Monthly Archives: February 2011

Reflecting on the lectionary with a demonstration in the background

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The rally at the Capitol against Gov. Walker’s plans to balance the budget is well underway. It’s noisy, well-attended, and there’s no sign of the National Guard (lots of cops though).

Next Sunday’s reading from Leviticus 19 challenges us to think about what sort of society, what kind of justice we should envision. It demands care for the poor, equal justice for rich and poor, and love of one’s neighbor. Christians tend to personalize such demands, when they attend to them at all, turning them into a guide for interpersonal relationships rather than the vision of a just society imagined in Leviticus and elsewhere in both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.

We are also in the midst of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus reinterprets Torah, in many ways intensifying its demands, for example, turning the call to love one’s neighbor, into a call to love one’s enemy, as well. One might say that he is reimagining the just society to include not just the people of Israel, but all of humanity.

Such clear calls for justice and love challenge us to think clearly about the society in which we live and what God is calling us to be and do.

There’s another rally scheduled for tomorrow at noon, same time as our Wednesday service.

“The Rise and Fall of the Bible”: Rethinking the Good Book – Laura Miller – Salon.com

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Laura Miller writes in Salon about Timothy Beal’s new book on the Bible in American culture.  Entitled The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book, Beal’s work describes “biblical consumerism,” a situation in which the average American household owns nine bibles, purchases one a year (so what happened to the others), and yet most Americans are biblically illiterate.

Some of the most interesting chapters in “The Rise and Fall of the Bible” explore the world of Bibles created for specific subcultures and needs: the manly Metal Bible and Duct Tape Bible, kicky handbag/Bible combos and special editions geared toward teenagers, African-American women and so on. These can contain as much as 50 percent “supplemental” material, “explaining” the scripture according to the taste of the intended audience. Then there are Biblezines, publications in which articles about how to grill steaks or talk to girls (in the case of a Biblezine for boys) share the page with biblical quotations. Well-meaning older relatives give this material to young Christians, hoping it will make the Bible itself seem more “readable.” Beal thinks the kids just wind up reading the articles and skipping the quotations. He compares Biblezines to the “sweeter and more colorful roll-ups, punches, sauces and squirtable foams that I buy for my kids’ lunches” in lieu of the unprocessed fresh fruit they refuse to eat. At least you can tell yourself you’re giving them fruit.

Beal bemoans biblical illiteracy and those who want to interpret scripture literally. In fact, he sees a direct relation between the proliferation of niche bibles and the end of a search for certainty in scripture. I’m not so sure, and while I find the marketing of bibles to small subgroups of the population both odd and somewhat amusing, I don’t know that contemporary “biblical consumerism” is all that much different from what happened in earlier generations.

Take the Gideons, for example. They provide bibles in hotel rooms, hospitals, and the like, and distribute them on college campuses and elsewhere. I can’t remember where I was teaching at the time, but I recall coming into class one day (a Bible class, no doubt) and the students were joking about the New Testaments that were being passed out on the sidewalk.

For those passing out the bibles, they are a symbol of their own faithfulness as well as a means of reaching out and converting people. In past generations, a bible had a pride of place in many homes–a lavishly illustrated and bound volume displayed on an end table or coffee table in a living room. I doubt whether that particular bible was opened and read but its presence sent a message to all who saw it.

My sense is that the consumerism Beal describes has much more to do with the commercialization of Christianity–companies trying to make a buck–than with profound changes in biblical interpretation in the culture. Need a gift for a graduate? Why not buy the college-student’s bible?

Yes, there is rampant and growing biblical illiteracy, even in the South, and even among conservative Christians. It always amused me when freshmen figured out in the second week of class that the Bible course they took because they were certain it would be easy, turned out to be much more difficult than they anticipated, because in spite of their deep faith and regular church-going, they only ever read bits and pieces, at most. Then there was the kid who after I made an aside in another class, asked who Adam and Eve were.

 

The Belief Instinct

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Last week, Slate excerpted Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct. He argues that having a theory of mind was useful for us in the evolutionary process, to be able to imagine other people have thoughts, intentions, and emotions, and extending that even to inanimate objects. Ultimately, then, we projected a being (God) with a super mind, similar to our own. It’s rather simplistic, at least in the excerpt we’ve been given. Other thinkers, evolutionary biologists, psychologists, and theorists like Pascal Boyer, have placed the evolutionary origins of religion in other aspects of our brain. Bering does write with humor:

There is a scientific term for this way of thinking—”theory of mind.” It’s perhaps easiest to grasp the concept when considering how we struggle to make sense of someone else’s bizarre or unexpected behavior. If you’ve ever seen an unfortunate woman at the grocery store wearing a midriff-revealing top and packed into a pair of lavender tights like meat in a sausage wrapper, or a follicularly challenged man with a hairpiece two shades off and three centimeters adrift, and asked yourself what on Earth those people were thinking when they looked in the mirror before leaving the house, this is a good sign that your theory of mind (not to mention your fashion sense) is in working order. When others violate our expectations for normalcy or stump us with surprising behaviors, our tendency to mind-read goes into overdrive. We literally “theorize” about the minds that are causing ostensible behavior.

Josh Rothman responds. He views Bering as positing religion primarily as animism:

If belief in God is instinctual, then how do atheists overcome that instinct? I don’t believe in God – but I don’t find myself fighting some built-in tendency to personify the universe. (Neither, I suspect, does Bering.) If Bering is right, then one would expect very religious people to have very overactive theories of mind. But that hardly seems true: religious people don’t, as a matter of habit, personify inanimate things or over-read other people.

He concludes by asserting that religion is not about the search for personality but the search for meaning:

If there’s an instinct at work, it’s the instinct to make sense of things. That’s why it’s a mistake for Bering to dismiss theology: Systematic theology is about making sense of the universe, and it’s at the heart what makes religion useful.

The introduction of animism in the debate leads to another essay. Stephen T. Asma attacked the New Atheists by arguing that their view of religion was too narrow. Instead, one should look at Animism, which Asma contends is the world’s biggest religion. It sees a world inhabited by spirits, who can affect the lives of humans and need propitiation. He writes:

Religion, even the wacky, su­per­sti­tious stuff, is an an­al­ge­sic sur­viv­al mech­a­nism and sanc­tuary in the de­vel­op­ing world. Religion pro­vides some or­der, co­her­ence, re­spite, peace, and trac­tion against the fates. Per­haps most im­por­tant­, it quells the emo­tion­al dis­tress of hu­man vulnerabil­i­ty.

 

Foodies and the sacred

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B.R. Myers goes on a tirade against foodies in the March The Atlantic. Having read a number of recent books on the theme, he got enough ammunition for some cheap shots:

So secure is the gourmet community in its newfound reputation, so sure is it of its rightness, that it now proclaims the very qualities—greed, indifference to suffering, the prioritization of food above all—that earned it so much obloquy in the first place. Bourdain starts off his book by reveling in the illegality of a banquet at which he and some famous (unnamed) chefs dined on ortolan, endangered songbirds fattened up, as he unself-consciously tells us, in pitch-dark cages. After the meal, an “identical just-fucked look” graced each diner’s face. Eating equals sex, and in accordance with this self-flattery, gorging is presented in terms of athleticism and endurance. “You eat way past the point of hitting the wall. Or I do anyway.”

But his attempts at put down are often little more than cheap shots. For example:

And when foodies talk of flying to Paris to buy cheese, to Vietnam to sample pho? They’re not joking about that either. Needless to say, no one shows much interest in literature or the arts—the real arts.

But he does point to something in his essay, foodie culture as a search for meaning, even spirituality (but that’s my wife’s project):

Even if gourmets’ rejection of factory farms and fast food is largely motivated by their traditional elitism, it has left them, for the first time in the history of their community, feeling more moral, spiritual even, than the man on the street. Food writing reflects the change. Since the late 1990s, the guilty smirkiness that once marked its default style has been losing ever more ground to pomposity and sermonizing. References to cooks as “gods,” to restaurants as “temples,” to biting into “heaven,” etc., used to be meant as jokes, even if the compulsive recourse to religious language always betrayed a certain guilt about the stomach-driven life. Now the equation of eating with worship is often made with a straight face. The mood at a dinner table depends on the quality of food served; if culinary perfection is achieved, the meal becomes downright holy—as we learned from Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), in which a pork dinner is described as feeling “like a ceremony … a secular seder.”

His essay repeatedly cites examples of food writers grasping for spiritual language to interpret their experiences and their lives. Of course, he is critical of such efforts, but it seems to me that the use of such language is an attempt to make meaning. At its best, he foodie quest is above all, for authenticity and meaning. Given the prevalence of religious language in the movement, it seems also a quest for the sacred.

His essay is here: The Moral Crusade Against Foodies – Magazine – The Atlantic.

For a rejoinder, read Patrick Lam’s takedown in Salon.

Meanwhile, on Facebook, there’s the Episcopal Foodie Network.

The nature of religious authority

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There has been considerable discussion about the nature of authority in the Anglican Communion, precipitated by the recent Primates’ Meeting. These discussions often focus on the locus of authority (is it the bishop, the national church, the local congregation); less often do they focus on the origin of that authority. The lack of conversation about the source of authority is largely due to the notion of apostolic succession, although the challenge to that idea comes from those who view scripture or adherence to some doctrinal formulation to be more important than a genealogy that can trace authority to the apostles.

It’s interesting occasionally to compare the sources and loci of authority in one’s own religious tradition to those in others. There is currently something of a debate taking place within American Zen Buddhism that can shed light on our controversies. The source of the current conflict is described here. Here’s a call from one Zen practitioner for a “Protestant Reformation.” But the problem in Zen predates the current controversy. There’s a fascinating book that describes similar developments in the San Francisco Zen Center, entitled Shoes outside the Door.

Given the apparent centralizing and bureaucratizing tendencies in the Anglican Communion, it’s important for us as Episcopalians and Anglicans to do all that we can to resist such efforts. An interview with Bishop Mark Sisk of New York details some of the issues, and the cultural/political differences between the American church and other branches of the Anglican Communion.

The 400th Anniversary of the King James Version

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2011 marks the 400th anniversary of the Authorized Version which dominated English-speaking Christianity, shaped the English language and literature well into the twentieth century. There are numerous efforts to mark the date. Ben Myers points to several recent books and offers his own reflections.

Some years ago, I wrote a review of an earlier batch of books on the KJV. You can access it here: Grieser_kjvreviews.

Here’s an essay by Carol Rumens on Psalm 23 that reflects on its poetry (in the KJV translation). She also compares that translation to some other English translations, including Tyndale’s.

Hating God

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A new book by Bernard Schweizer explores this idea. Those who hate God–Schweizer uses the term misotheist–are not atheists. They believe in God, but the God they believe in “is malevolent or at least incompetent, indifferent—in any case not worshipful.” Among this group Schweizer includes biblical figures like Job’s wife, who counseled him to “curse God and die;” William Blake, and Mark Twain. Schweizer goes into greater depth here.

A review on Christianity Today by Jake Meador prompted this rejoinder from Schweizer.

Not having read Schweizer’s book, it’s not clear to me precisely what his argument is. However, it does seem to me that there is a qualitative difference between an atheist and someone whose antipathy to religion or Christianity, or God is rooted in a fundamental sense of a breech of relationship. I’ve encountered any number of people over the years who have lost their faith, but remain deeply engaged with Christianity (or Judaism, for that matter), who expend enormous amounts of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual energy in their efforts to extricate themselves from faith. In other words, like Job’s wife, they curse God, and want to die. The atheists, new or old, seem to be of a different sort. Their intellectual energy continues to be engaged in the project, but on some level, there is no longer any spiritual, or emotional energy engaged. Perhaps I’m splitting hairs here, but it has always seemed to me that someone who can proclaim publicly that they are an atheist has made a profound break with religious sensibility. To take one of Schweizer’s examples of a misotheist–Elie Wiesel has clearly not done that.

The dust settles on the Primates Meeting

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It didn’t take long, for there wasn’t much dust. It seems little happened, or in ABC-speak, “conversations took place, relationships were deepened, yada yada yada.” George Conger, Paul Bagshaw, and the Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church comment.

There seem to have been some important developments, not least the recognition (finally, what took so long) that the role of the primates differs widely from local church to local church, that their power and office are often structured quite differently, all of which make unified action impossible.

Bagshaw makes two comments which seem on target, and which reflect on ongoing development in the Anglican Communion. One is that “it is an ever more clerical communion.” It’s not clear to me why, and given the enormous cultural shifts throughout the world, a narrowing of the power and role of the laity seems both wrongheaded and against the tide of history. The second comment is that, given the changes in roles for the Lambeth Conference, the Primates Meeting, and the sidelining of the Anglican Consultative Council (all of which I think are taking place and have been taking place for the last decade), power is centralizing in the Archbishop of Canterbury and in the Anglican Communion Office–as Bagshaw terms it, an international bureaucracy. This, too, seems odd to me, and somehow roughly parallel to developments in the European Union, where power has centralized in the bureaucracy, not in any deliberative bodies.

But more important than any of this may be the absence of a significant number of Primates, for whatever reason. For many of them, what the Archbishop of Canterbury does, the meetings he calls, are meaningless. Conger and Bagshaw agree that “the Anglican Communion as we knew it no longer exists,” what isn’t clear is what precisely is coming into existence. And so long as there is no lay voice at the highest levels of international meetings, I don’t think the Episcopal Church should spend time, energy, or money, trying to remain a part of it.

Salt and Light: A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

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February 6, 2011

Let me repeat the last words of today’s gospel, in case your mind was wandering as they were being read: “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” There are some very hard statements in the gospels, things Jesus says that seem, if taken for face value, to offend us, challenge us, perhaps make us rethink everything we do. This is one of those statements. Spoken directly to the disciples, Jesus seems to be telling them that the Pharisees, who seek to keep the law as faithfully as possible, are exemplars of moral behavior for the disciples, that indeed, the disciples must do better than the Pharisees, or risk damnation.

When confronted by such texts, we are inclined to respond in one of several ways. We might discount it, giving reasons why it can’t mean what it seems to mean, that it can’t apply to us or our efforts. We might also take it as a challenge, seek to be more righteous than the Pharisees, to live as Jesus taught his disciples to live. A third alternative would be to worry that because we can’t be as good as that, it must mean we will one day burn in Hell. These are the sorts of questions that the Gospel of Matthew confronts us with, and will continue to confront us with, for the coming months. And in these weeks, we are in the heart of that challenge. At the same time, we all also need to confront our own emotional, intellectual, and spiritual responses to Jesus’ challenge. Continue reading →