The ABC on Anabaptists and Mennonites

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Inhabitatio Dei points to a passage in Rowan Williams’ address to the Lutheran World Federation. The LWF is officially repenting for the persecution of Anabaptists by Lutherans in the sixteenth century. Williams said:

One other crucial focus today is, of course, the act of reconciliation with Christians of the Mennonite/Anabaptist tradition.  It is in relation to this tradition that all the ‘historic’ confessional churches have perhaps most to repent, given the commitment of the Mennonite communities to non-violence.  For these churches to receive the penitence of our communities is a particularly grace-filled acknowledgement that they still believe in the Body of Christ that they have need of us; and we have good reason to see how much need we have of them, as we look at a world in which centuries of Christian collusion with violence has left so much unchallenged in the practices of power.  Neither family of believers will be simply capitulating to the other; no-one is saying we should forget our history or abandon our confession.  But in the global Christian community in which we are called to feed one another, to make one another human by the exchange of Christ’s good news, we can still be grateful for each other’s difference and pray to be fed by it.

As a former Mennonite, and as a former scholar of Anabaptism (in particular their treatment by other confessions in the sixteenth century), I have been thankful that it is no longer required of ordinands that we swear our commitment to the 39 Articles, which include in them a strong repudiation of adult baptism and other practices associated with sixteenth-century Anabaptists.

I’m unaware of any similar movement, either within the Episcopal Church or in wider Anglicanism, to address the historical condemnations by our tradition of Anabaptists.

The full text of Williams’ address is here.

Often, the disagreements among Christians that occasionally culminated in violence are now viewed by most contemporary Christians as quaint and misguided. But dismissing them masks the real theological differences that underlay those conflicts, as well as the long-term effects on both sides. As Williams states, the Anabaptist tradition confronts us “as we look at a world in which centuries of Christian collusion with violence has left so much unchallenged in the practices of power.”

The ABC on Religion and Secularism

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There’s an interview with Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, in The New Statesman. It shows him at his best: thinking hard about Christianity and contemporary culture and about the overall role of religion in society. He seems a bit to ready to me to argue for the importance of religion in shaping moral arguments but I do think there is something in his statement that religious language and imagery deepens our human reflection. He is also asked about the declining importance of religion in England, and the declining role played by the Church of England. Money quote:

There are bits of human experience and ­suffering that have to go somewhere, and ­secular society simply doesn’t have the
spaces, the words or the rituals. This does not translate into conventional church attendance and orthodox belief – and perhaps it seldom has in history, if the truth be told; but it still takes for granted a body/community/place where a person can feel related to something more than the sum of their own anxieties and their society’s normal patterns of talk and behaviour.

He’s on to something there but of course he’s not the first to say it. One could argue he is echoing Mircea Eliade’s notion of the sacred. He is also describing something I’ve detected when talking and observing people who come into Grace Church on Saturday mornings.

Beating the Heat

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There was an article in today’s paper about the challenges facing homeless people during heat waves. Of course, one of the issues raised was the fact that there is no air conditioning in the shelter at Grace. While I’ve never been homeless, I have lived in cities without AC. I know how hot it can get in third floor apartments. When I lived in Boston in the 80s, I quickly learned where to go to beat the heat. It wasn’t easy back then, because most of Harvard’s buildings lacked AC. Sure bets were movie theaters and super markets. For $2.50, you could get a double feature in the somewhat effective air-conditioned space at the Harvard Square theater. I saw lots of movies in the summer.

Yes, it would be expensive to put AC in the shelter at Grace. Even more expensive would be the bill from MGE. What people don’t know, even most members of Grace, is that while Porchlight does pay us rent for the space, we pay for utilities. We don’t know how much of our utility usage comes from the shelter, but it’s likely to be substantial. Our annual budget for utilities is a little less than 10% of our total operating budget. That’s a chunk of change.

There’s no AC in the shelter. We do have it in the offices, but we don’t have it in the church itself, the guild hall, and the kitchen. It gets hot in all of those places, too, unbearably so in the kitchen.

Martha, Mary, and the Better Part: A Sermon for the 8th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11, Year C)

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Whenever I hear the story of Mary and Martha, I find myself thinking about two of my aunts—my dad’s sisters—who in an earlier age were called old maids. I think especially of my dad’s oldest sister. She was the oldest daughter in a family of 11 children. She only went to high school for a year, because getting there proved to be just too difficult (it was six miles away). She spent her life taking care of her younger siblings. Then as they left the home, she continued to care for her parents, and the one sister and brother who remained on the farm. Of course, she also took care of us—her nieces and nephews when we came to visit. When her mother and brother died in the space of a year and a half, Dorothy suddenly was left without much to do.

Continue reading →

Madison Early Music Festival

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I’ve been enjoying Madison’s musical riches this summer. First there was the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society. This week, it’s the Madison Early Music Festival. We attended the concert on Tuesday evening by Liber. The program was entitled Flyleaves and focused on music found in random manuscript pages. Much of the music was transcendent and there were several surprises. There were the usual Marian hymns but also a hymn to the Trinity, and others in praise of Ss. Catherine and Barbara.

The concert ended with an Ite Missa Est from the chapel of King Edward III, c. 1350-1360. It was remarkable and left me wondering if other sections of that mass setting survived.

Last night we heard Benjamin Bagby perform Beowulf. What a delight! It’s been over a decade since I taught the text in Humanities. To be honest, I always found it difficult to get a handle on. Bagby’s performance accompanied by a replica early-medieval harp, was transfixing. Translations just don’t convey the beauty of the language and to hear it, with supertitles above, is to experience something of the otherness of the world of Beowulf. Part of its inaccessibility to me was that it seemed to take place in a world very different than the early medieval world with which I was familiar. Of course that’s because the early medieval world I know is literate, Christian, and Latinate.

The other interesting thing for me last night was discovering how religious and how biblical the text is. Commentators are quick to point out that the poem does not articulate a particularly “Christian” perspective, that it seems careful to reference stories from the early chapters of Genesis, and its God seems shaped by those chapters. The Biblical imagery at times seems to lie lightly on the text as a whole. But there are also clear moments where the author is critical of his characters for their paganism and alludes to the thorny question for later generations of Christians whether their ancestors were damned.

The crisis in Religious Studies

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Well, perhaps crisis is too strong a word, but there is a growing debate over the academic study of religion. It’s not new by any means. In fact the study of religion is fairly young as academic disciplines go. It only really became a department in most liberal arts colleges and universities in the second half of the twentieth century and then only haltingly. It had to struggle against the fields of biblical studies and theology. It struggles still.

The debate has become more intense in the last decade or so as a number of scholars have gone to war against theology in religious studies. This may seem all rather esoteric but at the heart of the debate is the role of “believers” and “belief” in the academic study of religion.

Ivan Strenski is one of those scholars and he makes the case again in an essay on Religion Dispatches. The full essay is here. He is commenting on a conference, organized by a Philosophy Department around Charles Taylor’s work. What Strenski points out is that most of the participants in the conference have little notion of what religion is. Furthermore, there is among scholars of religion, and in the wider academy, considerable uncertainty about what scholars of religion should do. Strenski cites the example of Stanley Fish, who wanted to create a religion department staffed exclusively by scholars who were practitioners. That’s nonsense of course. We don’t expect scholars of literature to be poets, musicologists to be musicians. In fact, most of us would probably assume that objectivity (whatever that is) about one’s field of study is at least a goal for scholars, teachers, and students.

The problem facing Religious Studies is made clear by the other post on Religion Dispatches. It addresses the recent case of an adjunct professor, a Roman Catholic priest, whose salary is paid by an outside Catholic organization. He taught courses at the University of Illinois and came under fire for an email he sent to his students in which he used Natural Moral Law to argue against homosexual activity.

This is precisely what incenses scholars like Strenski. Should a public university support sectarian teaching for credit? We struggled with the same question when I taught at Furman University, which had severed ties with the South Carolina Baptist Convention in the early 1990s. We occasionally received requests from students to grant major credit for courses they took at local seminaries. Typically, we denied it. Still, there were those in the department whose teaching was (and is) overwhelmingly theological.

And I will admit that I often came to class after 2005 wearing a clerical collar. But few students ever complained that I was attempting to indoctrinate them or that I was teaching from an Episcopal perspective. Far from it. Most of them thought I was an atheist.

Still, I do think that Religious Studies, as an academic and humanistic discipline, needs to draw a bright line between what happens in it as a discipline, and the theological and biblical studies that largely function in support of the institutional churches, and in support of the spiritual quests of students.

In fact, it’s not that hard that to negotiate that path. The easiest way is to begin by acknowledging to oneself and to one’s students, that one’s perspective is a product of one’s own faith, intellectual and spiritual development and by definition narrow and not omnipotent.

Women Bishops in England!

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Well, not quite so fast. General Synod today voted to accept the plan for implementation of women bishops. It now goes to the dioceses for comment and input, and will come back before General Synod in 2012, I believe. There is much consternation among conservatives and speculation among some observers that a mass exodus will ensue. Truth be told, all I know about the Church of England is what I read in blogs, so I’m hardly an expert prognosticator.

Much of the news in the past few days has had to do with the defeat of the Archbishops’ amendment, which would have provided for something of a two-track episcopacy, in deference to those who refuse to believe women can be bishops (or priests, for that matter). Many think that the amendment’s defeat, coming on top of the disastrous outcome for the renewed push to appoint Jeffery Johns (gay, but celibate) as Bishop of Southwark, has dealt a body-blow to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s prestige and authority. I have no idea if that’s true. I do know that the ABC has lost considerable support on this side of the Atlantic.

I find two things surprising. First is that the Archbishops’ Amendment was defeated by votes from the clergy (it had to pass in all three orders–bishops, clergy, and lay). Second, the overwhelming majority by which the overall measure passed: 374 in favor, 14 against, 17 abstentions.

I’m all for trying to accommodate, and indeed retain minority viewpoints within the larger church, but the noes and abstentions amount to less than 10% of the total votes cast. That’s not a minority. All of the years of bending over backward to accommodate oponents of women’s ordination is little more than allowing the tail to wag the dog.

Let’s see how many clergy actually swim the Tiber.

Do This and You will Live: A Sermon for the 7th Sunday after Pentecost (proper 10, Year C)

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I don’t know about you, but the parable of the Good Samaritan annoys me. It especially annoys me, since I’ve been ordained a priest. It’s at the back of my mind every time I walk out the door, every time someone stops me to ask me for money. It popped into my mind yesterday, as Corrie and I were walking to the Farmer’s Market, and passed someone sleeping in the grass. As we went by, Corrie asked me, “He is breathing, isn’t he?” We didn’t give it another thought; although I’ll admit, I did look for him when as we made our way home an hour or so later. Continue reading →

Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate

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I finally got around to reading Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. It was published in 2009 and consists of his Terry Lectures on Religion and Science, given at Yale University. In fact, it’s a direct attack on the arguments of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, whom he has renamed “Ditchkins.” Eagleton is quite humorous and uses his wit effectively.

What’s perhaps most effective about the work is that he agrees with many of Ditchkins’ arguments against religion, but nevertheless takes them to task for their “faith” in rationality. Aside from the humor, which occasionally had me bursting out in laughter, there is a serious argument here. Eagleton links Christian theology to Marxism and uses both to level criticism at capitalism, postmodernism, and neoconservatism. He concludes:

The distinction between Ditchkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those like Ditchkins who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. This in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishig of humanity; but it holds that this is possible only by confronting the very worst. (pp. 168-169)

Eagleton, whose own religious convictions remain unclear throughout the work, has some powerful things to say about the New Testament idea of following Jesus:

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don’t end up dead, it apears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body. Those who do not see this dreadful image of a tortured innocent as the truth of history are likely to adopt some bright-eyed superstition such as the dream of untrammeled human progress…  (pp. 27-28)

The chapter on “Faith and Reason” especially deserves close attention. He works with Charles Taylor, Badiou, other philosophers, as well as Thomas Aquinas, to show that rationality itself requires certain prior commitments.


Corrie’s write-up of Monday night’s party/shelter meal

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WHAT A PARTY!

An elderly gentleman dancing with two little girls as Jim spontaneously conducted the band. Ginny giving a little TLC to a frightened, newly homeless 19 year-old. Neighbors from the Lorraine pitching in, as well as in and out-of-town family and friends (from as far away as Colorado and France!). A fury of egg deviling, tomato slicing and mac n’cheese engineering on one side of the kitchen. Later on the other, a NYC-trained chef, at least 3 Harvard PhDs, and an experienced shelter meal cook and painter extraordinaire trying to keep up with demand as the irrepressible Emma and others delivered plates to some 85 guests from the shelter and off the street. (Expecting around 65, we got “slammed” as they say in the culinary world. But we got everybody well fed in the end.) And, a vision of heaven: two long tables filled with the most exquisite-looking pies imaginable (and tasting even better).

Actually, the whole thing was a vision of heaven or at least, what the Kingdom of God should look like: people from all walks of life coming together to make this thing we call “church” (a free translation of ekklesia could be “party”) happen: feeding as we are fed by God and by the neighbors we serve and with whom we share more in common than we sometimes realize. This is how grace—and Grace—happen.

There are so many to thank. Somewhere around 45 Grace members and community volunteers who at one point or another (and many throughout) helped with set up, cooking, clean up, hosting and serving. And even more of you were present via your donations for the meal. That support not only made this meal possible, but it has helped give some relief our very meager Shelter Meal budget. (Did you know that Sarah and Sparky make the monthly meal—often feeding 150 guests—with a budget of less than $250/month?) There was the vivid presence of our Sunday School children who, with Carrie Scherpelz’s help, made banners of themselves welcoming our guests (see them still in Guild Hall). As always Russ was indispensable and Sheila and Janet kept communication and accounting flowing smoothly. Special thanks to Deb Barber for the extra help with Second Harvest and for providing (along with many of you) all that lemonade. And to Greg and Stephen—who brought heaven out of a “hotter than…” kitchen in a pie shape—well, the swoons and smacks of delight on Monday evening said it all.

And we are so grateful and honored by the help of the following local artists/artisan, farmers, and restaurateurs:

  • Smoky Jon’s Barbecue, especially manager Joel who came in on his day off after the busiest weekend of the year to do the meat for us. Joel wanted to do it because he was once a shelter guest.
  • Tony and Julie Hook of Hook’s Cheese in Mineral Point who gave us a generous discount on their award-winning cheeses. And their neighbors Mike and Marcia Bingham of Bingham Horticulture who did the same for their beefsteak tomatoes.
  • And our musicians, some of whom play regularly at the Contra Dances held in this room: Hollie Benton, Roger Diggle, Michael Kuharski, Carol Ormand, and Gregg Sanford, who put the group together. And all present were charmed and inspired by their children Callie and Nellie, who presented a quart jar full of donations they had collected for the Shelter Meal. Before we could even write to thank them, they volunteered to do it again.

The party isn’t over. We are called to make it happen every month. Perhaps we can’t always do it this elaborately. (Or can we?) But we must do it this collaboratively. …