(Ir)religiosity

I’m going to take a bit of blogging and social media break.  For a few reasons.

First, I’ll be leaving early tomorrow morning for a canoeing/fishing trip at the Boundary Waters.  I’ll be gone for about a week.  No computer.  No cell phone.  No iPod.  No technology.  It will be refreshing.  And it couldn’t come at a better time.

Which leads me to a second reason.  I’ve become increasingly irritated and disappointed at the lack of substance and content in the “social media world” lately (blogging, twittering, etc.).  That is not to say that good, engaging and original content isn’t out there, it is.  But it’s getting drowned out by all the crap and the noise.  It makes me tried and cranky.  I’m sick of reading banal blog posts and my twitter feed being dominated by spymaster games or reports on someone’s workout routine.  For me, these are useful tools to share information and float new, creative thoughts or ideas.  But there seems to be a lot of rehashing going on and the endless noise both drowns out the things worth paying attention to and dilutes the larger conversation.

The lack of originality and the dominance of pure junk and noise has affected me and my creativity more than I realize.  A lot of what I blog about comes from inspiration from either what I’m reading offline or what I’m reading online.  Lately I just haven’t been inspired by the latter.  Again, that is not to say good stuff isn’t being written or shared.  It’s just being overshadowed and marginalized.

So I’m going to take a much needed break for a least a few weeks.  And when I get back and I may seriously cut back on my media intake by purging my feed reader and twitter.

Hey, I might even toss out thoughts and ideas the old-fashioned way and have some real conversations.  Imagine that.

I ran across this in Walter Kaufmann‘s prologue to his translation of Martin Buber‘s I and Thou (an introduction which stands as an excellent piece writing in its own right).

[W]hy use religious terms?  Indeed, it might be better not to use them because they are always misunderstood. But what other terms are there?  We need a new language, and new poets to create it, and new ears to listen to it. Meanwhile, if we shut our ears to the old prophets who still speak more or less in the old tongues, using ancient words, occasionally in new ways, we shall have very little music. We are not so rich that we can do without tradition. Let [those who have] ears listen to it in a new way.

Jesus’ phrase “let those who have ears hear” is perhaps one of the most fascinating and enigmatic expressions in the entire New Testament.  It is so pregnant with meaning and life.  Too often I am afraid we try to force old readings into new wine-skins and end up hurting or even destroying both.  I am convinced that is why Jesus often spoke in parables — because such a medium inherently resists a static, colonizing hermeneutic.  Parables simply cannot be reduced to simple, “in a nutshell” type meanings.  They are complex, multi-faceted, life-giving narratives that invite the reader to participate in birthing meaning, in doing truth.  Like prisms, parables — if we have ears to hear — channel divine dynamism in multiple ways depending upon one’s vantage point or angle.  They abduct us, catching us off guard if we let them, and rupture our usual, predictable mode existence with divine excess and presence (or is it absence?).  I find that it is in the parables that we learn to see the face of the Other thereby see ourselves as (an)other.

But we must have ears to hear.

I’ve been learning to do just that.  And I’m finding that it is not easy and often demands that I forsake my familiar and comfortable reading for something that is unknown — something that makes me uneasy and uncomfortable.

In the process I rediscovered some old friends and have fallen in love with them all over again:  Augustine and Kierkegaard being chief among them.

Who are you rediscovering and re-reading?  Who have you met again with new ears to listen?

Tim Burton is one of my favorite film directors.  He’s got some upcoming projects that look to be pretty good (and one in the not so distant future that has the potential to be stellar).  I watched the trailer for 9 a few weeks ago and it looks to be pretty good, but I’m mostly stoked about his adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.  The first teaser trailer was released yesterday at Comic-Con (for real this time) and it looks delightful.  Interestingly, it looks like the Mad Hatter will be the main character.  I’m okay with that.  I guess I wasn’t paying attention before but it looks like Stephen Fry will be the voice of Cheshire Cat and Crispin Glover the Knave of Hearts.  Nice.

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• ‘Alice in Wonderland’ Trailer is Back Online! (cinematical.com)

It would be easy for me to rattle off a list of people who have influenced my hermeneutics from the worlds of theology and religious studies.  So I thought I would make it a bit more interesting and list several thinkers from outside the religious world (more or less) who influence my interpretation of not only the bible but literature in general.  Of course any “list” is always incomplete and unfinished.  There are many people who have indirectly influence my interpretive approach; I’m limiting this list to those that are more direct and most recent in time.  So here is my “hand” of 7 (in no particular order).

• Jacques Derrida - for deconstruction and différance
• Paul Ricoeur - for symbolism/myth and a hermeneutics of suspicion
• Judith Butler - for gender/sexuality identity and social construction
• Stanley Fish - for the importance of  interpretive communities and the downfall of foundationalism
• Emmanuel Levinas – for “ethics as philosophy” and the presence of the Other
• Michel Foucault – for the importance of history and power relations
• Cornel West - for “prophetic pragmatism” and the Socratic imperative

That’s my blend at the moment.

Who are a few of your non-religious and non-theological influences?

I had an interesting discussion with some friends on Facebook the other day over this comic.  It’s a depiction of a quote from Neil Postman‘s important book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Here’s the full quote from the forward:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Postman goes on to argue, very convincingly, that Huxley was indeed right and that our preoccupation with entertainment and excess of information has negated our ability to determine what is important, relevant, and true.  The book is a must read for anyone, especially people involved in social media.

The conversation I had revolved around the question of whether Postman was completely right.  In the book he argues that Huxley’s prophecy has come to pass (more or less) and Orwell’s has not.  I tend to think that there are elements of both in our culture and at our worst we oscillate between the two.  Which may turn out to be more dangerous than one or the other by itself.

Which do you believe is more present in our culture today? Or is it some mixture of both?

The first Emerget Outliers meeting happened yesterday evening.  We met for around two hours and discussed everything from Caputo, Derrida, and deconstruction to secularization, evangelism, and the sinner’s prayer.  It was great.  The group is wonderful and I’m looking forward to more meetings in the future.

We plan to meet again in two weeks.  Updates will be posted regular on the main site and we hope to utilize the forum as a means to set up the next group conversation.  Hope you will join us.

I’ll put all my cards on the table:  I think Kierkegaard is unfortunately habitually misread today.  The common reading as dictated by the philosophical and theological canon and undoubtedly displayed in undergraduate intro. courses couches (and caricatures) Kierkegaard as a prime example of religious fidelity gone awry.  His “teleological suspension of the ethical” represents all that is wrong and dangerous with religion after the Enlightenment and such a position is decidedly irrational, lacking the proper grounding in ethical reasoning.  That is one reading.  To be sure, it is important and one that should be not ignored, but it is, however, not the only one nor is it, in my view, the best one.

I was re-reading some articles and interviews by John Caputo in preparation for Emergent Outliers’ first book club meeting tonight (you should join us!) when I ran across an interesting reading of Kierkegaard that avoids that usual, banal approach and obliquely offers a critique of modern ethics.  Commenting on Derrida‘s reading of Fear and Trembling, Caputo writes that:¹

“Responsibility is the issue of the singularity of the situation of the responing subject (for which “Abraham” is a place-holder) standing alone before the “wholly other” (for which “God” is a place-holder) while the demands of the “other others” (for which Isaac is a place-holder) press in upon and interrupt the intimacy of this exclusive tête-à-tête ["head-to-head"].  Thus, to decide responsibly is always a matter of sacrificing “Isaac,” the ones who hold the Isaac position, by which he [Derrida] means, of sensitizing oneself to my responsibility to all the other others who also lay claim to my responsibility, even as I respond to the other one before me.  Unlike de Silentio, Derrida’s analysis does not turn a suspension of my ethical duty in the face of the religious call that overrides it, but on the conflict of ethical duties that structures every ethical choice, which makes the paradox of the akedah [the binding of Isaac] the paradigm of everyday ethical decisions right on down to the smallest detail….”

Interesting.  So instead of fixating on Abraham’s suspension of ethics perhaps it is helpful to read the narrative in a different manner, one that recognizes the sacrifice and conflict that is inherent in every ethical decision.  One must always, in every situation (even the most mundane and seemingly insignificant), chose between opposing responsibilities as there always other others.  That is the paradox of ethics and a paradox that most popular approaches to ethics (the deontological, utilitarianism, etc.) seem to avoid precisely because they are impermeable systems conceived in the abstract, demanding fidelity to a certain set of presupposed to premises which may or may not relate to the situation at hand.  I suspect that this is what Caputo is getting at in his book Against Ethics (though I have not read it in it entirety) and I believe that this is what the usual readings of Kierkegaard miss:  that modern ethical systems, while helpful as guidelines, will always be deconstructible insofar as they posit a set of disembodied propositions that must be applied to situation that always already has other cards that have been played ahead of time.

Such a critique virtually renders moot the tiring discussions we’ve all had over which ethical system is the best because all systems are in agreement that the most proper approach should be conceived in the abstract, relying on the so-called impartiality of Reason and  constructed outside palpable relations with the wholly Other and other others.  But the  true ethical dilemma is the one that catches us by surprise as we realize the impossible choice we must make between two responsibilities, two others who have already laid claim to us.  Such an event, not at all unlike the one faced by Abraham, simply cannot be solved by a intangible system alone.

That is, I believe, an unsung lesson of Kierkegaard and one that Caputo and Derrida can both return to after the desert of modern criticism:  that there is always already conflict inherent in every ethical situation, conflict that cannot be fully resolved and conflict that demands a choice between rival responsibilities and irreconcilable others.

1. The quotation is taken from an article Caputo wrote in the 2002 Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook titled, “Looking the Impossible in the Eye: Kierkegaard, Derrida, and the Repetition of Religion, pg. 8-9.  Caputo writes on the same subject at length in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida:  Religion without Religion, but the article provides the most concise and lucid description of his larger, more complex argument. [↩]

Hilarious.

(ht)

Reposted from Open Table Theology:

For quite some time my approach to prayer was nothing more than a glorified exercise in narcissism laced with all the right buzzwords and religious jargon.  I treated God like some sort of cosmic gumball machine.  Through my prayers I inserted the proper coinage, twisted the handle, and hoped what came out of the tube was a flavor of gum I liked.  My prayers consisted of elaborate wish lists containing all sorts of petitions and requests.  To be sure, I would throw in something every once in while about starving kids in a third world country to feel less guilty and hopefully pad my persuasive capital with God — as if God were taking orders from me, or flipping some sort of epic prayer coin to decided whether or not my request should be granted.   God, for me, was a better version of a Genie in a Bottle: except there was no bottle because God was always there to listen (I always wondered how God could be there to listen to everyone, but I never let it bother me too much) and I had an unlimited number of “wishes.”  The only catch was I would never know if my wishes would actually be granted.  Some would, others wouldn’t.  Sometimes the minor ones were granted while other more important ones were not.  I just assumed God arbitrarily picked which ones to honor and which ones to table.  So it went.

I have long since rejected that very trivial theology of prayer, but as I reflect on its implications I realize how important our understanding of prayer actually is.  It seems to me that prayer is often sidelined as a second or even third tier “issue” subservient to more important and pressing theological questions like the nature of God or theodicy or soteriology and so on.  For example, if you go to a local book store book on prayer (the quality of such books notwithstanding) are almost always placed in the “Christian Inspiration” section rather than the “Theology” section.  However, if theology is primarily about developing a sound and coherent word (logos) about God (theos) — however limiting and finite it may be — what could be more important than prayer?  If I am feebly and delicately trying to develop ideas about God, about the divine, about that which is beyond me and that which consumes me — which is what I have devoted the remainder of my life to doing — what could be more weighty and significant than my ideas about addressing the divine, than my approach to communicating with God, than the way in which I, to borrow from Brother Lawrence, practice the presence of God?

This is what I am trying to get at: prayer says more about our theology and our ideas of God than we realize; indeed, I would go so far as to claim that how we view prayer in some sense determines what we believe about the nature of God and vice versa.  If God is a deus ex machina, a mechanistic deity, a Big Daddy in the Sky who pulls strings for good people and cuts strings for bad people, then we will pray in a certain way.  And, like my example above, how we pray will reveal an understood theology whether we overtly claim it or not.  If we really want to “do theology” well and uncover all those areas in which the residue of our tacit assumptions about God still remain, then we had better take prayer seriously. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeremy Bouma liveblogged the Poets, Prophets, and Preachers conference that took place in Grand Rapids over the last several days.

I was reading over his coverage of Tuesday’s events was immediately struck by this line from the Pete Rollins session (I don’t know if he is paraphrasing or if it is a direct quote):

The question is not is Christianity true, but what does it mean when it claims to be true.

The traditional assumption, of course, is that Christianity claims to be true in the same way that biology might claim to be true (at least that is what seems to have been discussed at the conference).  This is part of my beef with calling theology a “science.” It reduces meaning to the realm of empiricism and rationalism.  Theology is reduced to a fleeting pursuit of objectivity, which often claims to posses The Univocal Understanding of how the world works.  But what if it’s not so much about the world itself and how it works but rather how one should be in the world and how the community should embody an alternative to the world’s dominant narrative (of violence, domination, etc)?

That’s one way of approaching it.  But of course it’s not the only one.

However we might choose to answer it, I think framing the question in this way gets us a little closer to where we need to be.

How might you answer that question?  What does Christianity, or any religion for that matter, mean when it claims to be true?