Category Archives: random tidbits

apropos of my sermon today

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From Richard Watson’s new book, Future Minds: How the Digital Age Is Changing Our Minds, Why This Matters and What We Can Do About It:

Our decision-making abilities are at risk because we are too busy to consider alternatives properly or because our brains trip us up by fast-tracking new information. We become unable to exclude what is irrelevant and retain an objective view on our experience, and we start to suffer from what Fredric Jameson, a U.S. cultural and political theorist, calls “culturally induced schizophrenia.”

The full article is here. (h/t Andrew Sullivan)

Bodies–The Exhibition, Updated

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I blogged about this last week. I learned just today that a panel discussion on the religious and ethical implications of the exhibit is scheduled for December 7.

Here is the announcement:
Because the exhibition raises a number of medical, ethical,  educational and religious questions dealing with the acquisition  and display of human bodies, Beth Israel Center, the conservative  synagogue in Madison, will host a public discussion about the  exhibition. The event will feature a distinguished panel whose  members will provide insights into the many issues that the  exhibition raises. The panel’s comments will be followed by a  discussion with the audience. The purpose of the event is education, not advocacy.

The panelists will include: Rabbi Joshua Ben-Gideon (Beth Israel  Center), UW Prof. Pilar Ossorio (Law and Bioethics), Fr. Patrick  Norris (Blessed Sacrament Church), and UW Prof. Walton O. Schalick  (Medical History and Bioethics). A representative of the exhibition  staff has been invited.

The event will occur from 7:00-9:00 p.m. at Beth Israel Center,  1406 Mound Street, corner of Randall Ave. and is co-sponsored by  Congregation Shaari Shamayim and Blessed Sacrament Church. There is  no charge for admission. People of all faiths and those without  religious affiliation are welcome to attend.

The spiritual lives of college students

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An interesting study reported on in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The study, Cultivating the Spirit: How College Can Enhance Students’ Inner Lives, is a longitudinal study of the religious and spiritual views of college students.

The key findings:

The authors use the term spirituality broadly, to mean people’s inner, subjective lives. They found that students’ level of spiritual quest, or seeking meaning and purpose in life, rose during college. By the second survey, eight in 10 students were at least “moderately” engaged in a spiritual quest. Students were more likely as juniors than as freshmen to say they wanted to develop a meaningful philosophy of life, seek beauty, become a more loving person, and attain inner harmony. …

And the authors found that students’ level of religious struggle, or questioning their beliefs, increased in college. However, their level of religious skepticism or religious commitment stayed about the same, even though their engagement in religion declined. Students also became less religiously conservative, measured by their responses to questions on issues like abortion and casual sex.

The full article is here

Bodies–The Exhibition

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I’ve been seeing ads around Madison, in newsprint and on billboards, for this exhibition that is currently on display: Bodies–The Exhibition. A private company has apparently procured corpses from China, preserved them by replacing tissue with plastic, and displays them throughout the world in various poses. The exhibition is alleged to be educational and of scientific interest. I find the very notion macabre.

There has been considerable controversy over the years (the exhibition has opened in more than 70 cities worldwide). There are questions about where the bodies come from, with allegations concerning prisons, execution, and torture. Those are important questions, but for me, the most important question has to do with with what it says about our culture, particularly our understanding of bodies and death.

Scholars agree that one of the great appeals of Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity had to do with how both communities took care of the dead. They rejected cremation, the widespread practice in Greco-Roman culture, and saw to it that the bodies of all believers, even the poorest were cared for. This was done because both religious traditions took bodies seriously, especially that there was an unbreakable link between soul and body. Over the centuries, Christians have lost sight of that central doctrine, derived from the belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the resurrection of all the dead. I happen to think that cremation is an important alternative to traditional burial practices, on environmental and on personal grounds. We have become such a mobile culture that the notion of binding our bodies to one place after death seems quaint, and a burden on our descendants.

What’s fascinating to me is that on the one hand ours is a culture that is obsessed with bodies, our own and those of celebrities, yet we can apparently disassociate our essential selves so completely from our bodies that we can look at preserved bodies with relative detachment. Eerie.

Revisiting the Civil War

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It’s the 150th anniversary of the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860 and we’re coming up on the similar anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. The New York Times got the idea of “live-blogging” history and it makes for fascinating reading: DISUNION – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.

I’m not much of a Civil War buff, although I watched the Ken Burns documentary, and one summer read Shelby Foote’s history when I should have been working on my dissertation. Having lived in the South for fifteen years, the first five in Sewanee, the home of The University of the South, one of the “Lost Cause” colleges. The history of Sewanee is recorded in stained glass in All Saints’ Chapel, including when the Yankees blew up the college cornerstone. Charles Wilson Reagan’s Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause tells the story of how Christianity in the South was shaped by the Civil War. That was certainly the case at Sewanee, with the prominently-displayed portrait of “The Battling Bishop” Leonidas Polk in a Confederate gray uniform, with sword in one hand and prayer book in the  other.

I was bemused to learn that my former colleague’s lectures on the Civil War at the Greenville County Public Library in South Carolina have been picketed. Among the signs being held: “Lincoln was a mass murderer.”

It’s hard for Northerners to understand the complexity of the relationship Southerners have with slavery and with the Civil War. The comments in the Times blog offers evidence of that. Even liberal Democrats who live in the South may express their discomfort at certain historical arguments, or what one called “South bashing.” The response is more complex when it comes from the thoughtful, and progressive descendant of a slave owner. The war lives on in the South in ways it doesn’t up north and the commemorations in the coming years will no doubt raise emotional arguments over a history that still affects contemporary life.

Church Ale

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I came across a report that St. James Episcopal Church in Lancaster, PA, has its own beer: St. James Brown Ale. Apparently, among its members are owners of a microbrewery who came up with this creative fundraising idea. It’s not a new idea, by any means. Monasteries have long been in the business of brewing beer and the Belgian Trappists have their own very popular style.

It’s not just monks. In the Middle Ages, Church Ales were among the most popular fundraisers for English parish churches. They didn’t necessarily brew their own, but they certainly sold large quantities, especially around the Feast of Pentecost. Church Ales were popular festivals for centuries, and often criticized by religious and social reformers. Brewing was a bone of contention in another way. Among the rites and privileges of many parish priests, in England and on the continent, was the right to brew, and sell their own beer. This put them in competition with inns and angered many local merchants.

It worked both ways, however. Parish visitation records are full of complaints from clergy that parishioners, especially men, spent most of Sunday service times in the local alehouse rather than in church, coming to service only in time for mass.

I doubt we’ll be brewing beer to raise funds for Grace, but you’ve got to give the people of St. James, Lancaster credit for creativity, and for marketing.

Who are these like stars appearing?

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We sang this hymn yesterday on All Saints’ Sunday. I suppose I’ve sung it many times before, but as with so many hymns, I didn’t pay particular attention to the text. Then, a parishioner drew my attention to verse 4:

These are they whose hearts were riven,
sore with woe and anguish tried,
who in prayer full oft have striven
with the God they glorified;
now, their painful conflict o’er,
God has bid them weep no more.

The first two verses of the hymn are a description of the saints arrayed before God’s throne, asking the question: who are they? Verse three begins to answer the question. So verse four is an answer to the question of who are the saints?

What’s wonderful about verse four is that it describes people who do not simply submit to God’s will:

“who in prayer full oft have striven with the God they glorified.”

In other words, their prayer has often been an intense struggle with God. It’s a powerful description of one aspect of a devout Christian life.

The text is a translation by Frances Elizabeth Cox of a hymn written by Theobald Heinrich Schenck (1656-1727). I tried to learn more about the author. He was German, educated at Giessen University (in Hesse) taught in the high school (Gymnasium) there and then became a pastor. It’s the only hymn he wrote that was published. His other publications are several funeral sermons (a popular genre of edifying literature in the early modern period). Giessen was a hotbed of Pietism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but whether Schenck belonged to that reform movement is not mentioned in the material I found.

I was also unable to find the original German text of the hymn. No doubt I’ve got it in a hymnal somewhere, but apparently the Germans aren’t as quick to put stuff like that on the internet. I’d be curious to see what it reads like in the original. There are a total of fifteen verses in the original.

Halloween and the church

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I learned last week that many clergy take the time in a service to bless trick-or-treaters. Some place restrictions–no scary costumes, for example. I’ll confess it never crossed my mind. At St. James, staff enjoy the annual parade of the day school kids in costume, but that’s as close as we got in Greenville.

At Grace this year, we participated in the annual downtown business trick-or-treating. Pictures are here. Clearly fun was had by all.

It’s quite a contrast to those Christians who view Halloween as demonic or use it as an opportunity to try to save souls. If you’re interested in the apparently lively debate over Halloween among some conservative Christians, check out CBN’s Halloween Resource Page. I’ve long been fascinated by one popular attempt to piggy-back on Halloween’s popularity: the Hell House or Judgment House.

Neither the uneasiness of some Christians nor their attempt to capitalize or mimic popular culture surprise me. Rather, I’m curious about the whole cultural phenomenon of Halloween, especially the tacky and tawdry decorations that seem ubiquitous these days. On the other hand, I went to the Home Depot yesterday, and the Christmas displays were already up. Talk about tacky and tawdry!

Reflections on visioning in the secular world

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The City of Madison recently released a draft of its Downtown Plan, which is supposed to set the framework for the next twenty-five years of development. An overview of the current state of the planning process is available here.

The vision for the process is:

Downtown Madison will be a flourishing and visually exciting center for the arts, commerce, government and education. It will be a magnet for a diverse population working, living, visiting and enjoying an urban environment characterized by a sensitive blending of carefully preserved older structures, high-quality new construction, architectural gems and engaging public spaces– all working together and integrated with surrounding neighborhoods, parks and the transportation system to create a unique environment for the community, County and region. (Downtown Advisory Report, July 2004)

What strikes me in the documents that have been produced so far is in fact, the lack of vision and the lack of attention to larger cultural, economic, and environmental trends that may profoundly shape the next twenty-five years. For example, higher education is undergoing a transformation unlike anything seen before. The crisis of affordability and the rise of technology will undoubtedly affect the University of Wisconsin as it is affecting smaller schools across the country. But the current state of the downtown plan takes none of that into consideration. It seems to presuppose a stable environment in which Madison will grow and develop incrementally.

Having reflected on meetings in which the plan was discussed, and being involved presently in a great deal of thinking about the future of Grace Church, I’m struck by the different tones in the two processes. It may be simply because I’ve not heard the kind of dire warnings in the secular sphere that we know about in the church as a whole, and in particularly at Grace Church.

But to envision a future in twenty-five years means thinking outside the box in all kinds of ways. I’m reminded of the futuristic imagining of the future during the 60s–The Jetsons, for example. We’ve come to realize that much of that was silly, but at the same time, the technological advances and cultural changes that have occurred were unimaginable. To vision the future five years down the road is one thing. It’s going to look a good deal like it looks today. But twenty or twenty-five years in the future? Who can imagine? And how can you plan for it?

“Glee” and Religion in America

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There’s a lively comment thread  on the Episcopal Church’s Facebook page about last night’s episode. It was interesting, especially in light of several themes repeated on this blog–the relationship between religion and secularism, contemporary American spirituality, and the role of religious knowledge. Much of the show seemed sensitive and thoughtful–teens dealing with questions of faith, for example, and the struggle with loved ones who are suffering.

Well-done, too, was the debate about the role of religion in public schools. How far can teachers and students go in proselytizing? What religious themes or topics are valid for public school classrooms?

Still, I found it ironic that after the debate about what students could and couldn’t sing in the school room, when the scene shifted to church, instead of a straightforward gospel number, we heard a version of “Bridge over Troubled Water.” I’m just not sure what to make of that. It’s almost as if the show’s producers were as uncomfortable about an openly-religious song in their show as school administrators tend to be.