Telling Time

Merry Christmas! Um, I mean, Happy Easter!!!

Leaving a school function last Friday (you may recall that it was Good Friday), a well-meaning and thoughtful teacher greeted everyone at the door with a hearty, broadly-smiling “Happy Easter.” I thought: Well, no– not yet. That’s not what time it is. Today is a day we remember an agony, an abandonment, and a death.

That teacher could have been me 20 years ago, so I did not  feel indignant or offended. What I did feel, was an acute sense of incongruity, and the collision of different worlds: the world of the Bunny who has been in stores since Valentines Day, and the world of Jesus, whose followers have been preparing for the Feast of Resurrection since Ash Wednesday.

What is happening to the time preceding Easter– and Easter’s Christmas-ification– are the clearest signs of how Christian practice is being swallowed by the culture of commerce, limitlessness, and frenetic death-denial. That is not said in a spirit of hand-wringing; nor is it a scold. It is merely an observation.

The happiness of a Happy Easter is of a special kind. It’s a happiness– joy is a better word– beyond what words can say; a joy that lives in the same place as our deepest feelings of belonging, and of being loved. This joy comes with a price: the requirement to descend into darkness and abandonment. There is no light without the dark; no dawn without the midnight. Easter might be a lovely spring day without Good Friday, but it is not joyful in the way that followers of Jesus know that particular joy.

This world– beautiful and good as it is– cannot give such joy.

via Easter Bunny History at EasterBunny’s.Net..

 

Looking At Democracy

The Illinois Humanities Council and the MacArthur Foundation are sponsoring a contest for media pieces on the subject of strengthening democracy.

So where do you start?

It’s long been the view of Religion in the Balance that what ails the body politic are the fundamentals on which politics are built: an operationalized view of human nature and the end (as in purpose) of human life; how the liberty of the individual, and the responsibility of the individual to the community, are balanced; how those who have power and voice in a society treat (in word, deed, and policy) those who are relatively powerless and voiceless.

Rodney King once famously said (paraphrased), “Can’t we all just get along?” King’s plea was for the peaceful co-existence of different races, and therefore something we should all desire. In the context of democracy writ large, however, the answer to “Can’t we all just get along?” is a resounding “No”– thankfully. We shouldn’t expect, or even want, to “all just get along,” because plurality, diversity, and disagreement are our strength. Unanimity– broad, society-wide unanimity– is just another word for totalitarianism. It would be troubling if we were all getting along without conflict– it would be a sign that either we were snow jobbing ourselves through widespread self-deception, or that we were being coerced into unanimity by an outside power. Both are false, and symptomatic of a society in deep decay.

The genius of our democracy is that we hold as an ideal (if not always in practice) that we can live peacefully– and actually compromise– with people with whom we disagree: people who do not share the view of human nature that we do; people who do not pursue meaning in life the way we do; people who balance individual liberty and communal responsibility in society differently than we do. The genius of our democracy is our ability to use this difference and diversity as a strength.

Re-learning how to use conflict creatively is the most important beginning we can make, to strengthen democracy today.

 

Capitalism and Its Discontents

We’ve been considering different themes  in Eugene McCarraher’s “Morbid Symptoms”  (Commonweal, November 2012). The last one to mention is his critique of capitalism. Coincidentally, this month’s feature story in Foreign Affairs is an evaluation of capitalism: “Capitalism and Inequality”, by Jerry Muller.

Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, and then with the decades-long rise of China and India through their participation in the Western-dominated economic order, criticizing capitalism feels like swimming against the tide of history. Surely the way that the Cold War ended, combined with the last quarter-century of unprecedented wealth creation, prove that capitalism is above reproach?

McCarraher dowses us with a bucket of cold water. “Wake up!” he shouts in muscular prose: capitalism comes with huge costs to the material of the world, and to the spirit of humanity. How could we fail to see that an economic engine which harnesses the power of human avarice to drive it, will inevitably grind us down, diminishing and deflating our sense of what a human life means. Are we made for the Love of God, or for the market? We are socialized to live as though we are made for the market– ie, that we are commodities– and it takes an act of will to choose otherwise. Market-thinking dominates our culture; how could it not penetrate our most basic understanding of who we are, and what the purpose of life is?

Muller is less radical. He sees chronic insecurity as the inevitable result of capitalism, since the dynamism of creative destruction brings continual change. His conclusion: don’t dismantle the welfare state, but strengthen it, because too much insecurity will lead to rebellion. Enlightened self-interest would suggest some level of re-distribution of wealth, in order to increase social stability.

While Muller and McCarraher have fundamentally different points of departure, both see serious flaws in laissez-faire capitalism. The system, while ascendant, is not above reproach– and without critique and correction, it contains the seeds of its own destruction. It may be said of capitalism as an economic system, as Churchill said of democracy: “It’s the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” Which is to say that capitalism, like democracy, is not the holy grail. It is not our salvation.

 

The Church Called America

Eugene McCarraher (“Morbid Symptoms,” Commmonweal, November 2012) makes reference to the “church called America”– which he understands to be separate from, and significantly different from, a Christian church. In making this distinction, he identifies one of the faultlines in American culture today. That faultline is the point of collision between two continent-sized ideas: one, that God’s good will for the world is co-extensive with American economic, political, and military principles and practices; and two, that God’s good will for the world is co-extensive NOT with any state or nation, but with a person whose self-sacrificing love revealed a divine, redeeming, inexhaustable Love at the heart of all.

This gets messy. Why can’t it be both, some may say: why can’t Jesus be the Savior AND America be the light, lately arrived on history’s scene, to show the world the way of God? Why not both?

Because we are human. Perhaps there is such a thing as “American exceptionalism,” but even if there is such a thing, it does not apply to our basic fallen nature: power corrupts always; pride leads to overreach always; nothing is purely good, ever.

McCarraher is criticizing the US Roman Catholic bishops for conflating the way of Christ with the way of American consumer capitalism/militarism, but the criticism applies to all who have authority in Christian churches (hello, self): we need to draw more clearly the lines that locate the God of Christ at work in the world, and the lines that locate the god of America at work in the world. We may imagine a time when those lines corresponded, but that time is not the present time.

To say so, is to make possible a love for both God AND country, with a love that is appropriate to each.

 

“Morbid Symptoms”– Eugene McCarraher

Cardinal Timothy Dolan

A good essay is like a good compass: it points north, and the truth of its pointing helps us find our way. Eugene McCarraher’s “Morbid Symptoms” (November Commonweal) is just this kind of “true north.”

The essay– cultural critique disguised as a book review– uses the material in four recent books by Catholic clerics as a runway to gain speed, before soaring wheels-up over today’s American cultural landscape. The view is impressive. This is not McCarraher’s first flight; he knows where to go, and when to dip a wing so that we get a clear view down.

The essay, at 4000 words, is longer than most of us will want to take the time for. Religion in the Balance will be considering the article in smaller bits, over the next weeks. “Morbid Symptoms” gives us so many helpful vantage points, that it is worth lingering over.

It’s important to remember that while a major theme of the essay is criticism of the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, our interest is in McCarraher’s critiques of America’s cultural life, and of a particularly unhelpful response by religious leaders– a response that is by no means limited to the Roman Catholic Church. I’m not into bashing Catholicism, and I don’t think McCarraher’s article is most fruitfully read in that manner.

Here is just a sample of what McCarraher offers– a critique of American culture that is much more penetrating, and therefore much more interesting, than the facile finger-pointing that we often get:

As Stanley Hauerwas perceptively reminds us in War and the American Difference, “America is a culture of death because Americans cannot conceive of how life is possible in the face of death”; as unregulated accumulators and consumers of ever-expanding wealth, Americans share nothing in common “other than the presumption that death is to be avoided at all costs.”

More on this to come.

via Morbid Symptoms | Commonweal magazine.

 

Beyond in Our Midst– A Witness

God’s City– Beyond, in the Midst

In a recent Christian Century article, author Benjamin Stewart mentions the group “Ashes to Go.” On Ash Wednesday, these clergy leave church in order to offer people the imposition of ashes– on street corners, in parking lots, and at bus stops. As the article states, they take “liturgy to the streets.”

We live in a world of reductionism. Exceptions exist for all of these examples, but reductionism pinches much of what dignifies human existence: value is reduced to economics; beauty is reduced to attractiveness; goodness is reduced to taste (“that’s good” = “I like that”); truth is reduced to subjectivity (“my” truth); life is reduced to consumption; the good life is reduced to financial success; education is reduced to career training; freedom is reduced to personal license; the Cross is reduced to a “Get Out of Hell Free” card; the Transcendent One of the Older and Newer Testaments is reduced to the cult god of American dominance.

Contemporary American society tends toward the narrow and the flat.

A Christian witness– outside of the church and in the world– witnesses to a different worldview; or, to change the metaphor, traces the shape of a different architecture to the universe: instead of narrow and flat, we see through the surface to a depth, width, and height that is beyond, even as it is here and now. Ritual action (like good art) can open up and orient us to the depth dimension of life. Ritual action (again, like good art) can also expose the tendency of reductionism to collapse the world into a single system.

An excerpt from Stewart’s Christian Century article follows:

It is perhaps this same impulse that emboldens participants in the “Ashes to Go” movement to shrug off the risk of the police and head into city streets to offer to press ashes onto the foreheads of strangers on Ash Wednesday and to speak the ancient words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

A participant in such a liturgy in New York City, Mark Genszler, described the “wash of relief” that flowed over the faces of those who received ashes—a response he found partly surprising, as he had just told them that in addition to speeding toward the next subway stop they were more certainly traveling into death. But, he reflected, “if you share the secret of your mortality with someone else—even, or especially, a stranger—then you don’t have to pretend that you’re invincible.” The hidden vulnerability becomes at least momentarily public and honored as a holy mystery. And in any case, Genszler said, a shared burden may be lighter.

via Worship without walls: Taking liturgy to the streets | The Christian Century.

 

Recent News from Georgia: the Ku Klux Clan and Roadside Debris

Cleaners from the Ku Klux Klan, Hoping to Adopt-a-Highway in Georgia

The Ku Klux Klan’s application to adopt-a-highway in north Georgia has been denied by the Georgia Department of Transportation. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a similar case in Missouri went to court, where the KKK won its appeal. The court in Missouri ruled that the state could not discriminate against an organization based on that organization’s beliefs– a First Amendment case.

Specifics aside, this story is an example of something American society, in general, does pretty well: holding in creative tension the liberal idea that government must keep open, as much as possible, the marketplace of ideologies (distasteful as some ideologies are); alongside the conservative* idea that some ideologies call for governmental restriction because they threaten the common good. What is difficult, but healthy (if done in the true democratic spirit of listening and humility), is working through which ideologies are a threat, and which are merely distasteful.

The public debate over the definition of marriage is a great example of this tension. Some people fervently believe that any definition of marriage that would include homosexual couples is not just distasteful, but is a threat to the common good– and therefore merits government’s prohibition. This case of the KKK wanting governmental recognition to pick up litter is similar (albeit with fewer ramifications): is the KKK’s ideology merely distasteful (and therefore government needs to be neutral); OR is the KKK’s ideology a threat to the common good (and therefore government needs to be more assertive in its ruling)?

*I mean classically conservative, in the tradition of Edmund Burke and more recently Russell Kirk. I do not mean “conservative” as it is most usually used, as a synonym for today’s Republican party.

via KKK group seeks Adopt-A-Highway OK  | ajc.com.

 

What Friday? Which Saturday?

Church: Will the Jesus Movement Find a Home Here?

Disestablishment means the taking away of official government support for a particular religion. In the American way, this is a good thing. In a polity that values liberty, and a culture whose strength is diversity, we don’t want a government to favor, abet– or worst of all, to compel– a particular brand of religion.  Voluntary religion is our way, and has been for nearly 200 years: New Hampshire (where I live), for example, disestablished in 1819.

For those of us who believe that a healthy dose of religion would improve the well-being of our political and cultural life, there is a temptation to yearn for a quasi-re-establishment of Christianity– a desire more deeply rooted in nostalgia for the 1950s, I would say, than in current reality. When some well-intentioned folks get in a froth about “Christmas” trees versus “Holiday” trees, for example, the underlying issue is about trying to maintain Christianity as the unofficial official religion. Even if we grant that there was a time when Christianity was the official religion of the culture, those days are gone. Increasingly, to follow Jesus means to be counter-cultural.

This truth is very uncomfortable for many Americans who claim to be Christians. The old certainties are gone, but that only makes sense: the death and resurrection of Our Lord was, is, and always will be about the disruption of certainty and the re-creation of new possibilities. Lived Christianity (as opposed to a system of Christian belief), is always about the new life that God is bringing into being on the edge of now.

The following news tidbit, relatively trivial in itself, is a sign of the increasing distance between the culture and “official” Christianity (and “official” Judaism, for that matter). While the aged and ossified Church (of whatever catholic, orthodox, or protestant flavor) may see this increasing distance as a threat, a vibrant and counter-cultural Jesus Movement will see this increasing distance as an opportunity:

University Ends Scheduling of Breaks Around Religious Holidays

“Christian Post” reports today on the decision by New York’s Stony Brook University to end the practice of scheduling the academic calendar around major Jewish and Christian holidays. In the past, the school closed for Good Friday, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It will no longer do so, and will end the practice of scheduling Spring Break to always coincide with Easter and Passover. Instead Spring Break will be the seventh week of the semester. The school says it is ending the practice that honored only some religions. However the American Center for Law and Justice says that the change demonstrates hostility toward religion and fails to accommodate religious practices.

via Religion Clause: University Ends Scheduling of Breaks Around Religious Holidays.

 

The Reduction of Human Flourishing to the Experience of Satisfaction

Miroslav Volf: Helpful Words for the Mess We're In

The Yale theologian Miroslav Volf, following others, characterizes the American predicament this way: our definition of human flourishing has become so self-centered, that chronic dissatisfaction and pervasive despair are the result.

As Volf tells the story, it wasn’t always like this. In another time, human flourishing was conceived to be inseparable from loving and giving glory to God. The Westminster catechism comes to mind: Q. What is the chief end of man? A. To glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. In this understanding of who the human being is, human flourishing is unintelligible if severed from transcendence. Right relationship to the goods of this world depends on our right relationship with the Transcendent One.

Then came humanism, and the disconnect from God. Human flourishing was defined in strictly human terms, without reference to divinity. There was still a connection to transcendence, however: instead of that transcendence being grounded in giving glory to God, it was now grounded in ideals like universal brotherhood/sisterhood, or the society of a commonwealth, or universal human rights. While disconnected from God, these ideals were still larger than the solitary self– still transcendent, in that sense.

Finally– and Volf traces this final movement to the last 30-50 years– the notion of human flourishing collapsed into the solitary self itself: collapsed into the pursuit of pleasure, and the individual experience of satisfaction. Inevitably, dissatisfaction, melancholy, and despair follow, when human flourishing becomes disconnected from some kind of self-transcendence. The solitary self is a poor repository for ultimate meaning.

via 9781587432989.jpg (JPEG Image, 1050×1623 pixels) – Scaled (38%).

 

The Phony “War on Christmas”

Rich Simpson has some cutting words for Rick Perry’s “Strong” ad, Fox News, and the so-called “war on Christmas” [an excerpt and link are below].

The “war” on Christmas is a pernicious off-shoot of what we have known, for decades, as the “culture wars.” What’s true, is that various factions in our society hold different ideas about important things. Two of the battlegrounds in these “culture wars” are:  morality (including, but not limited to, sexual morality); and patriotism (what does it mean to love America?). Religion is naturally brought into the fray, but please, don’t blame God for that.

Many of the differences and disagreements in our society are worth serious conversation, but serious conversation gets mocked in most (not all) public discourse today– especially when the public discourse gets highly politicized. Highly politicized public discourse is happening whenever the desire to “score points” for your side, trumps a disinterested, fair-minded love of the truth. No one can ever be totally disinterested, but it is possible to love truth enough to recognize one’s own biases, and to engage in humble self-reflection.

How we manage public language around this time of year does matter– and on that, at least, we might find initial agreement between those with differing ideas about whether the tree on the town square is a “Holiday Tree” or a “Christmas Tree.” Both sides agree that words matter.

And if we can agree that words matter, then that agreement can become a promising start for the kind of listening that is the precondition for “Peace on Earth.”

Here’s Rich:

In any event, I prefer to keep the Christmas greetings in church – not because I think faith can be segmented from real life but because I seek to build bridges and find common ground with all of God’s children who seek good will for all, and peace on earth in this time. Moreover, I’m not sure that a Christmas greeting at Walmart or the mall makes me somehow feel more special. At the very least it cheapens and distorts and commercializes what matters so deeply to me; the Incarnation. If I hear one more time about ABC-Family’s 25 days of Christmas I am going to scream! For the record, it’s still Advent, and there are twelve days of Christmas that culminate in Epiphany! I don’t expect ABC-Family to preach that. But I’d so much rather they call this the 25 days of Solstice than distort my tradition!

Happy Holidays!

via Rich’s Ruminations.