for the time being

NEW BLOG

2010-02-25T18:48:00.002-06:00

Theology reading list: Pauline Interpretation

2010-01-20T12:19:00.005-06:00

So a couple days ago J.R. Briggs offered some good tips on reading well. It spurred some good conversation.

Well, I'm currently working on my comp. questions for at Marquette, and I thought that some of you all would be interested in what I have to read for my tests. So today, is my bibliography on Contemporary Pauline Theology with special reference to the Philippians Hymn. I would highly recommend the short book by Stendahl to see where the "New Perspective on Paul" came from and where N.T. Wright got everything (well, kinda).

Pauline Interpretation

F. C. Baur, Paul, Apostle of Jesus Christ: His Life and Works, His Epistles and Teachings (Reprint; Peabody: Henrickson, 2003), part 3.

Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. William Montgomery (New York: Seabury, 1968), 1-40, 52-140, 334-396.

Rudolf Bultmann, The Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel (2 Vols.; New York: Scribner, 1951-55), 187-345.

Ernst Käsemann, “‘The Righteousness of God’ in Paul,” in New Testament Questions of Today (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), 168-82.

____________Justification and Salvation History in the Epistle to the Romans,” in New Testament Questions of Today (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), 60-78.

Krister Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976)

E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 431-557.

James D. G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” in idem, The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 99-120

--------------“The Theology of Galatians: The Issue of Covenantal Nomism,” in Jouette M. Bassler, ed., Pauline Theology Volume 1: Thessalonians, Philippians, Galatians, Philemon (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 125-46

James D. G. Dunn, “The Narrative Approach to Paul: Whose Story?” in Bruce W. Longenecker, ed., Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2002), 217-30.

James D. G. Dunn, “Once More, Pistou Christou,” in E. E. Johnson and David Hay, eds., Pauline Theology Volume IV: Looking Back, Pressing On, 249-271

J. Louis Martyn, “Events in Galatia,” in Jouette M. Bassler, ed., Pauline Theology Volume 1: Thessalonians, Philippians, Galatians, Philemon (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 160-79

Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California, 1994), 1-85, 228-260.

Richard B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1- 4:11 (2nd Ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), xxi-lii.

Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University, 1989), 1-33.

Francis Watson, “Is There a Story in These Texts?” in Bruce W. Longenecker, ed., Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2002), 231-39.

Richard B. Hays, “Pistou Christou and Pauline Christology,” in E. E. Johnson and David Hay, eds., Pauline Theology Volume IV: Looking Back, Pressing On, 35-60.

Francis Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith (New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 1-29.

Mark Seifrid, “The Narrative of Scripture and Justification by Faith: A Fresh Response to N. T. Wright,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 72 (2008), 19-44.

Richard Horsley, ed., Paul and Politics (Harrisburg: Trinity Press, 2000), 160-83.

Philippians Hymn

Bauckham, Richard. God crucified : monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (Carlisle : Paternoster Press, 1998), 51-61.

Dunn, James D.G. Christology in the making : a New Testament inquiry into the origins of the doctrine of the incarnation (Philadelphia : Westminster Press, c1980), 98-125.

Fowl, Stephen E. Philippians (Grand Rapids, Mich. : Eerdmans Pub. Co., c2005).

Heen, Erik M. “Phil 2:6-11 and Resistance to Local Timocratic Rule: Isa theo and the Cult of the Emperor in the East.” In Paul and the Roman Imperial Order, ed. by Richard A. Horsley, pp. 125-53. (Harrisburg: Trinity, 2004).

Gorman, Michael J. Inhabiting the cruciform God : kenosis, justification, and theosis in Paul's narrative soteriology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2009), 9-39.

Keesmaat, Sylvia. “Crucified Lord or Conquering Saviour: Whose Story of Salvation?” Horizons in Biblical Theology, 26 (2004), 69-93.

Martin, Ralph P. A hymn of Christ : Philippians 2:5-11 in recent interpretation & in the setting of early Christian worship (Downers Grove, Ill. : InterVarsity Press, c1997).

Martin, Ralph P. and Brian J. Dodd, eds. Where Christology began : essays on Philippians 2 (Louisville, Ky. : Westminster John Knox Press, c1998).

Oakes, Peter. Philippians : from people to letter (Cambridge, UK ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Wright, N.T. The climax of the covenant : Christ and the law in Pauline theology (Edinburgh, Scotland : T & T Clark, 1991), 56-98.

Spiritual Leadership

2010-01-12T05:57:00.006-06:00

What is spiritual leadership? What does it consist of, where does it come from, where does it propel us?

Let me know because at Life on the Vine we have been thinking more and more about leadership development, and this has returned me to a classic from my college years (which, surprisingly, is over 10 years past). This classic for me is Spiritual Leadership by J. Oswald Sanders. So I've decided that over the next couple of days and weeks I'm going to take various sounding from that book and reflect on them here. Sanders still speak to, encourages, and exhorts me to a deeper spiritual leadership and, frankly, I still haven't found a better leadership book that covers all the basics.

But because I've read the book several times, it would help me to know what issues or topics you think most important so I can focus on those themes rather than merely whatever strikes me.

So let me know what you think is most important for or about spiritual leadership? And hopefully together we can gaze through the murky waters of leadership.

Missional Monday: Baptismal Family

2009-12-14T07:24:00.003-06:00

How do you understand and practice the ecclesial truth of the Family of God? And not just in the social sense that we, who practice faith in Christ, are part of a new reality, but that we truly have a Father with whom we can intimately converse.

At Life on the Vine we speak of the centrality of the Baptismal Family, around which the Biological Family must be ordered. This means that those with children, or even married couples, must not mirror the dominant cultural obsession with the nuclear family and all its activities, habits, and typical seclusion. Rather, our Biological Families are not the center of the social, political, moral, or economic universe because the Family of God is the center of all things. We try to indoctrinate our congregation along these lines especially around Easter when we baptize our youth and new believers, and during Pentecost when we bless and receive infants into the community of the Family of God, exhorting young parents that they cannot do it alone. And the reverse is true for singles. While the culture debases singles and makes marriage the norm, in the Baptismal Family of God all have a necessary place, meaning, and significance.

But for me this is really just the surface of what it means, for really, there are so many of us who come from broken families, who never had fathers who loved them, who never had healthy brothers to protect or exhort them, who never had sisters to encourage them, and never had mothers to nurture them. There are so many who are lost and wandering because they never really had a family to speak of (even if there family existed in some sense with all the elements). There are some many who have been emotionally, relationally, and spiritually orphaned by their families, and they feel it so deeply every Christmas when they go home. Or perhaps they have just stopped going home because there is nothing there.

It is here, in these places of loneliness, of insecurity, of defensiveness, and hurt that the church must live out the truth of the Family of God. There is not merely pastors and congregants, employees and a building, founding members…No, we are fathers, and mothers, sisters and brothers to each other. One’s pain is all our pain; and another’s joy is all our joy. It is here that we break the rule of what it is OK to talk about with others who are in our family, where we say hard things, where we show and embarrassing amount of love, where we can just be awkward because its alright...you're home.

So, how can we better witness to the Family of God? For, certainly, each biological family should be practicing the mission of God, but the Baptismal Family witnesses to the love of the Father for all.

this is a test.

2009-12-02T12:44:00.000-06:00

oh, yeah a test. baby!

Missional Monday: Verge, LA

2009-11-09T09:12:00.004-06:00

I'll be heading out to LA this Friday for Verge, LA: where the next BIG idea meets UNconference. If you are near by you should check it out.

DETAILS:

DATE
Friday, November 13th – 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Saturday, November 14th – 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

PLACE
The Fountain Room

HOST
The Ecclesia Network

COST
Free

RSVP
Please RSVP to the event on Facebook, as we need an accurate estimate for lunch on Saturday.

EXPLANATION
We will be thinking imaginatively about the future of the church with others in an open-source gift economy way. The next BIG idea is about giving time to interact about innovative ways to partner with God in the renewal of all things. Unconference is about freely sharing creative ideas with one another without putting anyone on a pedestal. It is more participant oriented than personality driven, which is why there will be no lists of speakers. There is also no cost, because people share their gifts and knowledge freely.

TOPIC
Within a 24-hour period there will be twenty 14-minute presentations by 18 – 20 different speakers from 18 – 20 different churches on innovative ways to think and live missionally. Some of the missional themes that people may talk about include:

Colonialism and Mission
Leadership and Mission
Worship and Mission
Strategy and Mission
Sabbath and Mission
Incarnation and Mission
Prophetic Ministry and Mission
Unity and Mission
Social Justice and Mission
Anthropology and Mission
Jesus and Mission
Community and Mission
Hospitality and Mission
Spiritual Leadership and Mission
Spaces and Mission
Neighborhood and Mission
Economics and Mission
Pacifism and Mission

In addition, we will have interactive times with those who share as well as informal conversation at different venues around Hollywood.

The Sounds of Silence

2009-11-04T11:51:00.007-06:00

There are at least two levels of silence, if not many more: the silence after the audible sounds have left, and the silence after the accusers and justifiers have left.

The first is just getting to a place or a space, of solitude, of quiet, of silence. This is where physical, or audible silence, or at least something close enough to it to give the mind room to listen. Only utter silence works if I have ear plugs in, because mere stillness still has creaking floors, stepping cats, or distance cars to distract (they actually startle me, which is worse). Often I just use a fan or something that lightly covers over those other noices, something consistant and non-discript. But this is all merely technique preparing for silence by getting rid of the exterior sounds.

The second level of silence I often do not achieve. This is occurs when all the sounds of the accusers and justifiers have left my mind and my soul. Some struggle more with silencing the accurser, other the justifiers. The accusers all the thoughts and memories of what has gone wrong in a day or week, or last five minutes, and the recounting of your responsibility, of your guilt, of your shame within those moments. These voices are infinitely varied for each person because of our different families and contexts. The voices might accuse about failing to love someone, or being responsible for someone else’s failure, or you being the cause of relational problems, or you not raising your children right way, or you saying something just like your mother. It could almost be anything, and often is everything you have done, said, or left undone or unsaid. These voices often take on the persona of someone else, or God, a parent, sibling, spouce, friend, of some other authority in your life, shifting between these persons depending on the situation or infaction. The accuser slips into silence and proclaims that you are unworthy and unacceptible.

The voice of the justifier is usually given your own voice. It is you trying to explain, argue, convince others that you are right about something, that you didn’t mess it up, that they are the ones who don’t understand, that they are the ones in sin and causing all the problems. This is the voice of self-justification, or self-satisfaction before others, knowing that you are superior, but needing to tell yourself again just so that you feel better about yourself and your situation, about your effort, about your life. The justifier replays that past argument at work, and changes it so you come out looking good. It anticipates that future conversation you need to have with a friend about how they were wrong to treat you so poorly and how it offended you. The justifier mulls over a perceived social slighting by another, and dreams about how it might be reciprocated. In all these ways the justifer slips into the silence and proclaims that you are essentially right and good.

But in a sense, both the accuse and the justifer are addictions which we hardly know about until we enter silence. They are manifestations that we are addicted to ourselves, either in condemnig ourselve or approving of ourselves. And don’t be fooled, while it might seem transparent that self-justification is of course odious for Christians, self-loathing is equally as bad. While the former trusts ourselves for approval, the latter does not trust God in his approval of us.

But in any case, passing into the second level of silence is to silence these voices, which is a mental struggle all its own. It is here amid the warring voices heard most clearly in silence that we can turn toward the grace of God, the approval of God, the truth of God spoken in Christ. And this voice of Christ is only heard after the sounds of silence have ceased.

Missional Monday: Editability vs Accountability

2009-10-31T14:42:00.006-05:00

Do you live in a world of accountants or editors? Are you yourself an accountant or an editor? I’m not talking in the sense of actual professions, but rather in your relationships, in how you understand others, and in your community.

Joe Myers, in Organic Community, speaks of the difference between accountability and edit-ability: the former looks for mistakes and problems while the latter looks for goodness and improvement. Here is the quick and dirty as Myers breaks it down:

- accountability relationships are bilt on the understanding that people are primarily bad and sinful.
- edit-ability relationships are built on the understanding that people are good, made in the image of God.

- the accountabilty partner looks for mistakes and keeps an account.
- the editor looks for trengths and makes suggestions for imporvemnet.

- the accountability partner initiates accountability discussions on a regular schedule or on whatever schedule that accountability partner deems necessary for proper recording.
- in a relationship of edit-ability, one person brings requests for help to the other on an as-needed basis.

- the accountability partner tries to help by creating more structures, rules, and regulations.
- the editor makes suggestions but leaves the major reworking wih the individual.

- the accountability partner is often drawn from a limited resource pool (e.g. someone within the individual’s organized small group).
- the editor is a person of one’s own choosing, in whatever spher of life would be helpful.

- the accountability partner tries to get the individual to cooperate with and conform to certain standards and expectations (a prescriptive pattern).
- the editor allows one to resource oneslef in whatever ways are healthy (a descriptive pattern).

- the accountability partner emphasizes and inadvertently reinforces the negative behavior by concentrating on it.
- an editor celebrates the journey of wholeness.

- the accountability partner holds the power.
- the project--health or wholeness--holds the power.

Now for the most part, I really like the way he construes this, speaking of the accountability relationship as one of cooperation according to a master plan as opposed to edit-ability as a relationship of collaboration according to an organic order.

But I must say, that while great in theory, often life is not so clear cut. There needs to be a connections relationships of accountability to root out sin and relationships of edit-ability to foster grace and the gifts of the Spirit. While one portion of my theology says that humans are created good in the image of God, another part of my theology (and most of my experience) says the Fall messed everything up, so I can’t whole-sale affirm editorial understanding of relationships. However, as Myers says, “when presented with th option, most peole prefer an author-editor relationship over a client-accountant relationship.” And certainly this is true, and a needed corrective to such evangelical spirituality which merely focuses on sin-management. So let us recover this edit-ability where we celebrate God’s grace in each other, but let us not abdicate the responsibility of legitimate accountability

The Lost Tools of Learning

2009-10-31T12:18:00.006-05:00

"We let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of "subjects"; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spellbinder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education, lip service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.” (Dorothy L. Sayers, "The Lost Tools of Learning")

Children are taught various subjects (history, literature, science, arts), but not how to deal with subjects. They are not taught the tools of learning, or organizing, or criticizing a subject, but the facts of a subject from an authority. These lost tool are basic grammar (rules of a subject), logic (rules argumentation of a subject), and rhetoric (rules for articulating and debating a subject). The are taught the basics of reading words, but not of reading for arguments, for biases, for implications, for spurious reasoning.

Dorothy Sayers wrote the above over 50 years ago, but are we, and our children, not still worse off? They know words but not the power of words, nor how to articulate the Word, and are left vulnerable.

Missional Mondays: On being a Pre-Evangelical

2009-10-19T07:02:00.004-05:00

It used to be in vogue to be post-evangelical. And to some extent I can understand this. People understand evangelicals often according to those who speak the loudest while at the same time defining it the narrowest. For those who became post-evangelical it was a protest of sorts about an all too limited theology and all too shallow view of society. This conversation continues still now with Rob Bell, and there with Scot McKight, and over here with Tony Jones.

For many it seemed like post-evangelicals had lost the truth, lost the way, lost the life which comes with modern Christianity. But these post-evangelicals always claimed they were working their way back to the way, truth, and life of Christ, and his Gospel, the euangelion. But then Robert Webber helped us to back off a bit and to think about pragmatic and younger evangelicals. And now people just busy themselves with out-maneuvering each other with historical and biblical investigation about what being evangelical really means.

For me, since I’ve been at Marquette, a catholic university, I have just returned to calling myself an evangelical (it always make me laugh when the student here ask about my evangelical religion). Perhaps I like the scandal it makes when people who used to be evangelicals find out that I still consider myself one (they are often now either disillusioned with the church, or have turned into Anglicans…One post-evangelical, now Anabaptist, philosophy student audibly guffawed during when he found out it was still an evangelical!).

But, I think I’m going to make a change. I would like to think of myself as a Pre-Evangelical, as one who is waiting for these little turf wars to die down, one waiting for a re-birth of the truly Evangelical. I’m want to be a Pre-Evangelical, not as one trying to get behind a fundamentalist/liberal divide or the modernist debates of the 1920’s, or recover some authentic 19th-Century religiosity, but one looking forward to a glorious dawn, one could even say the return, the parousia, toward which the Evangel points and proclaims.

I claim to be a Pre-Evangelical because the Gospel has yet to totally take root, to fully transform me. As John tells us, "what we will be has not yet been made known," but because I am being made into the image of Christ, who is The Evangelical, we know that "when he appears, we shall be like him" (1 John 3:2) and only then will I be able to claim to be an Evangelical.

So who will join me? Let's start a movement, a revolution, of Pre-Evangelicals. But let it not be through publishing contracts or conference circuits, let it not be through blogs and tweeds, let it not be through doctrinal emphases or identity markers, but let us Pre-Evangelicals live, proclaims, follow, give, die, and rise again with Christ the Evangelical. Let us not argue over being a post-Evangelical, but living into the Gospel as something before us that leads us on.

Christian Radio Redeemed!

2009-10-09T10:14:00.006-05:00

I can't believe it, but it is true. One line from one song has temporarily redeemed Christian radio for me: "Late have I loved you."

Yes, that is right. There is a song played on KLOV which references St. Augustine's Confessions. Here is the full excerpt for Augustine.

Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you. You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.

The song was written by Matt Maher, who is known for composing "Your Grace is Enough" which was made popular by Chris Tomlin. Now this song that I heard, Alive Again, is basically structured around this excerpt, which is read on the feast day of Saint Augustine.

Oh, did I mention that Matt Maher is Catholic. Yes! A song that was written as a reflection from the reading on the feast day of Saint Augustine is now at TOP 20 song on KLOV. Incredible! Christian Radio can be redeemed.

Here are all the lyrics, not sentimental or poorly crafted, well written and drawing from the ancient traditions of the church.

Alive Again

I woke up in darkness  Surrounded by silence  
Oh where, oh where have I gone?  
I woke to reality Losing its grip on me  
Oh where, where have I gone?  
'Cause I can see the light   Before I see the sunrise

You called and You shouted  
Broke through my deafness  
Now I'm breathing in and breathing out  
I'm alive again  
You shattered my darkness  
Washed away my blindness  
Now I'm breathing in and breathing out
 I'm alive again  

Late have I loved You , You waited for me, I searched for You  
What took me so long?  
I was looking outside  As if Love would ever want to hide  
I'm finding I was wrong
   'Cause I feel the wind   Before it hits my skin  

You called and You shouted  
Broke through my deafness  
Now I'm breathing in and breathing out
 I'm alive again  
You shattered my darkness  
Washed away my blindness  
Now I'm breathing in and breathing out  
I'm alive again

Missional Monday: 10 People Not To Have In A Church Plant...

2009-10-03T10:42:00.010-05:00

Here is a list of 10 personality types that destroy all the energy of planning and planting churches (and even the energy of an existing church). The opposite to these are based in deep faith and relational maturity, something I'll be posting on later (and if I was artistic I would made fun little drawings of the people).

So, the top 10 people not to have in a church plant...

1) Mr. Dream-Killer
"Come on, let's be realistic!"
"Don't you realize what facts are?"

2) Ms. Nay-Sayer
"That just doesn't make sense."
"That would never work."

3) Ms. Air-Talker
(to no one in particular, to everyone in general)
"I really wish this meeting could start on time."
-(translation: you are wasting my time and I don't like it.)
"At least I did what I was supposed to do."
-(translation: I'm the most responsible one here but no one appreciates me.)

4) Mr. Been-There (or Mrs. Done-That)
"We tried that once in the '90s, but..."
"People used to always think that, but..."

5) Ms. Reminds Me Of
"Once when I was 12 I saw a cat and..."
(then 7 minutes later)
"Oh yeah, that was like the time when I..."

6) Mr. Pouter
(with arms folded)
"...oh just forget it!"
(looking out the window)
"... you just don't understand."

7) Mr. Doer
(squirming in his chair)
"Are we still talking about this?"
"Are we done here? Can we move on?"

8) Ms. US Weekly (or if a man, Mr. Gus-ip)
(after the meeting)
"Did you know that X said...?"
"Could you believe X when Y said Z?!? OMG!!!"

9) Mr. Stereo(type)
"You always say that!"
"You sound just like..."

10) Mr. Bulldozer
"That is all well and good, but I think..."
"Really? It is more that obvious that..."

So, who do you think is missing?

trust the community entrusted to you

2009-09-30T13:38:00.005-05:00

In our organic leadership styles, and non-hierarchical organizations, where starfish grow and spiders flee, it is often heard that we must trust the community. We (leaders of some type) must learn to trust the community (and by that I mean individuals within the community) to work out its individual problems, sins, and issues. If leaders always jump in and attempt to solve the problems then people are deprived of the opportunity to learn the difficult skills of living together under the lordship of Christ. And they eventually become dependent on leaders to solve everything. So of course we need to trust the community, let it grow and learn at the proper rate, experiencing first hand how to live in Christ with others.

But, sometimes this hands-off approach to trusting the community turns into an abdication. For leaders, at least leaders commissioned by the church, have a responsibility to the community which has been entrusted to the leaders. While leaders (and there are always leaders no matter how democratic, or flattened your structure) must trust the community, they must also realize that the community has been entrusted to them for its care, protection, and provision. And while this idea of "entrustment" can lead to authoritarian abuse by those seeking to control a community according their own whims, we must not abdicate leadership when issues, problems, or sins threaten the general health of the church. If a wolf is loose in the sheep pen, it is the shepherd's responsibility to take care of it, not the community of sheep.

Finding the balance between intervention and abiding is very difficult, especially for action oriented and people oriented leaders (yes, that is everyone!). So, thankfully I get to work it out in community!

On not beginning with the book...

2009-09-28T15:48:00.006-05:00

“We are inclined to begin with the book, with historical context and social setting, words and idioms, grammar and literary forms, religious and theological vocabulary, and the many other topics that command our attention. But the early Christians began with the risen Christ.”

by Robert Louis Wilken

“Interpreting the New Testament,” Pro Ecclesia 14 (2005): 15-25, 16.

Missional Monday: Pseudo-Spirituality

2009-09-28T06:08:00.004-05:00

I had been warned! I had been warned by many that seminary would kill my spiritual life. But it is not the only thing that can. There are numerous pseudo-spiritualities that lull us into a way of life that only mirrors a vibrant life with Christ, but is in reality only a dim reflection.

A friend recently reflected with me about his struggle with the pseudo-spirituality of seminary life, where it is easy to think that reading Genesis 1-50 (in one sitting!) is simultaneously homework and devotion. Where one reads Trinitarian theology for 5 hours and allows oneself to claim the time as also a contemplative practice of union with God. But sadly, this is not the case, and seminary life can all too easily fall into pseudo-spirituality.

But unfortunately seminary is not the only place this occurs. Parenting can turn into pseudo-spirituality as we think teaching our children about God, or living as examples of Christ can replace our own struggle and practices of living in Christ. Pastoral ministry of all kinds (vocational or not) can fall into pseudo-spirituality. Leadership meetings, discipleship times, counseling prayer, hospital visitations, or sermon preparation can all lend themselves as spiritual practices of a kind, and it is tempting to allow them to replace disciplined time with Christ. Likewise, social action and community service, with all the time it demands and the concerns it generates can function as a pseudo-spirituality. The list could go on.

Now I’m certainly not saying all the above have no part in forming a vibrant life with Christ. That would be absolutely wrong. But rather the reverse. That all these must be fundamentally connected to Christ, and should never act as a replacement, but rather as an extension of living with Christ.

Here at Life on the Vine, we seek to “live in Christ, with one another, for God’s mission in the world.” But I must remember that I can’t allow living in community or the practices of mission to become the center of my spiritual life because then caring for/being with other and living the gospel life transforms into a pseudo-spirituality. Rather, “living in Christ” is the center that is not a center, because it permeates all things, for it is only by His Spirit that I can do all the others.

So what other forms of Pseudo-Spirituality have you been tempted by?

Missional Monday: Don't Reify "Helping the Poor"

2009-09-21T04:43:00.004-05:00

I know that I am guilty of this at some level. But I'm really stuck. I, and many at Life on the Vine, are both concerned for the poor locally and globally. And that is the rub. You see, I'm concerned about not participating in poverty creating or exploitative economic practices, and therefore try as best I can to purchase ethically manufactured clothes, shoes, food, etc. I believe that every dollar I use to purchase something is not only related to that product, but circulates far beyond through economic practices/companies/regimes that I may or may not want to be affiliated with. For those reasons I support places like No Sweat, Autonomie Project, and Toms.

Now I don't think that is missed placed concern at all, but I also know the temptation to reify my concern for the poor in these concerns for exploitation free economics. Being missional is certainly not to stand on the heads of global workers by buying designer jeans while we go out to a local coffee shops or bars and drink a designer coffee or beer. But that is not enough. We still need to seek out the poor locally and not congratulate ourselves merely for supporting local economics (as good and right as that is).

So, anyway, that is what I'm trying to remember here in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.

when pushing the envelope, don’t destroy the letter.

2009-09-15T14:45:00.002-05:00

Many of us in the emerging church or missional conversations can become wary, disillusioned, and disappointed with the church. It moves so slowly. It changes imperceptibly. It squashed innovation ruthlessly (unless it is innovation of basically the same thing). Many times it seems that we can’t break out of the status quo without a serious jolt, a shock to the system, a dramatic upheaval.

And this is where we come in. The “we” of missional change. The “we” of emerging openness. The “we” of prophetic pronouncement. The “we” that wants to look back on our lives and know that “we” were on the side of history, of a great revolution, for God’s kingdom against the status quo of mere churchiness. And so “we” come to push the envelope. But often when “we” are pushing the envelope “we” end up destroying the letter. In the effort of tearing down walls we end up building new ones. Often we fail to accomplish what we set out to do, and lose ourselves and our relationships over an ideal.

But Paul, even in the midst of his immense frustration with the church in Corinth, needing to push all the envelopes and buttons to get them back in line, still could say and live:

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everybody. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. (2 Cor. 3:2-3)

Because letters written on hearts are from Christ, the ministries and individual which pushes the envelop in the name of Christ must take care not to destroy those letters in the process. Our zeal is no excuse for running over people and communities. So, when you are pushing the envelope, be sure you don't destroy the letter.

Science Fiction Friday: How Will The World End?

2009-09-11T17:20:00.000-05:00

So this summer I read A Canticle for Leibowitz, and loved it. It is a post-apocalypic novel about the monks of St. Leibowitz who preserve the "memorabilia" of the previous (our) lost civilization, destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. The novel works its way through three different time periods as new generations grapple with the lost sciences and their eventual recovery. It is just brilliant. When Walter E. Miller wrote the novel in 1960, the threat of nuclear war was on everyone's mind. But now, are we really going to blow everything to kingdom come, or will world end in a different manner?

I have a sense that it will end differently, and not out of fear of other humans. It no doubt will still be motivated out of fear. But fear of what?

Here is my idea. What if we immunized ourselves to death out of fear of some pandemic? Really, what if we, in trying to create a vaccine, for say the swine flu, we ended creating some killer strain that wipes out 3/4ths of the world population. I'm talking about the scale of 12 Monkeys (great movie!) or 28 Days Later. I'm just wondering because I have heard rumors that we are headed toward the possibility of forced vaccines if the swine flu truly does escalate (here, here, and a video here), and what if it backfires or instead causes the pandemic.

To add fuel to the fire, below is a hip-hop version of an anti-vaccine announcement. it is pretty fun and somewhat informative (well, maybe). But it still makes one think. Also, if you are interested, you can choose your own apocalypse (at least for America).

But let me know how you think the world will end. Or rather, what do the bowls and scrolls of Revelation contain?

On building walls

2009-09-08T17:18:00.003-05:00

So I'm preaching this week on living together in Christ, and I need your help. What keeps us from living in the peace of Christ, the peace that IS Christ himself? What breaks up the unity of the Spirit in believers?

I'll be preaching on Eph. 2:11-22, of which 2:14 says, "For [Christ] himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility." Compare it to Robert Frost's "Mending Wall", where the speaker acts like he is against walls, but still keeps mending them all the same (see commentary here, text below). But please let me know what you think is the reason for the Church to typically not live in the peace of Christ.

“Mending Wall”
by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Missional Mondays: On not being so bad at b-ball

2009-09-07T20:47:00.004-05:00

So this Labor Day weekend was full of sports (no, not just watching them), which means I had a great time of it. I got several games of volleyball in (and found out my cousin has mad skills). Then I played a bunch of corn hole, or as the capitalist Man calls it, Baggo (trademark). But to top it off, a couple high school guys call up to see if I wanted to play basketball with them. And so I just go back from playing some pick up ball down at the local middle school.

I had mentioned earlier about it being good missionally to be bad at something, but thankfully tonight I wasn't so bad (even though one team of polish guys killed us!). But it was really great because I was able to meet this college student, Denis, who is studying philosophy and sociology at NIU. And it just happens that I also studied philosophy in undergrad, and so we were able to talked about philosophy and religion, and little about his aspiration for law school.

Anyway, just briefly, this is a reminder that hobbies in the flow of life are the great beginnings of a missional lifestyle...always getting in the way of people so that they might stumble into the Way. Here is a great summary about ways to get in the way: 8 Easy Way to Be Missional.

Sci-Fi Friday: Cybor-Pirate-Ninja Jesus

2009-09-04T10:05:00.003-05:00

So it is the first week of school, and I didn't have time for a real post about compelling Science Fiction, so I went the Sci-Fi route of bad christian jokes.

For me, this is how not to engage middle school boys.

Aninalic Theology?

2009-09-03T07:02:00.001-05:00

Ok, now I know this is a bit of a rant, but really, do we need to be SO ORGANIC, or rather ANIMALIC in our theology? We all want to exhibit Organic Leadership, but now we have jumped from biology to zoology. I starfish and spiders (the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations) have become all the rage. But do we really need to learn about The Monkey and the Fish, or The Rabbit and the Elephant. Sometimes a marketing ploy just gets out of control. And frankly, humans don't organize like animals (even if they are just used analogously).

Science Fiction Friday: Mourning the Loss of...

2009-08-28T12:16:00.005-05:00

...my time, first of all, for having seen Knowing (2009) and totally regretted it. I never like Nicholas Cage (except in Next which was clever), so I should have known. But is wasn't so much the bad acting, but the totally contrived nature of the plot, attempting to pit faith against science, and then aliens who are really angels (?), and then them taking children to be a new Adam and Eve on another planet before Earth is consumed by fire. IT IS TERRIBLE!!! It is bad sci-fi which neither tells us anything meaningful about ourselves or the world, and baits Christians along the way (shame on followers of Christ if they get sucked in--Hollywood is just taking your money by putting a picture of Ezekiel into a poorly written script).

I'm also mourning the loss of Termin ator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, a low budget Fox show that I was quite pleased with because it new what it was and didn't try to do too much. It raised more interesting questions about time travel, the inner life of a cyborg (Cameron, which Jon secretly loved, and Miss Weaver, a rouge T:1000 who seems to work against Skynet), and how one lives with knowing the future...it raise these better than the newest Terminator movie (which does not even deserve a link!). It was also very creative in its writing and plot development without over-extending itself like Lost. But alas, it is cancelled and now there is no good science fiction on TV (i don't have cable), and Heroes doesn't count even though I watch it. Perhaps I should watch the Dollhouse...

The Art of Losing

2009-08-27T16:31:00.009-05:00

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like like disaster.

We are all marked by loss, by losing things, people, places. Humanity is marked by being able to lose things and yet not to forgotten them. The trick is to learn to lose well, to live well amid the losses.

Or perhaps the trick is to reverse the process so that it is not a disaster, but a movement to green pasture. From the loss of a world that won't stay to a journey to one that won't leave.

Missional Mondays: Radicals or Missionals

2009-08-24T06:52:00.005-05:00

Now this is just a question, so please help me out. It seems to me that much of missional theology comes from a more evangelical background, and much of a radical theology comes from the anabaptists. is that right?

Missional theology tends toward equipping the church to participate in the Mission of God by help it shed its heirarchical and institutional baggage, and engage in cultural studies. Radical theology tends toward practicing resistance to an idolatrous culture in a more overtly political and economic manner.

It would seem they both would benefit from a better integration and cross-pollination of ideas and practices (notice how I resisted saying 'conversation') to mutually reinforce one another. It seemed that for a while over the last couple of years that these two streams were flowing together, but I'm not as certain now.

What do you all think?

Science Fiction Friday: Series Re-boot

2009-08-21T19:13:00.005-05:00

Now that I am hoping to blog more often I would like to resurrect or re-boot an older blog series: Science Fiction Fridays. I don't promise to write something every Friday, but I will try (and some will be updated re-posts).

Science Fiction vs. Sci-Fi: So, what is the difference between Science Fiction and Sci-Fi? (I'm basically using a distinction my cousin, Kevin Reed, proposed to me.)

Science Fiction: A form of social critique or investigation set in the future (distant or near), or set in the present amid highly anomalous circumstances. Science Fiction is what you see in Cyber-Punk books, the Dune series, and Philip K. Dick (and the movies based on his stories).

Basically, science fiction offers a utopian/distopian vision of the future as a critique of the present, and therefore is not supportive of the status quo (I also also Fantasy but that was going to make my series name too long, and I don't read/view as much of it).

Sci-Fi: Roughly state, Sci-Fi is strictly entertainment of the futuristic type (somewhere in space) or concerning dangerous scientific research (think Mutant X or X-Men), and it is not different than the status quo. Just about everything is Sci-Fi now on film and the tv; there are few view science fiction movies or tv show which actually critique rather than support the current system of thought.

So, basically, I want to commit to a regular reading of the difference between Science Fiction and Sci-Fi, in literature and film. Through this series I'll engage in ideological and theological critiques of the consumer american lifestyle in which I live and minister.

I have recently just finished The Sparrow, A Canticle for Liebowitz, and a border book, Foucault's Pendulum, all of which will receive some reflection, as well as some recent films.

But to get started, and to add to my reading/viewing list, what are your favorite science fiction books or movies? And why?

Missional Gibberish: On learning German and leading.

2009-08-11T16:06:00.005-05:00

"Learning to read German is like constructing a jigsaw puzzle: the more pieces you have in place, the easier it is to fit in the final pieces." German Quickly

That is so true it is ridiculous! I need to read German for my doctoral program, and I am having so much trouble with it. But now it is finally getting easier. Unlike English grammar which is relatively straight forward (linear day I say), German grammar is more intuitive and loose (the pic is not a joke, it is reality!).

The same goes for much of missional theology. It is a jigsaw puzzle, a gestalt of pieces placed together which become comprehensible only when nearly finished. It is often hard to know where to start when describing it to people: "It has to do with theology...but really missiology, or rather, what Christ has accomplished on the cross, so that is soteriology, but not merely in a substitutionary-individualist sense...well, what I mean is God gathers us into his mission to save all creation, but we can't really do that unless we are in a concrete community...so really God is calling a people and that is what the cross is about..." Ever had that conversation? And we are still not even talking about what a missional church might look like!

The problem, though, that I've noticed is that often we missional leaders are so steeped in the missional grammar that we don't think it is confusing to talk like this, to talk as if we were speaking German. But just as often we loss the people we are supposed to be leading and then get frustrated that they don't see the big picture.

We must get in the habit of going back to the missional basics. Just because we are in advanced missional linguistics doesn't mean we neglect teaching our young leaders the basic missional grammar in clear, compelling language. If we don't, many of our lay leaders will start off excited albeit confused, and then continue being confused without being excited.

On being missionally bad at basketball

2009-08-06T20:33:00.007-05:00

Now, just image how good these two guys would likely be while playing some street ball at a local park with mostly Latinos. Now you know just how bad I played tonight. Really bad...blown 6 foot jumpers and missed layups. I was terrible. But I love it. Playing basketball, which I picked up just last winter, fulfills a triple function in my life.

The first is that I need to stay in shape, but I hate exercising. I have to be competing to stay motivated to run around.

Second, it works out great that I hate exercising alone because I end playing a team sport, which means I get to mix it up with people from my neighborhood. Which means staying in shape is one of my missional activities. I've met two high schoolers at the park across the street, a bunch of graduates just starting out in their careers, and I get to play with the hidden minority here in Chicago (i.e. the Latinos). Hopefully soon I'll be hanging out at the local pub after games.

And it works out great that I'm not very good (I'm a slow, skinny, tall guy...so at least I'm good for rebounding). But its great because if you are friendly you can just ask for pointers on how to get better, and people love to play coach and teach you stuff. One of the best missional activities is not to offer help, but to ask for help.

And lastly, I think everyone, but especially pastors, and especially missional pastors, should have something that they are getting better at. Anything will do, even if it is not ministry related. I think people in ministry should discipline themselves to grow and master something they love as part of their continuing development, as a means of sharpening their lives, as well as relieving stress. It could model train building for all I care. Basically a hobby of some sort (but watching movies or sports does not count!). It was and still is music for me, but now bodily health, missional relationships, and personal development are running through basketball for me. Even if I'm a skinny white guy.

Mission activities that you plan in advance to be with strangers to the gospel are good (going to a regular hangout, being part of a food co-op, or whatever), but when you really love something and share it, then that itself will become actively missional. For me that is what basketball is right now, even though I embarrassed myself tonight.

No Sweat on Public Radio

2008-09-02T17:57:00.003-05:00

The New Hampshire Public Radio has just run a story about No Sweat Apparel. Check it out.

Cyd and I have been buying shoes ans shirts from them for a while. Quality, well made stuff. And responsible too.

Hum...Politics

2008-08-28T14:56:00.002-05:00

I'm very much looking forward to Obama's acceptance speech tonight. And seeing the reaction from various fronts.

It is good to be living into these moments.

And as a contrast, living into the Russo-Georgian 'war' also seema to be a moment in 21st century global politics. America might get its first Black President, and Russia shows the world that it is liable to invade a sovereign country on the basis of humanitarian compulsion (even though some think it is to protect its oil interests in the region) Oops, that sounds like some else.

"This is my blood" and the fruit of the earth

2008-07-22T15:07:00.004-05:00

"I think that any sermon on the salvation of the soul, on love of the poor, any so-called eucharistic ritual, any evangelical discourse that doesn't concern itself with saving the earth and its natural resources, is perverted. How can certain men and women repeat the words "This is my body, this is my blood" over the fruit of the earth with out worrying about how long that earth will remain fruitful? What are these men and women talking about?"- Luce Irigaray (1983)

Wow. This is great. Personal salvation, corporate worship, and social action must coordinate with preservation of creation or it all equals non-sense. I'm all about the Eucharist, but this really put it in a different frame. I think I really should become a farmer to understand the gospel (and why did Jesus pick fishermen anyway when he's always talking agriculture?)

Christian Politics?

2008-07-22T08:44:00.002-05:00

Some great posts on christian politics, or on not always as christian as we might think.

"Not Voting" as an Act of Christian Discernment- by Dave Fitch
Changing the Wind?- over at Jesus Manifesto
Advise Everyone...Endorse No One- by Shane Claiborne

Summertimes

2008-07-21T06:46:00.002-05:00

Posting these days gets more difficult, esp. with learning German and working on some articles. Although I have set up a facebook account, finally, and mostly living through that cyber-portal.

Christian Liturgy #1: reading notes

2008-01-31T06:28:00.000-06:00

(these are my reading notes for my Christian Liturgy Class)

In his essay, Kevin Irwin notes two types of liturgical theology: first, reflection on the meaning/significance of the liturgy, particularly the sacraments; second, using liturgy as a principle source for systematic theology. This dialogue is noted in the reciprocal relationship between lex orandi and lex credendi, where the prayers of the church are the material for theology, and theology can be a corrective to deficient prayer. To these two, current liturgical theology has added lex agendi, which is the performative experience of liturgy. These three must always work in critical relation.

Kilmartin, Christian Liturgy: I Theology and Practice, sets the stage with the scholastic definition: a sacrament is a sign instituted by Christ to confer the grace with it signifies. But this definition only makes sense in the context of salvation history, addressing humanity’s problem. Therefore a theology of the sacraments must address God’s activity in the world, human sinfulness, and most of all, be linked to the incarnation and life of Christ and his Church (6). This leads to the questions of divine initiative and faithful response of the Church. Against the neo-scholastic separation of created and uncreated grace, recent theology affirms the original grace of God as always orienting humanity toward God, through the sacraments and elsewhere. Also, against the neo-scholastic orientation of a passive reception of the liturgy, there has been a turn to active participation in the sacraments. Also, from the scholastic understanding that the sacraments happen within the church by qualified minister, a turn to sacraments as acts of the Church itself. Conclusding, in the liturgy, God addresses his people through Christ, who is still proclaiming his gospel to all people. In the liturgy, the assembly hears, receives, and responds in faith to the call of God.

The article, "How to Receive a Sacrament and Mean It," Karl Rahner deepens this perspective by initiating a Copernican revolution in sacramental understanding as being not a movement from the world to God and then a return to the world, but rather as the movement of the world to God. He begins by moving beyond old understading of grace, as Kilmartin explained it, and also by outline the liturgy of the world as salvation history, which always situates the narrower conception of liturgy. From here Rahner unfold that the efficacy of the sacraments is not added to the sign-character, but rather is found within themselves. Or rather, the causality is internal to the sacrament itself. This return to ancient tradition of the ‘real symbol’ allow Rahner to then speak of the Church as the ‘sacrament of salvation’ of the world (via Vatican 2), linked with his articulation of anonymous Christians. In this way, as the Church celebrates the sacraments, it is as a sign to the world, even without their participation, of the redemption of Christ.

Analysis:
Rahner returns to patristic source of sacraments as unity of sign and reality, but then applies the latter shifts of the corpus mysticum to this recovery (i.e. anonymous redeemed). It is only a half-turn to patristic source because it doesn’t identify church with Christ as his body as an ‘ontological symbolism’ but only a ‘real symbol’ linking Christ and world through the church as a sign.

Questions:
- Is ‘real symbol’ related to performative action, the perlocutionary aspect of language?
-How does Rahner’s view relate to the secularization thesis of Christianity, or an understanding of the ‘kenotic’ emptying of the Church into Culture?
-If the ancient tradition affirmed the combination of sign and reality, sign and cause, in the sacraments, they also affirmed there was no salvation outside of the Church. How is it that by recovering the formed, Rahner still denies the latter?

the jesus manifesto

2007-10-18T09:43:00.000-05:00

hello everyone,

so classes have started in my program at Marquette, which is partly why I'm not posting hardly at all. I love it! And church stuff is keeping me busy also.

But I'm very excited to announce that beginning next week I'll be contributing to the now collaborative blog at Jesus Manifesto.

Beyond Jesus: on the Atonement

2007-08-21T13:35:00.000-05:00

So I'm reading through a copy of a Scot McKnight's new "A Community Called Atonement." It really is a great book and I'll write a review of it soon. But something struck me that I wanted to comment on.

At the end of a chapter where Scot explores Jesus' own interpretation of his death, linking it to Passover, which is the Story of protection from God's wrath (via the blood of the lamb on the door posts) and God's liberation from Egypt. But Scot notes that the early church didn't feel compelled to stick only to this interpretation. That's Jesus' interpretation is not privileged. Paul links atonement as much to Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) as to the Passover; John's Gospel drops Kingdom language and talks of 'eternal life'. And Hebrews links Jesus to the Priesthood and the Temple. And the early church copied Jesus kingdom language and interpretation.

Scot just notes this, but I ask why? Why are they so free to interpret differently?

The answer given by much of critical scholarship is that Jesus never intended his death to be thought of as accomplishing anything between God and man, i.e. Jesus didn't have an atonement theory and the Church just make up whatever was useful for them at the time. But that is too easy.

Instead I would propose that the disciples had freedom to reinterpret, or go beyond Jesus, because the Hebrew Scripture (the OT) already had interpreted God's might acts in various way, all complimenting one another. After there is not one covenant, but three between Abraham, Moses, and David. God does and doesn't want a king, and the king turns into the coming Messiah. God gives the land after the exodus, and then takes it way in the exile. The tension the OT between God's revealed Law and the order of Wisdom (some think there is a shift from one to the other). The interpretation of the rise of David in 1 Kings and 1 Chronicles. There are some many strands of salvation in the OT that the early church gathered them all into Jesus, even if he only emphases the Passover.

And isn't that appropriate? Passover was the beginning for Israel; so too for the church. Jesus interpreted himself as at the beginning of something new, and therefore Passover is his theme, and he lets the disciples reinterpret the rest of the story accordingly. And we continue to this day.

CSA or 2007 Farm Bill: What to Do?

2007-07-26T12:41:00.000-05:00

So today our family picked up our fruit and veggie boxes from Angle Organics, our local CSA. And today, via Church World Service, I learned that the House is about to vote on the new Farm Bill (learn more about the farm bill and whose involved) and I through them I contacted by representative and let him know what I thought.

So I did two things: 1) supported local economics via the ALMIGHTY DOLLAR, and 2) tried to influence national/global economics via DEMOCRACY (or something close to it).

Which is better to do?

Or course the answer is both/and, right? Left, I mean wrong. The way I view the world right now is economically. Of course I view the world that way, they want me to. But what I mean is that I really dont' think that Big Government can do as much to change things (or at least i don't have enough time to MAKE Big G care about what I think, and TIME is MONEY afterall).

But how I spend my money is very much something that I can control and will have an impact. I could lobby Big G to help out the small farmer (and therefore my assistance and my values are mediated thru someone else), or I use my money and ensure that I help them and that I am living by my values.

They same is true for clothing. Let your dollars speak, and if necessary and convenient, speak through the Government.

What do you think? What did I miss?

2/3 World Economics and the Church

2007-07-25T14:11:00.000-05:00

Africa: Churches Reject New Trade Pacts With Europe --This is a very interesting article discussing African Trade, the UE, and WTO trade standard. Sure that might not sound very interesting, but it is significant that many churches in Africa are involved in what is going on concerning fair trade, domestic and foreign and global markets.

Oh that the Church in the US would get involved .

The Gift in Stranger than Fiction

2007-07-23T20:55:00.000-05:00

Please go check out Eric Austin Lee's The Gift in Stranger than Fiction, pt. 1 over at church and pomo. It's talking about that grat movie Stranger than Fiction, and then reading it through both Derrida's and Milbank's understanding of 'gift'. Today is Derrida's turn and Wednesday is Milbank's. This is good stuff.

Help! Global Church News Aggregator?

2007-07-19T13:17:00.000-05:00

I really want to figure out how to get all my news through the church instead of either Fox or NPR. Can anyone help me?

I was challenged recently that we should be listening to the global church to find out what is going on in the world instead of mega-news agencies who think only through the lenses of economics and state-craft.

Does anyone know how to gather together multiple news sources into one home page or something like that? I'm not smart enough to figure it out.

Where is the presence of Christ?

2007-07-10T06:02:00.000-05:00

I once preached on this, in relation to the story of the road to Emmaus. And I still want to say something close to it. That Christ is found everywhere his ministry is continued, everywhere his actions are imitated, everywhere his gestures are followed.

I certainly want to uphold a high sacramental position within the Church as the Body of Christ for the life of the world. Too often it seems people are all too ready to jump the ecclesial body and find Christ in the world, separate out the Church and the Kingdom, instead of distinguishing between them. This lead to a lot of misguided political activity.

And yet I do in a sense want to locate the body of Christ beyond the sacramental body (in the Eucharist) which makes the ecclesial body (as the Church). I want this because the story of the Road to Emmaus, with the disciples eyes being opened to see Christ is not merely a Eucharistic reflection, but a continuation of Jesus’ own hospitable table fellowship. And even the narratives of the Last Supper are not merely institution narratives which begin the Eucharistic practice, nor are is it an elaboration on Passover or the Day of Atonement, but they are continuations of Jesus’ revolutionary table fellowship, a radical hospitality toward the loss, excluded, and marginalized. And this table fellowship becomes both the test of discipleship in Matthew 25 (the Sheep and the Goats) as well as the test of the presence of Christ. In Matthew 25 it is not only a question of who are the true disciples (those that mimic and extend Jesus’ table fellowship and hospitality through the giving of food, drink, clothing, and time), but in this process of being like Jesus we discern the presence of Jesus.

But again, I don’t want to disconnect this discernment of Christ in the world from the Eucharistic discernment of Christ in the Sacrament. Indeed to do so is to loss the resources of both discerning Christ and power to be like Christ. Therefore to know Christ’s body (in the world) one must first be Christ Body (in the Church).

'Christian' is not an adjective!

2007-05-05T13:32:00.000-05:00

Sure, we might have ‘christian’ music, ‘christian’ books, ‘christian’ movies, ‘christian’ politics, etc, etc. But ‘christian’ is not a means of modifying of something we already have. When we think this way we

“make ‘Christian’ an adjective, an epithet, a style—when what God offers his people is particular action—verbs—through which they can become and distinctive nouns—people, disciples, witnesses.” (13)

God gives us particular Verbs that transform us into particular Nouns. Now I don’t want to get too grammatical, but this is very important. Too often we think we can take this type of lifestyle, and that kind of activity, mix it up with our own personal preferences, and then add a little bit of ‘christian’ to it and feel good that our lives are conforming to the Gospel. We assemble ‘nouns’ and ‘verbs’ of our own liking, and then add the ‘christian’ adjective.

But this is just not how it works. The Gospel is not an adjective that modifies our groups of nouns and verbs, our possessions and actions. Rather, the Gospel comes as a set of Verbs (of actions, an entire life with Christ, care for the outcast, love for one another) which form us into a set of Nouns (children of God, the body of Christ, a temple of the Holy Spirit). The Gospel is the connection of these Nouns and Verbs, of offering grace and peace, a new reality, a new community, not just the modification of an old reality.

‘Christian’ is not an adjective. If it is then we have lost ourselves.

These thoughts brought to you by The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, “The Gift of the Church, and the Gifts God Gives to It.”

Where Have I been? Where is Geoff going?

2007-04-25T10:56:00.000-05:00

O' man. Where have I been? It has been over a month since I last posted. Where has the time gone. Easter pretty much took a bunch of my time, and then I was in Philly last week for the Emergent Theological Conversation with Caputo and Kearney (which was great!). I was also organizing the pre-conference readings for churchandpomo.org, which I think turned out pretty good. I posted on the conference here.

But where am I going?
1) Well here is the very exciting new. First off I was accepted to the Summer Seminary series on Liturgical Identities: Global, Nation, Ecclesial at Calvin College with Steven Long and Michael Budde.

2) But even more excitingly, I was accepted to the doctoral program in Theology at Marquette University in Milwaukee. This is huge blessing from God and opportunity for me. I have been in a process of discernment for a couple of years about whether or not I should pursue a Ph.d, and the doors always seemed ambiguously open and closed, not clearly shut or open. But then during Lent, appropriately, it really felt that the door was closing. Steve Long, who I really want to study with, took a job away from Garret (one of two schools I applied to), and then I got rejected from Garrett (ouch! I thought for sure I would get it). But then I got accepted to Marquette without funding (hello, who wants to pay $50,000 to go back to school). So that was like as bad as getting rejected too. But then, on Palm Sunday I got a call from the director of graduate studies telling me that some funding had become available. This guy then proceeded to offer me a full ride + TA (teaching assistant) living stipend. And on top of that, Steve Long took a job at Marquette and will most likely be my advisor.

So what does that means? Well I'm going to continue on pastoring at Life on the Vine, but I will be able to quite my part-time job at Starbucks. Hopefully my blogging won't suffer too much, but you all will probably get a bunch of my reading notes.

anyway, that's all for now.

Oh Man! I wanted to be Gen X

2007-03-14T16:28:00.000-05:00

...but now I find out that I'm really part of Generation Y. Yes, douglas coupland has nothing on me. I was reading this great article about consumerism and the return of the 'me generation' and it said that Gen Y is from 1977-97. I was born in '78, just made the cut off.

anyway, the article is very good, and it resonated with me a bit. But b/c I have older siblings, does that mean I'm more X than Y. but like being the oldest of the Yers instead of the youngest of the Xers. So I dub myself leader of Generation Y (provisionally). But Gen Y is really a selfish bit a techno-individualist, the return of the "me" generation, brainwashed by product placement cartoons and video games.

So I'll divest my title and just become a good generation x again. they care about the world and stuff.

But maybe... I just don't know.

what generation are you? do you fit?

covered heads-bare legs: its all good for business

2007-03-07T15:21:00.000-06:00

Cute Veil! Where'd You Get It?
by Endy M. Bayuni

How Fashion takes advantage on dispute between conservatives and liberals.

"So while the conservatives and liberals are slugging it out to try to impose their values on the rest of society, most Indonesian girls, like their peers around the world, just want to have fun. The question of whether or not to cover their heads for them is really a matter of choice, and it is theirs alone to decide. The fashion industry will only gladly comply and serve their needs either way."

peace in the middle east? no sweat, and organic

2007-03-01T13:57:00.000-06:00

I won't go into all the stuff about the global economy and sweatshops and what not. If you care about where your clothes are many, or care about innovative economic possibilities, then check out these shirts made in Palestinian and Israeli collaboration. You can get the lowdown here, and watch the youtube below.

Recent New: The 'Value' of Nation Elections

2007-02-15T19:09:00.000-06:00

(The 'value' is about $100 million per campaign...but that's getting ahead of myself)

Here are some recent news stories that relate to my recent questioning of elections.

The first two relate to the funding of the candidates (While we may vote for the presented candidates, who decides which candidates are presented? Those with Money of course!)

Death Knell May Be Near for Public Election Funds (01-23-07)
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRIC
The public financing system has failed to keep pace with the torrents of money flowing toward the presidential elections.
Democrats Chasing Big Money (02-15-07)
by Chris Cillizza
Every serious candidate is spending hours each day courting the whales who can write big check.

This next piece explores the possibility of region politics superseding national politics (as in secession from), with my home state of California at the center.

California Split (02-10-07)
by GAR ALPEROVITZ
"Somthing interesting is happening in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that no nation — not even the United States — can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale..."

And lastly, what are the prospects of a participatory politics (enabled by blogging)? It is hard
to tell, but Edwards is paving the way.

Edwards Learns Campaign Blogs Can Cut 2 Ways (02-08-07)
By JOHN M. BRODER
tag line: Candidates could face problems as they try to integrate online political discourse into traditional campaigning.
A Blogger for Edwards Resigns After Complaints (02-13-07)

So while the price tag of running a successful campaign is very steep ($100 mil.),
is it really worth it?

Dictatorship of the Bourgeois: Universal Sufferage and Secret Balloting

2007-02-09T15:24:00.000-06:00

(WARNING: while seeming to be a theoretical post, this is important, ending with an earnest question.)

If not through a violent coup de taut, how do dictators come to power?
Voting. Hitler!

How do seemingly mediocre or blatantly partisan politicians come to power?
Voting. Louis Bonaparte! (Although he probably didn’t come to mind).

While initially seen as the surest means of a fair and equal democracy, has voting turned against (or been turned against) the masses? Has the process of voting becomes a veil of something more sinister (or perhaps a mere banality)?

Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani, agreeing with Marx, says Yes.

Voting…
Universal suffrage is, of course, the “system wherein people of all classes participate in the elections” (Transcritique, 151). Now certainly this seems like a great idea because universal suffrage opens the door for every single person to have a stake in her/his future through participation in national politics (i.e. through choosing a representative to hold forth their views). Along with this, the mechanism of secret ballots secures the voter from intimidation and retribution allowing the voter to voter her mind without fearing the consequence. In fact, it is universal suffrage and the secret ballot that distinguished what Marx calls ‘bourgeois parliament’ from the previous representative systems in feudal and monarchist governments.

But as Karatani says, “But this is not all—at the same time, and inversely, in this system, all individuals are, for the first time, separated in principle from all class relations and relations of production…Hiding who votes who for from, secret voting liberates people from their relations; at the same time, however, it erases the traces of their relations” (151, italics added for emphasis). The secret ballot also short circuits responsibility of the elected (representatives) from the electors (represented) such that the elected can think and behave as if everyone (i.e. no one) elected them (and is this not true of Bush recently).

Also this mechanism (voting in general) effectively erases class relations and relations of domination by “temporarily ‘reducing’ people into ‘free and equal individuals’…In elections, the freedom of individuals is guaranteed, but this exists only at the moment that the hierarchical relations in the real relations of production are suspended” (152). So in a sense, the freedom and equality promised by democracy is only actualized when the hierarchy and inequality of their daily relationships are suspended/bracketed. In other words democracy only comes into existence during elections and ends after elections (again b/c the representatives are severed from the electors and keep company with the bureaucrats). We are free and equal only one day a year, the day we pretend that there are no other relationships of importance! Oh, the wonderful fiction!

Karatani's conclusion is that universal suffrage and elections are “an elaborate ritual to give a public consensus to what has already been determined by the state apparati (military and bureaucracy)” (152).

…On the State
Now I don’t bring this all up to merely say that voting is irrelevant and unnecessary (although at times I think that), but to point out that elections are oriented toward the State, i.e. State-Power. But this is not the only arena of power.

Civil Society is an equal site of power and resistance. A possible objection to Karatani is that people all over the world have been denied the right to vote and have fought in order to vote (especially African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement). But I would point out that radical movements precisely began in the civil arena, hence the name “Civil Rights”, and typically end with reception of the vote. But this is generally more an uneasy truce than a true victory. The Civil Rights Movement never did effectively take over the Democratic Party, and African Americans have yet to by represented in relations to their population. Being given the ‘right to vote’ in many cases is the right to be distracted from doing what you were doing (changing concrete, civil society) and offered the chance to begin something else (the improbable task of changing State politics).

So, in short, might not the Church be wiser abstaining from the mechanism (voting) by which the “dictatorship of the bourgeois” functions (a mechanism to which both the religious right and left cling), and instead creatively partner with the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (i.e. the exploited/resisting side of globalization) via means of civil actions and innovative protests, through on the ground associations?

lindbeck after wittgenstein?

2007-02-05T12:54:00.000-06:00

eric lee has posted a very thoughtful engagement around george lindbeck's use of wittgenstein. Hopefully we will be able to discuss the political repercussions.

Health is not Profitable.

2007-02-05T10:57:00.000-06:00

While being a very sad indicator of the current state of our health system, the below article by the NY Times reveals the symptom (the hidden truth) of our economy. What is best for the individual, environmental, social, and political health of our community is not what is best for the economy. The common good, which requires forethought and planning, is not nearly as profitable as crisis and carelessness.

What’s a Pound of Prevention Really Worth?
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Preventive medicine just doesn’t pay in the current American medical system.

Lectio divina vs. gramatico historica: the scripture parallax

2007-01-30T10:43:00.000-06:00

A similar thing happened to me in seminary. It made me stop reading my bible. When I’m in a worship service, I only listen to scripture. I never read it in my own Bible. Now it has happened again to my wife.

She has been reading scripture as a catalyst for prayer and devotion, moving between word and prayer, the Book and her Life. But recently she became a ministerial study program that is teaching her the RIGHT way to read scripture: hermeneutics, exegesis, historical method, etc. We were talking yesterday and she told me that once she started LEARNING how to read the Bible that it no longer functioned as a base for prayer, but instead has died in her hand. The Spirit had left the Word. That is exactly what she said!

Why is it that when someone learns the historical-grammatical method that the Bible becomes less a means of devotion and more a task to be mastered?

There is a subtle lure about learning how to properly read the Bible. It is the ever-present shift from communing with God to learning about God; from listening/talking with God to overhearing someone else’s conversation; from conversation to monologue.

This is the parallax of Scripture: at one moment it is the means of communion with God, listening to the Spirit’s whispers, integrating life and text, present and past (and future); while in another moment it is document to researched and argued over, to be investigated and analyzed. The same object can lead us on the paths of God, even while it functions only as a map; in it sings the songs of salvation even while it only notes the score; it overflows with the Spirit even as it dries up as a dead Letter.

The paradox of Scripture: Divine Prayer is always in need of guidance; Exegesis is always in need of Life. The danger is there, but it can’t be resolved. Prayer and Theology must walk with one another.

Stats to Go Along with the State of the Union

2007-01-29T10:49:00.000-06:00

Courtesy of our friends (via an email I received) at the Campaign for America's future here are few facts and figures to put the President's speech in context:

ON INCOMES:

--Median household income in 2000: $47,599
--Median household income in 2005: $46,326
(US Census Bureau, Table H-8. Median Household Income by State: 1984 to 2005)

--Salary of a full-time minimum wage employee without vacation: $10,712
--Average time for top CEOs to earn that sum: 2.06 hours
(Forbes Magazine. "What the Boss Makes." April 20, 2006)

--Federal minimum wage in 2000: $5.15/hr
--Federal minimum wage in 2006: $5.15/hr
--Loss in purchasing power, full time worker annually: $1,562

ON ENERGY PRICES:

--Average price of home heating oil on Jan. 3, 2000: $1.15 per gallon
--Average price of home heating oil on Jan. 1, 2007: $2.42 per gallon
(U.S. Energy Information Admin. Jan. 4, 2007)

--Average price of gasoline on Jan. 3, 2000: $1.31 per gallon
--Average price of gasoline on Jan. 1, 2007: $2.38 per gallon
(U.S. Energy Information Admin. Jan. 5, 2007)

--Exxon Mobil profits in 2000: $7.9 billion
--Exxon Mobil profits in 2006: $36.1 billion
(CNNMoney.com, accessed Jan. 19, 2007)

ON CLIMATE CHANGE:

--Year Bush said Kyoto Protocol emission targets were “not based upon science”: 2000
--Decrease in NASA budget for Earth observation since 2000: 30 percent
--Year with highest average U.S. temperature ever recorded: 2006
(The White House, June 11, 2001; New York Times, Jan. 21, 2006; National Climate Data Center. U.S. Dept. of Commerce. Jan. 9, 2007)

ON EDUCATION:

--Average cost of a year at a public four-year college in 2000: $9,958
--Average cost of a year at a public four-year college in 2006: $12,796
(Costs include tuition, fees, room & board. MSN Money 2000/Associated Press. Jan. 14, 2005. College Board. Trends in College Pricing 2007)

ON RETIREMENT SECURITY:

--Workers without retirement plans at work in the private sector 2006: 80 percent
--Baby boom Americans approaching retirement: 76 million
(Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 2006; The Seattle Times. Jan. 22, 2005)

ON HEALTH CARE COSTS:

--Americans without health insurance, 2000: 38.2 million
--Americans without health insurance, 2005: 46.6 million
(US Census Bureau, Sept. 2001; US Census Bureau, Aug. 2006)

--Average monthly worker contribution for family coverage in 2000: $135
--Average monthly worker contribution for family coverage in 2006: $248
--Personal bankruptcies due to medical bills: 55 percent
(The Kaiser Family Foundation, Sept. 26, 2006; Health Affairs Health Policy Journal, Feb. 2, 2005)

ON THE IRAQ WAR:

--Number of US troops killed in Iraq prior to “Mission Accomplished” speech in 2003: 139
--Number of US troops killed in Iraq as of Jan. 22, 2007: 3,056
--Number of Iraqi civilians killed in 2006, according to the United Nations: 34,452
(iCasualties.org, Jan. 22, 2007; U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, Jan. 16, 2006)

--Number of US troops wounded in Iraq prior to “Mission Accomplished” speech in 2003: 542
--Number of US troops wounded in Iraq as of January 10, 2007: 22,834
(iCasualties.org. Jan. 10, 2007)

--Total US military expenditures (including in Iraq and Afghanistan) in 2006: $522 billion
--Total military expenditures of the 10 next top spenders combined: $386 billion
(Includes China, Russia, the UK, Japan, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Italy, and Australia. Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Feb. 16, 2006.)

--U.S. Federal Discretionary Budget spent on Military not including Iraq, in 2006: 48.7 percent
--Amount spent on Education: 6.7 percent
(White House Office of Management and Budget, Feb. 6, 2006) ON DEBTS AND DEFICITS:

--Monthly U.S. Trade Deficit in October 2000: $33.8 billion
--Monthly U.S. Trade Deficit in October 2006: $58.9 billion
(U.S. Census Bureau Foreign Trade Statistics. Jan. 10, 2007)

--U.S. Current Account Deficit, FY 2000: $435.4 billion
--U.S. Current Account Deficit, FY 2006: $900 billion
(Economic Policy Institute. March 14, 2001; Economic Policy Institute. March 14, 2006)

--Loss of value of U.S. dollar relative to the Euro, Jan. 24, 2000 to Jan. 23, 2006: 23 percent
(X-rate.com, accessed Jan. 23, 2006)

--US Budget Deficit in FY 2000: $230 billion surplus
--US Budget Deficit in FY 2006: $423 billion deficit
(White House Office of Management and Budget. Budget of the United States Government, Historical Tables, Fiscal Year 2007; White House Office of Management and Budget. Table S-1. 2006 budget totals)

--US National Debt in FY 2000: $5.7 trillion
--US National Debt in FY 2006: $8.5 trillion
(Bureau of the Public Debt, Jan. 16, 2007)

Welcoming Christ in the Migrant

2007-01-24T12:23:00.000-06:00

"I Was A Stranger And You Welcomed Me." (Matt 25:35)

A very thoughtful (thought provoking) YouTube film. I've never posted a YouTube before but i thought this was worth it. Thanks to Catholic Joy for the heads up.

I got a new computer...

2007-01-23T16:45:00.000-06:00

...well actually it is an old computer, but it is new to me. I can't tell you how excited I am. I've now officially made the switch to MAC. Not by choice. My old laptop's screen went out and there was an old mac for church use that wasn't being used. One of our congregants (thanks Steve Wilson) works at a MACstore and updated everything.

so i'm not sure if now I'm going to be super productive b/c of all the cool features, or if i'm just going to fool around and waste all my time. we'll see.

more substantial post will be coming shortly...

Incarnational vs Incorporational.

2007-01-15T12:28:00.000-06:00

In the wake of Christmas time and Advent, when God becomes a human in Jesus Christ, I want to consider how the ‘person’ of Christ is different than the ‘person’ of Corporations? There has been adequate critique of the Church organizing like a business corporation, but what about the Church living in, but not of, multinational corporations?

I submit that unless the emerging/missional/organic church of progressive evangelicals moves beyond a critique of corporate influences on ecclesial life and a superficial critique of consumerism (as in “Do buy things you do need!”), to a robust practice of investing in local cooperatives, then we will fail in our attempts to be Incarnational, and remain in the grips of the Incorporational.

Wendell Berry makes the interesting observation that “the folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as “a person.” This point is often overlooked in critiques of Capitalism. Usually people make a big deal about the exploitation of workers by those who own the means of production, or there is talk about the ‘fetishism’ of money, how we go around chancing more and more of it, even though it really isn’t anything. But the fiction that a corporation is legally a ‘person’, with rights, aims, and purposes, really begins the step beyond outright oppression and exploitation (say in agragian and feudal societies), to the more insidiou, once removed, form of exploitation otherwise known as the ‘free market.’

Berry goes on: “A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance...It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.”

‘Incorporation’ literally means ‘to make into one body’ which is to gather many different human persons into one giant uberperson (whose goal is to make more money). This uberperson remains even if its founders all die off. The modern corporation is immortal, living beyond all it mortal creators (although of course it can be killed by an economic wound).

But this immortality is precisely the problem. Corporations don’t fear natural deaths, they have no being-towards-death. Berry continues: “The limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because corporations are not a person. As such, unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetimes of children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, or change of heart. It cannot humble itself.”

And this is exactly where we see the antithesis in Christ, “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross” (Phil 2:6-8). In the Incarnation we see God become man, so that he could die, even a death reserved for the most lowly. A corporation could never sacrifice itself. Its whole purpose is to return back more money to its investors. Anything else is a failure. This ultimately is where the agency of the Corporation exceeds the agency of its individual investors, managers, and executives. Anyone who in their old age finds a humane conscience is asked to leave, to start a charitable foundation, or carry on their philanthropic work somewhere else on their own time.

But those who gathered together in the Incarnation do not try to escape death, but know they must die for the sake of the world. Those gathered together in a Corporation attempt to escape death, storing up riches on earth and kingdoms to rule.

Now of course I’m not advocating that we all quit our corporate jobs and do something else (although that would be good), but rather that we, as much as possible, support alternative ways of grouping people together, which are otherwise known as cooperatives or co-ops. Cooperatives support an alternative to the ‘free market’ by allowing producers and consumer to share the risks and opportunities of generating products. One way it works is like this. My family becomes a ‘member’ of my local CSA, Angle Organics, at the beginning of the year. This guarantees delivers of 20 boxes of organic vegetable (from June to October). The benefit to me is that I get a bunch of great food, grown in a manner that I know is responsible to the Earth (God’s Creation) and fair to its employees (made in God’s image). The benefit to the farm is they get, in advance, the cash necessary to produce the crops of the next year. In this way I assume the risk of a bad crop along with the farm. If the crop is bad, my boxes will not be full. If it is good, they will overflow. This keeps my money, and the farmer's money, from getting tangled up in the financial institutions of multination corporations. Everything stays local; and money is not thrown into a pile of ever increasing money. Along the same lines, there are clothing and food cooperatives, housing and energy, and even healthcare cooperatives, whose goal is not to sells their moral allegiance to a pile of cash, but instead to share in the benefits and dangers of securing the things they need.

So again, I submit that the emerging/missional/organic church of progressive evangelicals mmust move beyond a critique of corporate influences on ecclesial life, to a robust practice of stepping outside of the circulation of money between multinational corporations and instead begin investing in local cooperatives. Only then we will succeed in escaping the grip of the Corporation.

Best Contemporary Theology Meme

2007-01-12T11:54:00.000-06:00

Cynthia Neilsen tagged me to compile a list of what I believe to be the most important and substantial theological works published in the last 25 years (1981-2006). The originator of the meme desires that the focus of our selection be theology (not biblical exegesis, historical studies etc., unless these are of special theological interest!).

John D. Zizioulas: Being as Communion
George A. Lindbeck: The Nature of Doctrine
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory

Pretty much to above three have formed me significantly. But the one that has really pulled things together for is...

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence.

This book brings together the critique of ontotheology, linquistics, ritual studies, Moltmann, Girard, Trinitarian Theology, and many others. It is outstanding.

Lacan and the Political

2007-01-09T16:17:00.000-06:00

I just received Lacan and the Political. I am very excited, and it better be worth it b/c $35 is alot to spend on such a small book. Arrrgh that Routledge!

But I can't get to it yet. Must practise self-control and actual finish digesting Transcritique before gorging myself on another book.

Agrarian Economics and Transcritique

2007-01-08T13:29:00.000-06:00

I just finish a great book, and now I'm reading one that is blowing my mind.

The book that I recently finished is Kojin Karatani's Transcritique: on Kant and Marx. There is just too much to go into here. In fact I will probably spend much of the next month posting about it. His understand of the interrelation between the trinity of Capital, Nation, and State true open up helpful ways of understand globalization and individual states, as well as possible resistance to exploitative capitalism. Very philosophical. A tough read.

The one I'm currently reading is Wendell Berry's Art of the Common Place: The Agrarian Essays. It is honestly the most refreshing commentary on American life I have ever read. It is very accessible, written in a journalistic style rather than a academic one. He just pulls all these threads together. If you are at all concerned about ecological issues, the local economy, body and the earth, or if you read (or want to read Crunchy Cons, which is quite good also).

Thankfully, most of Berry's essays you can find online (I love the internet). Here are some that I found and that I strongly recommend:

The Idea of a Local Economy (written a couple of years ago... great critique of our economy)
Feminism, the Body, and the Machine (a response to a hostile reaction created by his essay in Harpers, the response is better than the initial essay)
The Body and The Earth (p. 29 of the pdf...long but interesting.
Health is Membership

off the grid: no sweatshop clothing

2006-12-27T19:33:00.000-06:00

So it's just after Christmas time and we have all spent too much money on things we probably didn't need. I of course bought some books (which are a necessity) and a book stand.

My prized purchase is something I want to share with you. Perhaps you have hear of Blackspot sneakers adbusters (an information age social activists movement). Well I heard about it a while ago, but I didn't need new sneakers. And my momma said, "if you don't need it before you saw it, then you don't need it."

But this year I was in the market for new sneakers and I thought, "hey what about those adbuster shoes?" But then I found out they are 60 bucks and I thought, "no way!! that's like more than half my book money." But I continued to shop around and I found No Sweat Apperal (as in 'no sweatshop') with these sweet shoes. I just got them in the mail and they are great. Very comfortable.

Also, for other off the exploitation grip see:
the working world
new american dream
justice clothing

Advent Explorations over at C&P

2006-12-22T14:40:00.000-06:00

I've recently been posting some thoughts on Advent and Political Theory over at C&P (churchandpomo.org)...

Emancipation and Advent: The Future of Freedom
Revolution and Advent: Christ Transforming Culture

...chech them out.

Personal Statement for Ph.D apps

2006-12-14T15:11:00.000-06:00

Over the last couple of weeks I've been forced to write a 'personal statement' for Ph.D applications. Now while this might seem a bit pretentious, I thought I would post it because it really is the best statement of where I am at and what I intend to continue thinking about, whether or not it is in relation to an advanced degree.

So here is most of the statement that I'm submitting with my application. Let me know what you think and what questions you have. But don't steal my project!!

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How might we return the Book of Common Prayer to ministers as a revolutionary manual, rather than merely as a guide to personal prayer or corporate worship? Within the ................................ concentration of the ........................ program, I plan to answer this question by researching the intersection of Liturgy and Politics, with the hopes of reclaiming the subversive power of Christian liturgy for the Western Church after Christendom.

My interest in corporate worship has transitioned from an understanding of personal piety, to corporate spiritual formation, to the advent of an alternative community. These transitions roughly fit the trajectory of my intellectual and theological development. Beginning from my undergraduate studies in philosophy, and being influenced by Reformed Theology, I primarily understood corporate worship as a form of personal piety. During my preparation for pastoral ministry in graduate school, being influenced by post-liberal theology, I then shifted to an understanding of worship as corporate spiritual formation, or the place of forming a distinctive Christian identity. Finally, throughout my pastoral ministry, and in relation to the movement known as Radical Orthodoxy, I began to conceive of corporate worship as the definitive space for creating an alternative political community. During my three years as an associate pastor I have increasingly noted the importance, and yet difficulty, of forming an alternative community in the midst of American consumerism and individualism, as well as the capitulation of the Religious Right to conservative politics. All of this has led to my interest in the relation between liturgy and politics, culminating in a desire for sustained research in both sacramental and liturgical theology, as well as political philosophy focusing on the emergence of American Pragmatist political theory, exemplified by Jeffrey Stout, and post-Marxist appropriations of Christianity, represented by Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou. In relation to the above, as well as my vocational commitment to developing future church leaders, both pastorally in the church and academically as a seminary professor, I am seeking an advanced degree at .............................

My specific research proposes to investigate the intersection between Liturgy and Politics. Beyond merely stating that there is a connection between liturgy and politics, this research will show how liturgy constitutes the Church as the political Body of Christ, and how this Body interacts with the political, social, and economic bodies found in our global situation. The liturgical side of this project will examine the “subject” as it is produced through sacramental practices. It will draw particularly on the resources of Jacques Lacan, whose articulation of Freudian psychoanalysis can be understood as an anti-sacramental philosophy (mirroring an authentic sacramental theology), and for that reason offering insights into the inter-subjective, corporeal, and symbolic nature of liturgical practices. Building from this, the possibilities of a political subjectivity will be explored as a primary site of resistance to the current abuses of globalization. This research will suggest the liturgical resources of the worshipping Church as the culmination of recent political projects seeking to reintroducing the themes of Kantian ‘cosmopolitanism’ and Hegelian ‘recognition.’

This research will build from my past education and current activities. In addition to receiving a B.A. in Philosophy concentrating on Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and a Masters of Divinity, I am working with James K. A. Smith on a project relating postmodern philosophy to church practice in the works of John Caputo, Merold Westphal, Bruce Bensen, Graham Ward, and Karl Raschke. I am also organizing a conference concerning Political Theology at Northern Seminary. I have written an essay on Augustine’s Eucharistic theology in relation to the political philosophy of Antonio Negri under the supervision of Bruce Fields, and a paper integrating the New Perspective on Paul with post-Marxian revolutionary politics. In addition to this, I have developed a personal reading program covering the post-Marxist appropriation of Christianity in Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizkei, the Italian political philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, and American Pragmatists such at Jeffery Stout, Hilary Putnam, and Robert Brandom, as well as the liturgical theologies of Gordon Laythrop (Lutheran) and Lious-Marie Chauvet (Catholic). Through all of this I have prepared myself to extensively research both political and liturgical theology.

Academically, this research will contribute a Lacanian reading to sacramental theology which will both enrich sacramental theology as well as an understanding of Lacan as an (anti)sacramental philosopher. In addition, this research will add to the nascent appropriation of Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou as resources for political theology. Practically, it will help ministers see how the planning and execution of corporate worship does not merely prepare or inform our political awareness (although it certainly should), but is itself a political act, producing a specifically Christian political subjectivity through the liturgical elements of public worship.

It is my conviction that within the secular processes, economic and political, of globalization and it fundamentalist (religious and/or ethnic) backlash, the Church must affirm again the politically constitutive nature of its public worship. Only when ministers see how the planning and execution of corporate worship does not merely prepare or inform our political awareness, but is itself a political act, producing a specifically Christian political subjectivity, will it again be able to witness to and embody the peace and reconciliation of the Gospel in Christ.

The GRE is finished!!!!

2006-12-06T08:26:00.000-06:00

Where have I been?

I've been locked in mortal combat with an evil companion know as the GRE. The ferious encounter is over, and now I am nursing my wounds.

Someday so I will raise up again, stricking the keyboard with brilliant posts.

Rich Whitney for Govenor

2006-11-01T11:14:00.000-06:00

This is the first time in my life where I have been following an election season, and might even vote. Actually I was going to not vote even thought I was voting b/c I'm voting for the Green Party here in Illinios (esp. Rich Whitney for Govenor).

But now it seems that Whitney is gaining support and that my vote might be much more of a statement in the elections b/c now he has 16% (click on Gubernetorial Races and hit IL) of possible votes in the election, which is very surprising. I was hoping to be irrelevant.

I'm voting for the Green Party because I'm convinced that if Christians really are meant to engage in national politics, then the most important contribution would be to form a viable Third Part (either with a platform or coalition of independent candidates).

now of course the Green Party is not inline with my view of sexual ethics, but their economic policy (esp. education) is up my alley. Some say that the Green Party is what the Republican used to stand for before neo-conservatives took over along with Big Business. Most of Green Party's 10 Values I can get behind, which is more than I think of either repubicans or democrats. And I think that if jim wallis really followed his reasoning, he would not be pro-Democrat, but would be Green or independent.

Toward World Republic: Beyond Capital-Nation-State

2006-10-31T12:51:00.000-06:00

Today I'm going to see Kojin Karatani at the university of chicago. he's an anarchist, or an 'associationist' these days, talking about "Toward World Republic: Beyond Capital-Nation-State". I've been meaning to buy his Transcritique: On Kant and Marx for quite awhile, so maybe now I will.

Zizek, in Parallax View, draws heavily from Karatani, and I'm interested in reading a Japanese Marxist who is offering a theoretic project comprible to Negri's Multitude. Basically I'm drawn to this stuff as one who is interested in alternative to global capitalism as well as how the Church might be part of this alternative.

Meat Labels Hope to Lure the Sensitive Carnivore

2006-10-28T10:25:00.000-05:00

This is a very interesting and hopeful article from the NYTimes: Meat Labels Hope to Lure the Sensitive Carnivore .

It talks about the trend toward labelling products "organic," "free-range," "animal compassionate," and "certified humane" in order to attract the more conscientious consumer.

The article notes two different consumers toward whom these labels might be appealing: 1) either the animal lovers who are worried about the treatment of chickens, cows, pigs, etc, and 2) those with a fine taste for food (free range chicken tastes better than factory farm chicken who never run around or see day light).

Now my wife and I are not well off, spending large amouts of money on organic food because it tastes so much better, nor are we out of control animal lovers (we both each meat whenever we can afford it). But we do spend extra amount on organic foods because not beause of taste, or activism, but because of Health.

Not only are organic, free range foods humane and tasty, but they are much more health for you: they don't have growth hormones, pesticides, pumped into them, and the meat has been feed what God intended for them to eat rather than artifical sources of nutrients. The factory farms are produce much lower quality foods which is contributing to Americas much lower health, and much higher cancer rate.

So I think it is interesting that the NYTimes would ignore this Health angle to the story, when for many it is their over-riding conviction on the matter, more than animal activism or food snobbery.

"If the Lord is Risen, why can't we see Him?"

2006-10-23T13:12:00.000-05:00

I just posted an engagement with Pete Rollin's How (Not) to Speak of God.

After an appreciative summary of Pete's argument in Part One of How (Not) to Speak of God, I offer an immanent critique (a critique internal to his presuppositions) of his project. After this I outline what I see as a continuation of his project be other means, via sacramental theology, attempting to answer the question implicit in the story of the Road to Emmaus, “If the Lord is Risen, why can’t we see Him?”

Please check it out and join the discussion here.

"You look like Lenin," I was told

2006-10-15T15:20:00.000-05:00

So, about 2 minutes ago, I'm sitting in Panera, about to work on a little essay I'm writing for churchandpomo.org. A man approaches me and asks me if I can help him with his computer. It keeps freezing on me. After trying for a bit to help him (which I can't because all I know how to do on computers is create Word documents and surf the web), I give up.

"You know way I asked you to help?" said the older gentleman. "Because I'm young and you figured young people know all about computers," I replied with a smile. "No! Because you reminded me a Lenin. You know I'm from Russia. You know who Lenin is, Yes? Do you know history? You look like Lenin when he was a student, your chin. He was a genius!" And with that he let me go.

Should I ponder the deeper significance of this? Or chalk it up to chance?

Where Have I Been?

2006-10-14T15:23:00.000-05:00

Yikes! it has been an entire month and I haven't posted anything.

Well, I've studying for the GRE which is stressing me out. and our church, life on the vine, has been entering into a process of finding another pastor (actually two pastors), so while this is great for our church, it has taken a bunch of time and thought, which means less time for posting.

and lastly, i've been hanging out at churchandpomo.org. we're engaging pete rollin's book, how (not) to speak of god. it has so far been a very creative and stimulating conversation.

Badiou: Event, Truth, Subject

2006-09-15T16:55:00.000-05:00

Given my continuing interesting in Badiou and his relevance to political and theological inquiry, here is an extended summary of his understanding of the event, truth, and subjectivity,. Below is part of a larger project contrasting recent pragmatist understandings of 'social objectivity' with Badiou's 'political subjectivity'. But below is just the parts concerning Badiou on truth and subjectivity.

(If it feels like you jumped into the middle of something, it is b/c you did....
and this is a first draft)

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Knowledge/Encyclopeadia

judgements
“We shall posit that discernment is founded upon the capacity to judge (to speak of properties), and classification is founded upon the capacity to link judgments together (to speak of parts). Knowledge is realized as an encyclopaedia. An encyclopaedia must be understood here as a summation of judgements under a common determinant” (Being and Event, 328). “The encyclopaedia contains a classification of parts of the situation which group together terms having this or that explicit property” (B&E, 329). Or as we said before, all that falls within a specific norm of objectivity is considered its ‘knowledge’.

What we can see here is the deployment of language games as designators of knowledge which circumscribe ‘existence.’ What Badiou describes as the ‘encyclopaedia of knowledge’ consists of all the terms, properties, objects, and rules which have been allowed, created, or otherwise found(ed) by a language game. In this framework, only what can be made explicit by a well formed language is granted existence, and “whatever is not distinguished by a well-made language is not” (B&E 283).

To speak of ‘judging’ and ‘judgment,’ and the ideas of a well-made language should trigger Stout’s conception of ‘objectivity’ and the operations of making everything explicit. Badiou is not criticizing this conception, knowing that it is usefully deployed in understanding different situation and contexts. However, Badiou seeks to understand how these situations can change, and change drastically, especially when the resources within a situation cannot make everything explicit.

Events and Truths

So, how might something new come about? How can a new word/idea/thought be spoken? How are these new things spoken, breaking with the existing ‘knowledge’ and established ‘understanding’ of the world? We can become trapped in our language games, but not necessarily.

the margins of knowledge
This extended quote from Theoretical Writings (TW) will clarify:

“I call ‘encyclopedia’ the general system of predicative knowledge internal to a situation: i.e. what everyone knows about politics, sexual difference, culture, art, technology, etc. [But] there are certain things, statements, configurations or discursive fragments whose valence is not decidable in terms of the encyclopedia. Their valence is uncertain, floating, anonymous: they exist at the margins of the encyclopedia [of knowledge]…Nowdays, for instance, knowledge enjoins us not to decide about God; it is quite acceptable to maintain that perhaps ‘something ‘exists, or perhaps it does not. We live in a society in which no valence can be ascribed to God’s existence; a society that lays clam to a vague spirituality. Similarly, knowledge enjoins us not to decide about the possible existence of ‘another politics’ [beyond democracy]; it is talked about, but nothing comes of it. Another example: are those workers who do not have proper papers but who are working here, in France (or the United Kingdom, or the United States..) part of this country? Do they belong here? Yes, probably, since they live and work here. No, since they don’t have the necessary papers to show that they are French (or British, or American…), or living here legally. The expression ‘illegal immigrant’ designates the uncertainty of valence,…it designates people who are living here, but don’t really belong here, and hence people who can be thrown out of the country” (TW 146-7, italics added).

These terms floating at the margins of ‘knowledge’, these ‘empty signifiers,’ are unstable sites with the situations. They are areas within the encyclopeadia ready to explode and change everything.

event of truth
But how are these unstable areas ignited? They are set off by an event, blowing a hole in ‘knowledge’ and setting off a chain reaction reorganizing everything previously ‘known.’ Badiou calls this chain reaction a ‘truth procedure’, culminating in the production of a truth. For a “truth is always that which makes a hole in knowledge” (B&E 327).

What Badiou calls an event is a decision about something undecidable within a situation. “Basically, an event is what decides about a zone of encyclopedic indiscernibility” (TW 147). An event is the naming of something for which the ‘encyclopedia of knowledge’ had no language; it is the calling into existence what the situation (the encyclopeadia) did not allow. It is the calling of something out of the nothing. Examples: the Copernican event of calling the solar system ‘heliocentric’ against the knowledge claiming the sun circled the earth; the event of the French Revolution within the situation of the ancient regime; the event of special-relativity within the encyclopedia of Newtonian science.

These events lead to new truths. They don’t gives us the Truth, but open a path towards certain truths. The emergence of a particular ‘truth’ linked to a particular ‘event’ keeps us focused on the reality that truths emerge through a process, rather than being merely found as ready-made objects, and that it is not ‘the Truth’, but ‘a truth,’ which is produced in a dynamic process.

knowledge as objectivity and truth in events
So in summary, we could say that objectivity is on the side of knowledge, according to its specific norms of rationality and objects of investigation, but truth makes a hole in this knowledge, it obscures this objectivity. A truth, while being infinitely open to addition, while constantly grouping to itself different and radical combination from the situation (from the encyclopeadia), is nevertheless not gather by objectivity, but rather with a type of subjectivity.

Subjectivity without Subject

Having now traversed Badiou’s somewhat complex presentation of knowledge, objectivity, events, and truth, we are in a position to understand the question guiding our investigation: In relation to politics beyond Science (objects) and the State (subjects), “is it possible to think subjectivity without a subject?” ( Metapolitic, 64).

Why a ‘subjectivity without a subject’? This is a subjectivity without a (modern) subject because this subject does not “overlap with a psychological subject [Freud], nor even with a reflexive subject (in Descartes’s sense) or the transcendental subject (in Kant’s sense)” (Ethics, 43). A subject realizes a truth, or “we might say that the process of truth induces a subject” (Ethics, 43).

truth induces a ‘subject’
How is the truth of an event made possible? Or, how is the truth of an event known? For Badiou, the truth of an event is manifest through a faithful subject, or rather, through one subjected to the event. A truth always works its way through particular subjects, faithful to a singular event, investigating its results and connections. A subject does not produce truth (being merely a type of subjectivism); rather a truth produces a subject.

Using an example dear to Badiou, we could say that St. Paul did not produce the truth of Christianity on a subjective whim, but rather he was himself produced (/converted) by the truth of Christianity in his encounter with Christ. St. Paul was faithful to the event of truth (the resurrection), and in his declaration of this truth, became more and more subjected to it. We could say the truth made St. Paul, rather than that St. Paul made the truth.

Or, concerning Galileo, he was ceased by the truth of the heliocentric model, and faithful to this truth, he discerned and articulated the being of this truth within the reigning geocentric situation.

For this reason Badiou says, “it is abusive to say that truth is a subjective production. A subject is much rather taken up in fidelity to the event, and suspended from truth” (B&E 406). A subject is suspended from the truth because there are no free-standing, transcendental subject who finds or discovers the Truth; only those who have been subjectified by a truth, and are actively discerning its reality in the world. Or, not using the static term ‘subject’, but the dynamic ‘subjectivization’, Badiou says, “Subjectivization is that through which a truth is possible” (B&E 393).

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Well, there it is. Questions please.

Badiou on Heideggar on Truth

2006-09-06T16:22:00.000-05:00

In a previous post on Badiou and Truth I summarized the 'structure of Truth' but not Badiou's understand of a 'truth procedure' and the becoming new of a truth. Also, in the comments, John noted a similarity between Heideggar and Badiou. I will take up these issues in reference to Badiou’s “Philosophy and Truth” in Infinite Thought.

Badiou starts with four fundamental theses on truth:

1) Starting from Hiedeggar, there is no other solution to the question of truth than that of the poem. While, as John noted, Badiou might seem similar to Hiedeggar, he is actually opposed to him. B. argues that the for H., only the poem can properly reveal Being, and also our being-in-the-world (this movement to the poem, while latent in B&T is in full blown in the later writings). For H., Dasein is always already in the 'truth' of being. Before the 'truth' of assertions, Dasein is in the Truth, the primordial Truth of Being of which he falls into forgetfulness through predication/metaphysics. But equally, Dasein is in the un-truth, or is in erring. But for Badiou, we are never simply in the 'truth' because truths are new and unexpected. For Badiou, Truth is not a structure of our being, but something that becomes. And the best way to speak of this newness of Truth is not through the poem (as for Heideggar) but through mathematics (a mathematics of which H. would have no part).

2) But to move beyond the poem we must also distinguish truth from the narrow form of proposition and judgment of the analytic tradition. So truth is neither the poem nor proposition.

3) so “we must conceive of a truth both as the construction of a fidelity to an event, and as the generic potency of a transformation of a domain of knowledge” (43).

4) In light of the above, the essential categories of truth are negative: undecidablity, indiscernibiltiy, the generic not-all, and the unnameable.

After passing through a couple comments on Hiedeggar’s concept of truth, Badiou begins his own ideas, begin with the distinction between knowledge and truth, with truth as a becoming of something new. It is worth quoting a lengthy section:

“I will start from the following idea: a truth is, first of all, something new. What transmits, what repeats, we shall call knowledge. Distinguishing truth from knowledge is essential. It is a distinction that is already made in the work of Kant: the distinction between reason and understanding. It is a capital distinction for Heidegger: the distinction between truth—alethia—and cognition or science—techne.” (45)

If a truth is distinguished from knowledge, as the becoming of something new, then what is the process of its appearing? “A truth must be sumitted to thought, not as a judgment, but as a process in the real” (45). This begins an examination of what Badiou calls the “truth process,” filling out the four negative of truth.

The process of a truth begins when something happens, where there is an event. Knowledge is a repetition of what we already know, of common sense and received knowledge. Truth is a supplement to knowledge, and knowledge is always of what exists, of what is, so Truth is something that happen as a becoming beyond what already is. This is initiated in the event. The event is the first negative of truth: the undecidable, because the realm of knowledge cannot decide if this thing called the event actually exists. But the undecidability of the event is such that it induces a subject, a subject which decides that the event did indeed happen, that it does exist, and this subject is constituted in this act of decidinig to be faithful to the event. Fidelity is the nature of the subject of the event, through the decision, is caught between two indiscernibles. Two concepts are indiscernible when no language game can distinguish between them. But the subject of truth, does distinguish between them based on his fidelity to the event. From the faithful discernment of the Subject, between indiscernible concepts, the process of the truth continues, producing a generic subset within the previous situation of knowledge. The generic subset can never be fully named, otherwise it would fall under the rule of knowledge and under the sway of mere existence. The process of truth in its becoming can never be fully realizing, and therefore always has the unnameable as its limit. In fact, for Badiou, the forcing of a truth into total nomination, is the basis of Evil.

Badiou on Truth and the (re)turn of Philosophy

2006-08-30T09:41:00.000-05:00

This is my summary of Badiou's “The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself” found in his Manifesto for Philosophy. As you will see, there are many similarities as well as divergences with American pragmatism, of which I had earlier hinted.

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This essay is laid out in a series of thesis/propositions. But we will not engage all of them, only the once pertinent to Badiou’s understanding of truth and philosophy.

Thesis 1: Philosophy today is paralyzed by its relation to its own history.

Thesis 2: Philosophy must break, from within itself, with historicism. This break with history is to assume a definition of philosophy which will judge the history of philosophy, rather than the other way around.

These 3: A definition of philosophy exists. But this definition must distinguish itself from modern sophistry. “Who are the modern sophists? The modern sophists are those that, in the footsteps of the great Wittgenstein, maintain that thought is held to the following alternative: either effects of discourse, language games, or the silent indication, the pure ‘showing’ of something subtracted from the clutches of language. Those for whom the fundamental opposition is not between truth and error or wondering, but between speech and silence, between what can be said and what is impossible to say…The modern sophist attempts to replace the idea of truth with the idea of rule.” (117).

So, Thesis 4a: Every definition of philosophy must distinguish it from sophistry.
Thesis 4b: The category of truth is the central category, be it under another name, of any possible philosophy.

Now this (re)turn of philosophy to the category of truth flows through Plato. Why? Well, for all those claiming the End of Metaphysics, they point out that Plato was the down fall, the “moment of the launching of metaphysics” (121). For Badiou, both continental philosophy following Heideggar and analytic philosophy following Carnap proclaim the end of metaphysics, the end of Plato, the emblem of metaphysics. But, Badiou wants to announce the end of the “End of metaphysics” and announce the return of philosophy, of truth, and therefore of Plato. Badiou, in other writing proclaims a return to a “Plato of the multiple”, the multiple of set theory.

So, continuing on from thesis 4b, Badiou sketches the category of truth, in another list.
1) “Prior to philosophy, a ‘prior to’ that is not temporal, there are truths. These truths are heterogeneous, and proceed within the real independently of philosophy” (123). These truths are the sites of/for philosophy. There are four sites (for Badiou’s Plato): Mathematics, Art, Love, Politics.

2) “Philosophy is a construction of thinking wherein the fact that there are truths is proclaimed against sophistry. But this central proclamation supposes a strictly philosophical category, the Truth.” There is a relationship between the multiple truths and the Truth, such that we can maintain the “plural state of things (there are heterogeneous truths) and the unity of thought”(123).

3) “The philosophical category of Truth is by itself void. It operates but presents nothing. Philosophy is not a production of truth, but an operation from truths”(124) When Badiou speaks of the void, he is not talking of some vague, existentialist notion of angst, nor of the beyond being of God, but of the mathematical void of set theory, the null/void set from which all other sets are built. Badiou points out that this is the fundamental crossing of philosophy and mathematics (ontology = mathematics), and that while Truth is an operational void, it is not the void of being. The Truth is a logical void, not ontological (but to illuminate this will get us a bit off track). So,

4) “What is the structure of this operation?” (124). The structure of this operation borrows from the discourse of philosophy’s two longstanding opponents: the sophist (dialectical reasoning, endless definitions, proofs and refutations) and the poet (metaphor, images, myths, and narrative). The Truth is the un-known of sophists fictive knowledge, and the un-utterable of fictive art (125). Truth is a set of tongs or pincers, one side being the being argumentative proofs (sophistry) and the other being subjective potency (art).

5) “The pincers of Truth, which link and sublimate, have a duty to seize truths”(126). Philosophical Truth seizes truths, captures them for thought.

This seizing of Truth by the thought of philosophy can also be thought of as “subtractive”, based in the thought of the void. Philosophy subtracts thought from the maze of sense, from the hold of presentation, for the Truth is never merely presented, it has no immediate presentation. This seizing effect of philosophy (seizing the truths of life for thought) is “first and foremost a rupture with the narrative and with commentary about the narrative…Philosophy separates itself from religion because it separates itself from hermeneutics” (127).

Now, in the above, Badiou has outlined the ‘structure’ of the operation of Truth, but not what he calls a “truth procedure” or the “procedure of truth.” This will have to wait for another time. From here Badiou examines some consequences of (mis)understanding this conception of Truth.

One misunderstand is to confuse the condition of Truth (which are the truths of mathematics, art, politics, and love) with the operation (which is empty, formal) of Truth. We can’t think of particular truths as identical to the operation of Truth. Philosophy is not identical with art (Nietzsche/Heideggar), politics (Plato/Marx), love (Pascal/Kierkegaard), or science (Husserl/Carnap) (129). The Truth is never found in the being of these situations (art, mathematics, politics, love); Truth is not!

For Badiou, to claim that Truth is, to substantialize Truth, is to give up on truths, the multiplicity of life, and reinstate the One, the God of metaphysics. Badiou is for the metaphysic of the multiple, the “Plato of the multiple” but not the “Plato of the One” beyond being. Badiou does not want anything to do with the beyond being, the sacralization of eternity or infinite, because eternity/infinity can both be happily understood via set theory, one of the conditions (truths, ‘mathematics’) of philosophy. And for Badiou, via Derriad, Levinas and Ricoeur, sophistry leaves the door way too wide open for religion to enter back in.

Badiou ends the essay with this helpful summary:
“Asserting the end of philosophy and the irrelevance of Truth is strictly a sophistic appraise of the century (speaking of the disaster of the 20th century toward which much continental philosophy is directed)…Language games, deconstruction, feeble thinking, irremediable heterogeneity, differends and differences, the ruin of Reason, the promotion of the fragment and discourse in shreds: all of these argue in favor of a sophistic live of thinking and place philosophy at an impasse.”

Against this reign of sophistry, Badiou ends with,
Thesis 5a: Philosophy is possible.
Thesis 5b: Philosophy is necessary.

On this return of Truth, the return of philosophy, the seizing of truths, Badiou claims that while Truth is not, it is becoming, and this becoming is the work of philosophy, such that Badiou can affirm with Marx, the “point is to change the world.”

Augmented Reality and Google Maps

2006-08-23T14:21:00.000-05:00

I just saw this over at fast company: Geo-Coupons Land On Google Maps.

I think all the new map software is pretty interesting, but I'm wondering about its effects on culture. For one, it continues to reduce the world and put everything on a grid. In this sense, of course, map making is the epitome of modernity: rational presentation of an area of study.

Also, this illustrates what many have been calling the shift from virtual reality to augmented reality. Instead of escaping reality for a 'reality' of ones own making, you simply augment the reality you are participating in via carrying a computer with you everywhere. This augmented reality is already seen in "on-star" in car, the proliferation of portable computers, cells phones, and PDAs, and I think will continue making in-roads through eye-wear.

As with all technology, there will the be good with the bad on this. I'm hoping that this will open up the door to receiving a renewed sacramental theology in all areas of life; but it very well might turn narcissistic.

Theology's Conversation Partners: Continental, Analytic, or Beyond?

2006-08-23T09:55:00.000-05:00

This is a summary and my response to a article over at first things brought to my attention at GO Thinktank, where I originally posted this.

summary:

Reno begins with a distinction between foundationalism and anti-foundationalism, with modernity championing the former and postmodernity the latter. Reno asks, Against the appeal of postmodern thought and its reveling in the positive side of nihilism (Vattimo), must we revert back to a foundationalist enterprise? Must we either, in rejecting violent universalizing discourse, embrace postmodern thought and its loss of Truth, or embrace a foundationalist Truth?

Reno answers, No. You can be post-foundational, yet retain truth, in analytic philosophy!

Drawing on the history of philosophy, he draws a line between ancient philosophy as "way of life", a "disciple of the soul," where as scholastic philosophy "does not so much sing about the meaning of life as prepare for, clarify, order, support, and clear away interruptions to the song sung according to another score." (please see the very helpful commenton the difference between "playing music" and "music criticism" by cynthia). Analytic philosophy has taken the mantle of this scholastic understanding, while continental philosophy has spoken in the dialect of the ancients.

But analytic philosophy is not a foundationalist discourse (in a sense) and ought to be embraced in it scholastic function, rather than passed over as a conversation partner in favor of the more prophetic continental discourse.

He concludes with affirming the analytic tradition as holding out the most promise "as a suitable conversation partner for theology in the crucial jobs of strengthening the doctrinal backbone of theology and restoring a culture of truth.

That is the gist of Reno's offering:
please, no more continental philosophy; analytic is very heplful.

My response:

I concede that analytic philosophy might be very helpful for all the reasons Reno suggested, and I even concede that continental philosophy in its nihilistic revelling betrays Christian doctrine.

The question for me is: How do we keep ideology (idolatry) critique, yet not lose truth? The continental tradition majors in the former, while the analytic tradition majors in the latter. But we need both.

And, using Reno’s own typology, I would say that many theologians gravitating toward the continental tradition also resonate with the understanding of philosophy/theology as “way of life”, as a “disciple of the soul/community.” This is why Marx’s statement, “Philosophy is about understanding the world, but the point is to change it!” resonates so deeply (is this a theory/praxis spilt? Perhaps yes; perhaps no.)

And in this post-Christendom situation, is the goal to restore Christendom (a culture of Truth, as Reno affirms), or is it something else. That something "else" is as "a way of life" is why it makes it hard to jump into analytic philosophy.

However, I would end with another alternative to either the post-foundationalist nihilistic postmodernity or post-foundationalist analytic philosophy: the emerging philosophies of the likes of Badiou and Zizek (based in Lacan) who equally draw from and challenge both traditions (especially pomo), but retain truth beyond foundations.

So, for a post-foundational philosopher who still trades in “truth” and the “universal,” I suggest Badiou's being and event as a good start.

it's a saddleback day

2006-08-15T17:13:00.000-05:00

So in my readers i find saddleback all over the place: from rick warren's list of how not to be sexually tempted (via the revealer) to a mash up over at fast company, comparing the purpose driven church and tribal knowledge. interesting, no?

over at C&P

2006-08-15T16:36:00.000-05:00

I will be over at C&P (the church and postmodern culture conversation). We are beginning our engagement with james k.a. smith's new "who's afriad of postmodernism?"

So I won't be posting much for a little bit.

but come join us. It should be interesting.

Ricoeur on Levinas: “Self” between the “I” and its overthrow

2006-08-11T14:03:00.000-05:00

I’ll just jump right into Oneself as Another to explain R.’s reading of Levinas, and an approach to pragmatism and political versions of phychoanalysis.

The basic thesis, explored through the many detours of ‘sematics,’ ‘action theory,’ ‘narrative temporality of the self,’ and ‘moral/ethical obligations,’ is that “the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, that instead one passes into the other, as we might say in Hegelian terms” (3). This selfhood, or just the self, is to be distinguish both from the ‘cogito’ (Descartes is paradigmatic) and the cogito’s shattering (a la Nietzsche). “The quarrel over the cogit, in which the “I is by turns in a position of strength and of weakness, seems to me the best way to being out the problematic of the self…[namely] that the hermeneutics of the self is placed at an equal distance from the apology of the cogito and from its overthrow”(4). We could say that the cogito which posits itself (its world) begins with Descartes and its modern variants, while its overthrow is exemplified in Nietzsche and his postmodern offspring.

Now, skippng about 300 pages, and landing in R.’s sustained reading of both Husserl and Levinas, we find out that they are the latest incarnations of the cogito (Husserl) and its over throw (Levinas). The gist of it is that both presuppose an asymmetrical relationship between the cogito and its other. Husserl, beginning from a phenomenological position, posits the ego, master of its world, which then must somehow account for alter egos, those ‘people’ who must be assumed to have a cogito as I do, but I can’t really prove it. Husserl finds it difficult not to be solipsistic. Now, for Levinas, he begins from the opposite pole, that of the Other. This Other breaks all the pretensions of the “I” and its knowledge and truths. The asymmetrical relationship comes from the Other to the ego, and overwhelms the ego. The problem with both views is that they absolutize the poles of Same and Other. In fact, R. claims that these perspectives are symmetrical, or mirror of each other, in that to consistently how to one position, you must also hold the other, for “The two movements do not annihilare one another to the extent that one unfold in the gnoselogical dimension of the sense, and the other in the ethical dimension of injunction”(341). The problem is that from these original asymmetrical position, it is almost impossible to account for ‘everyday’ experiences of reciprocity.

The problem for R. in both of these approaches is that they neither the realm of the Same nor the Other ought to be absolutized. Instead, we must admit that “Same” or identity is split between idem-identity and ipse-identity, which means, somewhat like Freud, the self (ipse-identity) is not the ‘cogito’ or “I” (idem-identity), and because of this, the Other is split (The Other is not identical to itself). So back to Levinas, R. claims that Levinas makes a mistake by only allowing the Other to find its trace in the face of the other person. Ricoeur wants to place the Other, not only (1) in the face of the other person, (2) but also into the divide between the self and its body/flesh (the experience of your own body is an encounter with Otherness), and (3) between the self and its conscience (Conscience as some Other voice in your head, from God, the anscestors, other people).

At the end of all this, and more so in The Course of Recognition, ch. 3, R. moves toward a Hegelian understanding of reciprocity as the constitution of selfhood, rather than an original asymmetry. So the ‘self’ is situated between the sameness of the cogito, and it shattering by the Other, where the self is always already, othered in various ways.

This turn toward Hegel has also been heralded by two other schools of thought (but in very different ways). American pragmatism has taken up Hegel’s critique of the social contract and his theories of sociality, and Continental/philosophical psychoanalysis (of the Lacanian variety, as to be distinguished from the American reception of Freud) also has taken up Hegel’s master slave dialectic (via Lacan’s appropriation of Kojeve’s reading of Hegel).

So, both of these Schools are now my playground, and I will take leave of Levinas for now. Thank you, and good night.

(Dis)interested in Levinas?

2006-08-10T17:37:00.000-05:00

(back to Levinas. The 3rd party must wait for meaningless philosophy!)

The reasion I am (dis)interested in Levinas is because of many contrasting themes and approaches to other philosophers I’ve been reading (of which I’ve already noted from Badiou and Zizek), all of which have political/ethical ramifications.

Briefly, concerning Lacan, I note:

1) the similarity that the subject is broken from something Other (for Levinas it is the Infinite of the Other outside; for Lacan it is the unconscious inside, which Zizek calls the Inhuman).

2) For Levinas it is the Desire (the disinterested desire) which reveals the Other before us, but, oppositely, for Lacan it is desire which ensnares/captures us in the Other (which dominates us), for we don’t have a Desire (interested or not), but rather we are always overtaken by the “desire of the Other,” the “Other’s Desire” within us.

3) For Levinas the goal is to give up on Desire (to be dis-interested), but for Lacan the goal is to ‘never give up on your desire,’ with the emphasis on your desire, not the Other's desire.

4) For Levinas the trauma is the Infinite outside us, but for Lacan it is the Inhuman within us (the death drive).

Each of these contrasts highlight the fundamental difference between the ethical uses of Levinas, and the more recent political uses of Lacan (via Badiou and Zizek).

But before I get to this ethical/poltical divide, I will finish these reflections on Levinas via Riceour. So soon I’ll note how Riceour helpfully (dis)places Levinas, and offers a helpful move forward through Hegel, which will set up the problematic between American pragmatism (its use of Hegel) and Zizekian psychoanalytic(ism?) (and its use of Hegel via Lacan via Hegel via…).

till then...

Third Party- christians and politics

2006-08-09T12:05:00.000-05:00

(Let's take a break from philosophy)

Senator Lieberman has lost his bit for re-election in the primary for Connecticut, but has decided to run as an independent candidate.

Now many in the EC and beyond are talking about what it means for the church to be political (does the Church have its own politic, if not the Christian Right then the Left?, and such). I for one have felt the Sojourners option to feel like a Christendom of the Left and that Jim Wallis sounds like he's more for the Democratic Party than anything else (yes I need to nuance more!).

I have recently thought that if Christians really are meant to engage in national politics, then the most important contribution would be to form a viable Third Part (either with a platform or coalition of independent candidates).

So along with Lieberman (who is Jewish), perhaps Christian politicians should pull the plug on their party affiliation, and form a Third Party. A Third Party would be a truly astonishing political innovation in America.

So Let's do it! (err, wait! maybe I should think about this for a couple of years...)

a slow blog = slog

2006-08-08T16:46:00.000-05:00

(I posted this over at churchandpomo.org, but I thought since it also rings true for this blog, that I might as well...)

Many of you have probably heard of the slow food movment (against the fast food industry), and perhaps even a slow life city (heralding a slow pace, slow education, slow industry, and slow aging). But what about slow blogging, or slogging? (Slow + Blogging = Slogging)

If you are looking for the next microwaved ‘critical theory’ with a side of canned theology, sprinkled with cheesy pop cultural references, then maybe this won’t work out for you.

But if you like things to simmer and stew for a bit, if you like chopping up the salad (adding those sugared walnuts), and setting the table with a reasonable argument, then pull up a chair and let’s have a conversation.

for the time being aims to be, hopes to be, longs to be, a place where we can reason together (and maybe argue a bit, together). And to do that takes a little time. So that is why we hope to be a SLOG, a Slow Blog.

Levinas' Infinite Trauma

2006-08-07T16:32:00.000-05:00

(More on the in-breaking of the Infinite from Levinas)

So far my theme from Levinas has been the infinite, not to the neglect of the Other, a persistent theme of L.’s, but rather as a way of understanding how, beyond the phenomenological horizon, the Other break in from a height, from an elevation of transcendence, beyond that of Being (which goes under the guises of Subject, "I", consciouseness, Same, experience, theme, or horizon). The linking of the Other, Being, Infinite, and the Subject are my concerns (especially as they relate to the work of Badiou, who fundamentally disagrees and seeks to subvert all the work of Levinas, more on that later).

So, more on the Infinite from “God and Philosophy.”

The problem guiding Levinas in this essay is the challenge from Derrida that “Not to philosophize is still to philosophize,” drawing attention to Levinas’ hopes of escaping Greek Onto-theo-logy into Judean Ethics of the Other. Levinas’ response is to question whether or not God, the Other, the tout autre, can “be exposed in a rational discourse which would b neither ontology nor faith” (131), a discourse beyond the opposition of the God of philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (as Pascal likes to say).

Infinite
Levinas thinks there can be. And after many twists and turns, blind alleys of the phenomenon and “no outlets” of the Same, Levinas returns to the ‘idea of the infinite’ as that which is constitutive of thought while at the same time its ‘beyond’, the condition of subjectivity as totally beyond the subject.

Let me stitch a quote together from page 138.

“The figure of the Infintie-put-in-me, and according to Descartes, contemporaneous with my creation, would mean that the not-being-able-to-comprehend-the Infinite-by-thought is somehow a positive relationship with this thought…The not-being-able-to-comprehend-the Infinite-by-thought would signify the condition—or the unconditionality—of thought…The Infinite affects thought by devastating it and at the same time calls upon it; in a “putting it back in its place” it puts thought in place. It awakens it. The awakening of thought is not a welcoming of the Infinite, is not a recollecting, not an assuming, which are necessary and sufficient for experience. The idea of the Infinite puts these in question….The infinite signifies precisely prior to its manifestation.”

Desire
Levinas continues by asking what is the meaning of this “idea of the Infinite” put into me, why is it there at all. The idea of the infinite awakens a desire in the subject (which is the very shattering of the subject) for a Desire beyond all end or utility, beyond all enjoyment or pleasure (all of which is merely a desire for being, and its ‘interests’). The desire for/of the beyond the finite is a dis-interested Desire, for “Affected by the infinite, Desire cannot proceed to and end which it would be equal to” (140), but rather an end totally unequal, non-reciprical, utterly dissymmetrical to the Subject, and is therefore the Desire for the Other.

The Good
In this the idea of the Infinite (which is the condition and devastation of the Subject, of Thought) subjects us to our responsibility to the Other, which is the Good, or goodness. For “to be good is a deficit, waste and foolishness in a being; to be good is excellence and elevation beyond being. Ethics is not a moment of being; it is otherwise and better than being, the very possibility of the beyond” (141).

The Trauma
This idea of the Infinite, which affects a Desire beyond interestedness, soliciting the Other and the Good, is “a trauma that could never be assumed; it consisted in being struck by the “in” of the infinity which devastates presence and awakens subjectivity to the proximity of the other.” “This trauma, which cannot be assumed, inflicted by the Infinite on presence, or this affecting of presence by the Infinite—this affectivity—takes shape as a subjection to the neighbor. It is thought thinking more than it thinks, desire, the reference to the neighbor, the responsibility for another.”

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Phew (brush the sweat from your brow, drink a cup of water)…and wonder why you ever read this blog. I have more, put I will stop today.

Questions? (like why do you do this?)

Levinas on Levinas

2006-08-02T12:24:00.000-05:00

Recently I’ve been working through Badiou’s and Zizek’s complaints with Levinas, so I thought that perhaps I ought to work through Levinas himself.

So here are some quotes/thoughts from his Basic Philosophical Writings (all paginations from this text). The themes which interest me (and I know Levinas hates the ‘thematic’) are ‘subjectivity’, the Infinite, and language. So of course there will the themes of Freedom, Desire, Substitution, and others which I will pass over. Today will be his essays on "Is Ontology Fundamental" and "Transcedence and Height", and later will be his "God and Philosophy".

“Is Ontology Fundamental?”

In this early work L. is seeking to resituate phenomenology, opening a door (or rather taking the roof off) toward a height of transcendence beyond the mere horizon of Being, which locks everything into the immanence of the Same. The relation with the Other, as toward a Height beyond the Horizon of Being, is one of language (a language preceding ontology) which is full of invocation, calling, and response which is the relation of Ethic to the Face of the Other.

So, he begins, “The pages that follow will attempt to characterize in a very general way this relation which is irreducible to comprehension,” a comprehension resting in the openness of being. The understanding of a particular being is always against the horizon of Being, a being’s openness and going beyond itself to Being. “To comprehend the particular being is already to place oneself beyond the particular. To comprehend is to be related to the particular that only exists through knowledge, which is always knowledge of the universal.”(p. 5)

But, Levinas maintains, the relation with the Other is not one of comprehension where the being we perceive is stands out upon the horizon of Being, because in relation to the Other “he is a being and counts as such” without reference to a horizon. The Other presents a being without it also presenting an openness to Being (nor comprehension, nor knowledge). Hence, the Other is a (particular) being which escapes the openness/horizon of Being (universal), and as such is not enclosed by our themes or projects (against Heideggar). “The other is not an object of comprehension first and an interlocutor second….The comprehension of the other is inseparable from his invocation.” And it is this speaking, this language, which precedes ontology, a speaking to the particular as particular, neglecting his universal being. This relation which precedes ontology, irreducible to representation or comprehension, is an ethical relation. This relation to a particular being in one of invocation, of address, demanding a response.

So, “In relation to beings in the opening of being, comprehension finds a signification for them on the basis of being. In this sense, it does not invoke these beings but only names them, thus accomplishing a violence and a negation”(p 9). So while the knowledge of being(s) only names, and is therefore nominalist, the relation which invokes, which calls to us, which exceeds comprehension, is that of the ethical. “A being as such (and not as incarnation of universal being) can only be in a relation where we speak to this being. A being is a human being and it is as a neighbor that a human being is accessible—as a face” (8).

The face of the other witnesses to this (ethical, non-ontological) relation with a depth/height, rather than as a horizon, which carries a significance not established by the horizon of Being, but rather a face which signifies itself. “To comprehension and signification grasped within a horizon, we oppose the signifyingness of the face” (10) which comes from a height.

[This transparency of the ‘face’ as self-signifying (without recourse to the horizon of Being) with what Zizek questions. Not because Zizek wants to bring back the horizon, but rather to question whether the ‘face’ is not already a mask provided by the symbolic order to keep us from our neighbors.]

---

Moving on to “Transcendence and Height” which was published just after “Totality and Infinity”. In this essay L. moves from questioning philosophy (as phenomenology), to the questioning of me by the Other, to the question of Infinity as the invasion of what is beyond being (the Other) into the immanence of the Same.

“The Other thus presents itself as human Other; it shows a face and opens the dimension of height, that is to say, it infinitely overflows the bounds of knowledge” (p. 12).

Levinas argues that philosophy is assimilation, is adequation of knowledge/representation to Reality where every true Other is made into the Same. The “I of knowledge is at once the Same par excellence, the very event of identification and the melting pot where every Other is transmuted into the Same” (p 13), but “the resistance of the Other to the Same is the failure of philosophy” (p. 14). The myth of philosophy is broken in the intrusion of the Other. “The myth of legislative consciousness of things, where difference and identity are reconciled, is the great myth of philosophy. It rests upon the totalitarianism or imperialism of the Same.” The Other, the face of the Other, resists this totalitarianism. This Other which resist the pretension of the I, of consciousness, demands a responds in which my respons(ibility) is founded.

The cogito of Descartes, the ego of Kant, the I of Husserl, and the Dasien of Heideggar, are all punctured by this approach of the Other, who before ontology calls be to respond, to ethical responsibility. This provocation is nothing other than that of the Infinite. “The Other who provokes this ethical movement in consciousness and who disturbs the good conscience of the Same’s coincidence with itself compromises a surplus which is inadequate to ntentionality. Because of this inassimilable surplus, we have called the relation which binds the I to the Other is the idea of the infinite.” “The idea of the infinite consists precisely and paradoxically in thinking more than what is thought while nevertheless conserving it in its excessive relation to thought. The idea of the infinite consists in grasping the ungraspable while nevertheless guaranteeing its status as ungraspable” (p. 19).

This idea of the infinite takes thought outside of immanence, outside of being. Through this idea, which Descartes introduces into his through, shatters immanence. This Cartesiansim is akin to Plato who seeks a ‘beyond being’ attesting to the thought that the idea of being is younger than the idea of the infinite (p. 21).

So, from philosophy of the Same (and its I), to its shattering before the face of the Other, to the idea of the Infinite, ontology is not first philosophy, rather, ethics is.

---

Well that is enough for now. I've mostly been summarizing rather than reflecting/engaging. I certainly need to think through more how this has worked out in the Emerging Church (for good/ill) and what we should be doing with it.

Soon I’ll post on L. “Essence and Dissinteredness” and “God and Philosophy” where many of the same themes are cover albeit in a different way.

the subversion of community

2006-07-31T14:15:00.000-05:00

reflection on Psalm 15.

Psalm 15

A psalm of David.

1 LORD, who may dwell in your sanctuary?
Who may live on your holy hill?

2 He whose walk is blameless
and who does what is righteous,
who speaks the truth from his heart

3 and has no slander on his tongue,
who does his neighbor no wrong
and casts no slur on his fellowman,

4 who despises a vile man
but honors those who fear the LORD,
who keeps his oath
even when it hurts,

5 who lends his money without usury
and does not accept a bribe against the innocent.
He who does these things
will never be shaken.

Liberal (and many Evangelical) Communities typically become places to repair individuals (such that the community exists so the needs of individuals can be met) or places where the goals of the community replaces the individual (such that the individual must denied her desires/needs). These are the typical poles of community/individual.

But as I said before, the true poles are community and worship. As we look at worship the contours of community with appear. As we gaze at community, we will gather the lines of true worship.

The 'individual' was created when man disengaged from community (from a relationship with the Communal (Triune) God), resulting in alienated/antagonistic relationships among God and mankind, and between mankind. The poles of community/individual assume a fundamental (ontological) violence which governs relationships (even all of reality). But starting w/ the goodness of creation (including mankind) Christians assume a fundamental peace in creation that has been disrupted leading to antagonism. The only way back toward this peace/shalon beyond the violence b/w the community and individual, and between individual (competing) communities is through a prophetic connection with our Creator, which is through worship.

What I mean is not the sunday morning "worship" of singing, reading Scripture, preaching, etc. Too often this just becomes the simulacra of community, the gathering of individuals (but not necessarily). Let's turn to Psalm 15 which started all this in me this week. It begins with the question of worship, the presence/connection of God. "Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary? Who may live on you holy hill?" Answering this question is a one sentence (going on for five verse) explaining the practices of community: people should act righteously, speak truthfully/ not lie or slander, be good neighbors/not cheat, keep promises, and share money. The short psalm ends by bring in the individual, "He who does these tings will never be shaken." At the beginning is a question of worship; at the end is a statement concering the individual, with community tying them securely together. And this is nothing new for the OT prophets continually linked the true worship God with the practices of the people; rites and rituals enacted without righteous relationships are considered vain.

How do we stand against/within a Consumer Capitalism, splintering us into indvidual needs and markets? How do we seek and sustan economic justices amid "communities" of class/race/gender? How do we display an alternative to the Power of desire, the will to dominate through individual choices? How can we sustain unity amid diversity? We won't through the dialectics of community/individual. But as we worship/reconnect with God through worship, as we reorient our direction toward peace instead of violence, as we enter into the communal practices of forgiveness, truth, love, gift-giving, sacrifice (which is true worship) then we will see community flourish, growings spontaneously, organically in the soil of life shared together. Only then will artifical community, its synthetic copy, be seen as it really is. We need to replace the plastic flowers (of simulated community) which we placed around our churches to give it more life, with real plants. Only the will we become of subversive community witnessing of the kindgom.

So, community/individual or community/worship? What have I missed? What do we do now? What is over/under-stated?

Beyond Liberal Community

2006-07-28T09:04:00.000-05:00

The idea of "community" is like the sun. The more we stare at it the less we see.

Or rather, community is like Happiness, which if pursued outright always escapes us, leaving a narcissistic void (much like most discusions of worship seem to miss the essence).

Rather than a direct apprehesion or formation of community, we must think more tangentally. We cannot begin with a direct relationship between individuals separate, and then individuals together. Rather we have to ask, What environment leads toward community? What soil is needed? Which nutrients can we add? We can't build community industrially; only prepare for its blooming organically.

In the discussion there are two dialectic poles that we circle around: the community and the individual; the collective and the singular (which comes to us through the modern political tension of state and citizen: one keeps order and limits freedom; the other expects freedom and creates disorder.) But these are not opposites, merely the division of a single concept (the concept of liberal Freedom). But man is communal from the beginning; individuals only come into existence when we forget this, or rebel against it. The individual was created at the Fall. But to be truly human is to be communal, in the image of the Triune God.

Because of this, it is my contention that the true dialectic poles are community and worship. Each is the shadow of the other; only through staring at one can we gather the outlines of the other. More on this tomorrow.

the simulacra of community

2006-07-26T13:02:00.000-05:00

the simulacra of community: the gathering of individuals.

where is community? What does it look like? too often our search for community ends in a cheap simulation, a simulacra, and the church is most complicit in this illusion. Churches aren't called "Church" anymore; they're called "communities" of Christ, faith, friendship, whatever you want. Yet rarely is community reached? Why? Because we reach for the ideal of community without its practices. It's like trying to be spiritual without the spiritual disciplines.

our theraputic culture treats community as merely as the place to repair/fix/reaffirm individuals (this is best seen in our bible studies and prayer groups). Statements like "I want a community that will let me (fill in the blank)..." continue the individualized/privatized nature of our culture. The self-help culture has clothed itself in the garb of Christian community to legitemate a shallow narcissism. The concrete practices of community- forgiveness, reconcilation, repentance, and sacrifice, hospitality- are foriegn to our culture that tries to build community around the motto that "I'm OK and you're OK."

Our culture wants a nice (simulated) community, but Christianity offers a messy (real) community.

So what does this have to say about those in the emerging church who perpetuate/multiply ad infinitum descrete subcultures in the name of relevant community? Is the emerging church a technologically advanced simulation of community? or the real deal?

these thoughts prompted by "Embodying Forgiveness";
and for more on this see post-community and tells me what you think

Zizek on Levinas: Smashing the Neighbors Face

2006-07-21T20:45:00.000-05:00

While the argument in this essay meanders among many topics (as do all of Zizek’s writing), I’m going to focus on the twists and turns of Zizek’s complaint against Levinas.

Summary

In the face of our neighbor, do we glimpse the Other as transcendent ground of ethical relations, or spy a terrifying monstrosity from which we hope to turn away?

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Facing Others

For Zizek, the topic of the Other must be analyzed through the Lacanian registers of the imaginary, Symbolic, and the Real. Imaginary others- “other people ‘like me,’ my fellow human beings with whom I am engaged in the mirrorlike relationships of competition, mutual recognition, and so forth.” Symbolic ‘big Other’- “the ‘substance’ of our social existence, the impersonal set of rules that coordinate our coexistence.” The ‘Other qua Real’- “the impossible Thing, the ‘inhuman partner,’ the Other with whom no symmetrical dialogue, mediated by the symbolic Order, is possible…And it is crucial to perceive how these three dimensions are hooked up. The neighbor as the Thing means that, beneath the neighbor as my semblant, my mirror image, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical Otherness, of a monstrous Thing that cannot be ‘gentrified’”(143).

Or we could say, between the imaginary others (other people) of narcissism and the impenetrable Real Other steps the symbolic Other, gentrifying the chaos.

“In order to render our coexistence with the Thing minimally bearable, the symbolic order qua Third, the pacifying mediator, has to intervene: the “gentrification” of the Other-Thing into a ‘normal human fellow’ cannot occur through our direct interaction, but presupposes the third agency to which we both submit ourselves—there is no intersubjectivity (no symmetrical, shared, relation between humans) without the impersonal symbolic Order.” (143-4)

For Levinas “the Other who addresses me with the unconditional call and thus constitutes me as an ethical subject is—in spite of the fact that this is an absolutely heteronomous call which commands me and so comes from a height—the human other, the face, the transcendental form of the neighbor as radical Other.” 145. Hence Levinas says, “To seeks truth, I have already established a relationship with a face which can guarantee itself, whose epiphany itself is somehow a word of honor. Every language as an exchange of verbal signs refers already to this primordial word of honor…deceit and veracity already presuppose the absolute authenticity of the face” (146, quoted from Totality and Infinity, 202).

This self-referential face of the other is meant to serve as a non-linguistic point of encounter breaking the “vicious circularity of the symbolic order” (146). To encounter the face, for Levinas, is to side step the mediation of the ‘big Other’ of the symbolic order, and engage the neighbor-as-Other. This is meant to circumvent the presencing of "ontology" and "metaphysics" as well as the cultural order.

But for Zizek, via Lacanian psychoanalysis, the human face is already consumed by the symbolic order, it is already engaged as that which gentrifies the “terrifying Thing that is the ultimate reality of our neighbors” (146). The Other qua Real is never revealed in the face of the neighbor, but rather in defacement, when the Real/Unconscious of the Other as Subject breaks through mild manner face; the the inhumanity of the human neighbor is manifest.

The inhuman: the monstrous beyond of the face

“What Levinas fails to include into the scope of ‘human’ is, rather, the inhuman itself, a dimension which eludes the face-to-face relationship of humans” (158). Just as with the undead, which are neither dead nor alive, but rather a monstrous ‘living dead’, so to the inhuman is neither human nor non-human (animal or divine), but “marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as ‘humanity,’ is inherent to being-human.” To illustrate, Zizek turns to reason: for pre-moderns humans were rational beings struggling between merely animal lusts and divine madness. But after Kant, this madness is part of reason itself. In the pre-Kantian universe, when “a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity, in other words, the animal passions or divine madness took over, while with Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being” (160).

Or another example, the difference between animals and humans is not that humans are homeless, deprived of instinctual support, in need of a “second nature”, of symbolic norms and regulations; in short, in need of civilization (the standard anthropological account via Geertz). Rather, the difference which “defines a human being is therefore, not the difference between human and animal (or any other real or imaginary species, such as gods), but an inherent difference, the difference between human and the inhuman excess that is inherent to being-human” (175).

“What Levinas fails to take into account is not some underlying Sameness of all humans but the radical, ‘inhuman’ Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity” (160). Zizek’s question is whether we understand neighbor as “the bearer of a monstrous Otherness, [the] properly inhuman neighbor” as the same as the “neighbor that we encounter in the Levinasian experience of the Other’s face?” (162). For Zizek the answer is, No.

So what is Levinas’ main failing? It is not trying to circumvent the symbolic order, the ‘big Other,’ through postulating an encounter with the human face as a window toward the transcendent, but by forgetting that there is another Third party, not of the symbolic order, but of the very inhumanity within us, the monstrous Other of which the face of my neighbor covers over. As Zizek says, “Far from displaying ‘a quality of God’s image carried with it,’ the face is the ultimate ethical lure…the neighbor is not displayed through a face; it is, as we have seen, in his or her fundamental dimension a faceless monster” (185)

So the ethical gesture par excellence is not merely suspending the symbolic order and embracing the human face of the Other, but rather to both dissolve the symbolic order, which is even hidden in the face, and embracing the thoroughly inhuman monstrosity which is the human neighbor.

the emerging church is like...

2006-07-21T19:17:00.000-05:00

(these are some thoughts I prepared for an interview [an commented on], most of which I didn't say, nor was shown, but I thought, hey why not post it.)

…it is like a renegade stage production. Several of us have been given a role and consumes, but the clothes didn’t fit right, and we didn’t like our lines. We are not getting rid of the scrip, just the producers who have made it into a bad play, and we're movin' out of the fancy theater to wherever we can find.

…it is like taking blinders off. Evangelical had tunnel vision, looking toward the ground, only trying to save souls and build bigger and bigger churches, and thinking they were the only ones. the emerging church takes off these blinders, and sees that there are a bunch of people with them (Lutherans, Methodist, Episcopal, Catholics), and they look behind and remember the past the good and the bad.

…it is like recovering from a hundred year amnesia. Main evangelicals can’t think past 20 to 50 years ago. But the church has been going on for 2000 years, and a lot has happened, for good and bad. The EC is trying to remember its past, so it can live into the future. The reason the Da Vinci Code has made such a stir is that many Christians simply don’t know their own history, so when someone comes along and tells a compelling story, it fills in this vacuum left by forgetting out past.

…it is not merely looking backward, but also to around, not just in America, but all over the world to see what is happening. The EC is looking toward the Taize community in France where Catholics and Protestants are gathering to pray for peace around the world…it is looking to the Global South to learn about how faith can work against exploitation, and care for those with AIDS.

… seeing God’s work as much bigger, not just saving our souls, but extending peace, justice, and love all over the world. The emerging church movement is asking again, What is salvation? not just of my soul.

Universalism, Truth, and St. Paul: interview w/ Badiou

2006-07-19T21:16:00.000-05:00

Here is a great interview with Alain Badiou.
It is a great intro to his thought in the area of St. Paul, universalism and truth.

Here is a bit of it:

What is this new conception? For me,
something is universal if it is something that
is beyond established differences. We have
differences that seem absolutely natural to
us. In the context of these differences, the
sign of a new truth is that that these
differences become indifferent. So we have
an absorption of an evident natural
difference into something that is beyond that
difference.

A striking example, which is completely
different from the Pauline example, is the
example of the creation of a new physics by
Galileo. Before Galileo, there is a clear
difference between natural movements and
abstract mathematics. From Aristotle to the
16th century natural movement is conceived
of as something with local determinations,
as a kind of movement that is part of a
closed cosmology. With the Galileo-event
we have a completely new conception of
movement in which the difference between
concrete, natural movement on the one side
and mathematical analysis on the other side
becomes indifferent. This happens because
Galileo declares that the world itself is
written in mathematical language. The old
difference simply loses its pertinence.

Traditionally, universalism is conceived
as the realization of a universal judgment
about some real thing. This is something like
a grammatical conception of universalism.
Universality as a judgment is something that
you can find from Aristotle to Kant to
analytic philosophy today.

My conception is, on the contrary, a
creative one. Universalism is always the
result of a great process that opens with an
event. To create something universal is to go
beyond evident differences and separations.
This is, in my conviction, the great
difference between my conception of
universality (which, of course, is not only
my conception) and some traditional
conceptions of universality. It is also the
difference between a grammatical
conception of truth and my conception of
truth as a creation, a process, an event.

Ethics of the Other? Badiou on Levinas

2006-07-18T20:59:00.000-05:00

Alain Badiou on Emmanuel Levinas:

concerning the 'ethics of the other' and whether it has a future...from Alain Badiou's Ethics:

Summary of Levinas: The greek origin of metaphysics has subordinated all thought to the logic of the Same, that of substance and identity. The metaphysics makes it impossible to encounter the Other in its alterity, incapable of recognizing the Other without violence, and therefore allows for no truly Ethical relations. So, Levinas argues, we must leave the Greek origin and return to the Jewish tradition. In the Jewish tradition, the ‘thou’ immediately disarms the ‘I’ of the reflexive subject. The encounter with the Other precedes, is beyond, a relation of similitude.

Badiou’s question is: how to decide that the encounter with the face, touch, of love with another is really with an Other, and not really a mimetic recognition? Mimetic recognition is when I see the other reflected as myself (narcissism, which is outlined preeminently in psychoanalysis). Badiou says that the encounter with the Other is just as likely to be merely mimetic recognition when view phenomenologically (which is how Levinas is grounding it). But the choice is not decided between the Other or the Same based in the phenomena.

So, Badiou claims, Levinas must undergird the encounter with the Other by an altogether Other, God. In this move, Levinas conflates the thoughts of philosophy to that of theology. And not even a theology as such, but really into an absolute Ethic. In this way, Levinas shows that all ethics freed of metaphysics must ultimately be pious discourse.

So, the first conclusion, is that all derivations of Levinas’ ethics, which go under the names of ‘ethics of the other’, ‘ethics of difference’, ‘recognition of the other’, ‘multiculturalism’, and also attempts to suppress the pious, religious discourse will inevitably regress into mere ideology supporting the reigning capitalist-liberalism.

Second conclusion... “the whole ethical predication based upon recognition of the other should be purely and simply abandoned” b/c of its religious affiliation. Instead, “the real question…is much more that of recognizing the Same” (25).

Argument: Badiou’s axiom, “There is no God. Which also means: the One is not. The multiple ‘without-one’—every multiple being in its turn nothing other than a multiple of multiples—is the law of being.” This ‘without-one’ of reality of overlapping and situated multiplicities admits of infinity in the ordinary fabric of life, rather than as a transcendent intrusion as for Levinas. According to Badiou’s axion (and here is his speaking of ontology via mathematical set theory), all this is is already infinite difference. This infinite overlapping of differences (from physics, to biology, to animals, up to cultural difference) is not a surprise, nor need for special comment, and especially not the creation of an ethical theory. Difference is all that there is, but is that what has to be.

So, “philosophically, if the other doesn’t matter it is indeed because the difficulty lies not on the side of the Same. The Same, in effect, is not what is (i.e. the infinity multiplicity of differences) but what come to be. I have already named that in regard to which only the advent of the Same occurs: it is a truth. Only a truth is, as such indifferent to differences…the truth is the same for all”(27).

The ‘ethics of the other’ then does not cast anything new on the field of humanity, but merely assert that differences should be respected, which easily deflates into the rhetorical tolerance of liberal democracies by which capitalists continue on in their exploitation with much protest but little action.

Differences are, but the Same is what will come. Unlike the Same that comes before and tames the Other in Levinas, it is the Other with is and the Same is worked toward, the Same which is also called equality. Ultimately for Badiou, the ‘ethics of the other’ degenerates into a way of keeping things unequal, while the truth that we must strive for is that we are all equal, we are all the Same in our humanity.

---

questions for further reflection:

So how should those who believe ‘God is’ respond?
Should we herald Levinas’ return of ethical discourse to the religious?
Can we agree with Badiou while still claiming ‘God is’?

new feed

2006-07-14T13:11:00.000-05:00

if any of you care. I've got a new feed by feedburner.

Escape from the ‘Now’, or Return turn to the Present? toward an answer (pt. 2)

2006-07-14T12:41:00.000-05:00

I would say that philosophically and cultural/pastorally our problem is not our abandonment to the present, but rather the inability to receive the ‘present’ time.

on answering the philosophical objections to the present (if that can be done): as I mentioned in the comments the either/or the modern/postmodern discussion seems to be a univocal present which guarantees ‘presence’ of ideas and universal accessibility. While under the aegis of progress (moving forward), we really end up with the end of history, and the eternal now of philosophical or political thought.

Against this is an equivocal casting of our anchors into the past (for Levinas) or the future (for Derrida). But these anchors never reach the bottom (nothing determinate) and therefore we are still lost in the see of time, confronted with the Other that faces us, but we can never bring into our present (time) or presence (space). [In light of this I could add two things: 1) much of American pragmatist conceptions of truth and its political relations are similar. and 2) much of currently theological eschatology adopts the above positions, separating the future Kingdom of Christ from the present Church/Body of Christ.]

So against the univocal and equivocal, I would insert the analogical via the time of incarnation. The time of the ‘already-not yet’; the time which splits time in the middle (of the incarnation/crucifiction/resurrection) awaiting it culmination in the future. But his eschatology is not totally separate from the present (working toward the Kingdom, but without claiming too much [Reformed and Pragmatist conceptions do this], but the bears upon the present and we work to participate/create/appropriate the future right now.

And of course I would say that this shift from retreat to the past/future to fully engaging the present, is correlative to shifting from the ethical (what can we do/say) to the political (what must to do/say).

so, concerning the cultural ‘now’ of capitalist modernity: well, I don’t think there is more for me to add then I did in my response to Jason, so I’ll leave it hear for now.

---
disclaimer: yes I know i've oversimplified Levinas and Derriad. It is much more sutble than this. But hey, this is a blog not a term paper. And while all for rigorous thought, there is also the time to step back and argue the big picture.

Escape from the Now, or Return turn to the Present (pt 1)

2006-07-12T09:37:00.000-05:00

what is the situation of the 'present', or the 'now', in the current philosophical and cultural perspective?

philosophically:
The ethics of the Other, recourse to the Past/Future, are all attempts to escape a totalitarian conception of rationality and correlated politics. With Levinas’ turn toward a forgotten past where ethics preceeded ontology, and Derrida’s endless deferral to the future, the present time was vacated as a means to guarding against the ‘presence’ of modernity, the immediacy of Enlightenment rationality, and it politics of certainty. Is the future really what we should be longing for? A ‘messianism without messiah’ for Derriada? A future without determinate content, b/c otherwise it would be rendered 'present.'

but I ask, might we instead return to the present? Not to demand, control, or institute the ‘presence’ of some idea, but to be present to receive the gift of the present.

culturally:
This perspective seems to also accord with recent articulations of the social/cultural milieu of forgetting the historical (past) and lacking utopian dreams (future) [see Jason Clark and my response]. Because of this there is the contemporary desire to remember and hope for the future (See Fredrick Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future [which i want to read, and would fit with SciFi Fridays]).

So, again, should the goal of contemporary philosophy and pastoral cultural critique be to get us out of the present, the keeper of presence (philosophically), or escape the Now of consumer capitalism (culturally)?

I say No! I think the situation is exactly opposite.
But I’m not telling why ‘til later.

What do you think?

been working

2006-07-11T15:16:00.000-05:00

Well I've been working a bunch for church and at the 'bucks. But I did manage to finish The Worthing Saga. I'll post my reflections for SciFi Friday.

Very thoughful posts on Senator Obama and that lack of the Christian Left from Jamie Smith (Barack Obama: Another Reason to Leave the Christian Left) with expansion by Eric Lee ( Modernity attempts to subvert Christianity's particularity).

Also, I'm working through Lacan again. I love it. I'm working throug Book I of his seminars: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I : Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954

And I'm reformatting a bit of the format here, trying to make categories and update my reading list.

i'll try to post profound thoughts soon.

detecting prejudice in the brain

2006-07-07T09:05:00.000-05:00

I've been in a discussion with Kester Brewin over at Complext Christ concerning the relationships of gift, market, and plunder economies.

And then I came over this this morning. Very disturbing: "Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low: Neuro-imaging responses to Extreme Outgroups".

If you believe someone is not human, they even your brian acts as if they are not human!

the presence of the present

2006-07-06T15:34:00.000-05:00

“Contemplation means ‘being’ with God within the reality of the present moment”

“We don’t know how to be with your kids
We don’t know how to be with ourselves.
We don’t know how to be with God.” (from CYM)

Especially with the advent of Information Technologies, we never know when or where we are. This goes back to the question before concerning if we are trapped in the ‘NOW’ of an endless present (because we have forgotten the past and no longer hope for the future), or rather are we kept from ever entering the present.

As I’m working though thoughts on spiritual direction, youth mentoring, and a general youth ministry here at LOV, I’m leaning more and more toward thinking that our biggest problem is that we don’t know how to be present with people…we don’t know how to just sit with someone and be there fore them. Rather we are off in the future dealing with the next project or problem, or we are thinking of the past with regret or nostalgia. Or while physically present, we are mentally across the world or neighborhood thinking about different places/people. We are rarely present, even to ourselves.

SciFi and the Body

2006-07-05T08:45:00.000-05:00

So I’m about to start reading something that intersects with something I just read. Riding in the back of a friends car, I saw a book by Orson Scott Card, and asked about it. He said it was better than Ender’s Game (which is hard to believe), so I borrowed it, The Worthington Saga. The premise is that a drug called Somec drastically increased people’s life span, but only for those who can afford it, creating two societies: the who live long and those who live short.

Now sometimes it is reality that imitates fiction, but a book was just released and reviewed over at New Left Review. In it the author, Herve Jurin, describes the new movement toward the ‘body’ in capitalism. This is not the old biopolitical refine that our bodies are the symbolic territory fought over by different ideologies (a la Foucault and many feminists theorist…who of course are on to something there). Jurin is not talking about what the ‘body’ means in different contexts (manufacturing meaning of ‘body’), but the actual manufacturing and disposal of bodies through alternative birth strategies and end of life options.

“In between entry [birth] and exit [death], meanwhile, the body-shops of maintenance, repair, transformation and perfection are proliferating, as expenditures on dietetics, health care, cosmetic surgery, embellishment soar…announc[ing] a time when the human body has started to pre-empt all other measures of value in the West, separating the experience of contemporary generations from that of all predecessors, and the rest of the world."

This is the human body turned into property to enhance value, and ultimately to extend life, separating the need for regeneration (or procreation as the old term goes). Jurin argues that capitalist industry will in fact move dramatically toward the maintenance of the human body as its priniciple industry, away from information technologies.

Pretty scary thoughts. Anyway, check out the review, and I’ll start in on the Worthington Saga and see what it is all about.

Who knows, maybe I’ll try to revive Science Fiction Fridays.

Objectivity and Truth: the new war (part 2)

2006-07-03T05:50:00.000-05:00

(continued from yesterday)

new war

This new, and I am persuaded more important, battle lines are being drawn within the ranks of those who have already dismissed the modern project. These postmodern pragmatists, instead of rejecting truth and objectivity (which is the inversion of the modern project), argue that Truth is in the Objectivity. Or rather, Objectivity is Truth. These pragmatists do not want to jettison Truth or Objectivity, but to retain both via modification. Pragmatists, like modernists, desire to retain the link between objectivity and truth, keeping a robust account of the objectivity as social norms and practices, and expounding a minimalist form of the truth. So, unlike the modernists who understand objectivity as something like universal access to all rational observers, pragmatists argue that objectivity is situated not in individual, rational subjects, but is found in the rationality of social practices and those properly trained into them. And, unlike a modern theory of Truth which claims the complete correspondence of statements and objects, usually assuming a type of metaphysical supplement, pragmatists argue for Truth as a partial, provisional, and falliblist part of our everyday practices which is non-relative (not subjectively constituted) and non-metaphysical.

Now of course, this account of Truth is not very different than other postmodern versions of contextuality and interpretation. But the firm linkage of this Truth with a social understanding of Objectivity becomes the new war over words. This old linkage with revised concepts, while at the same time attempting to under gird rational discourse within democratic society, becomes the new area of exclusion for authentic theological discourse.

For it seems to me that this new war is that between Truth as Objective and Truth as Subjective. In a good old reform adage, we cannot come to know the Truth unless we have been converted/changed/redeemed, and this entails a Subjective transformation; a transformation by the Truth. The Truth makes us, not the other way around. We practice the Truth (subjectively), we do not observe it (objectively).

stakes

If we accept, or fail to understand, this new movement of philosophical/political theory, within the various postfoundational discourses, we will again fail to articulate a truly Christian vision of the present/future, and mistakenly underwrite the “violence inherent within the system.” To link Truth with the Objectivity of social practices, again block the New Revelation of God in all historical situations, it again binds us to the imminence of this world.

So instead we should assert that Truth is out there, but it is not Objective. Truth is embattled, fragile, and hard to find, it is not Objective as a rule to be followed, but rather written on our hearts as a gentle wisdom.

Philosophy and Critical Theory

2006-07-01T15:48:00.000-05:00

Philosophy, Politics, and Critical Theory

Philosophy

"If the Lord is Risen, why can't we see Him?"

Badiou: Event, Truth, Subject

Badiou on Heideggar on Truth

Badiou on Truth and the (re)turn of Philosophy

Theology's Conversation Partners: Continental, Analytic, or Beyond?

Ricoeur on Levinas: “Self” between the “I” and its overthrow

Levinas' Infinite Trauma

Levinas on Levinas

Zizek on Levinas: Smashing the Neighbors Face

Universalism, Truth, and St. Paul: interview w/ Badiou

Ethics of the Other? Badiou on Levinas

Escape from the ‘Now’, or Return turn to the Present? toward an answer (pt. 2)

Escape from the Now, or Return turn to the Present (pt 1)

Objectivity and Truth: the new war (part 2)

Objectivity and Truth: the new war (part 1)

With Friends like Rorty, who needs Enemies.

Reviews of "Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Realism, not Empiricism

Multitude, People, or...

Critical Theory

Political priests and Sectarian Theologians: is the shrine empty? (3)

“empty signifier vs. the empty shrine”: EC and American Political Discourse. (2)

Emerging Church as “Empty Signifier”: Labels don’t fit because the container is Empty (1)

Politics

Advent Explorations

Third Party- christians and politics

“It’s not about racism, it’s about law and order.”

christians and the political

Emerging Church

2006-07-01T15:47:00.000-05:00

Post on the Emerging Church

“empty signifier vs. the empty shrine”: EC and American Political Discourse. (2)

Emerging Church as “Empty Signifier”: Labels don’t fit because the container is Empty (1)

Culmination-Culture, not Counter: of temporal refugees

Lines of convergence: global-urban-postmodern

Science Fiction Fridays

2006-07-01T15:46:00.000-05:00

Series on Science Fiction, Ideology, and Theological Hermeutics

Science Fiction Fridays: Weekly Series

Science Fiction Fridays: C.S. Lewis on SciFi

Why Star Trek is liberal ideology.

SciFi and the Body

Objectivity and Truth: the new war (part 1)

2006-06-30T19:05:00.000-05:00

Objectivity and Truth: the new war

(please forgive my militarist tone: i was sitting in the hot sun on vacationwhen I wrote this: although i’m uncertain about the correlation).

below i present the new linking of ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’ which pragmatist develop against foundationalist. But I think this new link is bad, and that truth is not objective. (see also a good discussion from a while back at generousorthodoxy)

old war

The collusion of objectivity and truth has been under fire for several years now, especially among evangelical Christians. Usually the warring parties gather under the banner of ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’. (I could site parties but I’m not going to bother.)

The conservatives (or modernists) argue (or merely assume) that Truth is only assured by Objectivity. If something is not objectively true, then it is not true. Truth is not subjective after all, for that would be merely whim or opinion. They generally disparage the enemy by claiming their opponents have given up on Truth all together and have embraced relativism, or at least agnosticism.

The liberal (postmodernist) responds by saying that they certainly have not given up on Truth, but they realize that Truth is very hard to get at, that there is never merely an Objective point of view, and that instead of Objectivity we must realize our embeddedness in particular stories, local contexts, and idiosyncratic interpretations, all of which do not bar the Truth, but open up the Truth is different ways.

Now concerning this war, it is somewhat old news, and while the battles rage, I do not think that those articulating the postmodern (or premodern depending on your view) perspective should continue fight this battle, when a more pressing conflict is brewing, drawing new battle lines.

Well, I'll tell you tomorrow or Monday.
But what do you think is the most pressing issue after ?
Have I majorly misconstrude the issues?

for the time being

NEW BLOG

Theology reading list: Pauline Interpretation

Spiritual Leadership

Missional Monday: Baptismal Family

this is a test.

Missional Monday: Verge, LA

The Sounds of Silence

Missional Monday: Editability vs Accountability

The Lost Tools of Learning

Missional Mondays: On being a Pre-Evangelical

Christian Radio Redeemed!

Missional Monday: 10 People Not To Have In A Church Plant...

trust the community entrusted to you

On not beginning with the book...

Missional Monday: Pseudo-Spirituality

Missional Monday: Don't Reify "Helping the Poor"

when pushing the envelope, don’t destroy the letter.

Science Fiction Friday: How Will The World End?

On building walls

Missional Mondays: On not being so bad at b-ball

Sci-Fi Friday: Cybor-Pirate-Ninja Jesus

Aninalic Theology?

Science Fiction Friday: Mourning the Loss of...

The Art of Losing

Missional Mondays: Radicals or Missionals

Science Fiction Friday: Series Re-boot

Missional Gibberish: On learning German and leading.

On being missionally bad at basketball

No Sweat on Public Radio

Hum...Politics

"This is my blood" and the fruit of the earth

Christian Politics?

"Not Voting" as an Act of Christian Discernment- by Dave FitchChanging the Wind?- over at Jesus ManifestoAdvise Everyone...Endorse No One- by Shane Claiborne

Summertimes

Christian Liturgy #1: reading notes

the jesus manifesto

Beyond Jesus: on the Atonement

CSA or 2007 Farm Bill: What to Do?

2/3 World Economics and the Church

The Gift in Stranger than Fiction

Help! Global Church News Aggregator?

Where is the presence of Christ?

'Christian' is not an adjective!

Where Have I been? Where is Geoff going?

Oh Man! I wanted to be Gen X

covered heads-bare legs: its all good for business

peace in the middle east? no sweat, and organic

Recent New: The 'Value' of Nation Elections

Dictatorship of the Bourgeois: Universal Sufferage and Secret Balloting

lindbeck after wittgenstein?

Health is not Profitable.

Lectio divina vs. gramatico historica: the scripture parallax

Stats to Go Along with the State of the Union

Welcoming Christ in the Migrant

I got a new computer...

Incarnational vs Incorporational.

Best Contemporary Theology Meme

Lacan and the Political

Agrarian Economics and Transcritique

off the grid: no sweatshop clothing

Advent Explorations over at C&P

Personal Statement for Ph.D apps

The GRE is finished!!!!

Rich Whitney for Govenor

Toward World Republic: Beyond Capital-Nation-State

Meat Labels Hope to Lure the Sensitive Carnivore

"If the Lord is Risen, why can't we see Him?"

"You look like Lenin," I was told

Where Have I Been?

Badiou: Event, Truth, Subject

Badiou on Heideggar on Truth

Badiou on Truth and the (re)turn of Philosophy

Augmented Reality and Google Maps

Theology's Conversation Partners: Continental, Analytic, or Beyond?

it's a saddleback day

over at C&P

Ricoeur on Levinas: “Self” between the “I” and its overthrow

(Dis)interested in Levinas?

Third Party- christians and politics

"Not Voting" as an Act of Christian Discernment- by Dave Fitch
Changing the Wind?- over at Jesus Manifesto
Advise Everyone...Endorse No One- by Shane Claiborne