(Ir)religiosity

My friend Matt Scott is starting a new blog consortium and emergent collective.  Open Table Theology will be an place to foster diverse theological conversation and hopefully an outlet for voices — important and interesting voices, to be sure — that might not otherwise be heard amidst the noise of social media.

You can read more of Matt’s thoughts on the project here and here.

The idea is to gather together a diverse group of persons who are interested in creating an participating in open theological conversation about a wide variety of topics.  You don’t have to be a blogger to participate.  You should have to be someone who has something to share.

A new theme/topic will be selecting each month beginning in June.  There’s really no limit to contribution at this point.  Submissions will be posted and hopefully a thoughtful and engaging conversation will be sparked and continue for the duration of the month.

So here’s the deal. These sorts of things only work well if people participate.  We need contributors! If you’re interested stop by and sign up and you will receive and email from Matt with instructions.  If you don’t want to be a steady contributor add the Open Table RSS feed to your feed reader so you can join in the conversation once it gets going.  The more people we have involved the richer and more engaging the conversation will be.  So check it out!

I had every intention of reading through Žižek’s latest book on violence and relating it to my thoughts in the previous posts.  But I’ve been super busy and had some trouble getting my hands on the book (trouble with Amazon, but that is a different story).

Incidentally, I was reading through Caputo and Derrida’s Deconstruction in a Nutshell last night for a totally different project and ran across a provocative quote.  I thought I float it and see what your reactions are.

A little background.  The book has two parts.  Part I is the transcript of a round table discussion that took place at Villanova University in 1995 between Jacques Derrida, John Caputo and others.  The point of the discussion was to dispel many of myths and false understanding of Derrida’s thought and the project of deconstruction.  The book is fascinating in that respect.  If you’ve ever tried to read Derrida you know that he is not the easy thinker to understand.  The discussion provided a rare moment of transparency.  Part II is an extended commentary on the discussion by John Caputo.

The immediate context of this quote has to do with the setting and format of the discussion.  Captuo notes that the discussion is, in a way, violent towards Derrida.  Derrida, a native French speaker, was asked to spontaneously and succinctly answer, in English, questions regarding a philosophy that he has not only dedicated his life toward, but one that he repeatedly insists defies short, sound-byte type definitions.  Captuo playfully asks forgives for the “multiple violence” placed on Derrida, for forcing him to answer in a foreign language (OK, I have to admit that I find Derrida’s English to be much better than mine!) questions about his thought that simply cannot be adequately expressed in an hour and a half.

Ok, enough of that.  Here’s the quote.

“There is no pure non-violence, but only degrees and economies of violence, some of which are more fruitful than others.”

Interesting.  No doubt he is right.  I find it particularly interesting — and I’ll probably pick this up in a later post — that many of us tend to focus on nonviolence only apropos to physical violence.  Which is ironic considering most of us will never have a real chance to exercise that nonviolence by choosing not to act physically violent towards the other.  We do, however, have all sorts of chance to act nonviolently and fail to do so.  In fact, I would argue that most times we simply fail to recognize the violence in which we participate or perpetrate.  It never shows up on our radar screen.

I’m not saying this to suggest that I am categorically against nonviolence.  Quite the opposite.  I am, for all intents and purposes, a theoretical pacifist, falling just shy of absolute pacifism (I’ll take this up later on too).  I use the word theoretical here to point toward the absurdity of my calling myself a nonviolent person in reference to a specific type of violence (physical) while simultaneously engaging and participating in numerous other forms of violence.  It could even be argued that nonviolence, in terms of its opposition only to physical violence, serves as a sort of religious fetish that precludes us from confronting the other forms of violence in which we participate.  If that is true then perhaps we should hold our physically nonviolent dogma a bit more loosely in order to become more holistically nonviolent.

But I’m already getting ahead of myself.  I’m interesting in what you think of the quote.  Agree?  Disagree?  Don’t care?  What are your thoughts?

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For a long time now Jim Wallis has denied that he or his organization comprises or wants anything to do with the so-called Religious Left.  In fact, in one of his more popular books he spends a great deal of time arguing that the should be neither a Religious Right nor a Religious Left.  Much of his rhetoric has suggested that faith communities and religious non-profits should strive to transcend the political polarities that always seem to dominated public discourse.

I agree.  I think that is exactly the route that should be taken.  And I think that Wallis and Sojourners have done a pretty good job of modeling that ethos.

But then yesterday a statement was released from the Sojourners press office with a noticeable change in language and tone.

I wanted to gauge your interest in the first big mobilization of the Religious Left in the Obama era — a signal of the shift in power dynamics. Sojourners is mobilizing over a thousand Christian activists and 70 religious and anti-poverty groups at a conference next week in DC to prepare a new poverty coalition for legislative battle this year. This is the Religious Left filling the hole created by the decline of the Religious Right but now we have the political power and ear of the White House — definitely a new trend and a “first” within this new political era. (ht)

Yikes.  I don’t like the sound of that at all. I’m all for a mass mobilization to fight poverty but I don’t see the need to brand it has the rise of new Religious Left.  We’ve seen what happened with the Religious Right.  Polarizing and divisive language should be expected of our politicians.  But I think it’s time for our faith communities to model a different way that transcends the false dichotomies of modernity.

What’s interesting is that this press release is the only statement (that I know of) that uses the new verbiage.  So it makes one wonder if Sojourners really is shifting or a deputy press secretary is just off message.  The official website for the conference makes no such mention of “mobilization of the Religious Left.”  But either way, it makes me very curious about insider talk.

What do you make us this?  Is it a careless mistake or indicative of a wider shift?

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As I’ve mentioned before — or maybe I haven’t mentioned it before, I can’t remember — I reserve the right to blatantly disagree with myself and change my mind on this blog.  That’s just the nature of things.

A while back I wrote a post in which I attempt to provisionally answer Augustine’s timeless question: What do I love when I love my God?  One commenter pointing out that my answer was very anthropocentric. No doubt he is right.  I’d probably modify my language were I answering it today.

Last night I was reading On Religion by John Caputo and I ran across a quote that made me wonder about the premise of the question.  No that’s not right.  Not the premise of the question per se, but perhaps the way the question has been couched by virtually every commenter since Augustine firs posed it.

The name of God is the name of the ever open question.  Unlike reductionists, who think that the name of God closes every question down, that it supplies  a ready-made answer for every possible questio, the name of God in my post-modern Itinerarium is the name of infinite questionability, of what is endlessly questionable, for no name can cause my head to spin more than the name of what I love and desire.  But what do I love when I love my God?  In loyalty to St. Augustine, whom I also love, I have retained the “what,” but of course, if I dared to correct a Saint, which I would never do, if I were an obscure copyist in an Irish monastery in the tenth century working on the Confessiones, I would in all fear and trembling have furtively amended the what to a how.  How do I love when I love my God? For love is a how, not a what.

Captuo goes on to argue that God is not merely a name to by examined by theologians and metaphysicians, but a deed — or deeds plural, that is more like it — to be carried out, a doing to be done, and action to be enacted, a how to be put into practice.  For it is in doing justice and doing love that God exists, not in the hopelessly modernistic arguments for or against the existence of God as a simple proposition, for God cannot be constraint my reductionist propositions and premises.

Perhaps then both ends of the spectrum, of God as Being-Itself (Paul Tillich) and God as that which is without Being (Jean-Luc Marion), are as equally problematic as is the false dichotomy of theism and atheism.  To ask whether God is or is not is to miss the higher movement at play and to reduce the name of God to pure empirical proposition.  Rather, in this view, God is in facere veritatem ( the doing of truth), to borrow Caputo borrowing Augustine.  Truth is brought into existence in the happening; likewise God is brought into existence in the event.  God is a God-Who-May-Be, to use Richard Kearney’s expression, because God rejects as false both modern reductions of theism and atheism, of possibility and impossibility, real and unreal.  This God is utterly Beyond, a God of a/theism, a God of im/possibility, and a God of the hyper-real, that is the Real beyond real, whose name is brought to bare in the happening of truth, the doing of justice, and the enacting of a possibility otherwise thought to be impossible — that is love.

I’m trying to put together something of a summer reading list.  It’s been far too long since I’ve read some good fiction.  So long that I don’t even know what good fiction is these days.  I’ve got several graphic novels lined up, some Tolkien (which I haven’t touched since high school unfortunately), some Kafka, some Vonnegut — who knows, I might even read some poetry.  But I’d be open to some good suggestions.

What should I read?  What would be your favorite fiction titles?

(ht)

I opened my Facebook this morning to find this:

It is conceited I know.  But it’s not every day one of your intellectual hero/ines is perusing your reading list.  So I’ll indulge myself.

But seriously, his latest post on the nature of belief is well worth your read.  It is interesting to observe how quickly a conversation, especially a theological conversation, concerning belief and the nature of one’s beliefs capitulates to what one can know with certainty — beyond the shadow of a doubt as it were — and the empirical factoids that one can observe in an ‘objective’ manner about the world.  Belief is hopelessly reduced only to what one can sensibly see rather than pointing toward the incoming of a reality that, in Peter’s words, “does not yet exist,” the incoming of something wholly beyond mere fact, something wholly beyond epistemological certainty, and something wholly Other that inaugurates the very real possibility of the im/possible.

Peter draws particular attention to the absurdity of our relegating to the realm of absurdity any belief that might appear to be counter-factual.  It is an important observation and one I hope we do not ignore.

The mystery of God for himself culminates in the words of Jesus on the cross: ‘Father, why did you forsake me?’  At that moment, God is completely abandoned by God and thus shares the human experience of being abandoned by God.  In this way, it is the moment when ‘Christ becomes fully human,’ the moment when ‘the radical gap that separates God from man is transposed into God Himself.’  On the cross, God abandons himself totally and in this way the absolute identity of God and humankind is realized.  Or, as Žižek puts it: ‘When I, a human being, experience myself as cut off from God, at that very moment of the utmost abjection, I am absolutely close to God, since I find myself in the position of the abandoned Christ.’

– Frederiek Depoortere in Christ in Postmodern Philosophy (115)

Today God is eclipsed….and we are left to wrestle with its aftermath.

In response to my last post, Andrew offers what I a think is a good working definition for violence.

For me, and I suspect for others, violence is most easily described the way the concept Force is described bythe formula “force equals mass times acceleration.” Another way to state this is to say “force is the quantity that, when applied to a mass, produces acceleration.” In this way, I think it is both simplest and most comprehensive to describe violence by its effect rather than its myriad causes.

Violence is that property which, when applied to an entity (be it an entelechy, social structure, or any other kind of object) through some action or process, produces injury or damage.

I agree.  Violence — be it subjective, systemic, or symbolic — is that which causes injury or damage to, and demands the subjugation of, a particular autonomous entity.

I would also want to draw attention to the fact that this definition allows some emphases that have — at least in Christian theology — often been ignored.  Here I am thinking particularly of the violence of language and the violence of ideology especially as it pertains to certain Christian concepts (e.g. evangelism, missiology, nonviolence, etc.).  It would seem, if we are to accept this definition, that insisting upon ideological and linguistic conformity — as these ideas at lest in there more traditional forms tend to do — would be to do violence to the other and thus undermine the Christian project altogether.

I say this only to return to another question:  I wonder, can these concepts be freed from ideology and re-appropriated in such a way that does not perpetuate violence against seemingly potential ideological converts?  I want to suggest that somehow they can.  This will be something I explore in another post.  For now I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about violence lately and I think I may do a series of posts on the subject.  To begin I want to simply pose a question: what is violence?  This seems simple to answer but I want to intentionally suspend for a moment the Christian preoccupation — I daresay a fetish — with nonviolence and pacifism as a response only to overtly physical violence.  My reasoning  here is simple.  The Christian doctrine of nonviolence, its goodness notwithstanding, seems to ignore other, perhaps more dangerous forms of violence from which physical violence may or may not be derived.  With that in mind it would be interesting to consider what it might mean to be, in our world, a truly nonviolent person, that is one who denounces more than overt acts of physical violence.  Indeed, expanding our definition of violence calls into question the viability of nonviolence as a normative form of behavior.

So again, without resorting to the more myopic definitions that all to often dominate theological discourse, I ask what is violence broadly defined?

To get the ball rolling, here is a quote from an interview with Slavoj Žižek whose latest book addresses this very subject.

We should shift the perspective and ask, what if some kind of violence needs to go on to keep things the way they are? What if what we think of as violence is a distraction? To understand this, we must distinguish between subjective violence, systemic violence and symbolic violence.

Subjective violence is violence that is actively done, which can be attributed to a certain subject, such as a murderer, the police, a mob, terrorists – you can see who did it.

Systemic violence is anonymous violence. An example is George Soros. He has done wonderful things with his foundation, but if you look at his market speculation with currencies 10 years ago, what was the effect? Hundreds of thousands losing their jobs in south-east Asia. It was a social tsunami. This is anonymous, systemic violence.

And then you have symbolic violence. Today in the West, there is an obsession with harassment. Anything that another person does to you can be harassment. There is something very violent in this extreme sensitivity to another person’s proximity. I’m opposed to the ideology of tolerance, because what we call tolerance is a form of intolerance. (Link)

So let’s developing a working definition of violence.  How would you define it?  Do you agree that it involves more than overt acts of physical violence?  If so, what more should be included?