Monthly Archives: March 2012

Another perspective on ads against religion

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This time in response to a billboard sponsored by American Atheists, targeting Jews.

I Saw God on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway | Stay Attuned | Big Think.

Unfortunately, it is questionable whether or not people can extricate themselves from the power of myths that they have once sanctified. If they can’t, even when they want to, then the billboard might as well hover over a poor, jobless, stigmatized, crime-ridden, environmentally polluted neighborhood and read: “Be Happy!”

The billboard that I saw is apparently one of several. There are others targeting other myths. They ought to be welcomed onto roads that also offer “Jesus Is The Answer.” Nevertheless, on American roads these billboards may ultimately prove self-defeating: they lack the gravity necessary to ground the myths that they evoke.

 

Archbishop of Canterbury resigns

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Lambeth Palace has announced that Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, will resign, effective in December. He will become the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Info at the Lead and Thinking Anglicans.

I remember the joy on this side of the Atlantic which greeted his selection in 2003, a few months before General Convention 2003 which gave consent to the election of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire. Much of his time in office has been spent dealing with the fallout from that event.

Williams is a brilliant man with a deep faith who held that office during a time of great difficulty. I wish him well and look forward to reading the theological and spiritual reflections that will come from serving in a position less burdened by controversy.

While I have made my disagreements with him public on this blog, I have enormous respect for him and am sorry to see him go. Speculation about his successor is of course already well underway, and several of the candidates mentioned would be much less open to change than he was (and probably even less skilled at diplomacy).

I will always remember the Sunday lunch we shared with him in Sewanee, years before he became ABC. He sat cross-legged, on the floor, eating corn on the cob. What a delightful image!

Quitting Church

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This week there’s been a good bit of discussion around the web about quitting or leaving church.

I’ve been thinking about this theme myself, in part because of recent encounters with a number of Roman Catholics who are struggling with their faith and their membership in that Church. Some can no longer find a spiritual home there and have embarked on a journey that leads them away. Others are struggling to find some way of finding peace with a hierarchy from which they are alienated and finding peace as well with a personal history and family tradition that still binds them.

Over the weekend, our neighbors down the street at the Freedom from Religion Foundation had an ad in the NYTimes urging Catholics to quit the church. Here it is:

The ad has produced its desired result: considerable response from various quarters. Sidney Callahan wrote about it for America magazine’s “In All Things,” observing that:

Helpfully, the free from religion folks provide a long list of oppressive “dark age” errors that “must be stopped.” One can become a member of their cruade by sending checks ranging from $40 (Individual) to $100 (Sustaining) to $500 (Life) to a puzzling category of (After Life) for $5000. This pitch for money prompted one wag to reply, “Hey people, you can quit for free you know.”

I’ve long joked that I would love to run an ad campaign directed at Roman Catholics with tag-lines like “The Episcopal Church: All of the Liturgy, none of the Guilt.” I do believe that the Episcopal Church can offer a home to at least some Roman Catholics who can no longer be at home in their church. But at the same time, to make such a direct appeal seems problematic. Here’s another version, from Rev. Matthew Lawrence.

A generous, pastoral response is necessary; and above all, humility that the Episcopal Church might not be the appropriate place for everyone who is estranged from the Roman Catholic Church.

One Catholic who left the Church and an order, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, is Mary Johnson. An interview with her  is here.  Her story of leaving is An Unquenchable Thirst.

My doubts in the convent were more questions about my call than doubting God or my Catholic faith — that came later. Though I’d felt called to serve the poor, I was assigned years of administrative work. Eventually when I was superior of a house that cared for refugee women and their children, I was forbidden to start programs that would have helped the women toward self-sufficiency; my superiors insisted that I limit myself to providing food and shelter. As Mother Teresa aged and her health failed, I clashed with two powerful sisters who had pulled the community very far to the right. I also realized that I needed deeper human connections than the rules allowed. I kept hearing within me the words of Jesus in the gospel: “I came that you may have life, and have it to the full” — and life in the MCs didn’t look very full. I felt as though I was suffocating.

Lisa Miller points out that women are giving up church in growing numbers. According to the Barna Group, regular attendance by women has dropped by 20% between 1991 and 2011. Her focus is on conservative Christianity.

One woman who struggles with church-going is Elizabeth Drescher, who writes about  “Giving up Church for Lent.”

Dave Kinnaman (The Barna Group) on their current research findings, postulating “two worlds” one of active, engaged Christians; the other consisting of secular people completely alienated from religion and Christianity. He suggests that perhaps whole segments of our population and culture have given up church. That is to say, religion is no longer of any significance or interest to them.

Marilynne Robinson’s When I was a child, I read books

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Her new book of essays is out.

One of the essays is here (Guernica)

We should drop the pretense that we know what we don’t know, about our origins and about our present state. Specifically, we should cease and desist from reductionist, in effect invidious, characterizations of humankind.

I would like to propose a solution of sorts, ancient and authoritative but for all that very sporadically attended to. What if we were to say that human beings are created in the image of God? It will certainly be objected that we have no secure definitions of major terms. How much do we know about God, after all? How are we to understand this word “created”? In what sense can we be said to share or participate in the divine image, since the Abrahamic traditions are generally of one mind in forbidding the thought that the being of God is resolvable to an image of any kind?

But it is on just these grounds that this conception would rescue us from the problems that come with our tendency to create definitions of human nature that are small and closed. It would allow us to acknowledge the fact, manifest in culture and history, that we are both terrible and very wonderful. Since the movement of human history has been toward a knowledge and competence that our ancestors could not have imagined, an open definition like this one would protect us from the error of assuming that we know our limits, for good or for harm. Calvin understood our status as images of God to have reference to our brilliance. He said, truly and as one who must have known from his own experience, that we are brilliant even in our dreams. There is much that is miraculous in a human being, whether that word “miraculous” is used strictly or loosely. And to acknowledge this fact would enhance the joy of individual experience and enhance as well the respect with which we regard other people, those statistically almost-impossible fellow travelers on our profoundly unlikely planet. There is no strictly secular language that can translate religious awe, and the usual response to this fact among those who reject religion is that awe is misdirected, an effect of ignorance or superstition or the power of suggestion and association. Still, to say that the universe is extremely large, and that the forces that eventuate in star clusters and galaxies are very formidable indeed, seems deficient—qualitatively and aesthetically inadequate to its subject.

Another essay from the collection “Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred” Chronicle is particularly thought-provoking and moving.

 

When I write fiction, I suppose my attempt is to simulate the integrative work of a mind perceiving and reflecting, drawing upon culture, memory, conscience, belief or assumption, circumstance, fear, and desire—a mind shaping the moment of experience and response and then reshaping them both as narrative, holding one thought against another for the effect of affinity or contrast, evaluating and rationalizing, feeling compassion, taking offense. These things do happen simultaneously, after all. None of them is active by itself, and none of them is determinative, because there is that mysterious thing the cognitive scientists call self-awareness, the human ability to consider and appraise one’s own thoughts. I suspect this self-awareness is what people used to call the soul.

Modern discourse is not really comfortable with the word “soul,” and in my opinion the loss of the word has been disabling, not only to religion but to literature and political thought and to every humane pursuit. In contemporary religious circles, souls, if they are mentioned at all, tend to be spoken of as saved or lost, having answered some set of divine expectations or failed to answer them, having arrived at some crucial realization or failed to arrive at it. So the soul, the masterpiece of creation, is more or less reduced to a token signifying cosmic acceptance or rejection, having little or nothing to do with that miraculous thing, the felt experience of life, except insofar as life offers distractions or temptations.

Having read recently that there are more neurons in the human brain than there are stars in the Milky Way, and having read any number of times that the human brain is the most complex object known to exist in the universe, and that the mind is not identical with the brain but is more mysterious still, it seems to me this astonishing nexus of the self, so uniquely elegant and capable, merits a name that would indicate a difference in kind from the ontological run of things, and for my purposes “soul” would do nicely.

Another excerpt is here (Commonweal)

Reviews are here:

A comparison of her and Terence Malick (Tree of Life)

Making use of digital media: Madison Episcopal Churches get national publicity!

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I was at the CEEP (Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parishes) conference last week and met Jake Dell, whose insights I value. He blogged on the conference over the weekend, offering suggestions on how mainline denominations might utilize digital media more effectively. Here’s his original post.

One of his suggestions seemed to fit in very well with what we are already doing here in Madison. I shared our joint website with him and he has now blogged about our efforts and offered more suggestions. Read his follow up post here.

Our efforts began quite by accident as we brainstormed how we might leverage our limited funds for publicity more effectively. It’s also a direct result of our common efforts in other areas, all of which were generated because we Madison rectors meet regularly for lunch.

Our joint website is here: http://madisonepiscopal.org/

Thanks for the hat-tip, Jake, and for the other suggestions. I’m sure we’ll be talking about them when we meet again tomorrow.

 

Symbols: Living and Dead–lectionary reflections for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

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This week’s readings

Next Sunday’s gospel includes what is probably the most famous verse in all of scripture John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but have everlasting life.”

I wonder whether Episcopalians, indeed anyone who isn’t an Evangelical Christian, can hear in those words the transforming and life-giving power of the gospel. Their ubiquity in contemporary culture (the placard with John 3:16) a fixture at sporting events since the early 1980s has numbed us to their power, and perhaps turned us off. During the Eucharist, when the moment comes for the “comfortable words,” I find myself avoiding John 3:16 and reading a different verse.

Words and images have power. Often that power comes not from what they refer or point to directly, but rather to associations we make with them. In the case of John 3:16, what comes to mind for me when I see that combination of word and number, is all of the ways Christianity succeeds in alienating people. After all, who, besides a Christian, would know the words to which John 3:16 points? To those who understand, the words may be life-giving, but to those not in on the language, they are meaningless. To the rest of us, John 3:16 is a dead symbol.

There’s a case before the European Court that tests the English government’s decision to ban the wearing of crosses by Christians. It’s a silly decision, on one level, for a cross on a chain is more a fashion statement than a faith statement, which is what the Archbishop of Canterbury seemed to be getting at. You can read about the controversy here.

So there’s John 3:16, a symbol of something, that is interpreted differently by different people. There’s another symbol in this week’s texts, that of the bronze serpent, which is lifegiving and life-preserving for the Israelites, and is used in the gospel of John as a symbol of Jesus Christ: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so too must the Son of Man be lifted up.” That bronze serpent became a symbol of something else over time, so that when King Hezekiah cleansed the temple in the 8th century BCE, he destroyed the bronze serpent which had become an object of devotion (II Kings 18:4).

Symbols are powerful and they are often powerful, or become powerful in ways that we who use them can’t imagine or expect. It’s easy in Lent, and especially as we move closer to Holy Week, to focus our attention on the cross. It is a symbol of our faith, a symbol of Jesus’ Christ’s suffering, but it can often allow us to ignore other aspects of our faith, other possible symbols, or the ways in which a symbol like the cross, can become embedded in a whole culture or web of meanings that we don’t intend. It sometimes seems like Lent and especially Holy Week, become a time when we worship the cross. I thought of that this afternoon as I began planning our Good Friday service, which includes the veneration of the cross.

The cross is not just about my (our sins), Jesus’ suffering, and the doctrine of the atonement. It is also about Roman power, and God’s love, or in the words of the collect:

You stretched out your arms in love on the hard wood of the cross, that everyone might come within reach of your saving embrace

College and faith

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I know the controversy is so last week. But I finally got around to reading Garry Wills‘ eminently reasonable response to Santorum’s complaint that colleges destroy religious faith:

Minds grow by questioning things, and adolescence is a great period of questions. Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken learned to cross-examine the Bible all on their own, without any help at all from college. An unquestioned faith is not faith but rote recitation. The opposite of such questioning is not deep belief but arrested development.

A report on research by Richard Putnam (Bowling Alone) and David Campbell on young adults, Christianity, and the culture wars: . A free summary of the Putnam and Campbell Foreign Affairs article is here. To quote Putnam, young Americans are saying, “If religion is just about conservative politics, I’m outtahere.”

But it’s not just conservative Christianity that turns college students and young adults away. There are significant cultural factors as well. Christian Piatt cites seven, not one of them connected with conservative politics or the culture wars.  Instead, he mentions:

  • that there’s no natural bridge to church when teens leave home
  • distraction
  • the need to filter out the vast quantities of information (and advertising) that assault young people.

In other words, we’ve got our work cut out for us. Especially in light of Christian Smith’s ongoing research, which I’ve mentioned before. Another take on that is here:

Elaine Pagels on Revelation

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I previously blogged on Pagels’ most recent project. She lectured at UW Madison a couple of years ago. Here’s what I said then:

she seemed to suggest that the author’s Judaism was in some way more important for making sense of the visions than his belief that Jesus Christ was the Messiah. I think you can do that only if you separate out the letters to the seven churches from the visions. For if the same audience is implied then the most important context is the relationship between Christianity and the empire, not Judaism and the empire.

More troubling is her blaming Athanasius for the canonization of Revelation. His wasn’t the leading or primary voice. There were too many other things in its favor, particularly, by that time, the universal assumption that the author of the gospel of John and the author of Revelation were the same person. And it wasn’t just Athanasius who attacked alternative visions or revelations. Early Christianity is filled with such visions, and attacks on them. Unfortunately, Pagels’ bias against orthodox Christianity, the Great Church, whatever you want to call it, in favor of the personal experience emphasized by the Gnostics and others, blinds her to historical reality

Adam Gopnik’s review in the New Yorker is here.

Martin Marty comments here.

An interview with Pagels is here.

One excerpt is here. Another is here.

The conversation on the Church’s Budget: Updated. Updated again (3/12)

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Updated with a link to the feedback site. Add your thoughts!  http://jscpbf.blogspot.com/

It’s heating up. If you want to follow some of the more active participants, I commend to you:

Are there others?

This week in Anglican Covenant news

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Last week, three Church of England dioceses voted down the covenant; one narrowly approved it. Details here. Complete results of the voting so far is here.

Overall, it looks like it may be heading for defeat. If it passes, it will be a very close thing, proving that it lacks widespread support (the bishops are fairly united in favor, but clergy and laity are less enthused). This turn of events has given rise to considerable comment

From Tobias Haller, here and here.

The letter from Diarmaid MacColluch to the Church Times is priceless.

As momentum against builds, the forces in support continue to marshal lame arguments in support.

  • From the Bishops of Bristol and Oxford. Tobias Haller’s response.
  • the Archbishop of Canterbury has issued a video in support (surely a sign of growing desperation)
  • other essays in support linked from Thinking Anglicans

Diarmaid MacCulloch’s video response to the ABC:

Mark Harris on the “scramble for votes”

All this suggests increasing desperation on the side of the covenant’s supporters. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the effects to the Anglican Communion’s leadership if it isn’t approved by the Church of England General Synod–and for it to be debated there it needs a majority of yes votes from the dioceses. It’s clear that its primary constituency in the CoE is the bishops. They support it overwhelmingly, while both the laity and clergy are split narrowly between supporters and opponents. Hopefully, the close votes in CoE diocesan synods will allow many who are somewhat swayed by the lame arguments of the ABC et al, to resist whatever “bonds of affection” they may feel, to resist the temptation to submit to the leadership’s requests.