Theologically my interests concern the nature and workings of sin. This is perhaps an odd thing for a Unitarian Universalist to say. But I am not interested in sin in the manner of a Christian, who is like a doctor trying to cure an individual’s disease. Instead, my interest resembles a public health official who tries to prevent and manage disease vectors more than managing invidividual cases. Where I am concerned with individual cases, it is because of the broader dynamics they represent.
For the study of these disease vectors, I turn first to Foucault. Drawing on Foucault’s three axes of study–power relations, power-knowledge, and the formation of the self–we can then go on to analyze sin as occuring in three intersecting patterns: oppression, ignorance, and the unwhole self. We do not need to stay with Foucauldian understandings of these patterns, although they will be helpful. Analysis of each pattern individually will be fruitful, but we stand to gain the most from looking at how the three intersect and work together.
As far as salvation, I am not concerned with why it happens so much as how. That is, I am only peripherally concerned with why “God” chooses to save us from the dynamics of sin. In short, I am not a Christian nor a monotheist, so their many theories on this matter are not useful to me. Yet salvation still happens, and outside the bounds of Christianity and monotheism. How best to describe it? If we know how to describe sin, how do we say that we are saved from it in this lifetime?
So far the best description I’ve encountered comes from Henry Nelson Wieman. Wieman asserts that salvation happens as a “creative interchange” between people, an event that renders them more fully human. Where or who this interchange comes from–that is, whether from “God” or not–is largely irrelevant. What matters, says Wieman, is that creative interchange happens and that it seems to be caused by something greater than ourselves (although we are also causes along with it). For Wieman this creative source–or just “creativity” for short–is as good a description of god as we will ever get–and as good as we will ever need. Creativity happens, and we can either align ourselves with it or choose less fulfilling paths. Echoing Tillich, Wieman sees this as our ultimate choice.
Wealth Bondage has a riff going on the Rapture. As Christian comedian Mike Werneke used to joke, you don’t know when it’s coming, so it’d be best to get out in the yard and start jumping, just in case.
You heard it here first: I was wrong. We don’t find out in the latest Matrix that Neo and buds were actually AIs–and that the AIs were actually human. I owe someone some Blogshares funny money…
From Maria at Crooked Timber:
So why do we find it so damn hard to offer heartfelt sympathy and support to people with mental illness? Because we think that these diseases are in some way not ‘real’, and that the people who suffer from them have somehow invited them in or allowed them to stay. It seems to me that the people who vehemently exhort those with depression or a range of illnesses that are equally stigmatised* to ‘snap out of it’ are speaking not from judgement but in fear. How terrifying is it to think that you might wake up one day and be one of those people who literally cry with despair at the prospect of having to get washed and dressed? Or to realise one spring, perhaps months after a bout of winter ‘flu, that your health has disappeared for no apparent reason and may never be coming back? How horrifying might it be to inexplicably find yourself in a state where your mind or your body has simply forgotten how to be well?
Be sure to follow the discussion in the comments section too.
A couple of comments. One, notice the similarity of the language “invited them in or allowed them to stay” to the language of demonic posession. Could it be that as a culture we still haven’t gotten beyond the metaphor of mental illness as demonic posession?
Two, the paragraph closes by noting the fear of the surprise onset of a mental illness. Could it be that as a culture we still like to think that, if we woke up one morning with just such a terrible surprise, we would just “snap out of it?” If so, urging the mentally ill to “snap out of it” is a projection of fear, a fear that we might not be able to snap out of it ourselves should our day come. “The disabled”–a category which includes the mentally ill–is the only minority group we’re in danger of joining at any time. But perhaps we’d like to avoid thinking about that.
I’ve been sparse around here lately, mainly because of a bout with depression and a bad chest cold.
From an evolutionary perspective, it seems that depression is an exagerrated coping mechanism, or, rather, a mechanism that kicks in after you’re coping mechanisms have up and quit. How you’re predisposed or not to depression seems to be a medical conundrum we haven’t yet cracked.
According to NIMH, eleven percent of missed work days are from depression, and one in twenty workers are fighting depression today. Over the course of a year, almost ten percent of Americans will experience depression.
In any case, that’s why I haven’t been around much lately. Seems the process of buying and moving into a house has maxed out my coping mechanisms, and now I’m searching for better meds and working at getting through one work day at a time. That’s how it goes with depression. Either you give in or you fight the damn thing. Either way, it’s not a lot of fun.
So until I’m a bit better, I’ll continue to be sparse around here. As I get better, I’ll write more. In the meantime, check out some of the weblogs along the right sidebar. They’re worth the read.
