Faith and unbelief: some links

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I’ve gathered some beautiful and challenging writing on faith and doubt and the struggles many have with identifying as “Christian” in the twentieth century

First, Christian Wiman, raised Southern Baptist, estranged from the church, now exploring that complex relationship between faith and doubt in our contemporary world:

I do feel that some people may be called to unbelief—or what looks like unbelief—in order that faith may take new forms. Emily Dickinson is a good example of this, or Albert Camus. But I also believe that God requires every last cell of yourself to bow down. Or perhaps that verb, requires, is wrong, or that it’s God doing the requiring: It’s more like your nature requires, in order to be your nature, that every last cell of yourself bow down. There is still some satanic pride in me, for which I pay a high price.

Casey Cep on the spiritual journey of Reynolds Price (part I, part II):

It pains me to know that Price considered himself “a literal outlaw” of Christian churches because of his homosexuality. In one of his final books, A Serious Way of Wondering: The Ethics of Jesus Imagined (2003), Price confessed “though I’m not a churchgoer, for more than sixty years I’ve read widely in the life and teachings of Jesus; and since at least the age of nine, I’ve thought of myself as a Christian.”

Like the mystic Simone Weil, who resigned herself to “the conclusion that my vocation is to be a Christian outside the Church,” Price found his community with Christ beyond the sanctuary.

I never met Reynolds Price, but I carry his meeting with Christ in my consciousness, hold the words of his translations in my heart. Here was a writer, who many assumed would appeal to me for all his imaginary worlds, but who I only ever understood as a brother in the faith.

Pained as I am that he felt himself an outlaw of Christianity, I cherish the knowledge that he and I meet forever in the communion of saints.

Justin Erik Haldor Schmidt writes beautifully of “coming out of the closet” as a Christian, and the difficulties he has in confessing his faith publicly:

Those who know me or have read me will probably know that I have often claimed that I am an atheist. I would like to stop doing this, but if I had to justify myself, I would say that it is for fear of being confused with that blowhard with the ‘John 3:16’ banner that I am unforthcoming about what I actually believe. I am infinitely closer, in the condition of my soul, to the people who feel God’s absence– the reasons for this feeling are a profound theological problem, and one might say that it is only smugness that enables people, atheists and dogmatists alike, to avoid grappling with this problem. I am with the people who detect God’s hand, perhaps without even realizing it, where the smug banner-holder sees only sin: in jungle music, dirty jokes, seduction, and swearing. I am with the preacher who puts out a gospel album, then goes to prison on fraud and drug charges for a while, then puts out a hip-grinding soul album, and then another gospel album. I am with the animals, who can’t even read, but can still talk to the saints of divine things. I am sooner an atheist, if what we understand by Christianity is a sort of supernatural monarchism; if we understand by it that God is love, though, then, I say, I am a Christian.

The food stamp challenge and the faces of the hungry in Madison

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I participated in a press event organized by Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice. They are encouraging faith communities to participate in the Food Stamp Challenge. I was invited because Grace Church has had a pantry since 1979.

Here’s what I had to say:

In 1979, visionary members of Grace responded to the growing need in our community by starting a food pantry. Those founders aren’t around anymore but I’ll bet if they were, they would tell me that they had no idea that the pantry they founded would still be in operation nearly 35 years later.

I see them every afternoon lining up before our pantry opens its doors. White, African-American, Hispanic, Asian; old and young, parents or grandparents with children, occasionally even college students. I see the diversity that is twenty-first century America, the diversity that is hunger and poverty in our great nation on display within sight of the State Capitol. Their stories are as diverse as their ages and the color of their skin—the elderly or disabled on fixed incomes who are trying to scrape by until the next check comes, unemployed or underemployed people trying to supplement the pay from a job that doesn’t provide a living wage; college students who can’t afford to pay tuition, room and board; homeless people, too. On Saturday mornings, our guests are mostly employed, but their low-pay jobs don’t pay them enough to make ends meet. I’ve handed food out to people who had absolutely nothing to feed their children that afternoon; I’ve given formula to a grandmother whose baby grandchild had been abandoned by her mother and she had come to us in desperation.

These are the faces of the hungry in America. The SNAP program, what we used to call food stamps is intended to supplement, not provide, food for people who have nowhere else to turn except to food pantries and meal programs, people who are supposed to be able to feed themselves. And the amount that’s provided is barely enough to ensure adequate nutrition—the equivalent of $29 and change every week per person.

Those of us with homes, jobs, adequate clothing, and adequate food have no idea what it’s like to live without those things. As the gap between rich and poor continues to widen in our country, and we’ve learned that the US has the greatest income disparity of any of the world’s developed nations, the gap of comprehension of what it’s like to live without is growing as well. Most of us never see those lines waiting outside the pantry, or later in the evening, the line of men waiting to enter the Men’s Shelter at Grace. If by chance we encounter it, we avert our eyes or cross to the other side of the street. To experience that world, the world of want and deprivation is a greater shock than traveling to another country. To experience it, even in something so simple as the Food Stamp Challenge, is to begin to comprehend the struggles faced by so many in our society, struggles faced day after day, year after year.

As we approach the Christian season of Lent, traditionally a season of fasting and repentance in preparation for the remembrance of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, it’s appropriate for us to imitate the one who we believe became like us, by walking in the footsteps of our brothers and sisters who live in poverty and want.

 

Old, female, and homeless

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It’s an article on San Francisco, but it’s about every city in the US, too; including Madison.

In San Francisco, there’s drop-in center just for women:

Located in the Mission District, the drop-in center is basically two large adjoining rooms, the otherwise bare walls brightened by a single big-screen TV. When I visited Oshun, I found a diverse group of forty-five women, each sitting or sleeping in a chair surrounded by her belongings. Some had old suitcases with broken zippers, while others had stuffed their things into ripped garbage bags. The lucky ones found a spot near a wall. They’d at least be able to rest their heads by putting a blanket against the wall behind them. The rest had no choice but to let their heads hang.

Yet what choices do older homeless women have? Despite a spike in older homeless clients, says O’Connor of the St. Anthony Foundation, there are still precious few services to help women like Marcia and Dorothy. “If you’re a homeless woman, you’re guaranteed to be assaulted on the streets,” said Paul Boden, organizing director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP), a West Coast coalition of homeless organizations. Boden, who was homeless himself at 16 after the death of his mother, also served as executive director of the city’s Coalition on Homelessness. “Women try to double up with guys to be safe, but they usually get beaten up by those guys, so their options are limited.”

One of the regulars at Oshun is an Argentine woman named Zulema. She’s a 65-year-old who, when I met her, had been sleeping in the plastic chairs there for six years. “I stayed in shelters for four months, but the process is inefficient and I never felt safe,” she said. “The shelters are very bad for women, especially older women.” She told me she had become accustomed to sleeping sitting up on hard plastic. “You have no control of your life at the shelter,” she said. “At Oshun, I can come and go.”

It’s cold in Madison tonight, do you know where you’ll be sleeping?

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Do you care where the homeless are sleeping tonight? Some people in Madison do.

This week’s cold snap has demonstrated the power, innovation, and love of Madison’s newly-energized community of advocates for the homeless. They’ve exploited social media to highlight the problems, strategize solutions, and mobilize the community. The bitterly cold weather energized activists and volunteers in new ways, to provide shelter for those who remained homeless last night–at a church in Sun Prairie and at Prairie UU Church. And now there’s an effort to actually plan for weather emergencies! You can follow all of this at the Feeding the State Street Family facebook group, and find out how to help out. A brief visit to that group will also make clear who all are taking leadership and pointing the way forward.

There really are some amazing things occurring around homelessness in Madison. For example, there’s the work of Sarah Gillmore and the staff and volunteers at the Daytime Warming Shelter. They’ve got a website that details everything that’s going on from help with resumes to yoga. And each week there’s an update on news and other activities. Here’s this week’s.

 

And Occupy is working to purchase a building to provide transitional housing. You can read about that here.

If that’s not enough, it looks like we’re making progress as well in beginning to talk about shelter for people with medical needs.

A news item last week helps to explain the continued prevalence of homelessness in Madison. The vacancy rate for rentals in Dane County is a little over 2%, meaning that landlords can be very choosy and as we all know, when demand exceeds supplies, prices rise. According to statistics compiled by Madison Gas and Electric, the vacancy rate in several Madison zip codes is 1.5% or below. This vacancy rate may also explain the boom in apartment construction, though from what I can tell, most of that is directed at students or the high-end market.

 

A little cold water to throw on Obama’s speech yesterday

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From Tom Junod: The War Obama Forgot:

I am not speaking, of course, of the wars that the president spoke of yesterday, in his second inaugural speech — the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that he spoke of without naming. I am speaking of the war that is currently being prosecuted in countries where we are not supposed to be at war, like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. I am speaking of the perpetual war, the shadow war, the invisible war against invisible enemies, the war whose latest manifestation came just two days ago, when three men identified as militants, names unknown, were killed by an American drone. I am speaking of the war that the president did not speak about, even though his Administration has never called it anything but a war, and it has killed thousands of people.

Read every word of it.
But here is the difficulty: the technology is so good that the criteria for using it are likely to be steadily relaxed. That’s what seems to have happened with the U.S. Army or with the CIA in Pakistan and Yemen. The overuse of drones and the costs they impose upon the civilian population have been carefully and persuasively documented in the Stanford/NYU Clinics’ report, Living Under Drones. I will focus on only one striking example of how the moral criteria have been relaxed in order to justify the overuse and the costs. According to an article in the New York Times by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, President Obama has adopted “a disputed method for counting civilian casualties” that makes it much easier to call drone attacks “proportionate.” In effect, it “counts all military age males in a strike zone as combatants.” If the targeted insurgent or terrorist leader is surrounded by, or simply in the vicinity of, a group of men who are, say, between the ages of fifteen and sixty (and even drone surveillance can’t be precise about that), an attack is permitted, and everyone who is killed is counted as a legitimate target. But this isn’t targeted killing.

Christianity and the Second Inauguration–Our Perilous Journey

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Today began with the traditional service of Morning Prayer at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square.

Merlie Evers Williams offered the invocation. Video and text here.

Luis Leon, Rector of St. John’s Lafayette Square, offered the benediction. Part of that prayer:

We pray for your blessing because without it, we will see only what the eye can see. But with the blessing of your blessing we will see that we are created in your image, whether brown, black or white, male or female, first generation or immigrant American, or daughter of the American Revolution, gay or straight, rich or poor.

We pray for your blessing because without it, we will only see scarcity in the midst of abundance. But with your blessing we will recognize the abundance of the gifts of this good land with which you have endowed this nation.

During the Inaugural, Evangelical superstar pastor Mark Driscoll tweeted this:

BBJX5-nCAAAeKnDThere was considerable controversy last week over the inclusion of evangelical Luis Giglio, even more controversy when he withdrew. There was controversy in 2009 over the decision to have Rick Warren pray. These are rituals of civil religion; even the service at St. John’s is largely a ritual of civil religion (to the extent that when FDR began it, the Episcopal Church was by and large the civil religion of the US).

I think Episcopalians would do well to engage in a lively conversation over whether bowing to that tradition of civil religion bodes well for us in the twenty-first century. Today,  I cringe at the Episcopal Church’s association with political power and prestige, and our apparent implicit consent in the wars, torture, use of drones, and assault on civil liberties, as well as domestic policies that have worsened the plight of the weakest in our society.

On the other hand, whatever conversation we might have would be drowned out by those like Driscoll who reject our Christian faith and the president’s; and by the shouting match between the religious right and the secularists who want nothing religious in the Inauguration; for example decrying the use of bibles in oath-taking ceremonies.

Negotiating our faithful journey among those alternatives requires a great deal of prayer, scriptural reflection, and much more humility than most humans have.

 

 

He revealed his glory: A Sermon for the Second Sunday in Epiphany, 2013

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January 13, 2013

A number of years ago, when we were living in SC, Corrie was invited to participate in an appreciation Sunday for one of her students. Gloria, I believe her name was, was soon to graduate from college and go off to seminary in Atlanta. She was in her forties, a mother, and for several years had pastured a CME church in a small town in the mountains of western NC. It was down a country road several miles off the main highway and when we got there, we found a typical mill village. At some point in the late 19th or early 20th century, an entrepeneur had built a factory, built houses for the workers, and milled cotton of some sort or another. When we visited, the mill was long closed, there were a couple of churches, the CME which was our destination, a United Methodist church, a school, a convenience store, and houses, some of them well kept, others rundown. Continue reading →

God, MLK, and Guns–updated

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Jim Wallis has this to say:

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, said this as his response to the massacre of children at Sandy Hook elementary in Newtown, Conn.: “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

That statement is at the heart of the problem of gun violence in America today — not just because it is factually flawed, which of course it is, but also because it is morally mistaken, theologically dangerous, and religiously repugnant.

The world is not full of good and bad people; that is not what our scriptures teach us.

Apparently Rush Limbaugh contends that if civil rights activists had had weapons in the 1960s, they wouldn’t have been beaten or killed: “you think they would have needed Selma?”

To which Rep. John Lewis responded:

“Our goal in the Civil Rights Movement was not to injure or destroy but to build a sense of community, to reconcile people to the true oneness of all humanity,” said Rep. John Lewis.  “African Americans in the 60s could have chosen to arm themselves, but we made a conscious decision not to.  We were convinced that peace could not be achieved through violence.  Violence begets violence, and we believed the only way to achieve peaceful ends was through peaceful means.  We took a stand against an unjust system, and we decided to use this faith as our shield and the power of compassion as our defense.

“And that is why this nation celebrates the genius and the elegance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s work and philosophy.  Through the power of non-violent action, Dr. King accomplished something that no movement, no action of government, no war, no legislation, or strategy of politics had ever achieved in this nation’s history.  It was non-violence that not only brought an end to legalized segregation and racial discrimination, but Dr. King’s peaceful work changed the hearts of millions of Americans who stood up for justice and rejected the injury of violence forever.”

Then there’s the outrage that during this weekend with MLK Day, a day in honor of the assassinated civil rights leader (if he’d been packing heat, he could have shot back!), the NRA and its supporters have declared January 19 to be Gun Appreciation Day. Among the sponsors, (apparently since scrubbed from the website) is a White Supremacist group.

Oh, and this: “They are used to defend our property and our families and our faith and our freedom, and they are absolutely essential to living the way God intended for us to live.” — California Rep. Tim Donnelly (R), talking about guns on The Bottom Line.

The mind boggles.

Jesus said,

 ‘You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. (Mt. 5:38-45).

A “Christian” re-write of Leonard Cohen’s Halleluia

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Radical conservative Christian (and neocon) Marvin Olasky has improved Leonard Cohen’s classic Halleluia

Verse 4:

“Blood your hyssop, I’ll be clean.
Wash me so my sin’s not seen.
Give me of your Holy Spirit, will you?
Create in me a new, clean heart.
Give me now a strong, fresh start,
So every breath I draw is Hallelujah.”

The post links to a recording of the new song, if you’re interested.

I’m speechless.

Here’s Cohen singing it recently:

Or one of my favorites, KD Lang:

 

 

A moral cesspool: Dave Zirin on Notre Dame

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It’s not just Notre Dame, of course. There is rot at the heart of collegiate athletics. Well, given Lance Armstrong, what happens with injuries in the NFL, and major league baseball’s coverup of steroid use, it permeates all of sports. But Zirin has pursued the scandals at Notre Dame fearlessly and writes:

Yet as with the far more serious previous scandals attached to this storied program, the problem is not just the behavior of students but the moral compass on display by the adults in charge. Within hours of the story breaking online, Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick held a press conference where he backed Te’o to the hilt saying, “Every single thing about this was real to Manti. There was no suspicion. The grief was real, the affection was real, and that’s the sad nature of this cruel game.”

Swarbrick revealed that a private outside firm had been hired to investigate just who had perpetrated this “cruel game.” The athletic director even cried. His behavior only raises more important questions than anything Te’o will face tomorrow. Why hasn’t there been any kind of privately funded, outside investigation into the alleged sexual assaults committed by members of the football team? Why was there no private, outside investigation into Coach Brian Kelly’s role in the death of team videographer Declan Sullivan? It says so much that Te’o’s bizarre soap opera has moved Swarbrick to openly weeping but he hasn’t spared one tear, let alone held one press conference, for Lizzy Seeberg, the young woman who took her own life after coming forward with allegations that a member of the team sexually assaulted her. Swarbrick’s press conference displayed that the problem at Notre Dame is not just football players without a compass; it’s the adults without a conscience. Their credo isn’t any kind of desire for truth or justice. Instead it seems to be little more than a constant effort to protect the Fighting Irish brand, no matter who gets hurt.

The cost to higher education is not just moral; it is also financial. A study released this week provides shocking evidence of how much more is spent on athletics than on academics:

Football consumes much of the athletic budget. At institutions competing in the top-tier Football Bowl Subdivision, the report found, median athletic spending per athlete was $92,000 in 2010, compared with median academic spending per full-time student of less than $14,000. In the other Division I subdivisions, median athletic spending per athlete ranged from $37,000 to $39,000, compared with median academic spending per full-time student of about $11,800.

Think about that the next time you watch a game on TV. For my friends in academe, think about that the next time your dean asks you to cut your budget….