O Depth of the All, whose light hides the darkness: Lighten our way along the path, that what we have hidden from ourselves will be revealed.
(Drawn from An Uncommon Lectionary.)
Pentecost 14
09.03.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on Pentecost 14
Can love save the world?
08.27.03 | Permalink | 5 Comments
Biblical scholar Walter Wink offers a fresh interpretation of Jesus on violence. His explanation of “turning the other cheek” is unique and enlightening: Jesus gives some snarky advice on the “pimp slap.”
Indie god-talk
08.26.03 | Permalink | 11 Comments
The point of the humanities, staying with Rorty, is to shake things up, to help us imagine new ways of living and being. He argues that the humanities offer “a desirable replacement of bad questions like ‘What is Being?’, ‘What is really real?’ and ‘What is man?’ with the sensible question ‘Does anybody have any new ideas about what we human beings might manage to make of themselves?'”
Theology has much to offer here. But first the point needs to be made that theology is one of the humanities. Once god-talk has discarded notions of special revelation (as opposed to naturalism), it can claim no special knowledge that other humanistic disciplines cannot also lay claim to. Once you’ve opted for panentheism, there can be no divine finger pointing out the truth from the sky.
It should go without saying that theology is not a science (and should not be). But like all other humanities, theology has been crept upon by the social sciences. The social sciences aid theology by describing religious persons and organizations, but they cannot tell theology where to go or how to get there–they’re not built for that. The social sciences can help identify sites for new hearings, but they cannot write the script. The prime question of god-talk must remain the god question, not the questions of management theory, psychology, or the new sciences.
Adding to Rorty above, the question for a humanities-based theology must be “Does anybody have any new ideas about what we human beings might make of ourselves in light of this god question?” Framed that way, god-talk opens up to the wealth of human experiences–religious and not–which theology has at most remotely concerned itself with. “What could this experience improve my god-talk?” ends up being a better question than “Who is god?” or “How might I be saved?”
Could our new and improved god-question place god-talk closer to anthropology and cultural studies than to theoretical disciplines like philosophy? Perhaps the traditional questions of theology and of the philosophy of religion could be reframed as meta-theology. If I’m right, the traditional “arts of ministry”–the sermon, the collect, hymnody, the pastoral visit–are candidates more likely to be real theology. Still, if the whole of human experience is open to god-talk, then the traditional arts of ministry are simply not enough. God-talk must find its way from and back to film, indie music, and other alternative media. (Perhaps even blogs?)
Contempt for the word
08.26.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on Contempt for the word
Languagehat gives us this quote to ponder:
An extraordinary contempt for the word, or what might even be called a loathing for the word has seized humanity. Confidence in the notion that human beings are capable of persuading one another with words and language has vanished in the most radical sense. Everything associated with parlare has taken on negative connotations. Parliaments are corrupted by their own disgust with parliamentary activities in general, and when conferences are convened somewhere the participants gather in an atmosphere of scorn and skepticism. Knowledge of the impossibility of communication has become too pronounced. Everyone knows that everyone else speaks a different language and lives in entirely different value systems, and that every people is trapped in its own system of values. Indeed, this is true not just for every person, but for every profession as well. The businessman can’t persuade the military man, nor the military man the businessman. The engineer doesn’t understand the worker; or rather, they understand each other only in so far as each of them concedes to the other the right to bring all means within their power to bear, to ruthlessly use their system of values to their own advantage, to break any contract necessary in order to crush and overrun their opponent.
Alternate titles: On the new feudalism. On the death of democracy. On the death of persuasion. On the death of the public. On the death of civil society. Others..?
(Hat tip to How to Save the World for the link.)
Postmodernism’s point
08.21.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on Postmodernism’s point
Still following up on Rorty, the point of “postmodernism” is the rejection of the project of philosophical intellectuals, that is, the hope that discovering reality-as-it-really-is “would end, once and for all, the process of reflection on what to do with ourselves.” In religious language, it is the naming of Truth as an idol.
The indie intellectual
08.21.03 | Permalink | 5 Comments
Richard Rorty argues that there have been three major movements of intellectuals: the religious intellectual, the philosophical intellectual, and the literary intellectual. An intellectual, says Rorty, is anyone who seeks personal authenticity and has the wherewithal to consume cultural artifacts to try and get there. (I would add that the intellectual feels the right to engage those artifiacts on his own terms.)
Philosophical intellectuals first took the scene during the Renaissance, leading the process of society’s secularization while the figure of the religious intellectual peaked and then faded during the Reformations. For the religious intellectual final personal authenticity was found through right relationship (variously defined) with the-one-god. For their philosophical intellectual successors, right beliefs about reality (variously defined) held hopes for finding final personal authenticity. (Fundamentalists, I could add, might be viewed as philosophical intellectuals pretending to themselves to be religious intellectuals.)
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