Category Archives: random tidbits

E. J. Dionne on why getting the Civil War right matters

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From The New Republic.

Money quote:

After the war, in one of the great efforts of spin control in our history, both Davis and Stephens, despite their own words, insisted that the war was not about slavery after all, but about state sovereignty. By then, of course, slavery was “a dead and discredited institution,” McPherson wrote, and “(to) concede that the Confederacy had broken up the United States and launched a war that killed 620,000 Americans in a vain attempt to keep 4 million people in slavery would not confer honor on their lost cause.”

He concludes:

Why does getting the story right matter? As Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s recent difficulty with the history of the civil rights years demonstrates, there is to this day too much evasion of how integral race, racism and racial conflict are to our national story. We can take pride in our struggles to overcome the legacies of slavery and segregation. But we should not sanitize how contested and bloody the road to justice has been. We will dishonor the Civil War if we refuse to face up to the reason it was fought.

I guess I went to the wrong movies this week. Oh well.

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So I saw Black Swan and The King’s Speech. Apparently, I should have gone to True Grit, instead; at least according to Stanley Fish.

In case you’re wondering–both were worth watching. Black Swan for the cinematography and Natalie Portman’s performance. I don’t quite buy Mahnola Dargis’s take on it.

The King’s Speech was wonderful. I learned a great deal about an important historical figure about him I knew almost nothing. Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush were both brilliant.

Perhaps I’ll find time later in the week for True Grit. I’ve been a huge fan of the Coen brothers since the very beginning.

Why do Americans claim to go to church more often than they actually do?

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Surveys fascinate me, especially surveys of religious belief and practice. I suppose I should have been a Sociologist of Religion. There’s an article on Slate.com that explores the reality behind survey results that show high percentages of Americans attending weekly services.

In contrast to self-reporting surveys, some social scientists have tried alternatives. For example:

This neutral interviewing method produced far fewer professions of church attendance. Compared to the “time-use” technique, Presser and Stinson found that nearly 50 percent more people claimed they attended services when asked the type of question that pollsters ask: “Did you attend religious services in the last week?”

In a more recent study, Hadaway estimated that if the number of Americans who told Gallup pollsters that they attended church in the last week were accurate, about 118 million Americans would be at houses of worship each week. By calculating the number of congregations (including non-Christian congregations) and their average attendance, Hadaway estimated that in reality about 21 percent of Americans attended religious services weekly—exactly half the number who told pollsters they did.

Perhaps most shocking: Philip Brenner concluded:

Americans attended services about as often as Italians and Slovenians and slightly more than Brits and Germans. The significant difference between the two North American countries and other industrialized nations was the enormous gap between poll responses and time-use studies in those two countries.

The full article is here. The first couple of paragraphs of the article are somewhat misleading, beginning with the question “why do Americans say they are more religious than they actually are?” In fact, church attendance may not correlate to beliefs or self-identification as Christian. The article then goes on to cite percentages who claim to believe in God.

Perhaps even more interesting would be to try to figure out whether rates of church attendance have fluctuated over the centuries. Certainly there’s an assumption that it was very high in the 1950s, but as I recall from reading a bit about the problem, that may have been an aberration.

Updates on the Civil War anniversary

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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.

Some poetry for Tuesday in the Third Week of Advent

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First, from The Guardian comes an article by Carol Rumens on David Wheatley’s “St. Brenhilda on Sula Sgeir.”

Then, Robert Pinsky on sonnets by John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins that refer to Jeremiah 12:1: “Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?” (KJV).

Donne concludes his sonnet with an image of a forgetful God. It’s a notion I’ve been coming back to often in the past few months. It definitely challenges common assumptions about God, but is of great consolation, too.

Karl Barth, December 10

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I was surprised by the appearance in Holy Women, Holy Men of a commemoration of Karl Barth. Not that he isn’t important, mind you. No, what took me aback was his presence in a volume produced by politically-correct Episcopalians in the twenty-first century. I would be curious to know about his presence in the syllabi of theology courses offered at Episcopal seminaries.

Barth was an important stage on my own theological journey. I read the Commentary on Romans as an undergraduate, then worked through the German original of the second edition. His insistence on the utter transcendence of God and the centrality of Christ were revelations to me and helped me move away from the theology of my upbringing. His resolute opposition to Hitler and his sharp criticism of his teachers and 19th century liberal theology were helpful as well.

Thinking about Barth today reminded me of how far I have come theologically in the last thirty years. I don’t know that I’ve read anything of his since the very early 80s. Certainly at Harvard in that era Barth was mostly a foil for critique, almost a straw man. We were certain we had moved beyond him.

The write-up on Barth for Holy Women, Holy Men provides a standard biography and some sense of Barth’s place in twentieth-century theology. It makes no mention of his impact on Anglican theology and I suspect for most Anglicans with advanced training, their indebtedness to Barth is relatively slight. He was a Calvinist after all, and although he had a deep Incarnational theology, he was also convinced that there was a chasm between God and God’s creation. This meant that he was suspicious of reason. To put it in more positive terms; for Barth, the Word of God was the only certain knowledge.

 

 

Why I love the Daily Office: Psalm 39 edition

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How often have I read or recited Psalm 39 over the years? For some reason this evening, while saying Evening Prayer, the words of Psalm 39 jumped out at me:

1 I said, “I will keep watch upon my ways, *
so that I do not offend with my tongue.

The opening verses are striking in tone, but it was the last verses that really threw me:

13 Hear my prayer, O LORD,
and give ear to my cry; *
hold not your peace at my tears.
14 For I am but a sojourner with you, *
a wayfarer, as all my forebears were.
15 Turn your gaze from me, that I may be glad again, *
before I go my way and am no more.

Verse 13 is clearly a plea to God to attend to the Psalmist’s cries, but what’s going on with verses 14 and 15? On the surface, v. 14 seems to be self-deprecating, but v. 15 is a plea for God to ignore the Psalmist–apparently God’s gaze is oppressive–until the Psalmist’s death.

What profound and unsettling notions of God and human being are packed into those two verses!

More on the Civil War and the South

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I’m going to be tracking how the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War plays out in popular culture. I lived in the South for fifteen years and was fascinated by the way in which the legacy of slavery and Civil War continued to resonate. The New York Times has an article about the ongoing attempt by many Southerners to de-couple the secession movement from slavery. So, we have a ball in Charleston to commemorate the attack on Ft. Sumter.

For non-Southerners, the South is a place of mystery that defies comprehension. That’s true elsewhere, too. So we have today mention of an exhibition of photos from the South in London. For those of us Americans who are not Southerners, the rather ominous observation:

‘You only begin to understand America when you reach the South,’ writes Jon Snow

I disagree. The South presents a particular aspect of America, perhaps distilled, or intensified, but it is not America. The extremes of America are more extreme, more pronounced in the South than elsewhere in the US. The religion more narrowly focused on God and country, sin and repentance; the economic disparities more exacerbated, the racial relationships more complex. To say that one understands America only when one reaches the South is to deny the American reality of New England, California, and, as I’ve come to learn after living away from it for thirty years, even the Midwest.