An amazing conference is happening among some of the leading social theorists globally gathering to both consider and, I think, assist Robert Bellah in his work on religious evolution and the key concept of the axial age. Something to watch, for sure, as it has profound implications on our understand of the present (just see Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, for example, to see that).
A really interesting article on "new habits" got me thinking about the relation between habit and cognition, bodily practice in creativity and learning, and the limited ways we moderns have for thinking about knowing. This is something I was just reading about in Charles Taylor's book, A Secular Age (yes, I'm still reading, trying to finish by the end of May. I'm on page 618, so the end is near.) He wrote (p. 615) in a section on the long process of 'excarnation' in Latin Christendom:
"If we think of the three levels of human linguistic-communicative activity in its broadest sense: one of bodily habitus and mimicry, one of symbolic expression in art, poetry, music, dance; and one of prose, descriptive language; we can say that aboriginal religious life was mainly couched in the first two, but that the culture which emerges from modern Western Reform has largely abandoned these, and confines itself to the third.
The rationalist paradigm that took hold of professional education--and theological education as well--over the last two hundred years has overemphasized detached cognitive reasoning. It has also overemphasized the individual thinker in whose mind such reasoning takes place. One of the reasons for common work (either in classroom settings or in a practical theology research laboratory such as I've described here) is that it allows for a richer conception of human thinking and communication to come to the fore.
My next project has to do with an epistemology of professional practice, looking at ministry in particular, and the beginnings of the project are outlined in my chapter contribution to a new book in practical theology titled For Life Abundant, available now, (see ch. 11, titled: "Learning Ministry over Time: Embodying Practical Wisdom"). The ideas there are woven through other chapters, too, and the concern is highlighted for further consideration in the book's last section titled: "In Anticipation" (isn't that a nice alternative to "conclusion" as if we'd wrapped up all that needed to be said . . . not!)
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Affirming the intelligence of practice
Texts and propositions alone cannot carry or communicate the knowledge of God’s grace in Christ that is at the heart of Christian existence. This lifegiving knowledge, which dwells in the bodies of believers and in the Body they comprise, is gained through forms of active and receptive participation that engage a wide range of human capacities. Likewise, the specific practices by which we respond to God’s grace — practices such as prayer, forgiveness and hospitality — bear knowledge of God, ourselves and the world that cannot be reduced to words, even though words are often important in helping us to learn and participate faithfully in them. Such practices embody certain kinds of wisdom and foster certain kinds of intelligence when engaged in serious and critical ways. The practice of Christian ministry also requires and imbues forms of knowledge, wisdom, and intelligence that include but reach far beyond mere cognition. Practical theology serves the church and the world by honoring and articulating such knowledge, wisdom, and intelligence as they emerge in actual persons and communities, and by considering how they might most faithfully be deepened and shared for the sake of abundant life. In doing so, practical theology seeks to clarify the intelligence of practice without reducing it, and to query its reasons even while acknowledging that it is impossible fully to comprehend either the concrete uniqueness or the Spirit-led possibility inherent in any given instance of practice. Like faithful ministry and discipleship, practical theology pursues the telos of a life-giving way of life in awareness that the means employed in doing so—the practices of faith, including the arts of ministry—are not merely tools. Rather they are both the goal and the path of the Christian life.
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anon, and +peace,
Chris
In one of those unexplainable lateral leaps through curiosity-inducing links on the web, I found myself at the website of a former teacher, Paul Rabinow (Anthropology, UC Berkeley). He has, together with a few colleagues, formed the Antropology of the Contemporary Research Collabratory (ARC). They describe it this way:
"ARC is a collaboratory in the human sciences. Its aim is to develop techniques of collaboration, modes of communication, and tools of inquiry appropriate to an anthropology of the contemporary."
The image they've chosen on the top of their website shows a traditional science lab with an ocean teeming with life pouring in through the door. Whatever they meant with this picture, one key is the effort to collapse the distance between the experimental research in the lab and the complexity of life just outside. Yet the picture of a typical natural sciences lab belies the intention to be a quite different sort of laboratory that the typical science lab.
An important statement of their idea is the working paper: "What is a laboratory in the Human Sciences?"
Concerns that brought them to found this lab include:
1. Dissatisfaction with the model of the "individual project" that assumes that interpretive and authorial virtuosity is the mainspring of good work.
2. Interest in how the context of a laboratory could encourage active thinking about the nature of collaborative work, originality, authorship, and about the collective tasks such as concept building to what seem to be individual tasks such as ethnographic fieldwork or focused historical research. But this also means that new ways of thinking about how knowledge is generated and how credit is given are needed.
3. The laboratory, they think, can more fully recognize the diffuse character of authorship as it is formed through conversations, borrowed concepts, and exposure to the work of scholars working on related topics. In the laboratory setting, authorship is a "problem" because, as compared to the usual academic conference and its 'collected' work, the laboratory creates 'collective' work.
4. It follows, then, that the laboratory setting focuses on concept formation, on the experiment, on the question, and through such common work in experimentation and knowledge building it is depersonalizing rather than emphasizing the virtues and talents of an individual author.
I place this really exciting development in relation to work I've been involved with over the last five years working to contribute to the restructuring of Practical Theology (one result of our common work is the volume For Life Abundant). One of the key issues arising from our common work is to highlight the telos to academic work in practical theology that drives from research to ministry to discipleship to the life of the world. All our academic work in practical theology is, so to speak, for life abundant. Dorothy Bass, who led this seminar, and has done similar seminars over the last 10 years, has really emphasized collaborative seminar-based work, but the results in the end are still of the 'collected' sort, not really able to recognize the fullness of the 'collective' nature of what we've done, even if we've stretched the 'collected' sort very far towards the 'collective' in this new book.
It seems that the potential for a laboratory in practical theology would offer the same sorts of benefits Rabinow and his colleagues suggest, but it would also, within practical theology, give a common focus to the usually disparate work of those working in various sub-areas: preaching, pastoral care, youth and family ministry, congregational leadership, mission, worship, education, social ethics, and so on. The lab would join our work around at least 1) common conversation about problems to address, e.g. living in a secular age, pop culture and the media explosion, the climate crisis, terror and security, globalization, etc; 2) common conversation about concept formation and methods for gaining insight; 3) more integrated and multi-faceted proposals for faithful engagement of such problems; 4) a more realistic space for training students since the issues in life and ministry are confronted as wholes, not as, say, discrete problems for preaching or leadership.
Well, lots more for conversation here, but I've been leaning this direction for a very long time, and feel like this model at ARC is pushing me off the fence to really seek to make something like this work.
anon and peace,
Chris
"The biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way." Read more here.
today walking the kids to school we passed a number of yards with tulip poplars in full bloom and the beautiful pedals littering the ground attracted my daughter grace's attention. she picked up a handful and commented on how beautiful they were. here's the tree, and an up close of the leaves:
they are so over the top. simply a superabundance of beauty, thrown before the world, falling daily on the ground, crushed under foot, turning brown, becoming rot. and the amazing thing is they are so indiscriminate about showing their glory. it is on full display for every and anyone. no admission charge. no proof of standing according to any membership in clubs that monitor aesthetic sensibility. just overwhelming copious amounts of stunning glory given, free, to all. O foolish god, o lord of all creation, who hath praise enough?
+anon,
Chris
I'm getting geared up for the release of my new book, Faith as a Way of Life, out from Eerdmans in May. I've heard recently from Rick Bliese, President of Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN. Eerdmans sent him a copy for comment and he had just read it. No word yet on if he'll offer an endorsement, but he did say he enjoyed it and was surprised to see within one book materials appropriate for seminary students, pastors, and ordinary Christians as well. Not too common, he thought, and by way of example said his wife, who owns an art gallery, read the chapter on faith and the arts, which she found convicting and engaging. Great!
Here is a bit more from Robert Bellah, who read the manuscript in January and offered the first endorsement I've seen. I posted his official endorsement here, but he went on to say:
"I read your book all the way through and like it a lot. You have focused on just what the problems are for recovering a genuine sense of faith in the modern world, why it is so tempting to think only in private and personal terms and thus lose the reality at the core of our tradition. I think your book should be of great help to pastoral leaders but also to lay Christians and I hope it gets wide circulation."
Me, too!
Peace,
Chris
Since I'm doing research on learning by practice (a study of theological education from the perspective of the learners), I thought I should learn something myself. Isaiah, my (as of Saturday) 10-year-0ld, has been learning guitar for three years, so I thought about guitar, too. But I sing tenor and bass lines on hymns and have played the baritone horn since 5th grade. So playing the bass guitar seemed more natural. I've been playing since last summer and I'm starting to get a feel for where to put my hands. I might write more about it but for now, meet my Ibanez AEB. It is a sweet guitar. Here's a picture.
An amazing moment is unfolding in the United States. In response to criticism of inflammatory snippets taken from the sermons of The Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s pastor for over twenty years, Senator Obama wrote and delivered the most powerful speech on race in America I have ever heard. The speech, watched live on Tuesday by over 4 million, and now the top video on YouTube since with over 1.7 million views, discusses Rev. Wright’s sermons against the backdrop of our nation’s struggle with slavery and race from its very beginnings. While much of the television and internet debate has taken place in attack mode, drawing on sound bites and shallow understanding of the issues, Senator Obama has paid down on his oft-professed “faith in the decency and generosity of the America people” by offering them a personal, eloquent, and thoughtful accounting of the problems and possibilities before us regarding the very real racial fissures in our nation.
When I heard Senator Obama speak in Hartford in January, he said: “I’ve not only read the Constitution, I’ve taught the Constitution and I believe in the Constitution.” And as he began his speech on race in the United States of America, the Constitution provided his title and starting place. “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” He recounted how the framers of the Constitution looked the issue of slavery in the eye and blinked, leaving its resolution to future generations. The answer was there all along, however. The Constitution, Senator Obama points out, has at its “very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law.” Successive generations have had to take up the hard work of forming a more perfect union. And it was, he says, for the sake of this work that he decided to run for president—“to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America.” Perhaps more importantly, his conviction is that we cannot solve these problems—we cannot perfect the union—unless we do it together.
This, as I’ve argued before, represents at significant and distinctive theological framing of the possibilities of the nation and it is hard for many Americans to accept. Let me first comment on why Senator Obama’s viewpoint is so significant theologically, and why it is hard for Americans to accept. Within that context, then, I can finally say something about the so-called ‘inflammatory’ and ‘anti-American’ preaching of The Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, long the senior pastor of Senator Obama’s church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
Senator Obama’s favorite theologian is not a black liberation theologian, as is the case for Rev. Wright (who cites James Cone, among others). Obama’s favorite theologian is Reinhold Neibuhr, whose long and influential career at Union Theological Seminary in New York cast a web of influence that caught up preachers and presidents alike, including perhaps most famously Martin Luther King Jr. Asked by David Brooks of the New York Times what he took away from Neibuhr’s writings, Obama said “"I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism." Such a perspective embodies what Niebuhr called Christian realism, a counterpoint to what he called America’s tendency to embrace a belief in the doctrine of ‘special providence,’ that is, the idea that we are a redeemer nation called to spread our light to others who struggle in darkness. Read Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, for example, to get more on this perspective, or listen to his sermon on “Our Lord’s Conception of the Providence of God” here.
Why is this sort of perspective hard for many Americans to accept? At present, one of the overwhelming reasons is the hyper-patriotic reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. President Bush has played strongly into the tradition that views America as pure, and as destined to bring our light to the world that still lives in darkness. That framing—good versus evil, freedom versus tyranny—has been powerful in a time of great national anxiety and I think propelled President Bush to a second term despite his gross mismanagement of the nation on many levels, not least of which is the war in Iraq, a war I have called immoral and unjust from the start. When people buy into the rhetoric of America as innocent, as guardian of the moral high ground, as somehow beyond the pale of critique, then a Niebuhrian perspective sounds unpatriotic at best.
If someone has the view of America as innocent, and of patriotism as upholding glory of our nation’s ideals at any cost, then there is little room for a prophetic critique of the sins of the nation—slavery and the legacy of racism as a major case in point. Many reactions to Rev. Wright’s sermon, dug up by ABC News and replayed on television and YouTube, have come from this perspective. I have not seen the full sermon anywhere (which is a concern—who wants to be quoted out of context), but the clip being broadcast shows Rev. Wright preaching in a 2003 sermon:
“"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible, for killing innocent people, God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."
Unless we as a nation, and especially those of us who are white, can hear in Rev. Wright’s sermon a cry for a more perfect union, then I think we’ve missed the deepest level of such a stinging critique. This is, after all, sentiment expressed by a respected and highly educated Christian minister, a man who served his country honorably as a United States Marine, one who has continued to serve his country in the tough neighborhoods of South Chicago where many white people wouldn’t dare to visit, let alone live and work. Read Rev. Wright’s full sermon titled “The Audacity of Hope” (the source of Senator Obama’s book title) and you’ll see what tremendous brokenness he deals with on a daily basis. Yet he does not end there; he ends with a call for hope for a world of liberty and justice for all, even and especially when no visible signs can be found, because God has promised to make a way out of no way, and that promise sustains us in the face of unjust bondage.
Anyone who takes the time to study the statistics on drug use versus drug sentencing will quickly see how disproportionately black Americans have born the brunt of this social ill. A recent study by the Pew Center on the States titled “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008” says that while only 1 in 106 white men ages 18 and older are in prison, 1 in 15 black men ages 18 and older are currently serving time. The agony of such a statistic for the black community cries out in the words of Rev. Wright. And such prophetic cries are a staple of the American tradition from Frederick Douglass’ stinging denunciation of the 4th of July to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s exposing of America’s morally bankrupt foreign policy to Rev. Wright’s denunciation of America’s complacency in the fact of the disproportionate incarceration of America’s black population. It is, as Robert Bellah reminds us again and again as perhaps our most distinguished sociologist of American life, a virtue of our more inspiring national leaders has been the ability to evoke our nations’ standing under the judgment of God, and not only God’s blessing. False prophets lead us to believe that God would only have blessing in store for us.
Abraham Lincoln, for example, in his Second Inaugural:
“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether’.”
Rev. Wright, it turns out, does not condemn America unequivocally. He said, “God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.” That prophetic cry, that lament, could well be construed as a Christian American cry for “a more perfect union.” We live, as the pledge of allegiance to the flag says, as “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” When I say that pledge at the elementary school my children attend, surrounded by 80% black children in a failing school district struggling against the odds to build community and educate well, I have a sense that it is indeed a pledge and not the reality. You may prefer more sugar-coated rhetoric, but we in America stand under God’s judgment for the sins of our nation. We all have a role in seeking to pay due on that pledge, to come together with Senator Obama--whether or not he becomes the next president of the United States--to “build a more perfect union.” It will not ever be perfect, but we have the choice before us now, in an unprecedented moment in time, to join together in making it “more perfect.”
Peace,
Chris
Wow. My son is 10 this month and my daughter is 7. The headlines the last few days have focused on a major new study on sexually transmitted diseases among young girls. Here's a graphic that tells part of the story:
Some girls offered their thoughts about why. Very instructive, I'd say. Here's the quote (and here's a link to the whole article.)
"The Marrow girls offered several reasons why teenagers have sex.
'It's to fit in, peer pressure,' Christine said, noting that virgins are often mocked. Also, 'sex sells on TV.'
Khadijah chimed in that some young girls found their inspiration in the popular R&B singer Rihanna, whose latest album is titled 'Good Girl Gone Bad'
But Christina suggested something closer to home. 'Write this down,' she said. 'Bad parenting'."
I talk about this in my new book, Faith as a Way of Life, I have a chapter on faith and family. One of the key issues there is about how few parents talk in depth about their faith and values with children, and talk through these sorts of moral choices with them--drugs, sex, even what sorts of music to listen to. Sonja and I talked the other day about how we feel about songs that have profanity in them as okay for the kids. This came about partly because of a segment of "The News From Lake Wobegon" in which someone learns to swear well. Isaiah thought it was really funny, but we didn't so much and we turned it off. But then we talked about swearing. I think we'll keep on talking, about swearing and much more.
peace,
Chris
Melissa Fay Greene: There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Her Country's Children
an amazing writer and deeply moral human being, Melissa Fay Greene hooked me with Praying for Sheetrock, her first book. In this wonderful tale, she puts a heroic face on the struggle to respond to an overwhelming tide of AIDS orphans in Africa. She has also adopted four children from Ethiopia.
David F. Ford: Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love (Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine)
David Ford has become one of the most important theologians writing today, and he has been mulling this one for more than a decade. I heard him speak at Yale in 2003 in response to Miroslav and Dorothy Bass' book Practicing Theology and many of these themes regarding wisdom come up. Especially powerful engagement with scripture from which he draws the idea of "wisdom cries." A practical theologian at his best. Read!
Mary Oliver: Why I Wake Early: New Poems
Here I find a carnal theology, so deeply enmeshed in the glory of the ordinary. finitum capax infiniti. read her and you will not look at an ordinary day as ordinary again. Try, for starters, "This World," on page 27. It begins thus: "I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it nothing fancy./ But it seems impossible./ Whatever the subject, the morning sun glimmers it./"
Charles Taylor: A Secular Age
My teacher, the sociologist Robert Bellah, says: "This is one of the most important books written in my lifetime." Okay, enough. Rush out and get this book, just out, from one of the best living philosophers and certainly the most important for Christians.
Wil Derkse: The Rule of Benedict for Beginners: Spirituality for Daily Life
My lent book last spring and one of the best spiritual volumes I've read in a very long time--a lovely view of how the rule can matter for daily life and work written by an oblate of St. Willibrord's Abbey in the Netherlands
