradition and biblical sources, agreeing that the very idea of resurrection is widely and badly misunderstood.

Misunderstood not just by those whose contemporary sensibilities restrain them from saying much more about resurrection than that it symbolizes some vague (and probably temporary) victory of life over death. But also misunderstood by many devout believers who consider themselves thoroughly faithful to traditional religious teachings.

Kevin J. Madigan is a Roman Catholic who teaches Christian history at Harvard Divinity School. Jon D. Levenson, a colleague at Harvard, is a Jew who teaches Jewish studies. Together they have written “Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews.”

The book, which will be published next month by Yale University Press, argues that the idea that God will raise the dead to life at the end of time is central to both Jewish and Christian traditions.

N. T. Wright is a noted New Testament scholar who has continued to churn out academic and popular works, even after moving from Oxford in 2003 to become the Anglican bishop of Durham. Last month he published “Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church” (HarperOne).

These two books are different in tone and agenda. Professors Madigan and Levenson are particularly interested in countering the assumption that resurrection is solely a Christian belief, rather than one deeply rooted in the Judaism from which Jesus emerged. Bishop Wright has written a more popular and pastoral book, with practical proposals for church renewal.

But both books converge in challenging several widespread notions. Resurrection, they maintain, does not simply mean going to heaven or life after death.

Resurrection is not a belief that divides an other-worldly Christianity from a this-worldly Judaism.

Nor is resurrection something that refers only — or even primarily — to the individual’s survival after death.

Instead, both books emphasize that in classic Jewish and Christian teachings, resurrection refers to a collective resurrection of people and renewal of all creation at the end of time.

Resurrection was linked to the expectation of judgment and a final triumph of justice. This was the idea of resurrection that had evolved as Jews returned from exile and struggled under foreign domination in the period before Jesus. It was this idea of resurrection that Christians had in mind when they declared that what occurred on Easter was the “first fruits” of what was to come.

If there is a key to the convergence among these authors, it lies, first of all, in their insistence on the bodily and communal character of resurrection, a view that has long competed with a Hellenistic philosophical and especially Platonic dualism, in which an individual disembodied intellect or spirit could be saved from its corruptible and corrupting body.

Even as great a Jewish sage as Maimonides seemed to be tempted in this direction, and Bishop Wright sees the legacy of this dualism in the storehouse of Christian images, from Dante to classic hymns, in which souls shorn of bodies find their final destiny in a heavenly region quite elsewhere than on earth.

This Hellenistic dualism had earlier reached its apogee in Gnosticism, which almost always taught the incompatibility of spirit and matter and sought salvation in the shucking off of the material body. Professor Madigan, Professor Levenson and Bishop Wright view the anti-Gnostic stances of early church fathers and rabbinic sages alike as a proper defense of their traditions’ core beliefs and not, as recently argued, a tactic in religious power politics.

Unlike Gnosticism, Judaism and Christianity, in different ways, held to the goodness of creation and the flawed nature of humans. This equips both traditions, in these writers’ opinions, to avoid the illusion that humans can build a perfect world on their own while yet instilling in humans the confidence that the good they do will finally be affirmed and completed by the God of Resurrection.

Both these books build on their authors’ previous works. In “Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel” (Yale University Press, 2006), Professor Levenson argued that belief in resurrection was much more deeply rooted in the Hebrew scriptures and Jewish tradition than many Jews today realized.

Five years ago, Bishop Wright, whose important contributions to the scholarly debate over the historical Jesus have emphasized Jesus’ place within Judaism’s expectations for a divine restoration of Israel, published “The Resurrection of the Son of God” (Fortress).

Although both books emphasize resurrection as the final expression of divine power, vindicating those faithful to God’s promises and regenerating all creation, neither is indifferent to the question of the immediate destinies of the departed.

Professors Madigan and Levenson do not think that their explanation of resurrection entails “a disbelief in the immortality of some aspect of the person or in the notion that the departed righteous even now enjoy a blissful communion with God.” And though Bishop Wright can be rather impatient with much of the talk of “souls” and “immortality” and “heaven” thoroughly embedded in Christian prayer and ritual, he has no problem when heaven as a “postmortem destination” is seen as a “temporary stage on the way to eventual resurrection of the body.”

This eventual resurrection, he writes, is not “life after death” so much as “life after life after death.”

Why Sex is Important

2008-03-11T13:40:00.000-04:00

One response to Gov. Spitzer’s sex scandal is, “It’s just sex. Why is it so important?” Well, it is just sex, and it’s important, because sex is important in our culture way beyond its role as one of our basic, and perhaps strongest, appetites. Often, sex is also a surrogate for our deepest, unconscious, unexamined emotions. This is, of course, Freud 101, but what is usually not recognized is the church’s complicity in keeping sex and the related emotions unexamined. For 2000 years, the church has been urging the renunciation of sex in favor of “purity.” For example, in Galatians 5:19-21, Paul lists “the works of the flesh,” which he links to death. The first three are fornication, impurity, and licentiousness. Thus, unsanctioned sexual activity takes pride of place in his list of vices which continues with apparently nonsexual activities, such as idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, and anger among others. Paul here seems to imply that the sexual sins lead right to all the other vices. Although all these are bad, the sexual ones may be at the root of the others, leading ultimately to separation from the Spirit.
Whether this interpretation of Paul is correct, the church has certainly acted as if it were. Peter Brown in his book, “The Body and Society” has documented that the church, from Paul right into the Middle Ages, opted to make sex and contact with sex one of the main benchmarks of the hierarchy of the Christian life. Celibacy for men and virginity for women took on great importance. Even today, as the Spitzer scandal demonstrates, there is zero tolerance in our culture for sex outside of the culturally permitted norms.
Now, this is not to say that sex should be or can be without consequences. The power of the sex drive militates against this idea, because sex without mature and conscious internal control can lead to some or all the nonsexual sins Paul deplores. However, instead of urging mature self-control in sex, the church; and, by extension, “Christian Civilization, has demanded that we “just say no” to sex.
But renunciation does not eliminate the appetite for sex or sexual activity. Instead, it makes guilty hypocrites of essentially everyone who tries, and generally fails, not to feel sexual, think about sex, or have sex. Of course, hypocrisy frequently leads to denial, deception, and lying, as in Gov. Spitzer’s case. Apparently, illicit sex was for him the response to a sex drive, which he couldn’t resist but which he thought he could handle. It seems as if renunciation did not work for him. How much better for him – and for us – if our culture could have allowed him to deal effectively with the issues represented by his unsanctioned sexual feelings.

The Metropolitan Fails Lincoln Kirstein: An Open letter to Philippe de Montebello

2007-10-23T23:29:00.000-04:00

I’ve just come back from the Metropolitan Museum’s presentation on Lincoln Kirstein very disappointed. This ad hoc, unscripted, uninformative program gave no insights into the source of Kirstein’s genius.
The executor of Kirstein’s literary estate told us nothing about Kirstein’s writing, nor did he read anything by Kirstein. Instead, he suggested a vague and unconvincing relationship between some quotes from T.S. Eliot and Kirstein.
The Met’s curator of photography showed two photos of Kirstein by Walker Evans and many pictures by Evans with the excuse that Kirstein was Evan’s patron. Why not read a letter from Kirstein to Evans illustrating this relationship?
The comments from Violette Verdy and Peter Martins were more about Balanchine than Kirstein. The most we got was that he ate tuna fish.
Besides being slapdash and unprofessional, the evening avoided completely a central aspect of Kirstein’s life: his homosexuality. Why hide this central feature of his life? When people talk and write about Balanchine they never fail to mention his many wives and affairs. This is not prurient prying, but an important key to his personality and his genius. Has not Martin Duberman in his new biography of Kirstein shown us that his sexuality was a major source of his passion? Although married, Kirstein never hid his homosexual life. How much better would the evening have been if someone who had researched Kirstein’s life, such as Duberman, had spoken? As it was, the only information we got was from the handout which was fine as far as it went, sketching his role in the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet, but without much depth.
The best part of the program was the dancing. Unlike the panel, the student dancers were poised, expressive, and professional. They gave the evening what pleasure there was to be had in this unfortunate exercise.

Save Us from Weak Resignation

2007-09-22T12:07:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite hymns is “God of Grace and God of Glory.” The music is the great Welch tune, “Cwm Rhondda” by John Hughes, and the words are by Harry Emerson Fosdick. In the fifth and last verse, he writes: “Save us from weak resignation, To the evils we deplore.”
As the war drags on and the deaths and misery keep mounting, this verse is a desperate cry for us not to sink into apathy and go shopping. With the Republicans supporting Bush and the Democrats unwilling to confront him and persist in demanding an end to the bloodshed, most people have moved on, actively willing the war out of mind. In his column of Sunday, September 16th, Frank Rich highlights our indifference to this intractable conflict. Thirty years ago, when Gen. William Westmoreland urged staying the course in Vietnam, all three networks pre-empted their midday programming for his appearance. When Gen. Petraeus gave his recent testimony on Iraq, no network interrupted a soap opera for his testimony. Rich points out that America can not win a war abandoned by its own citizens. The evaporation of that support was ratified by voters last November. For that, they were rewarded with the "surge." Now their mood has turned darker. Americans have not merely abandoned the war; they don't want to hear anything that might remind them of it or of war in general. Television programs and movies about our wars are ratings disasters and box office poison. The public has changed the channel. They don't want to see American troops dying in Iraq or Afghanistan, because they ask, “What can be done?” Now, writes Rich, our America, unlike Vietnam-era America, is more often resigned than angry.
Most Americans may have given up trying to end the war, but under their resignation, anger still lurks. This past week, when the Senate voted to censure MoveOn for its ad denouncing Gen. Petraeus, MoveOn reported the biggest outpouring of donations ever, ensuring more ads against the war.
So resignation is probably our attempt to forget, hide, or tamp down our anger. This is not likely to be helpful and may cause harm. As Harry Emerson Fosdick writes in his great hymn, we should not yield to resignation, but let our conscious and therefore focused anger be the weapon we wield against this terrible war. Write your members of congress, join protests, contribute money to causes that work to stop the war. Above all pray that your resignation be replaced with the determination to end this and all wars.

A Prayer on Yom Kippur

2007-09-21T11:41:00.000-04:00

In the Jewish Mosaic E-News on Sept. 21 (www.jewishmosaic.org), Rabbi Steve Greenberg writes about the Yom Kippur dilemma. He writes:

Every Yom Kippur, gay Jews who attend services are faced with a dilemma. In the afternoon service the portion from Leviticus delineating the sexual prohibitions is read in most traditional synagogues. The whole of chapter 18 is read. It is a list of sexual violations from incest, to adultery, from sex with a menstruant woman, to bestiality and of course sex between men. And with a male you shall not lie the lyings of a woman, it is an abomination. How are we supposed to respond to this public humiliation?

For nearly two thousand years gay Jews, and particularly gay men, have had to listen to their lives debased on the holiest day of the year, their sexual relations demonized with the word toeva, abomination. It’s no wonder that many liberal synagogues have rejected this tradition and have replaced it various other readings.

However, despite the difficulty, there is good reason for communities to sustain the traditional reading. Repressing difficult texts is a lot like repressing feelings; they inevitably resurface and often in much more destructive ways. It seems better to me that we read Leviticus 18 and deal with it than deny or ignore it. Moreover, reading the text in shul on Yom Kippur makes us present in a powerful, if challenging way. With acknowledgement, it can become a call to greater empathy, understanding. We can use it to bring to communal memory the countless people throughout the ages, who, on the most holy day of the year, had no voice in the face the most devastating misrepresentation of their hearts. And lastly, it can serve as an impetus for learning and reinterpretation of the biblical and rabbinic texts that should no longer be a cause of self-loathing or exclusion.

Toward this end I wrote this prayer along with my friend Danny Wohl to accompany the afternoon Torah service on Yom Kippur. It is printed below for communities to use and where that is not possible, for individuals to use privately. With wishes for a Yom Kippur that helps us all to overcome the obstacles in our way toward greater authenticity, generosity of spirit and aliveness and may Jewish communities everywhere come soon to embrace their gay and lesbian sons and daughters.

Prayer to accompany the Torah reading of Leviticus 18 on Yom Kippur Afternoon

by Rabbi Steven Greenberg and Danny Wohl

Master of the Universe
On this Yom Kippur,
As the noonday sun descends,
We open up your sacred scroll,
And read with awe its words of wisdom.
Troubled, we share our meditations withYou.

In the beginning You created us in your image,
Breathed into a pure body opposing desires,
The human was created, lonely and alone.
When You repaired the flaw, transformed it by love
Your creations rejoiced, their longings fulfilled.
Flesh of Flesh, bone of bone,
One made two and two made one.

But You have also kindled the storms of our passion,
How, brazen and reckless, we slake our thirst.
We are overwhelmed by a sea of desire.
Only the bonds of covenant restrain the torrent,
Setting boundaries that cannot be breached.

You call us to read on this sacred day
The verses that ban the uncovering of nakedness.
The sins committed in the embrace of families
That trample innocence and humiliate with touch,
The degrading coercions that cry out unheard,
The breach of trust and the betrayal of loved ones
Fill the land with violence from within.

Shield of Abraham and Defender of Sarah,
Grant safety and security to those who have suffered abuse.
Send them peace of mind and soothe their spirits
As they turn to you for healing on this Day of Awe.

Master of the Universe, to Whom all secrets are known,
As the reading closes and “abhorence” is spoken
Women and men, in every congregation
Hear the words “Thou shalt not lie” and weep
In the back rows of synagogues,
Outcast and broken.

On this Day of Judgment, please God remember
The myriad souls, who from the beginning
Found in their hearts a fierce inclination,
A mighty love, toward members of their own sex.

Remember O Lord their paralyzing fear.
The unspeakable longing, the shaming embrace,
Accusing them with the full force of Law
Of perversions that could only be remedied by death.

Remember throughout history the thousands upon thousands,
Who consumed by self-hatred and the scorn of others,
Were cast out as outrage, or suffered unseen.
Not one dared imagine that they were not cursed
But blessed by the One, Who revels in difference.

And I further observed the tears of the oppressed
With none to comfort them.
And I saw the power of their oppressors
With none to comfort them. (Ecclesiastes 4:1)

Master of the universe, Creator of humankind
Are the oppressors of your children,
The verses themselves or those who interpret them?
What tragedies do we inflict when we drive away
Beloved daughters, beloved sons?

Our scholars once knew how to look in the book
To create new worlds in both awe and in love.
Open their eyes to the marvels and wonders,
The ways to expand and deepen your Torah
and draw down among us your spirit from above.

Where there is no comfort for the maligned and oppressed,
Then be Thou their comfort, their strength and fortress.
Bless us with peace in the midst of our differences.
Grant understanding and courage to our Sages,
Wipe away shame from the hearts of your children
And give hope to all for both wholeness and love.

The Curse of Virginity

2007-09-11T13:47:00.000-04:00

Lutherans (of whom I am one) teach justification by faith, not works. We say that we cannot win God’s approval by what we do; God loves us unreservedly. However, the history of the church, including the Lutheran church, shows that there is one work traditionally required for acceptance into the church family. This is sexual renunciation, which is often encoded in Christian scripture, liturgy, and hymns as: “purity.” The flip side of purity is fornication and adultery. This summer in the Lutheran Church, the epistles read in the liturgy have kept up the drumbeat condemning both, and St. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians links fornication to impurity without defining either. Webster’s dictionary defines fornication as “consensual sexual intercourse between two persons not married to each other.” This seems quite nonjudgmental, particularly the “consensual” part.
However, Googling “fornication + Bible” produces, for the most part, very different results. Most sites point out how forcefully many Bible passages condemn fornication and how we fornicators are going straight to hell if we don’t repent. I found only one site that takes a different approach: “Liberated Christians” (http://www.libchrist.com), which writes of fornication: “I Cor 6:9 badly mistranslates "porneia" as fornication. Corinth was a wide-open port city. People there could get sex any way they wanted it. Where our English translations read 'fornication', Paul's original Greek word was 'porneia' which means to sell and refers to slaves bought and sold for cultic prostitution. What was happening in the Temples of Corinth was farmers were visiting the temple priestesses who represented the fertility Gods. By having sex with these prostitutes they believed their fields would be more fertile. It didn't even have to do with going to prostitutes, but pagan cultic worship.” So, perhaps fornication in the Bible is not “consensual sex,” but religious sex with gods (or their representatives) who are not the God of Abraham.
Adultery, of course, is a sin. It is defined in Webster’s as: “voluntary sexual intercourse between a married man and someone other than his wife or between a married woman and someone other than her husband.” However, “Liberated Christians” has an interesting slant on adultery, writing: “The Jews understood ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ very differently than Church tradition. It only applied to men if they had intercourse with someone else's wife, but it was allowable for a married man to have intercourse with a single woman. Adultery was the sin of "trespassing" on a man's property. Until marriage women were the property of their fathers. After marriage they became the property of their husbands.” So, in this light, adultery is more about property than about sex.
Christian preachers (at least those I listen to) probably know all too well how “impurity, fornication or adultery” have been used in the past to shame their listeners and to attempt to control their sex lives. Preachers these days rarely use these words. They may speak about “broken relationships,” but they steer clear of Paul’s harsh language, leaving us pew sitters to figure out as best we can what to make of these words in scripture. The traditional Christian message has been (and, as most of the sites on Google attest, still is) that any sex, in thought, word, or deed, outside marriage is sinful. Augustine went further, claiming that even within marriage, sex was sinful if not entered into with the intention of procreation. The ideas that fornication might refer to idolatry or that adultery might be about property rights are lost on most Christians. So in order to be a good Christians, acceptable Christians, church people were directed to renounce sex. Thus, they have been asked since the church began to perform this work, this obviously very difficult work, to be good Christians and, it follows, to gain salvation.
Where did this emphasis on sexual renunciation in the church come from? In “The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity” (1988), Peter Brown traces the development of the thinking and practice of men and women in late antiquity, starting with Paul and concluding with Augustine, as they defined and sought sanctity. The result of their frequently very strenuous efforts at ascetic renunciation was that it moved to the center of Christian life early in the church’s history. Brown shows that the church, from its early period right into the Middle Ages, opted to make sex and contact with sex one of the main benchmarks of the hierarchy of the Christian life. Celibacy for men and virginity for women took on great importance.
We church people live with this works righteousness (the idea that our works will save us) even today. Although celibacy and chastity for men have always been important, it is women’s virginity that is emblematic of sexual renunciation. It is only a translator’s slip that has given us Mary, the mother of Jesus, as a virgin. Isaiah 7:14, the passage in the Hebrew Bible that speaks of the mother of a deliverer like Jesus, uses the words, “a young woman” not “virgin.” However “virgin” was the word chosen in the Greek translation, and virginity very early in the church became the ideal state for all. Of course, the cult of virginity brings the concept of purity to its fullest flower (If I may be allowed this sexually fraught metaphor). The Virgin Mary is revered not so much for her role as the mother of Jesus, but as an exemplar of virginity and, thus, purity. In high Mariology, Mary is conceived without sin, leads a sinless (think sexless) life, remains always a virgin, and as befits her special status was assumed into heaven without dying, a feat that not even Jesus could manage. Mary becomes the exemplar of virginity, rather than, as in the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), the servant of God, who, while noting her lowliness, is quite assertive, presenting a quite liberal, if not socialist, vision of a world where the poor are fed while the rich are pulled from their thrones of privilege. This is not the traditional virgin, meek and mild, but a strong woman with a radical program for social change.
So, I believe, virginity, or, more precisely, what it implies, is the curse of Christianity, making us, as sexual beings, always guilty and never “pure” enough. I think that, rather than being guilty about our sexuality, we should embrace it, and learn how to be responsible sexual people. What’s involved in this, is the subject of an upcoming blog entry.

Who can you trust?

2007-08-29T23:04:00.000-04:00

This is from 365Gay on August 29th:
Barney Frank (D-Mass) one of only two openly gay members of Congress says that Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig should resist calls for his resignation.

"What he did, it’s hypocritical, but it’s not an abuse of his office in the sense that he was taking money for corrupt votes," Frank told the Associated Press.
"I think people should resign when they have clearly done the job in a way that is dishonest."

Frank went on to tell the AP: "It’s one thing to say that someone can’t be trusted to vote without being corrupt, it’s another to say that he can’t be trusted to go to the bathroom by himself."

Beauties on the Beach

2007-08-28T12:04:00.000-04:00

I saw two beautiful young men on the beach yesterday. I first saw them when they arrived at Two Mile Hollow Beach in East Hampton a little while after our arrival there, as they spread their blanket and stretched out about a hundred feet away. We go to Two Mile Hollow because it’s the gay beach, and the “scenery” is often very attractive. Our neighbors were outstanding examples. They couldn’t have been more than 20; one was fair, the other dark. I was particularly taken with him. He had movie star looks and a solid muscular body, which he showed off nicely in his low-riding surfer pants tightly covering his firm, round rear.
After a while, they got up and went into the fairly high waves. They tussled briefly and then played a game. One would step into the cupped hands of the other who would then flip him backwards and high into the cresting wave. After watching them play awhile, I fell asleep. When I awoke, it was time to go. The young beauties were now back on their blanket. As we passed, I saw that they were entwined in each others’ arms, fondling, and stroking, and kissing. This sight gave me great pleasure, and I smiled broadly when we were close to them. I think they saw me smiling at them. I hope so.
Why does this scene stay with me? It was sexually arousing certainly, but more than that, I sensed that I was seeing two lovers who were confident enough that they were in a safe and welcoming place to express their feelings openly. They probably knew they were on the gay beach and open displays of affection were fine. It made me happy that at least in one place – this sunny open beach – they could go where their feelings led them. For a moment, the beach was a bit of the Kingdom, where love reigned even for gay men in love.

The Bourne Ultimatum: an Anti-Government Film

2007-08-14T12:00:00.000-04:00

We saw “The Bourne Ultimatum” last night. It’s a very entertaining, fast-and-furious thriller continuing the saga of Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), a CIA agent who, having lost his memory, is desperately trying to recover it. His quest for his past is the driving force of this and all the Bourne movies. He is searching and on the run, not from standard-issue bad guys, but our own CIA, which is out to eliminate him, because he knows too much, is finding out too much, and will expose the agency’s criminal behavior.
The whole movie is an exciting chase with Bourne outwitting his pursuers at every turn. In his ability to survive the murderous campaign against him, he is essentially a supernatural character, a messiah saving us from our government.
I don’t remember another popular entertainment that so effectively showed the evil that is expressed in a secret, lawless government. Last summer’s James Bond epic, “Casino Royale,” in contrast, made no political statement. Indeed, James Bond always does the government’s bidding without a murmur. In “The Bourne Ultimatum,” Bourne realizes that he was duped into volunteering to serve his country and to “save American lives,” as his erstwhile mentor reminds him. Of course, instead, he has killed many people, each of whom, he says, he remembers. His memory is a grisly “cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) that torments him.
His volunteering is clearly meant to be emblematic of the trust shown by all the hapless souls now dead or still fighting our secret, lawless, futile wars. They, unlike Bourne, were not indestructible messiahs. For their trusting volunteering, they have achieved no “victory,” and for those who’ve died, we cling to the hope that they are in “the bosom of Abraham” (Luke 16:22).
In the movies, we can relax and let Bourne be our messiah; in life, we should realize that we have work to do if our world is not to be destroyed by war and lawlessness. If we ask what we should do to help avert catastrophe, we can remember the rich man who, not finding himself in the bosom of Abraham, wanted Abraham to warn his brothers that living a heedless life like his would result in the torment of Hades. Abraham’s answer is good advice for us: “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.” (Luke 16:29) I would add: Do what they urge us to do.
Unfortunately, Luke’s story does not end on a happy note. Abraham continues, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” (v 31)
Our Messiah has come to us from the dead, we don’t listen to him, and so we’re on our own. Given our predicament, we need the luck of Bourne. Alas, I fear that’s only in the movies.

Naming the Dead

2007-08-06T14:28:00.000-04:00

René Girard has described scapegoating sacrifice as, “a phenomenon that unbeknownst to us generates all human cultures and still warps our human vision in favor of all sorts of exclusions.” “Unbeknownst to us:” This is the key to the universal practice of scapegoating, in which a person or group is killed, while surrounded by the aura of the divine, to solve internal conflicts by uniting against the chosen victim. As S. Mark Heim points out in his book, “Saved from Sacrifice,” violence is done but, if the scapegoating is successful, none is perceived. Sacred killing does not register as killing because it is seen as a divine command, and, as in magic, our eyes are directed elsewhere at the moment of death, so scapegoating is “Unbeknownst to us.” The view and the voice of the victim are hidden from us.
Heim points out that, in contrast, in the Bible we come to hear the objections of the sacrificed. The voices of the victims are heard in the Psalms, the book of Job, the Prophets, and, of course, in the narratives of Jesus’ Passion, where redemptive violence is a sinful human construct for peacemaking, not a divine institution.
In her column, “Naming the dead,” in the July 24, 2007 issue of the “Christian Century,” Barbara Brown Taylor writes that she first encountered naming the war dead in church at a California monastery. She writes that our current war is “a touchy subject;” “to name the dead might be construed as a political statement; and “to say these names out loud, in the presence of God and God’s people, is not a matter of being for or against the war.”
However, naming the war dead is to make our scapegoats, those we would sacrifice for national unity, visible. Unlike Brown, I believe that once the dead are named, we must wrestle with the sacrifice of their deaths. We must wrestle with the politics of the war, whether we are for it and believe that the war deaths are justified or against it and believe that these deaths are a waste.
However we come down politically, it is telling that the Bush administration has worked hard to keep the war and the war dead invisible, thus lending credence to the idea that the war would be hard to justify if the costs and the deaths were made widely known. For example, the $456 billion that the war has cost so far has, until recently, been “off-budget” and thus effectively hidden. And, in his column in the “New York Times” on August 5, 2007, Frank Rich reminds us: “Mr. Bush created the template by doing everything possible to keep the sacrifice of American armed forces in Iraq off-camera, forbidding photos of coffins and skipping military funerals. That set the stage for the ensuing demonization of Ted Koppel, whose decision to salute the fallen by reading a list of their names in the spotlight of “Nightline” was branded unpatriotic by the right’s vigilantes.”
The crucifixion of Jesus was a political event undertaken, as Mark has it, “to satisfy the crowd.” However, with the resurrection, Jesus’ scapegoating became visible, and now he offers us “peace not as the world gives.” To receive this peace, we must renounce war and killing in war as a way to peace. As a start toward receiving Jesus’ peace, we must continue to make the war’s scapegoats, American, Iraqi, and Afghan, visible by naming them. As we become more aware of the deaths perpetrated in our name, we should be spurred to undertake the political work to end our wars and the scapegoating they entail.

Swedes on the March

2007-08-05T11:25:00.000-04:00

Here is a news item of interest. If the Swedes can support gay people, why can’t others?

Church Leaders Join Stockholm Gay Pride March

by 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff

Posted: August 5, 2007 - 11:00 am ET
(Stockholm) Swedish political and church leaders marched in Stockholm's LGBT pride parade Saturday, drawing large cheers and applause from thousands of people lining the streets of the capital.
About 30 members of the Swedish Lutheran Church, including the deans of the cathedrals of Stockholm and Uppsala. The Church is the largest denomination in the country.
In a statement the church said it wanted to "break the masses' big silence" regarding gays, bisexuals and transsexuals.
Representatives of the governing coalition and major opposition parties in Parliament also marched. The group included three cabinet ministers.
On Friday, Fredrik Reinfeldt became the first serving Swedish Prime Minister to take part in pride festivities when he toured a downtown park where pre-pride activities were taking place.
Close to 50,000 people marched in the parade while about a half-million people lined streets.
Prior to the march police and health officials advised people to bring plenty of drinking water to the parade as temperatures climbed into the 90s.
Earlier this year an international study of attitudes towards gays found Sweden the most the most welcoming country for gays.
Early next year it is expected Parliament will approve a same-sex marriage bill.
Sweden already has civil partnerships under a law enacted in 1995 that gives most of the rights and obligations of marriage to same-sex couples who register. But the country's LGBT community and moderate politicians have stepped up lobbying to have the law amended to permit gays and lesbians to marry.
A parliamentary committee studying the issue last year called civil partnerships outdated and has recommended Parliament allow same-sex marriage. It also would allow gay couples to marry in churches.
The Swedish Lutheran Church has said once the bill is approved it will conduct same-sex marriages in its churches.
©365Gay.com 2007

Religion: A Way of Visioning the Future

2007-07-31T11:51:00.000-04:00

A common view in religion is that God does not change, and, therefore, religion, too, is fixed and unchanging. In this view, religion then becomes a repository of unchanging tradition, which is often confused with God’s supposedly unchanging will. However, our life is always changing, and sometimes change can be unpleasant and unwanted, so many people try to avoid change. Although they can’t do this in life, many often try to retreat into their “Old-Time” religion, where, they say, God is the same “yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” Whether this is true or not is simply unknowable, at least by the likes of us. All we know of God are those experiences we label as “God.”
Because we know we change, we should rationally be able to agree that as our experience changes, our view of God can also change. One metaphor that can help us order our experience into a meaningful narrative is our life as a journey, moving from birth through life to death and always changing. Another helpful metaphor to add to this first metaphor is that God is calling us to move into the future trusting in God’s promises with all the frightening changes that such movement entails. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, the metaphor of God calling God’s followers on a journey into the future is prominent. God calls Abram to leave his home in Ur, and his father, and family to go to “the land that I will show you.” The Israelites follow Moses out of Egypt because of God’s promise that they will settle in Canaan. Jesus leaves Galilee and travels to Jerusalem to fulfill God’s mission for his life.
So, God can be envisioned as calling us into the future, a future containing many changes. Jürgen Moltmann, a prominent German Protestant theologian, has written about God not up there but out in front calling us into the future. Moltmann understands Christian faith as essentially hope for the future of human beings and for this world as promised by the God of exodus and by God’s resurrection of the crucified Jesus. Thus, an attitude of expectancy underlies all of faith. An active doctrine of hope gives hope for an alternative (my italics) future to the oppressed and suffering of our present time (adapted from The Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Modern Western Theology [http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/WeirdWildWeb/courses/mwt/dictionary/mwt_themes_855_moltmann.htm]).
As Christians contemplate possible futures, they remember the promises that God and they made in baptism, in the Word proclaimed, and in the meal. These promises can give us hope, and hope gives us courage to make choices that we trust will help make the promises a reality here among us now. Of the many promises we hear in the Christian religion, all can be understood as variations on “Thy Kingdom come on earth as in heaven.” The work of Christians is to participate in bringing in God’s Kingdom here on earth, where there will be enough for all and where justice and equity reign.
Each Christian has a unique contribution to make to this enterprise, and the choices each makes will help determine how effective these contributions are. Being conscious that we have choices is an important element in making effective choices. As we contemplate choices, we can play out the possible consequences of our choices in our minds and in conversations with others. So, if we can consciously envision a better world, a world more like the Kingdom, the perhaps we will make choices that, we hope, will bring it closer. So for Christians on a God-led journey into the future, the best chance for a future more like the Kingdom is based on trust in the promises and choices informed by the promises.

It’s Only a Paper Moon

2007-07-12T10:59:00.003-04:00

This is the paper from January of 2007 that gave me the title for this blog, "Worshiping at the Church of Non-Realism." Your comments are appreciated.

At the conclusion of his recent book, "The God Problem: Alternatives to Fundamentalism," Nigel Leaves asks whether God is real or simply a (non-real) symbol of our ultimate concern. He finds the non-realism advocated by Don Cupitt and Lloyd Geering more intellectually compelling, but the realism upheld by Marcus Borg and Bishop John Spong more emotionally appealing. Like them, many of us feel the need for a real God.
However, today even in the face of this yearning, Cupitt writes in "The Old Creed and the New," the great faith traditions, including Christianity, are rapidly breaking down and melting away, particularly in the West. Many people are no longer moved and motivated by traditional religion. The upsurge in virulent fundamentalism that would maintain the old supernatural religion with its real God is a clear sign of the challenge of non-realism. However, many people are dissatisfied with fundamentalism or other forms of traditional religion, because they no longer provide reliable answers and assurances in daily life or a convincing picture of a life after this one. As a result, non-realism is a popular default religious position for many people who have left the churches.
That said, thoroughgoing non-realism has been a hard sell, and Cupitt’s sales pitch can seem bleak: Nothing exists outside this world except (following Nietzsche) the Void. We are of this world and live and die in it. We can not observe God outside this life or demonstrate God by scientific experiment. No better (or worse) otherworld with promises of a perfect, everlasting life after this life, as conjured up by traditional religion’s supernatural picture, can shield us from the Void. To think that we can know God in heaven or in another realm not of this world in the way we know facts here in this world is an illusion. With the rise of rational enquiry from within the religious traditions, science and technology have come to dominate our thinking, leaving little inclination for supernatural explanations. And yet, along with Peggy Lee, we ask: “Is that all there is?”

The Church as the Theater of Feelings
Cupitt has been a reformer, not a despiser of the Church, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, or Sam Harris. Cupitt has always encouraged us to become more consciously religious; he urges us to remain in the Church, but keep our eyes open, making, as he writes in "Radicals and the Future of the Church," the church our (his emphasis) work of art. He writes that the church is needed because “It is a theatre in which we solemnly enact our deepest feelings.”
The theatre analogy points to how non-realism could work in real churches. When we go to the theatre we usually naturally and easily suspend disbelief to enter into the world of the actors who by speech and action on stage in turn evoke in us actions, feelings, experiences and thoughts. So, likewise, during a religious service we may also suspend disbelief, and have religious feelings and experiences.
Calvin wrote that each of us is an actor and God is the audience, but with the death of God and the disappearance of the supernatural from our scientific world, there is now no audience for the plays of our lives. But what if, instead, we are both actors and audience? What if, like Judy and Mickey and all the other kids, young and old, we run down to the old barn of the church and put on a play? We create the play of and about God and perform our creation for ourselves and the others with us who are also creators and performers? Then, God, who only lives if we manifest God, in the words of the old prayer, by our life and conversation, can appear again: this time in our play, both as playwright and performer. Of course, to encourage God’s appearance in our post-modern production, we will have to sprinkle ourselves liberally with the fairy dust of Paul Ricoeur’s post-critical naïveté to screen awhile our critical thinking.
That worship produces belief is an old idea. In "On Liturgical Theology," Aidan Kavanagh reminds us that orthodoxy means first “right worship” and only secondarily doctrinal accuracy. This implies that worship conceived broadly is what gives rise to theological reflection rather than the other way around. In the phrasing of Prosper of Aquitaine (c. 390 - 465), it is the law of worship which founds or establishes the law of belief. Belief does not come first, then worship, but rather worship produces belief.
Today, psychology is providing evidence that behavior, e.g., worship, produces feelings. For example, in "Feelings," James D. Laird argues that feelings do not cause behavior, but rather follow from behavior, and are, in fact, the way that we know about our own bodily states and behaviors. James W. Pennebaker points out that emotions, motivation, and other private feelings are inferred from our behaviors rather than being directly perceived. Stuart Walton writes in "A Natural History of Human Emotions" that this idea goes back at least to Charles Darwin, who in "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" (1872), contended that all humans everywhere have the same basic set of innate and constitutive emotions that are expressed by two kinds of muscular action: facial expression and bodily movement. We communicate these emotions to others often quite involuntarily as the result of instinct, rather than by learned behavior. Everyone worldwide recognizes and “reads” them similarly. Thus, we and those observing us may sense particular emotions while performing particular actions in worship, and, as Joseph Ledoux writes in "The Emotional Brain," emotions can produce conscious feelings, which, in turn, can lead to belief.
Viewing liturgy through the lens of non-realism, then brings meaning, a hallmark of belief, into focus. God can be the name and the marker for the meaning we find together in worship. God, as meaning, appears horizontally among worshipers; we understand that God in the vertical, supernatural direction is an exciting special effect produced as we together find God in our church of non-realism, in our theater of feelings.
But aren’t our feelings an unreliable basis for a real God? Yes, indeed. Feelings are erratic and fleeting, i. e., often they are over before they are identified or named. They come and go; they are conscious, but represent only some of our emotions, most of which are unconscious and not subject to our control. Thus, feelings, and more so, emotions, can be dangerous, which can heighten our anxiety. Furthermore, feelings can be hard to conceptualize, verbalize, and understand. They, like emotions, are virtually impossible to stop or control while happening and, once gone, may be hard or impossible to summon up again. Thus, feelings are like life as Cupitt describes it: finite, time-bound, contingent, unpredictable, transitory, and impermanent. Our feelings, quick, acute, and intuitive, tell us we are alive, and as insubstantial as feelings are, they are the basis of our life, our experience. They suffuse our experiences, including our religious experiences.
However, if our awareness of God comes from our feelings and experiences, we soon learn that supernatural ways of thinking “improve” our God experiences, preserving them perfectly and unchanging, as Peter would have done on the Mount of Transfiguration when Jesus’ light shone before the disciples. But, of course, as Jesus knew, experiences can’t be preserved, but must be lived, even to death.
We yearn to be sure of something other than death, and, indeed, Cupitt writes, language is a sure basis for our philosophy and religion. Ordinary language (heightened in popular songs) is necessary for us to function as humans in society. Although language is the basis of society and religion, language is totally contingent, developing by trial and error, and open to continuing future change, evolving over (a long) time by consensus. We are born into a world where our language is a given, but it is a given hammered out by agreements arrived at by society’s members over the years, changing as new needs arise and old ones fade.
Therefore, using the theatrical analogy, our play of God is always in rewrite with many varied incarnations. One scenario, sketched here, presents some Christian concepts through the facial expressions, movements, and language of the actors, who thereby convey Darwin’s six basic, facially legible emotions -- happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise – using some of the physical indicators he identified. Other emotions or states of mind, including contempt (which Darwin gave indicators for), love, hope, and joy are mentioned, and even though the presentation of these may not be as clear as that of the basic six, they may be suggested with the addition of dialogue. The emotions, feelings, and experiences produced in church may be thought of and spoken of as religious. In keeping with Cupitt’s contention that people use ordinary language for their religious experiences, ordinary, non-religious, in preference to “religious,” language and songs are used as much as possible.

A Play for the Theater of Feelings
In this scenario, the play has a prologue, two acts, and a conclusion. In the prologue, we see God happy: smiling, laughing, dancing, and clapping, while drawing our attention to the nifty supernatural set, painted by the likes of Michelangelo and Chagall, and at the same time singing the anthem to non-realism: “Say, it's only a paper moon, Sailing over a cardboard sea, But it wouldn't be make believe, If you believed in me.”
In Act I, “By the River,” a presentation of feelings aroused by Rom 6: 3-11, we first see a roiling, fast moving, and apparently deep river with many people on the shore and in the water. Bullies are pulling, pushing or dragging others into the water and holding them under.
We sense the bullies’ contempt. They uncover their canine teeth on one side, snort, and turn up their noses as they manhandle their weaker fellows. We also know that the bullies are angry. Their faces are flushed, their eyes wide open, and their breathing accelerated. They grind their teeth, clench their fists, and incline their bodies towards their victims. We also see the bullies’ disgust by their wide opened mouths, their spitting, their blowing through protruded lips, and the retraction of their upper lips.
The tormented, struggling to the surface and breathing again, show, after the shock of the cold water, surprise at breathing again. They open their eyes and mouths wide and inhale suddenly. Of course, their flailing limbs and contorted expressions convey mainly fear. They are pale, breathe fast, and have dilated pupils and contracted neck muscles.
We in the audience empathize. We either cheer on the bullies or yell to those drowning to resist more vigorously. Of course, others may be drowning on their own without any bullying. Some, by their bold move into the river, convey misplaced self-confidence. Others look sad. The corners of their mouths are drawn down, they are pale, and their muscles and eyelids droop; they seem to be seeking drowning.
As this scene unfolds, we become aware of another group near the shore. By their calm expressions and open stance, they convey empathy for all, including the bullies, the tormented, the confident, the despairing, and all the rest in danger of drowning. They don’t turn away to avoid the perils of the river, but gesture in invitation to act as supporting guides for all those who would enter the river. Many of the guides are singing: “Yes, we’ll gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river, Gather with the saints at the river, That flows by the throne of God.” Some whom the guides put down into the river come up screaming at the shock of immersion. Others, before going in, show fear, cringing back from the deep, cold, rapidly rushing river and tensing up with possibility of going under, losing control, not being able to breath, suffocating, and dying. But some, who accept the invitation, show by their relaxation into their guides, a tentative, but growing trust and confidence that their loving guides, while putting them under, won’t abandon them as they are drowning. And, yes, some of these, upon being brought up, may show, by their tears of joy, happiness at being able to breathe again, to live again. Thus, this non-real drowning can engender as toward God real emotions and feelings of happiness and gratitude that people might feel upon being brought back to life from death.
Act II, “Walking, Talking, Breaking,” describes feelings upon reading Luke 24: 13-32. The first scene shows two people walking along a dusty road. Their slow pace, slumped shoulders, downcast expression, and desultory talk convey sadness. They are joined by a man who asks what they are discussing. The two continue to show sadness while telling him about the crucifixion of Jesus but soon show flashes of anger as they point out that his death, at the hands of both the Jewish and Roman authorities, has dashed their hopes that he would free Israel.
Now, added to their anger, is the memory of their surprise at the tale of some female followers of Jesus, who said that early that morning they saw his tomb empty and angels who said he was alive. The two walkers tell the stranger that other followers of Jesus also went to the tomb and found it empty but hadn’t seen him. As the walkers recount the women’s story to this male stranger, contempt replaces their surprise (“You know how these silly women are. They’re always seeing things.”) But they are still bewildered that the others have confirmed the empty tomb.
The stranger’s response is tinged with anger. He is provoked and irked by the walkers’ slowness to perceive the meaning of the crucifixion in light of the promise of Israel’s redemption. He shows exasperation at their distrust and refusal to imagine the Messiah’s glory. Their critical thinking has reinforced their fear of death and prevented them from entering into the women’s vision. For them, the promise is unreal; not yet non-real. They have not yet embraced their post-critical naïveté to allow them to experience the promise in their theater of feelings, where hope might contend with fear.
However, in the second scene, later at the walkers’ home, as they see the stranger breaking bread, their eyes are opened, and they know Jesus again, even as he vanishes. They have yet to name the emotion they sense: It is happiness, the physical indicators of which are the brightening of the eyes, a quickening of the circulation, and the coloring of the complexion. This is a good description of the physical correlates to their experience, described in Luke, of “our hearts burning within us,” as Jesus opened the promise to them.
But, of course, their experience was deeper than happiness; it was joy. As Huston Smith remarks about the early Christians in "The Soul of Christianity," “...they had laid hold of an inner peace that found expression in a joy that was uncontainable.” They radiated joy as the sun radiates light. Their post-critical naïveté, no longer fairy dust, now lit them from within. Cupitt writes that we, like them, should emulate the sun, which shines now without regard to whether it will shine in the future or whether it will shine again when it dies. So, in joy, we attempt to make Jesus’ words real: “...do not worry about your life...but strive first for the kingdom of God...”
As Jesus vanishes and our play concludes, we hear a voice: “The play is over.” The doors of the church swing open, and, as we leave, we look back and see the empty set where just awhile ago God sang and danced. Back in the real world, we will again grapple with sadness, anger, fear, disgust, contempt, surprise, and happiness. But, feeling God singing within us, we radiate joy.

Bishop Spong on the Atonement

2007-06-07T11:26:00.000-04:00

Bishop Spong in his essay this week on the death of Jesus as atonement unwittingly, apparently, makes the point that S. Mark Heim makes in his book, "Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross." This point is that the Passion narratives, building on their sources in the Hebrew Bible, expose the scapegoating mechanism of the crucifixion, rather than hiding this mechanism, as is usual in most scapegoating myths. In these myths, the whole point is to hide the death deemed necessary to bring peace to the community, thus making scapegoating a good and necessary event without exposing the cost which is the death of the scapegoat. Another point of many such myths is that God demands the scapegoating, and God demands it over and over again.
The Hebrew Bible and the Passion narratives make scapegoating visible, as Bishop Spong does in his essay. That such exposure makes us uncomfortable is a major point of the Passion. We recoil from the violence and hatred scapegoating entails and say, “Surely, no good God would want or require this,” and we are correct. However, until we fully recognize our tendency to solve our problems by scapegoating, we continue to do it. We can only reverse this tendency when we bring it to consciousness and determine not to participate in sacrifice. As Heim writes, “...to surmount a moment of crisis without turning to sacrifice is one of the true simple signs of the reign of God.”

“Love Your Enemies” – A Reflection on “Suite Française”

2007-05-02T13:41:00.000-04:00

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says to his listeners: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:44). In “Dolce,” the second novella in Irène Némirosky’s “Suite Française,” love of the enemy is exactly what happens among some French women left to cope with the German occupation of their village during World War II. With all their men dead or prisoners of war far away, the women of the village are deeply affected by the enemy soldiers in their midst. Some resist the attraction they feel toward the handsome, polite soldiers. Others remain implacable in their hatred of the enemy, while yet others fall in love, and tell themselves, and anyone who challenges them, that only love matters.
Lucile Angellier, the main character of “Dolce,” works hard against increasing mutual attraction to maintain a polite distance between herself and the handsome, cultured, French-speaking German officer, Bruno, who is billeted in Lucile’s mother-in-law’s house, where Lucile also lives. She married the son of the house, now a prisoner of war, in a loveless arrangement, much as Bruno did. They read to one another, take walks in the garden, and he plays the piano for her. They both endure the contempt of Lucile’s mother-in-law, who hates Lucile as unworthy of her son, whom she idealizes, as much as she hates the Germans.
Lucile realizes that to fall in love with Bruno is to collaborate with the enemy, but others risk being branded collaborators for love. In one of the most powerful scenes in this powerful novella, Lucile brings a piece of silk to a dressmaker to be made into a dressing gown and sees a German soldier's belt on the bed. Recoiling, she murmurs,

“How can you?”
The dressmaker responds, “So what? German or French, friend or enemy, he's first and foremost a man and I'm a woman. He's good to me, kind, attentive... He’s a city boy who takes care of himself, not like the boys around here; he has beautiful skin, white teeth. When he kisses, his breath smells fresh, not of alcohol. And that's good enough for me. I’m not looking for anything else. Our lives are complicated enough with all these wars and bombings. Between a man and a woman, none of that’s important. I couldn't care less if the man I fancy is English or black – I'd still offer myself to him if I got the opportunity. Do I disgust you? Sure, it’s all right for you, you’re rich, you have luxuries I don’t have...”
“Luxuries!” Lucile cut in, sounding bitter without meaning to, wondering what the dressmaker could imagine might be luxurious an existence as an Angellier: visiting her estate and investing money, no doubt.
"You're educated. You see people. For us, it's nothing but slaving at work. If it wasn't for love, we might as well just throw ourselves in the river. And when I say love, don't think it’s only about you know what. Listen, the other day this German, he was at Moulins and he bought me a little imitation crocodile handbag; another time he brought me flowers, a bouquet from town, like I was a lady. It’s stupid, I know, because there are flowers all over the countryside, but he cared, it made me happy. Up until now, to me men were just good for a tumble. But this one, I don't know why, I’d do anything for him, follow him anywhere. And he loves me, he does... Oh, I've known enough men to tell when there's one who's not lying. So, you see, when people say to me ‘He’s German, a German, a German,’ I couldn't care less. They're human, like us.”
“Yes, but my poor girl, when people say ‘a German,’ of course know he's just a man, but what they mean to say, what is so terrible, is that he's killed Frenchmen, that they're holding our relatives prisoner, that they're starving us..."
"You think I never think about that? Sometimes, when I'm lying in bed next to him, I wonder, ‘Maybe it was his father who killed mine’ (my dad was killed in the last war, you know ...). I think about it for a while then, in the end, I don't give a damn. On one side there's me and on the other side there's everyone else. People don't care about us: they bomb us and make us suffer, and kill us worse than if we were rabbits. And as for us, well, we don't care about them. You see, if we did what other people thought we should do we’d be worse than animals. Around town they call me a dog. Well, I'm not. Dogs travel in packs and bite people when they're told to. Me and Willy..."
She stopped and sighed.
“I love him,” she said finally.
“But his regiment will be leaving.”
“I know that, but Willy said he'd send for me after the war.”
“And you believe him?”
“Yes, I believe him,” she said defiantly.
“You’re mad,” said Lucile. “He'll forget you the moment he's gone. You have brothers who are prisoners. When they come home... Believe me, be careful. What you’re doing is very dangerous. Dangerous and wrong,” she added.
“When they come home...”
They looked at each other in silence. There was a rich, secret scent in this stuffy room, cluttered with heavy rustic furniture, that troubled Lucile and made her feel strangely uneasy.

Lucile feels uneasy, no doubt, because she can’t deny that she feels much the same about Bruno as the dressmaker feels about Willy.
If we are to love our enemies, how can we do it? The love Jesus speaks of in the Sermon on the Mount is agape. The love of the dressmaker is clearly eros. Although distinct, these forms of love are closely related. In his first encyclical, “Deus Caritas Est,” Pope Benedict XVI makes the point that, as one receives love and gives it to another, the desire for (eros) is united to a desire for the good of (agape.) The more love grows, the more one wants to be present to the other – eros becomes agape and enriches the experience of love. Thus, the dressmaker proclaims, “I’d do anything for him, follow him anywhere.” She feels not only eros, but also agape, which has grown with the relationship.
Can we love our enemies without falling in love with them? If our emotions are involved, as they must be in love, it seems unlikely, and we risk the scorn – and worst – of our fellows. Love sometimes exacts a very high price.

Gov. Spitzer in Action

2007-04-24T11:43:00.000-04:00

Gov. Spitzer of New York supports gay marriage “as a simple moral imperative.” He’s got it right. It’s simple because all that it will require is a small change in state law. It’s moral because it is fair: Such a law would recognize that same-sex couples are entitled to the same rights (and must assume the same responsibilities) as heterosexual couples. It’s an imperative because many fair-minded people, both straight and gay, understand now that such a glaring inequity tears the social fabric, and perpetuates a group of disenfranchised citizens, who are treated by government as less than heterosexual people.
Furthermore, there is a clear religious mandate for this moral imperative, and it turns on fairness and inclusiveness. For example, the Acts of the Apostles records Saint Peter’s dawning awareness that God loves everyone, not only the Chosen people (who God never ceases to love). As Peter’s awareness dawns, he declares in Chapter 10, verses 34 and 35: “Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” Clearly, Peter has heard the Gospel and is proclaiming it. Religious people can follow Peter’s example.
Even though gay marriage is a simple moral imperative, enacting such a law will not be easy. The Republicans will be unlikely to embrace it. Many of the churches, notably the Roman Catholic Church, will denounce the possibility of such a law in the name of strengthening heterosexual families, even though homosexual families don’t weaken heterosexual families. And the Democrats have already started to bob and weave around the idea, trying not to alienate gays, while pandering to bigots. Obviously, being two-faced never works.
So, thank you Gov. Spitzer for your leadership on this issue. I wish you well and I support you. I hope that all fair-minded New Yorkers will also support your efforts for fairness.

Senator Obama, take the lead to control guns

2007-04-19T17:41:00.000-04:00

I sent this message to Barack Obama, and I'm sending it to my U.S. representative, Ron Klein.

After the tragedy in Virginia, it is time for you, Senator Obama, to take the lead in working for the passage of a strong federal gun control law. It is much too easy to obtain guns in too many states, and gun ownership should be much more severely limited than it is now. Too many unstable people have guns. If gun ownership were more restricted with more thorough background checks on people wanting guns, then senseless shootings like the one in Virginia would be less likely.
Of course, any attempt to control guns will be met with vigorous opposition from the gun lobby, but please be aware that the number of people wanting gun control far outnumber those wanting unlimited access to guns. If you take the lead on this important issue, I’m sure you will gain the support of many people who want sensible, restrictive gun laws in the U.S.

Lutherans in Action...Backwards

2007-04-18T11:40:00.000-04:00

On March 23rd, I posted a news item that the Church of Sweden Church of Sweden would perform gay weddings if the Swedish Parliament upgraded the country's civil unions to same-sex marriage. I called the post, “Lutherans in Action.” Now, in the April 17th issue of “The Christian Century,” comes news that the Church of Sweden will reserve matrimony for heterosexual couples. In making this decision, the article states, “the church (of Sweden) went against the recommendation of a Swedish government commission to accept both same-sex and heterosexual relationships within the legal framework of marriage.” So, my hope that the Church of Sweden had heard the Gospel was premature.
My first thought about this is that the people are always ahead of the church leaders theologically. The people hear the Gospel clearly: Discrimination is unfair. Most people say, be fair and treat everyone equally, as the Gospels say Jesus did. So the Swedish government, the organ of the people, wants to include gays in marriage.
In contrast, the church leaders are afraid of the bigots in the church and kowtow to them. They don’t seek fairness, but “unity,” trying to keep everyone happy. Homosexuals are a minority in the church and society, so the leaders feel safe in sacrificing them on the altar of “unity.’ The church is better off, anyway, they say, without those nasty queers, doing their nasty acts.
My second thought is about Janis Vanags who is an exemplar of the type of leader I’m thinking of above. Mr. Vanags is Archbishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia. The “Christian Century” article states that “His church believes that homosexuality is a sin, he said, and that people should repent of their sins and seek forgiveness, just as Martin Luther advised. The article concludes by reporting that African participants (in the meeting of the Lutheran World Federation, where Mr. Vanags gave his remarks) congratulated the Latvian archbishop after his speech for his forthrightness.”
Notice that Mr. Vanags didn’t say that homosexuals can be sinners. No, he said that homosexuality is a sin. The state of homosexuality is a sin, he maintains. He states this in the face of mounting evidence that homosexuality is a natural, biological variant among many sexualities. For the evidence of this, read “Born Gay?: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation” by Glenn Wilson and Qazi Rahman. This stance by Mr. Vanags recalls earlier witch-hunts against left-handed people. Remember “sinister” originally meant “relating to, or situated to the left or on the left side of something” and “of ill omen by reason of being on the left.” So, now we gays, like left-handed people in the past, are the object of witch-hunts by prominent church people, like Mr. Vanags and his African allies in the Lutheran Church.
Of course, all this makes me angry, but being a Christian and a layperson, I believe that the Gospel will be heard, even by our nasty leaders. When they do hear, it’s likely to because lay people won’t go along with their bigotry.
So, lay people, keep complaining about your nasty leaders. They will eventually follow your Gospel call.

The I-Rack

2007-04-12T13:21:00.000-04:00

Will Hutchinson sent me the URL below, which is for a video called I-Rack. It's funny and true.
http://www.mofunny.com:80/Movies/AppleIraq.wmv

The Democratic Presidential Candidates on Iraq as of April 10th

2007-04-12T11:16:00.000-04:00

As you may know, I am a member of MoveOn, the political action group on the Internet. On April 10th, MoveOn held a “virtual town meeting,” at which the Democratic presidential candidates presented their views on Iraq. The transcript of their remarks, below, is interesting mainly because of their different emphases. However, in my mind, the question remains: which one would be most effective in extricating us from Iraq?

Transcript of the Audio Highlights from MoveOn’s “Virtual Town Meeting”with the Democratic presidential candidates

Eli Pariser (EP): Hello MoveOn members, this is Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn.org, welcoming you to our first-ever Virtual Town Hall. Our first presidential candidate of the evening, Senator John Edwards.
JE: First of all, let me say that for the past nine months MoveOn members have accomplished amazing things. Thanks to your relentless grassroots pressure you’ve actually helped shift the national debate about ending the war in Iraq from a question of “if” to a question of “how soon.”
As you probably know, I voted for this war. I was wrong, and I take responsibility for that.
Everyday that this war drags on is worse for Iraq, worse for our troops, worse for our country.
This is not the time for political calculation, this is the time for political courage. This is not a game of chicken, this is not about making friends, or keeping Joe Lieberman happy, this is about life and death. This is about war.
If Bush vetoes funding for the troops he is the only one standing in the way of the resources they need, nobody else.
Congress must stand firm. They must not write George Bush another blank check without a timeline for withdrawal. Period. If Bush vetoes the funding bill, Congress should send another funding bill to him with a binding plan to bring the troops home.
If we show courage now, we can finally bring our troops home and bring this war to an end. So where will Congress find the courage to stand firm? I’ll tell you where they’ll find it, they’ll find it in your letters, they’ll find it in your calls, they will find it in your voice.
EP: Senator Edwards, we thank you so much. Next up we’ll hear from Senator Joe Biden.
JB: To be responsible, one has to be able to answer a two-word question in my view, after you put forward what you think should be done. And that is, “Then what?” After we pull our troops out, then what? After we cap troops, then what? After we cut partial funding, then what?
The problem in Iraq today is a self-sustaining cycle of sectarian violence.
To maintain a unified Iraq, you have to decentralize it. You have to give the Kurds, Sunnis and Shias control over the fabric of their daily lives.
Secondly, you have to have a limited central government.
Thirdly, you have to secure access to oil revenues for the Sunnis who literally have nothing.
Fourth, you have to increase reconstruction assistance for Iraq, but you have to raise that money from the oil-rich Gulf states who are floating in a sea of oil money.
And lastly, you have to make Iraq the world’s problem.
We should begin to draw down American combat troops within the next three months, and have a date of getting us out of Iraq by March of ’08. That is the essence of my plan. That is the only, in my view, workable solution for ending the war in Iraq and preserving our interest.
Leaving Iraq is absolutely necessary, but it’s not a plan, it doesn’t answer the critical question, “then what?”
EP: Thank you Senator Biden for participating in our Virtual Town Hall meeting on Iraq. Our next candidate is Congressman Dennis Kucinich.
DK: Thank you. I had the vision and the foresight to be able to say, “Don’t go to war.” And gave reasons why not. And since then, you know, I’ve delivered over 160 speeches on the floor of the House.
Stop the funding, end the occupation, withdraw the troops, as you close the bases, create a parallel process which involves the United Nations, move those troops in as our troops leave.
We need to reach out to the world community, and that means the president of the United States is going to have to be involved in a lot of personal diplomacy. Reaching out to all the nations in the region, making it possible for them to know that the United States is going to take a new direction, that we’re not going to endorse any kind of policies that would put us on the threshold of attacking other nations.
When you consider who you’re going to support, you’ve got to consider who had the judgment and the wisdom to say, “We should avoid the war in the first place.” I not only voted against the war, but I urged members of Congress not to support the war, I, you know, I voted against each and every appropriation. And it’s so important to remember. So I’m standing not only for peace from the beginning of this, but have the plan to get out of Iraq, and have a vision of the world that is interdependent and interconnected, and a country which stands upon the principle and the imperative of human unity.
EP: Thanks again, Congressman Kucinich. And now, we’re going to hear from Governor Bill Richardson.
BR: I want to thank you, Eli, and all the members of MoveOn that are participating in today’s town hall. If I were president today, I would withdraw American troops by the end of this calendar year. I would have no residual force whatsoever.
We have to look at Iraq not in an isolated way. We have to look at the whole Middle East, the Persian Gulf, the Israeli-Palestinian situation, and you get Iran and Syria to invest in the stability of the region. This will be tough. This will be difficult, but the full force of American withdrawal, the full force of American diplomacy, and the full force of bringing other entities, Europe, Muslim countries in the region for a solution will give Iraq a chance.
It’s the constitutional right of Congress to start a war and to stop a war.
I am for a timetable of withdrawal. I would be for a cut-off of appropriations. What I would do however is one step further. This Congress, several years ago, the Republican Congress, authorized this war. I would pass a congressional resolution de-authorizing the war based on the War Powers Act.
I believe I am the best candidate. I may not be a rock star. I may not have the most money. But I believe I have the best vision, the best background to be president.
EP: Thank you Governor Richardson. Next up, we’ll hear from Senator Hillary Clinton.
HC: Now first we’ve got to face up to the reality that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating. It is not improving, and all the happy talk in the world will not fix the grim reality on the ground. My plan to end the war confronts that reality head on. I introduced legislation called the Iraq Troop Protection and Reduction Act. Under it, we would begin redeployment of our troops out of Iraq in 90 days.
I have long advocated engagement with countries in the region, including Iran and Syrian. And I applaud Speaker Pelosi and her delegation for going to the region, as I applaud the Republican delegations that did likewise. We have to start a process to deal with those countries. Now as you know, Congress recently passed historic legislation to both fund our troops and begin a phased redeployment to bring them home. The president has threatened to veto it. And I have said repeatedly that the American people elected this Congress to bring our troops home, not to send more troops to purse a failed strategy. I have challenged the president to withdraw this veto threat immediately. So everyday in the Senate I’m working to change course in Iraq.
I am absolutely clear, we do not plan a permanent occupation, or permanent bases. But in line with all of the legislation that has been passed, we have tried to be responsible in saying, there may be some continuing missions to protect America’s vital interests and to support an Iraqi government that we hope to be an ally going forward, assuming they are acting responsibly.
Some of your members may be a little surprised to hear me say this, but I am grateful for your work. I remember when you started, and how important it was, and I look forward to continuing our dialogue in the years ahead on the important issues facing our country and the world.
EP: Thanks again Senator Clinton.
HC: Thank you so much Eli.
EP: Next, let’s welcome Senator Chris Dodd.
CD: Well I believe we that ought to begin redeploying our troops this evening. I’m the one that believes, as others have stated, that there’s no military solution at all in Iraq. I’ve felt that for the last several years. So I believe that we ought to start redeploying this evening, and over the next year we can do that very safely, provide all the support our troops would need.
So begin redeploying immediately. Have things finished in March of ’08. Talk about a surge in diplomacy, a surge in politics in the region which is not had at all, which is recommended by the Baker-Hamilton report and then also talk about energy independence. I think those are critical areas if we are going to be successful. But we ought to begin immediately, I would not wait any longer.
I believe the president should seek authority from Congress in advance to take military action against Iran or any other state for that matter. Now under extreme circumstances, unforeseen circumstances, emergencies, I think it would be appropriate for the president, any president, to act to repel, but even after that, it seems to me, after the emergency, the president ought to come back to congress, and succeed in getting that authority.
I believe we need new structures and new architectures. It’s not only important that we talk about what needs to be done to get out of Iraq, but what do we do in the post-Iraq period. I want to see an area of constructive, bold engagement by the United States, where we rebuild the relationships, where the United States is seen once again as a source of good works as a country. Where we condemn torture, not condone it. Where we end wars, not start them. Where we engage the world in part of a smart decision to allow all of us to live in a better opportunity, a better hope, and prosperity for all people.
EP: Thanks so much for joining us Senator Dodd. And now, our last candidate of the day, Senator Barack Obama.
BO: As you know, I opposed this war from the start. In part because I believed that if we gave open-ended authority to invade Iraq in 2002 that we would have an open-ended occupation of the sort that we have right now.
The idea that the situation in Iraq is improving, because it take a security detail of a hundred soldiers, three Black Hawk helicopters and a couple of apache gunships to walk through a market in the middle of Baghdad is simply not credible.
Since January I have put forward a very specific plan that is designed to create the last, best hope to pressure the Sunni and the Shia to reach political accommodation.
Well I’ve been saying for a year that we have to realize that the entire Middle East has a huge stake in the outcome of Iraq. And that we have to engage neighboring countries in finding a solution. I believe that includes opening dialogue with both Syria and Iran. We know these countries want us to fail, I’m under no illusions there, but I also know that neither Syria nor Iran want to see a security vacuum in Iraq filled with chaos, and terrorism, and refugees and violence.
Those who say we shouldn’t be talking to them ignore our own history. Ronald Reagan, during the Cold War, called the Soviet Union the “evil empire” but he consistently met with the Soviet Union because he recognized that power without diplomacy is a prescription for disaster.
I am committed to putting as much pressure on the president to end this war as possible, in a responsible fashion.
Assuming he vetoes the bill—I’m committed to finding the 67 votes we need to override this veto. I would support putting conditions on the next version of the legislation if we can’t muster 67 votes.
If this president thinks he can continue to ignore the will of the American people, and the American Congress, I think he’s badly mistaken. With your help, I believe we’re going to be able to bring our troops home, I believe we are going to refocus our efforts on the wider struggle against terror, and, as importantly, I think we have an opportunity to begin the process of restoring America’s image throughout the world.
EP: Thank you again, Senator Obama. Democracy is a process. And everyone who joined us tonight has taken part in it. We hope you’ll be with us for the next two town hall meetings on health care and global warming, and, to all of our members, we at MoveOn really can’t say it enough. Thank you for all that you do. Good night.

Saints in love

2007-04-03T11:55:00.000-04:00

I just read a funny novel about a Holocaust survivor and a neo-Nazi. Now, usually neither surviving the Holocaust nor being a neo-Nazi is funny, but Francine Prose, the author of “A Changed Man,” has created two people who are not merely representative of their respective categories, but are also engaging. They want to do good, but are not disinterested do-gooders. Prose shows us that saintliness can’t be separated from self-interest.
Of the two characters, Meyer Maslow, the Holocaust survivor, is the more obviously saintly. Having escaped death as a Jew in World War II Europe, he now heads the World Brotherhood Watch Foundation in Manhattan. This foundation works to save victims of human rights violations and, in so doing, to encourage the world to fight such violations. Maslow feels himself God’s agent on earth and knows what God expects of him, which is self-giving. The trouble is that Maslow has a foundation to maintain and publicize, and this requires that he raise money on the benefit circuit in New York. Raising money means that he always has to be concerned about his success in attracting favorable publicity and, as a result, money. It’s hard to be a saint sucking up to publicists and potential donors.
Enter Vincent Nolan, the neo-Nazi member of ARM, or the Aryan Resistance Movement, who, having read about Maslow’s organization, decides to go to Maslow and tell him, ''I want to help you guys save guys like me from becoming guys like me,'' and, in the process, reform himself. So, Nolan also feels the stirrings of something like saintliness. Never mind that to get to the foundation, he steals the Chevy pickup of his cousin and fellow ARM member, along with his drug stash and $1500. It’s all for a higher calling.
Once at the foundation’s office, he is handed over to Bonnie Kalen, Maslow’s assistant and chief acolyte, who is devoted to him and his cause beyond reason.
Bonnie introduces Nolan to Maslow, who sees Nolan as an answer to his prayers to find a way to sell out a big upcoming benefit for the support of the foundation’s work. Nolan, the changed man, will demonstrate that the work of the foundation can change people for the better “one person at a time.” All Bonnie has to do is all the work.
Maslow suggests that Bonnie take Nolan into her modest house in the suburbs, where she is raising her two sons after her divorce. All Bonnie has to do, in her devotion to Maslow, is to hope that the neo-Nazi won’t slaughter her and her children in the comfort of her own home.
Of course, what happens is not slaughter but love. Living uneasily with Nolan, Bonnie and her kids begin to accept him, depend on him, and to love him. He in turn finds himself a possible home and family. What Prose is saying is that disinterested saintliness doesn’t accomplish much. Rather, mountains are moved by strong emotions. In the case of the Holocaust, hate and anger wreaked havoc on millions. With Bonnie and Nolan on a much smaller scale, the strong emotion of love is the motive for helpful acts and mended lives.
So, maybe the moral of Prose’s novel is that if you want to do good and be saintly, fall in love first.