In 9/11's Shadow

Today there are Republicans and Democrats eyeing each other suspiciously across the aisle.

Just as on any other day, we are polarized and divided and frustrated with one another. But today isn't just another day, and there is something that unites us in the face of our differences and disagreements. Today we remember a tragedy born of ideological hatred, and we remember the sacrifices of first responders who didn't ask whether the people in danger were black or white, Democrat or Republican, Christian or Muslim.

Today we all stand together in the shadow of both the worst and the best that humanity can be. Let us, then, aspire for the best, and so make this day about those we would honor.

 

(Image, found here, is on display at the Ground Zero Museum Workshop)

Salvaging Leviticus?

Maurice Harris, a progressive rabbi, has written what appears to be a fascinating new book: Leviticus: You Have No Idea. You can find excerpts and a table of contents on his website for the book. Here's a choice quote that convinced me to buy it:

Why do I think Leviticus can be a valuable book for people today who have—for lack of a more precise way of putting it—a progressive approach to religion? Because when it comes to Leviticus, we really have no idea. No idea of the surprisingly relevant questions and insights it contains, and little idea of how to integrate its strange, authoritarian, and intimidating worldview with our commitment to progressive values. 

As with so many other parts of the Bible, we tend to miss a lot of what’s there in Leviticus by not taking the time to explore it and greet it freshly with the question, “What might we learn today from studying this text, from bringing our current problems and struggles into dialog with even this text?” And if, in the course of greeting Leviticus with those questions, we are willing to let our sacred texts be imperfect—let them be a record of our ancestors’ understandings of God, not of God’s literal words beamed down to us never to be challenged—then the potential for what we can learn that’s directly relevant to our moment in human history expands dramatically.

The final message here resonates powerfully with some current work I'm doing on the concept of divine revelation. My philosophical question--rather different from Harris's scriptural one but, I think, leading to complementary insights--is this: What implications does one's view about God have for one's understanding of divine revelation? More precisely, does a particular understanding of God--say, the understanding of God as being essentially loving--require or preclude any specific views about how a God would self-disclose or what content should make us suspect/doubt revelatory origin?

My argument (which should come as no surprise to readers of this blog) is that if we take seriously the view that God is love, we should not expect to encounter God most clearly in the pages of a text, but rather in the context of loving relationships--that is, in the context of loving and being loved (including but not limited to our experience of loving and being loved by the divine, our passional reaching for the infinite and our occasional sense of "being in the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face," to quote Simone Weil's account of her first mystical experience).

But lessons drawn from our experiences of love need to be formulated, and it seems that if God is love then we should place our deepest trust in those lessons that emerge out of a community of loving discourse. In such a community, I think a holy text can serve as the proxy voice of those who have lived long ago. Their wisdom and insights can become part of the loving conversation--not an authoritarian conversation-stopper that we must silence in order to have a loving discourse at all (which is what fundamentalism would turn holy texts into), but a voice in the dialogue, as Harris suggest in the words above.

Surgery, Swimming, and War: What Does Diana Nyad's historic achievement have to do with Syria?

Thanks to my wife, I watched Diana Nyad's historic achievement this weekend--swimming from Cuba to Florida--through a more engaged and passionate set of eyes than I might otherwise have done. Were it not for her I would have been fixated on the news about Syria. As reports came in of Diana's astonishing effort and ultimate achievement, the realization of her "Xtreme Dream," I would've distractedly thought, "That's cool," and then been sucked back into the prospect of missile strikes.

For several years now, my Ironman wife has pushed her physical limits through swimming, biking, and running, but her greatest love is swimming. As I write these words I am sitting in a surgery waiting room while my wife undergoes surgery on both her feet. The surgery is cutting short her season, hopefully with the result that she will be better equipped to "do her impossible" into the future ("Do your impossible" are the words that frame her Ironman tattoo). But it means that she will not be participating in Oklahoma City's Redman triathlon later this month, as originally planned.

What Impedes the Dream Today?

This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of the transformative March on Washington and Martin Luther King's famed "I Have a Dream" speech. When King delivered that speech, segregation remained a legal and social reality--an overt expression of racial division that no one could deny, even if many still sought to justify it.

Today, legal segregation is gone. Today, we have a sitting president whose father was African. Today, I have a student in one of my classes who can assert with all sincerity that racial prejudice is "fading" from American society.

A lot has changed in fifty years, and although I don't share my student's optimistic assessment, I understand why he said it. The dividing lines of race--the sharp divides imposed and reinforced by "Whites Only" signs and Jim Crow laws and police enforcement--are no longer so stark. If you don't see something with the vividness that you used to, the term "faded" makes some sense.

But a faded image may be every bit as present as it ever was, even though its colors are less sharp.

The Transforming Power of Grace Exemplified: The Case of Antoinette Tuff

A few months ago I offered the following remarks in a blog post, in answer to what Christians should think of Wayne LaPierre's idea that a good guy with a gun is the only thing that can stop a bad guy with one:

If there’s a common theme in Jesus’ ministry and message, it’s about a different way of responding to evil, to injustice, to violence, than the traditional human response of fighting fire with fire. Jesus’ life and death were a testament to this divine Third Way—a way that refuses to identify sin with sinners, evil with evil-doers, that insists on the possibility of redemption and seeks to transform a violent situation not by a final lethal stroke of violence, but by a creative act of love—even, if necessary, love that suffers unto death.  

As a response to evil, there’s an unbridgeable gulf between picking up a cross and picking up a gun.

Sardines, Beondegi, and Not-My-Kind-of-Sex: The Irrelevance of Gag Reflexes

A recent essay at the Gospel Coalition, by Thabiti Anyabwile (Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church of Grand Cayman in the Grand Cayman Islands), has garnered quite a bit of reactions from more progressive Christian writers.

This is not surprising. The essay, "The Importance of Your Gag Reflex When Discussing Homosexuality and 'Gay Marriage'", is striking in what it advocates. One might even say shocking. Anyabwile, with obvious sincerity and a sense of moral conviction, argues that conservative Christians should make more use of the following strategy when debating homosexuality and same sex marriage:

They should try harder to fire up and channel visceral disgust against same-sex activity. 

Family History

I'm in my childhood home for a few days, walking among the memories, the familiar paintings and photographs and objects laden with personal and family history. I'm here, perhaps, for the last time. My mother has decided it's time to move into a smaller space, into one of those independent living communities that's paired with a nursing home. We'll be looking at some of the options today.

Last night my mother shared some family history. I've heard pieces of it before, but as I lay in bed last night those pieces fell together in a new way, forming a story that dovetailed with a mood defined by my awareness of both history and impermanence.

Zimmerman's Acquittal is not Ours

On the day that George Zimmerman was acquitted of homicide in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, I wrote the following words on my facebook page:

I was not in the courtroom. I did not see and hear the evidence and the testimony. I cannot speak to this verdict based on the evidence. What I can say is that if my son were black, then tonight as I looked in on his sleeping face nestled into his beddings, I would feel an adrenal rush of fear, a heightened anxiety for his future. Because he is an unthreatening shade of pink, I feel instead the shame of my own relief.

And then I fell silent. I didn't rush to this blog, as I sometimes do, to elaborate--and not just because I've been deliberately neglecting this blog this summer to focus on other priorities.

I fell silent because I didn't know what else to say. I didn't know what my perspective could add, what I could say that wasn't already being said better by others or wasn't already expressed in my earlier post in the wake of the shooting. I didn't know how to answer the question that burns for so many in this country:

What now? What do we do to move forward, to help heal the social fault-lines highlighted by this tragedy and its aftermath (including the trial and subsequent acquittal)?

Salvation for Atheists: Is the Pope an Anonymous Lutheran?

Because I have been neglecting this blog for the past month to focus on other things, there is a post I started writing when it was timely (in the journalistic sense of piggybacking on current news) that I didn't get around to finishing until this morning, when it is no longer timely (in that journalistic sense). But since the main points are timeless in a deeper sense, I post it now.

Pope Francis made something of a splash recently when, during a homily, he asserted that through Christ God has redeemed all of humanity, even atheists. More precisely, he offered the following words, which are enough to make any Christian universalist (and perhaps a few atheists) flap about in barely suppressed delight:

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!

But despite how delightfully these words ring in the ears of a Christian universalist like me, I wasn't about to run around shouting that Pope Francis has come out as a universalist.

A Thought on DOMA's Demise and the Christian Discussion to Follow

Today, the Supreme Court of the United States of America struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, which has blocked federal benefits to married same-sex couples. They also let stand a lower-court ruling that overthrew California's Prop 8 (which would have banned same-sex marriage in that state).

They didn't assert a fundamental right of same-sex couples to be married, but the momentum here is unambiguous and, I think, inevitable. Given the generational divide on this issue--the broad and growing acceptance of homosexual couples and relationships among young Americans--we are seeing an accelerating move towards the normalization of same-sex relationships. The traditional categorical condemnation of same-sex romantic and sexual intimacy is steadily being cast off.

Conservative Christians are likely to see this as a tragic cultural shift away from the teachings of God, and will thus double down in their opposition, calling with renewed urgency for Christians to resist being sucked in by cultural "permissiveness." But these conservative voices, while still strong in most branches of Christianity, are confronting growing opposition from within. More and more Christians are adopting a progressive stance on the topic of homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

There has been a long tendency for conservative Christians to paint these internal critics of the traditional view as nothing but sell-outs to secular culture.