faithasawayoflife

Weeping for, laughing with and drinking to Nancy Eielsand

I attended the memorial service for Nancy Eielsand today at Candler School of Theology's Canon Chapel.  Remarkable remembrances were read by two of her colleagues ( Nancy Ammerman of Boston University and Liz Bounds of Emory) and two of her students who are themselves now professors (Graham Reside, Vanderbilt, and Marie Marquardt, Emory University). It was a moving service, with beautiful music (Shall We Gather at the River and For All The Saints were sung), as well as texts from Isaiah 40, Psalm 23, Revelation 21, and John 11.   I learned that there was a obituary in the New York Times, a lovely tribute that her husband, Terry, said she would have loved. "The obits were always her favorite part," Terry said. "I'd say 'that's sort of morbid' and she'd say, 'but I'm a sociologist--I love learning the details about people'." So here are the details about Nancy Eiesland. Read and remember a light that burned bright till the end. Pray for Marie, her six year old daughter, and for Terry now parenting alone.  One of the many moving moments of the service was watching Terry, with Marie on his lap, running his finger along the lyrics of For All The Saints, as the congregation and organ rang out a celebration of our claim that Nancy lives and we too shall sing with her in that place beyond tears and pain, beyond suffering and sorrow.
Anon, and peace,
Chris

Atheism for Lent IV: Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible" by guest blogger Jeni Grangaard

Welcome to the fourth installment of a music video divina series on the theme: 'atheism for lent'.  I've invited Jeni Grangaard, a Luther senior and savvy theologian working at the intersection of faith and culture, to post today.  Here's my introduction to the series.  And here's Jeni's post:

 Of all places, The Arcade Fire wrote 2007’s Neon Bible in a Petite Église in rural Quebec.  Though the site selection came more out of a desire to have their own space than to be in a church, the location was fitting for Neon Bible.

In an interview with Paste Magazine in April, 2007, lead singer Win Butler said this: “Neon Bible is addressing religion in a way that only someone who actually cares about it can. It’s really harsh at times, but from the perspective of someone who thinks it has value.”  Perfect for a video divina on the topic of Atheism for Lent.

Their 2004 album, Funeral, was written in the aftermath of three deaths.  It’s an honest album that faces death head-on and chooses life. Funeral is the more hopeful album, especially the songs “Neighborhood #3: Power Out” and “Wake Up,” Neon Bible reaches for fear and searches the darkness in order to see the light.  I gave it to the youth director at my internship site and she politely and quickly returned it the next day saying that it was “just too dark for her.” 

And dark, it is.  The song “Intervention” is dark enough to scare anyone away. “Who’s gonna throw the very first stone? Oh! Who’s gonna reset the bone?  Working with your head in a sling, gonna hear the soldier sing.  Working for the church while your family dies…you take what they give you and hold it inside.  Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home…Hear the soldier’s groan, we’re goin’ it alone.” brings the war home and challenges anyone who thinks brandishing  “Support Our Troops” is enough.

Though it’s dark and marked with fear, it’s a different kind of fear, fear that leads to hope.  Win continues, “There are two kinds of fear: The Bible talks a lot about fear of God—fear in the face of something awesome. That kind of fear is the type of fear that makes someone want to change. But a fear of other people makes you want to stay the same, to protect what you have. It’s a stagnant fear; and it’s paralyzing.”  It is the former, rather than the latter that they seek and, I would suggest, find.

Lyrics: “Neon Bible” from Neon Bible (very cool video below)

A vial of hope and a vial of pain,
In the light they both looked the same.
Poured them out on into the world,
On every boy and every girl.

It's in the Neon Bible, the Neon Bible
Not much chance for survival,
If the Neon Bible is right.

Take the poison of your age,
Don’t lick your fingers when you turn the page,
What I know is what you know is right,
In the city it's the only light.

It's the Neon Bible, the Neon Bible
Not much chance for survival,
If the Neon Bible is right.

Oh God! well look at you now!
Oh! you lost it, but you don’t know how!
In the light of a golden calf,
Oh God! I had to laugh!

Take the poison of your age,
Don’t lick your fingers when you turn the page,
It was wrong but you said it was right,
In the future I will read at night

In the Neon Bible, the Neon Bible
Not much chance for survival,
If the Neon Bible is true

Take the poison of your age,
Don’t lick your fingers when you turn the page,
It was wrong but you said it was right,
In the future I will read at night.

In the Neon Bible, the Neon Bible
Not much chance for survival,
If the Neon Bible is true.

Iqbal: protesting child slavery

Iqbal Masih was sold at age 4 into slavery and worked 12 hour days in a Pakistani carpet factory. He escaped and became an activist for child slavery, helping to free thousands of children from 'bonded labor' before he was murdered Easter Sunday 1995.  The Minneapolis Children's Theatre Company has staged a world premire play that tells his story and it is awesome. The play is written by Jerome Hairston based on the children's novel by Francesco D'Adamo.  Read the book, and if you can, see the play.  Then you can find a way to support this really important work ending child slavery world-wide.

Schleiermacher as pastor

I was looking up how to spell Friedrich Schleiermacher's name (he was an important figure in modern theology) and I found a section on his pastorate, two years before he moved to his first professorial job at the University of Halle. If you take the last line and shift it slightly, you could say "The obscurity of the pastor's style . . . prevented immediate success."  One wonders how, amid translating Plato and writing a critique of "all previous moral systems," he found time for people!  However, I admit that Wikipedia is not likely the best source from which to judge Schleiermacher's pastoral life.

Pastorate

From 1802 to 1804, Schleiermacher was pastor in the Pomeranian town of Stolp. He relieved Friedrich Schlegel entirely of his nominal responsibility for the translation of Plato, which they had together undertaken (vols. 1-5, 1804-1810; vol. 6, Repub. 1828). Another work, Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre (1803), the first of his strictly critical and philosophical productions, occupied him; it is a criticism of all previous moral systems, including those of Kant and Fichte — Plato's and Spinoza's find most favour. It contends that the tests of the soundness of a moral system are the completeness of its view of the laws and ends of human life as a whole and the harmonious arrangement of its subject-matter under one fundamental principle. Although it is almost exclusively critical and negative, the book announces Schleiermacher's later view of moral science, attaching prime importance to a Güterlehre, or doctrine of the ends to be obtained by moral action. The obscurity of the book's style and its negative tone prevented immediate success.

Read more here.

Anon and peace,

Chris

Industrial animal farms: cruelty that kills us, too

Nicholas Kristof writes a disturbing column (part one of two, the other due Sunday) on industrial pig farming in Indiana and the way such abusive farming practices are making communities around them sick.
Just another reason why the efficiency of the market driven by consumer desire for the low price create food production systems that are bad for everyone, not to mention dishonoring the creator who asked us to 'till and keep' the land'.  Hmm.  It seems that if we want to care for animals, we have to find means to honor and reward farmers for doing so, which honors and rewards their deepest instincts to about the land and the animals they raise.   Here's a resource for congregations from a cool organization called Earth Ministry.

From Bach to U2? Singing the Magnificat

Hilariously, and wonderfully, in the new cover article on U2 in Rolling Stone (not online yet), Brian Hiatt notes that the lyrics are full of allusions: "to James Joyce, to the documentary Man on Wire and especially to the Bible. . . 'Magnificent' was inspired by the Magnificat, a passage from the Gospel of Luke (in the voice of the Virgin Mary) that was previously set to music by Bach. 'There's this theme running through the album of surrender and devotion and all the things I find really difficult,' Bono says."

Here's a version of the song, sung on Letterman a couple weeks ago. Magnificent!

Atheism for Lent III: Dixie Chick's "Lubbock or Leave It"

 Welcome to this week's Friday Atheism for Lent Music Video Divina.  Each week through Lent I'm posting a song that represents one kind of rejection of God, seeking to listen to this rejection as a spiritual discipline. I wrote about what I'm up to here. I won't repeat it all, but encourage you to read through it if you haven't already, before going on with this week's installment. Part of the idea is to understand that atheism is not one common shared view but rather distinct denials, and seeking to understand the particular characteristics of the denial may help clarify (as if by a purifying fire) our understanding of God. It opens space for 'undergoing' God again, stripped of our conventions.

This week's song is "Lubbock or Leave It" from the Dixie Chick's 2006 Taking the Long Way. The longer story here has to do with the trauma they experienced after criticizing George Bush on the eve of our invasion of Iraq. They even received death threats and country music radio stations refuse to play their music to this day. The song tweaks the conventions of country music to fit love of family, country and God tightly together. Hank Williams and Johnny Cash rank at the top of country music and set the tradition of southern gospel singing. They both, however, sang the blues and struggled between the divide of music of saints and music of sinners. This song by the Chicks, however, is from outside that tension, looking back on the saints side with scorn and critique. It has, I think, a lot in common with the important book Unchristian. Their last song on the album, I Hope, offers one place for the band to move to a constructive place, suggesting what they'd like to hear the pastor say.
Lubbock Or Leave It lyrics Dust bowl, Bible belt Got more churches than trees Raise me, praise me, couldn't save me Couldn't keep me on my knees Oh, boy, rave on down loop 289 That'll be the day you see me back In this fool's paradise (Chorus) Temptation's strong (Salvation's gone) I'm on my way To hell's half acre How will I ever How will I ever Get to heaven now Throwing stones from the top of your rock Thinking no one can see The secrets you hide behind Your southern hospitality On the strip the kids get lit So they can have a real good time Come Sunday they can just take their pick From the crucifix skyline (Chorus) International airport A quarter after nine Paris Texas, Athens Georgia's Not what I had in mind As I'm getting out I laugh to myself Cause this is the only place Where as you're getting on the plane You see Buddy Holly's face I hear they hate me now Just like they hated you Maybe when I'm dead and gone I'm gonna get a statue too (Chorus)

In Memory of Nancy L. Eiesland

Nancy L. Eielsand, a distinguished and beloved Professor of Sociology of Religion and Disability Studies at Emory University, has died.  She was the first faculty member I met when I first visited Emory University in Atlanta exploring their doctoral program in religion.  She became an important mentor, teacher, and friend. I studied with her, co-taught courses with her, and served as a research assistant on a major research project she directed.  She was a reader and key advisor on my dissertation project, and a good conversation partner over the years on my ongoing research and writing.  We shared ambition (both of us had our master's theses published, a mark of the hyper-active academic) tempored by a desire to be good parents and spouses.  I got the word from numerous places last night that after her final struggle with cancer (diagnosed in late November) she died peacefully surrounded by family yesterday morning.  

Nancy had been extremely ill over the past year and a half, unable to attend a conference I hosted at Yale in September 2007 and, as I learned, unable even to carry on at Emory.  After a medical leave including a long hospitalization, she returned to her duties last summer.  I corresponded with her in the fall and her good spirits were palpable. It was not a month later when I learned, via Don Saliers, another of my teachers from Emory, that Nancy had been diagnosed with cancer.  Here is a short excerpt from a piece on disability and pain last Spring as she returned to full-time teaching.

For the last 18 months, I’ve been in the fight of my life to best a drug-resistant staph infection that had invaded my spine — where I had years before had metal implanted to keep me upright. Colleagues and acquaintances who knew my status as a person with a disability would often say, “I don’t think of you having a disability.” Of course, their misguided compliments gave me fodder for the truth-telling that they (like many) participated in the misapprehension that being capable and intelligent was incompatible with being a person with a disability. But over time, I have realized that I was a collaborator in those stories; many people trotted out this old saw because I didn’t think of myself as a person with a disability, though I had long identified as one. I had learned to overachieve, so that my competence was unassailable and my independence was a marker of a true blue American. As a toddler, I began the operations that were to eliminate my birth defect. But soon the one constant in my body was the register of pain. In the effort to first quantify and then control pain, the medical world created the insidious pain faces scale. If I’m an 8 am I obliged to drum up tears to begin to approach the picture to be truly convincing? I could never fix a number to pain, nor did I do well with the multiple choice approach. I always imagine a Freddy Krueger slasher scene during which he might stop and ask me if I’d prefer to be stabbed, burned or beaten. 

 Read the rest here.

Her books:

A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a Southern Exurb (Rutgers University Press, 2000)

Human Disability and the Service of God (Abingdon Press, 1998), co-editor with Don Saliers

Contemporary American Religion: An Ethnographic Reader (AltaMira Press, 1997), co-editor with Penny Edgill

The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Abingdon Press, 1994)

Anon, and peace,

Chris

where the world have I been?

visited 14 states (6.22%)
Create your own visited map of The World or vertaling nederlands duits?

The Theology of Doubt

I've fallen in love with a new-to-me poet named Scott Cairns.  His 2006 book Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected has this:

The Theology of Doubt

I have come to believe this fickleness
of belief is unavoidable.  As, for those
back lot trees, the annual loss
of leaves is unavoidable.
I remember hearing that soft-soap
about faith being given
only to the faithful--mean trick,
if you believe it.  This afternoon,
during my walk, which
I have come to believe is good
for me, I noticed one of those
ridiculous leaves hanging
midway up an otherwise naked oak.
The wind did what it could
to bring it down, but the slow
learner continued dancing.  Then again,
once, hoping for the last good apple,
I reached among bare branches,
pulling into my hand
an apple too soft for anything
and warm to the touch, fly-brown.

anon and peace,
Chris