Author Archives: djgrieser

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About djgrieser

I have been Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Madison, WI since 2009. I'm passionate about Jesus Christ and about connecting our faith and tradition with 21st century culture. I'm also very active in advocating for our homeless neighbors.

Reflections on Madison Pride and GSE–Gay Straight Episcopalians

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It was great to see so many religious communities marching in the parade. I noticed UCC churches, Unitarian Universalists, Quakers, and First Methodist all with contingents in addition to the group of Episcopalians. When Christianity is so often depicted in our culture and media as only consisting of the religious right, it’s important to bear witness that there are other voices, even if they are often drowned out. Members of our group who marched talked about the support they received along the way and the gratitude that many expressed.

That is not to say the voices of Conservative Christianity were silent yesterday. There were a couple of protesters with signs quoting verses like “The wages of sin is death.” They succeeded in angering those who were here for the parade. When I walked by, one protester was in a heated argument with a bystander.

For all the good it can do, religion can also do great harm. In our society one of the segments most hurt by the religious community are LGBT people. I was reminded of that earlier in the week when I had a conversation with a young woman who came to our midweek service. She had never been to services at Grace before but said she had been meaning to come for quite some time. The first question she asked after we exchanged names was about our stance on welcoming LGBT’s. I immediately mentioned the parade and Eucharist that were scheduled for yesterday, and she was delighted. She also shared that the last time she attended services at a church, the preacher launched into a tirade about sexuality and she walked out.

It is for people like her that we walked in the parade, celebrated the Eucharist, and need to say often, explicitly, and loudly that we welcome everyone to our services and into our congregations.

Gay Straight Episcopalians at the Madison Pride Parade

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Thanks to some initial organizational efforts by Michael Ramsey-Mulshof, the Madison rectors, and a team of lay people, a group began talking about ways of making Madison’s parishes more inclusive and supportive of LGBT people, and especially of LGBT teens. The group chose Gay Straight Episcopalians as its name, and decided to “go public” at the Madison Pride Parade today. At the end of the parade, while others were attending a rally just a block away, 30-40 of us, marchers and supporters gathered at Grace for a Eucharist. It was a wonderful experience. Here are pictures of GSE marchers:

 

I remember two years ago, coming out of church early Sunday afternoon and encountering the Pride Parade. It was my third Sunday at Grace and I was surprised that there was no visible Episcopalian presence among the marchers. Thanks to all those who organized and those who marched in witness to our inclusivity.

 

 

An interesting debate about the nature of religion

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It didn’t start out that way. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry posted the following:

To have a religion is to hold a belief about metaphysics. Either you believe that Allah is God and Muhammad is his Prophet or you don’t. If you do, and you eat pork, this will not make Muhammad more, or less, the Prophet. The two things aren’t related.

He was questioning the relationship between religious belief and “action,” specifically the question “why do you, as an X (say Christian), do Y?”

Noah Millman responded with the provocatively titled post, “When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”

Millman points out the priority, for most of the world’s religions of “orthopraxy” over “orthodoxy;” that is to say one’s actions, especially ritual actions are what make one a Hindu, or Jew, to take two examples.

In Gobry’s response, he says:

But here’s the thing: the subtext to this entire debate is really the question: “Does (my particular) religious belief make people a better people?” “And if so, to what extent, and how, and why?”

To the first question, my answer is a resounding yes.

Secularism and its Discontents

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James Wood on George Levine’s volume, The Joys of Secularism

Mark Oppenheimer on Charles Taylor: He points out the importance for Taylor of the quest for authenticity in the modern world, both for individuals and for cultures, and the possibility that we might create political forms or governments that enable human flourishing.

Taylor is a difficult but rewarding read, an insightful perspective on religion in contemporary Western culture.

Part of Charles Taylor’s first chapter in the collection Rethinking Secularism, is now available on the web. Taylor writes:

And so the history of this term “secular” in the West is complex and ambiguous. It starts off as one term in a dyad that distinguishes two dimensions of existence, identifying them by the particular type of time that is essential to each. But from the foundation of this clear distinction between the immanent and the transcendent, there develops another dyad, in which “secular” refers to what pertains to a self-sufficient, immanent sphere and is contrasted with what relates to the transcendent realm (often identified as “religious”). This binary can then undergo a further mutation, via a denial of the transcendent level, into a dyad in which one term refers to the real (“secular”), and the other refers to what is merely invented (“religious”); or where “secular” refers to the institutions we really require to live in “this world,” and “religious” or “ecclesial” refers to optional accessories, which often disturb the course of this-worldly life.

Through this double mutation, the dyad itself is profoundly transformed; in the first case, both sides are real and indispensable dimensions of life and society. The dyad is thus “internal,” in the sense that each term is impossible without the other, like right and left or up and down. After the mutations, the dyad becomes “external”; secular and religious are opposed as true and false or necessary and superfluous. The goal of policy becomes, in many cases, to abolish one while conserving the other.

The significance of this lies primarily in the question whether Islamic (or other societies) can “secularize.” If secularization is uniquely bound to its historic context in western Christendom, then the answer to that question is not obvious. Still, Taylor argues”

Either we stumble through tangles of cross-purposes, or else a rather minimal awareness of significant differences can lead us to draw far-reaching conclusions that are very far from the realities we seek to describe. Such is the case, for instance, when people argue that since the “secular” is an old category of Christian culture and since Islam doesn’t seem to have a corresponding category, therefore Islamic societies cannot adopt secular regimes. Obviously, they would not be just like those in Christendom, but maybe the idea, rather than being locally restricted, can travel across borders in an inventive and imaginative way.

Religion and Politics–in the nation and in Wisconsin

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Jonathan D. Fitzgerald comments on the continuing debate over the role of religion in politics:

It feels progressive to say that we should’t mix religion and politics, because it feels like by saying so we are upholding the dream of our founders, but when citizens allow their politics to be informed by religious convictions, they are not leading our country down a slippery slope toward theocracy, they are being fully engaged citizens. This requires dialogue and compromise, give and take; it is not the easiest way forward, but, really, it’s the only way.

Consistent with that perspective, yesterday a group of Madison-area clergy held a press conference in which they expressed concern with the recently-passed budget. Their arguments used religious language and came out of the scriptural traditions of Judaism and Christianity. Several clergy stressed the importance that their religious perspectives be part of the public debate, when so often, the only religious voices being heard or receiving notice come from the Religious Right. The full document produced by the group, Concerned Religious Leaders of Wisconsin, is here.

 

The Empty Cathedrals of Europe

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The Empty Cathedrals of Europe.

Brian Jay Stanley visited Europe’s cathedrals and pondered the absence of God:

Europe’s cathedrals sublimely evoke the absence of God. They are temples that have decayed into museums. Tourists, not worshippers, fill their naves, driven by curiosity, not faith. One does not pay alms anymore but admission fees. The altar is roped off, not because it is sacred, but fragile. The silence of emptiness has replaced the silence of holiness.

Upon further reading, he learns that there was a great deal of human interest and motivation involved in their construction: competition between cities for prestige, desire for aristocrats to show off their wealth and “buy their salvation;” etc. He finds all this unsavory and unreligious:

“A secular and a religious society are equally profane, for a secular society banishes the sacred, while a religious society defiles it with the human.”

In fact, religious desires can only be expressed by human beings using our human energies, abilities, and, yes, weaknesses.

But this seemed to open up an interesting question, or relate to the ongoing debate in England about the riots last week. Mark Vernon points to an essay by Gordon Lynch on the development of values in individuals and communities which includes this:

If broader, sacred values can also bind us into a deeper sense of shared moral community across society, we might also ask how these can be nurtured. Our society has distinguished itself in creating built environments that show the least signs of any sense of sacred meaning of any period in history. Our high streets are dominated by chain stores and global corporations who promise convenience but little meaning. New-build properties offer modernist-lite conceptions of style, devoid of any sense of modernism’s original moral purpose. The explosion of public art has left our towns and cities with works that are all too often vacuous and un-compelling. Policy makers are clearly aware of this gap and have tried to address it, usually through repeated and unsuccessful attempts to re-launch a sense of ‘British-ness’. But convincing moral visions for society cannot be created in ersatz fashion through short-term policy ideas. They are already at hand, woven through the moral significance that is variously given to the nation, nature and humanity in the stories that our society tells about itself. Learning to see where these sacred meanings still move us, as well as the shadow-side of sacred commitments, is another long task for a remoralising society.

I think this is exactly right for the USA as well as for England. And it points to one of the key problems with Stanley’s post. Whatever motivations were involved in the construction of the cathedrals, at their heart was a vision of a space in which one might encounter God, indeed a vision, in some sense, of the heavenly city itself.

Science and Religion–Part 4 of Venema’s journey

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After posting last night about Dennis Venema’s story, he posted part 4 of his story. Read it here.

His description of reading Michael Behe’s Edge of Evolution (Behe is one of the leading proponents of Intelligent Design):

Before I had finished Edge of Evolution, I was done with ID. I would lose my faith in ID not by comparing it to the science of evolution, but by reading one of its leading proponents and evaluating his work on its own merits. ID, I decided, was an argument from analogy, ignorance and incredulity. I was looking for an argument from evidence. Due to an interesting set of circumstances, I was able to read Behe both as a credulous lay reader and as a skeptical trained scientist. Behe, I realized, hadn’t changed: I had changed, and what a difference it had made.

The next step came the same day:

Having rejected ID, I began to look into the evidence for evolution. I can also clearly recall this transition, and, if memory serves, it happened on the same day I rejected ID. This transition, however, required only ten or fifteen minutes – just as long as I needed to read the first research article on my reading list: the 2005 Nature paper comparing the human and chimpanzee genomes. I put the finished paper down on my desk, said “well, that’s that, then” out loud to my empty office, and sat back in my chair. The contrast with ID could hardly have been starker: here was nothing but argument from evidence. As a geneticist, I was fully capable of evaluating that evidence, and it was compelling. Humans and chimps were close relatives, and I was no longer an anti-evolutionist. Game, set, match. Moreover, my eyes were now open to the wonder and scope of evolution as a foundational theory of biology: everywhere I looked, evolution informed what I knew, whether in cell biology, genetics, immunology or developmental biology.

He also mentions his colleagues at Trinity Western cautioning him against being to open about his new views.

Religion and Science–Updates

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A few weeks ago, I posted about the debate within Evangelicalism over whether Adam and Eve ever “literally existed.” NPR picked up on the question recently. Andrew Sullivan and his readers follow the controversy.

Dennis Venema, Associate Professor and Department Chair of the Biology Department at Trinity Western University in British Columbia is blogging about his journey from supporting the Intelligent Design movement to seeing Evolution as a creative mechanism used by God. There are three entries so far. Each is well-written and together they offer insight into the thinking of an Evangelical scientist. Read them in order: First, second, third.

Meanwhile, news has come out that Calvin College reached agreement with a tenured professor in the Religion Department to resign because of his views on evolution. The story is here.

Ominous signs for the homeless in Madison

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An article in Isthmus points out the implications for the homeless population of the ongoing restrictions in the State Capitol, and the closure for renovation of the Central Library beginning in November. One person estimated as many as 150 people have sought shelter in one or the other place on winter days.

One option that has been available when the library is closed on Sundays is also slated for elimination. The Salvation Army has offered a community breakfast on Sundays that will end this August. I’m accustomed to encounter as many as twenty shelter guests waiting for a shuttle bus that will take them there when I arrive at the church on Sunday mornings. They lack the funding to continue the program.

On the other hand, it’s estimated that the total number of homeless people in Dane County decreased from 2009 to 2010, according to the most recent summary issued by the City of Madison.