Life is a Dance

"Let us remind the frivolous how much they need to gird up their loins and flight like gladiators against the common enemies of humanity. And let us also remind the earnest contenders for all good causes how much life needs the illumination of beauty, the enrichment of art, the refinement of grace, the stimulus of rhythm, and the leaven of laughter. Life is a struggle and life is also a dance." Winfred Garrison, Affirmative Religion, 1928

Lessons from Mass

Massachusetts that is. To the degree that the Obama administration has been content on backroom deals with the drug companies, bailouts for the banks, etc. in the midst of double digit unemployment, the easier it is for the GOP to run as outsiders. When the dems are identified with our messed up economy and the the industries who helped us get there, dems lose. Here's hoping that Obama and the national democrats gets the message.

Martin Luther King Day

A few things worth noting for Martin Luther King today. Here's a link to some MLK quotes which highlight his thought. And here's a piece which situates King within a complex set of relations on the left, in the social gospel, and in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr.

The only thing missing is the personalist tradition which King picked up from at Boston University. Personalism, has much of the same metaphysical commitments as process theology does but it takes God's personality, our own, the universes' as central to defining not just what should be but what is.

Admittedly I'm apt to think that this is an over extension of the term. Much of the universe strikes me as "indifferent" if not an obstacle to the development of personality. Personal consciousness is quite an unusual thing which has developed in the history of our planet.

Thus I can see the ethical import that King and other personalists derived from importance of creating the conditions by which persons can develop but I'm not sure I can share the metaphysics behind it. I'm too much of a hide bound naturalist on that score.

But I think as a tradition it's worth noting, being attentive to, and drawing what resources we can from it as well from the social gospel movement, the democratic left, etc. Otherwise all we'll have is a sanitized King that fails to challenge our society. And that would be the worst response to his legacy.

I'm a "sort of" Calvinist

This is to say that there are themes in the writings of John Calvin, a French Reformation leader, that I take as my own while leaving other parts behind. I thought I'd highlight what some of the themes I've taken.

1. The natural world tells us all of God that we are in a position to know. That's a robust natural theology! Special revelation is not new information beyond our world. It illuminates something already at play in our world.

2. Theology starts with anthropology. To know something of God is to know something about ourselves and our relationships to each other and our wider world.

3. Sin, pride, impiety is an over (or under) estimation of ourselves in relation to one other and our world. Any number of cruelties (to use Niebuhr for a moment) against each other and nature occur when we ignore those relations.

4. Sin and grace are bigger than individuals. They both indicate significant features of a world that draw us either to inordinate self regard or other regard. The ambiguity is living in a fallen world that yet gives signs of God's redemptive purposes.

4. Calvin was just as able to draw from Seneca as Scripture. As a French Humanist he saw the Christian tradition as a wisdom tradition, a philosophy almost that could draw from the best, including non Christian resources.

5. Like Augustine, Calvin also believed that all knowledge was from God. Science, literature, philosophy, any field and discipline was a gift not something to be wary of or at war with. In fact it can set us on a path to discern our proper place in our world and relations.

6. God's redemptive work is for the whole of creation. So there is no way to cut off some part of the world, the secular, or some area of life as not religiously significant.

More Updates

I'm torn between closing this site or revising it. But as one can tell it's in a holding pattern. But I've updated the links and the picture Unfortunately yahoo killed geocities which is where I was held my posts that I had written while I was at blogstudio.

And the Church World Service page which has updates on the relief work being done in response to the earthquake in Haiti. It's in those stories of responding to the disaster that one finds evidence of God at work. As for Pat Robertson, the only response that can had is satire.

I'm back

I'm going to, in the 6th year of operation, to try to restart and revamp this blog. I may stay here or move to a new location. But after a number of months of absence I'm missing an outlet for my theological quips. And seminary is providing more such thoughts.So something needs to be done. As that proceeds, I'll try to keep folks up to date.

Jesus vs. The Pharisees

In response to Candace Chellew-Hodge's piece on the site, Religion's Dispatch, which claimed "Jesus never built a bridge with a Pharisee," I raised an issue that I think is key. Some liberals are apt to use the word pharisee for conservative but there's a polemic hidden in there.

Pharisees are after all, the basis of what would become Rabbinic Judaism. If one put the headline "Jesus Never Built a Bridge with a Jew", that could perhaps highlight why using the word Pharisee as an anti-type is problematic.

Maybe we could raise the question of what does it mean for a religious position (including those found in the New Testament) to be so dependent on an "other" to define itself over and against? Christianity's other in some measure was Judaism and that history is an ugly one.

I'm worried when liberals have an "other" too. Contending over real differences is important. But we ought to be mindful of what spirit we contend. So we don't repeat the mistakes of the past and so we can be open to what God might call us to be in light of engaging others.

Her response indicated that she did not mean anything by the use of this anti-type and in any case, it's found within the New Testament. I respond by noting the history of this anti-type, ie one of pitting Judaism as everything that is not Christianity.

If it's been used for ill (which it has), if we use this idea or this language, we have to be careful. It's not so much a matter of personal intention as how our language can be take by others, (especially if that language has a long and unfortunate history).

And while I agree that we do find this in the Gospels that doesn't lessen the problem. If anything it may make us more critical in looking at how the communities that formed the Gospels defined their status against other people.

The Pharisees prominence as a competitor to Christianity, especially after the fall of Jerusalem, makes these stories of Jesus clashing with the Pharisees all the more suspect.

Especially as the stories of Good Friday confront us, with "the Jews" and how that has played out historically in anti-semitism, we ought to rexamine our language and history and ask how we want to relate and not relate to those who are different.