First the thoughtful: Ross Douthat in the New York Times.
Jonathan Chait responds to Matthew Yglesias and Ross Douthat.
A couple of pieces on Religion Dispatches:
And then there was the $11,000,000 Christmas tree in the hotel in Abhu Dabi. Talk about your culture wars!
An article in today’s NY Times about a new approach to homelessness. Building on the “housing first” initiative that begin in the 1990s, it views homelessness more as a public health crisis than as a nuisance. Homeless people have access to emergency rooms; they do not have access to ongoing care. And this is expensive. In LA, 4800 chronically homeless people (10% of LA’s total homeless population) consume a half-billion dollars worth of services each year.
These are shocking statistics:
Another thing that Common Ground discovered was that the homeless were an amalgam of many subgroups. They have now surveyed almost 14,000 chronically homeless people and found that roughly 20 percent are veterans, 10 percent are over the age of 60, 4 percent have H.I.V. or AIDS, 47 percent have a mental illness and 5 percent remain homeless because they can’t find housing with their pets.
For more on the 100,000 homes project, go here.
First up: This article on the Secession Ball, held last evening in Charleston, SC. No comment is necessary. The brilliant historian Eric Foner offers a necessary historical perspective.
A century and a half after the civil war, many white Americans, especially in the South, seem to take the idea that slavery caused the war as a personal accusation. The point, however, is not to condemn individuals or an entire region of the country, but to face candidly the central role of slavery in our national history. Only in this way can Americans arrive at a deeper, more nuanced understanding of our past.
The Civil War lives on, as does racism. To wit, Haley Barbour.
For a very long time, perhaps since 1995, I’ve had a visceral reaction to “Lessons and Carols.” I can attribute that to having been at Sewanee for five years. When we arrived; no, perhaps it was already during our interview, we heard about the Lessons and Carols extravaganza at Sewanee. When we came to Sewanee, Lessons and Carols provided us with several of our quintessential moments. One was the year we received tickets to the “special performance.” It wasn’t called that, but it was the Saturday performance at which prominent donors, and busloads of Episcopal Church groups came from far and wide. It was a warm day in December, perhaps in the 70s. As Corrie and I walked to the reception in Convocation Hall, we passed a frat house on the heart of campus, where the guys were enjoying the weather, and their alcohol. Then we saw a group of folk, assembled behind a seminarian clad in cassock and surplice, and carrying a crucifix. We attended the reception, then made our way to the service. The music was beautiful of course, but what made the greatest impression on me was the myriad of Southern Anglican matrons in attendance, wearing their minks, in unseasonably warm weather.
I’ve always thought that any Lessons and Carols service, apart from that at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, was manipulative and contrived, designed more to attract donations than to create a worshipful experience. Still worse, I’ve thought, was the Festival of Advent Lessons and Carols. At least that was liturgically correct, unlike Sewanee’s or Furman’s, which are clearly Christmas services, taking place during the Season of Advent.
Today was the second Lessons and Carols over which I’ve presided at Grace (I succeeded in doing away with it at my previous parish, but I note its return since my departure). I rarely expect, when presiding, to experience God’s presence outside of the celebration of the Eucharist, or to worship. But that happened today. The music was profound; our soloists were perfect; the musical selections transported us out of the mundane into the heavenly presence.
Thanks to all who participated. Berkley Guse and Greg Upward, music director and organist, Will Raymer, whose composition “Come/We wait” captured the Advent experience; and especially the performance of Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium, in memory of Jerry Shannon.
Our processional hymn at the conclusion of the service was Lo! he comes, with clouds descending, text by Charles Wesley. The words are transporting, taking us from first Advent to Second:
Those dear tokens of his passion
still his dazzling body bears,
cause of endless exultation
to his ransomed worshipers;
with what rapture, with what rapture, with what rapture
gaze we on those glorious scars!
December 19, 2010
There’s a lot about Madison with which I am unfamiliar yet. Oh, Corrie and I know how to get around town, of course, and we certainly have our favorite restaurants and shops, and after a year and a half our circle of friends and acquaintances continues to grow. But there’s a lot that I still don’t know, a lot that takes getting used to. One of the most interesting things for me is exploring Madison’s curious relationship toward religion and specifically toward Christianity. I had one of those encounters this week that reminded me I’m not in the south anymore. Continue reading
Here’s C.S. Lewis echoing some of the same ideas as Wallace (in my previous post):
The gods—and, of course, I include under this title that whole ‘hemisphere of magic fiction’ which flows indirectly from them—the gods were not to paganism what they are to us. In classical poetry we hear plenty of them as objects of worship, of fear, of hatred; even comic characters. But pure aesthetic contemplation of their eternity, their remoteness, and their peace, for its own sake, is curiously rare. There is, I think, only the one passage in all Homer; and it is echoed only by Lucretius [Odyssey, vi, 41 & Lucretius De Rerum Nat. iii, 18]. But Lucretius was an atheist; and that is precisely why he sees the beauty of the gods. For he himself, in another place, has laid his finger on the secret: it is religio that hides them. No religion, so long as it believed, can have that kind of beauty which we find in the gods of Titian, of Botticelli, or of our own romantic poets. To this day you cannot make poetry of that sort out of the Christian heaven and hell. The gods must be, as it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them, before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination. For poetry to spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a marvellous that knows itself as myth. For this to come about, the old marvellous, which once was taken as fact, must be stored up somewhere, not wholly dead, but in a winter sleep, waiting its time. If it is not so stored up, if it is allowed to perish, then the imagination is impoverished. Such a sleeping-place was provided for the gods by allegory. Allegory may seem, at first, to have killed them; but it killed only as the sower kills, for gods, like other creatures, must die to live.
The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1958 [1936]), p. 82.
h/t Nathan Schneider at Killing the Buddha. It’s a great blog, by the way.
Paul Wallace’s essay on negative theology and atheism offers much to ponder. He takes apart the immature atheism of Richard Dawkins by making use of negative, or apophatic theology, which begins with the notion that the only true statements one can make about God, are negative, saying what God is not. Negative theology has a long history in the Christian tradition, going back to Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite.
Wallace’s starting point is a statement by Denys Turner: “Atheists reject too little,” Turner writes, “This is why their atheisms lack theological interest. The routine principled atheist has but tinkered with religion.”
His essay put me in mind of a job candidate for a position in a department of religion some years ago, who when asked about his own religious commitments, said boldly, “I’m an atheist.” I thought at the time, and still do, that it seemed strange and immature coming out of a scholar of religion–not that I expect scholars of religion to be believers by any means, but I expect them to have developed an understanding of the complexity of religious ideas and practices which would preclude such simple, black and white statements.
Jesus stands at the door knocking. In total reality, he comes in the form of the beggar, of the dissolute human child in ragged clothes, asking for help. He confronts you in every person that you meet. As long as there are people, Christ will walk the earth as your neighbor, as the one through whom God calls you, speaks to you, makes demands on you.
That is the great seriousness and great blessedness of the Advent message. Christ is standing at the door; he lives in the form of a human being among us. Do you want to close the door or open it?
St. John of the Cross was a Spanish mystic most known in the contemporary world for coining the phrase “dark night of the soul.” His biography is available on wikipedia.
Here is the beginning poem of the work that bears the title Dark Night of the Soul:
1. One dark night,
fired with love’s urgent longings
– ah, the sheer grace! –
I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.2. In darkness, and secure,
by the secret ladder, disguised,
– ah, the sheer grace! –
in darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.3. On that glad night,
in secret, for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything,
with no other light or guide
than the one that burned in my heart.4. This guided me
more surely than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
– him I knew so well –
there in a place where no one appeared.5. O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
the Lover with his beloved,
transforming the beloved in her Lover.6. Upon my flowering breast
which I kept wholly for him alone,
there he lay sleeping,
and I caressing him
there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.7. When the breeze blew from the turret,
as I parted his hair,
it wounded my neck
with its gentle hand,
suspending all my senses.
8. I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.
The full text is here.
From: THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD, revised edition (1991).
Copyright 1991 ICS Publications. Permission is hereby granted for any non-commercial use, if this copyright notice is included.
There was another one of those conservative Christian tempests in a teapot last week. It was caused by Elizabeth Edwards’ last facebook post which seemed to conservatives to deny the existence of God:
“You all know that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces–my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope,” she said in a statement on her Facebook page. “These graces have carried me through difficult times and they have brought more joy to the good times than I ever could have imagined.”
One conservative wrote:
Clearly Elizabeth Edwards wants to put her faith in something, be it hope or strength or anything. But not God. I wonder if it’s just bitterness … At her death bed and giving what most folks are calling a final goodbye, Elizabeth Edwards couldn’t find it somewhere down deep to ask for His blessings as she prepares for the hereafter? I guess that nihilism I’ve been discussing reaches up higher into the hard-left precincts than I thought.
For a more thoughtful perspective, read this article from Politics Daily.
For a longer perspective, here’s Michael Shermer on Einstein’s God. He concludes the essay with a quotation from a letter Einstein wrote in 1949:
I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
The call for humility is even more necessary, and less heeded, than it was sixty years ago.
Preaching Grace on the Square 