William Temple on the God's mission for the church

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As Christ’s purpose was to found a Kingdom, so we should think of the Church as the army of that Kingdom. It is, no doubt, true that we have repeatedly substituted compromise for warfare and prudence for the spirit of adventure. The world in which the Church is set to work has, over and over again, made terms with it, which the Church of that period has most wrongly accepted. One of the commonest of the compromises that have been made is for the world to allow the Church to be at peace in proclaiming what may be called its philosophical paradoxes provided that it keeps quiet about its moral ones. And to some extent we have to confess that the Church, as we ourselves constitute it, has fallen into the snare. We have shown, no doubt, a disproportionate of concern about the distinctive philosophical doctrines of Christianity as compared with the moral duties of all disciples of Christ. We have, for example, been much more silent than we ought concerning Christ’s perfectly plain teaching on the subject of wealth and poverty. We have not driven home upon men His clear intuition that though, if wealth comes, it ought to be accepted and used as an opportunity, yet it must be recognized as rather a snare to the spiritual life than an aim which the Christian may legitimately set before himself and pursue. … 

An Army does not exist for its own benefit; it exists for its kingdom and its king; and you must come to the Church not chiefly for what you can gain from it, but for what you can give it. When you come like that, you will gain far more than if you come looking for gain. … Come to lend yourself as a member of the Body of Christ – one of His limbs, to be moved according to His will in cooperation with the other limbs in His Body. … 

And, remember, the supreme wonder of the history of the Christian Church is that always in the moments when it has seemed most dead, out of its own body there has sprung up new life; so that in age after age it has renewed itself, and age after age by its renewal has carried the world forward into new stages of progress, as it will do for us in our day, if only we give ourselves in devotion to its Lord and take our place in its service.

William Temple, Christian Faith and Life (pages 128-131)

Happy Easter!!

Happy Easter to our Orthodox brothers and Sisters! 

Movement toward full incarnation

Every time you close another door--be it the door of immediate satisfaction, the door of distracting entertainment, the door of busyness, the door of guilt and worry, or the door of self-rejection--you commit yourself to go deeper into your heart and thus deeper into the heart of God.

This is a movement toward full incarnation. It leads you to become what you already are--a child of God; it lets you embody more and more the truth of your being; it makes you claim the God within you.

Henri Nouwen ~ The Inner Voice of Love

In the spiritual garden of our lives

In the spiritual garden of our lives

by Charles LaFond
“Tenemos” is a Greek word originally referring to the cultivated land that wrapped around the temple – a set-aside bit of holy garden one had to cross in order to enter the temple. The tenemos was like the moat that wraps around a castle. Our senses, touch, sight, and hearing are that same tenemos – that same temple-garden, which is the gateway from physical life to the spiritual world within and around us.

One day I was walking near the pond of my New Hampshire writing retreat, Blackwater Bluff, and there was a heavy mist on the ground clinging close to the tall grasses and bright yellow wild orchids. The mist was only a few feet high. I sat down so as to be engulfed in the mist – it was like entering a moist, foggy world where vision was nearly impossible – and mysterious. Then I stood up and my head pushed back up into the clarity above the mist, and I could see shapes and colors and beauty again at a long distance. Suddenly I began to understand the spiritual life not as something we attain, way out in front of us, like some reward for self-discipline or heavenly peace; nor the finish line of a race. Rather, I began to understand what the early Christian Celtic mystics were saying about the spiritual life and the physical life being parallel – one atop the other, and each within reach.

The Celtic priests referred to heaven as being a foot above one’s reach. Our Roman Christian heritage has trained us that, like the altar in our great cathedral, the HOLY is way, way, way up there, way beyond the floor where we are allowed to sit, way up those great steps, up past that rood screen, past the choir stalls, past the altar rail (designed as a barrier) and way up around the “high altar” where only priests may roam in cassocks. But that is a lie. 

Read it all HERE at Episcopal Cafe or at the Daily Sip, a ministry of St John’s Cathedral in Denver, CO 

10 Things Every College Student Needs to Know About Religion, by Martyn Oliver

I found this article compelling and quite spot-on.  A pretty good justification for religious studies.  I would, probably, go further and say that we also need to teach theology (especially in Independent Schools, and certainly in Episcopal Schools).

A thoughtful piece.

Chaplain Carey

10 Things Every College Student Needs to Know About Religion 

I love teaching students about religion. But we’d go deeper and further every semester if everyone understood these 10 basic ideas.

By Martyn Oliver
At FaithStreet

I'm about to take 100+ college students through their first course on religion, as I do every semester. Here’s what I wish they knew coming in (and, what I wish I’d known myself as an undergrad):

1. You don’t know what a “religion” is.

We tend to think of religion in terms of our own experiences with our own traditions. But religion is a slippery word. Did you know, for example, that the United States Armed Forces counts both Buddhism and Atheism as “religions”? Would your definition be wide enough to include them? Probably, because most of us agree that religions are sets of beliefs and practices shared by a community (and note: we can leave belief in a god out of the equation). But then, if you expand your definition just a little bit, Red Sox Nation or ComicCon cosplay start to look awfully “religious.” Are we cool with that?

As you study religion, your definition of it may get bigger, weirder, more slippery. I argue that the category of “religion” ought to remain a contested space, and what we hold to be elemental about our own tradition is not necessarily so for others.

2. History will screw with your beliefs.

Caesar did not call for a census that drove Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem — it just didn’t happen, despite what the Gospel of Luke says. Also, Buddhists have often been perpetrators of astounding violence, not only in contemporary Myanmar, but also in Japan, Tibet, and Thailand — peace, compassion, and mindfulness be damned. Religions tend to rewrite history, and the sooner we can come to terms with the discrepancies, fabrications, or willful ignorance of religious traditions, the better.

Just like it’s uncomfortable to confront the fact that slaves built the U.S. Capitol Building or that American settlers committed genocide against the Native People, the history of any religion forces us to grapple with the ugly realities of ourselves. This isn’t your professor being anti-Christian or anti-Buddhist — it’s just historical information. What you do with that information, however, matters. History doesn’t ask you to throw away a faith or dismiss religion altogether. Nor should it make you distrust academia for disseminating some nefarious agenda. Instead, at its best, history can help us ask how we make the future better.

3. If you call yourself religious, you might want to know something about your own tradition.

Some passing familiarity with the texts and traditions you hold sacred would be great. Some understanding of what makes your religion or sect different from religions a lot like yours would be wonderful. I’m not asking for the ability to cite scriptures chapter and verse, nor to explain John Wesley’s break from the Anglicans and the Moravians. But a general awareness about what one believes — and why, and why not — would be super helpful.

Too often, in intro courses, adherents of, say, Lutheranism, think they can skate through the Christianity unit, failing to recognize that Lutheranism and Christianity are not the same thing. Unfortunately, students usually have institutions and parents who do not foster a sense of consciousness about the peculiarities of their position. Once students recognize this, disenchantment often begins. That is never a professor’s intent, but students would be bettered fortified if they understood their tradition as having developed in particular ways and for particular reasons.

And if you can differentiate the Sermon on the Mount from the Ten Commandments, all the better.

4. All religions are not the same.

This issue is so critical that one of my mentors wrote a book about it. Different religions make different claims to truth, and the exclusivity of those claims matters. Students tend to accept and defer to pluralism without considering how they might be running roughshod over the claims of their own traditions. This is a good thing for civil society, but a problematic thing when it comes to explaining tensions between religions.

I spend weeks working to help people realize that while their neighbors’ faith may not (to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson) pick their pocket nor break their leg, it does seriously impinge upon assertions that one group of people is chosen and another is not. This matters. If it doesn’t, then you’ve sacrificed a part of your beliefs upon the altar of good manners. Not that I’m against manners, but we should know the consequences of our bargains.

5. Religions have good reasons for what they teach, do, and believe.

It might seem crazy to make offerings to a god with an elephant’s head, but only if you’re not familiar with Ganesha’s story and the obstacles he overcame to become who he is. From someone else’s perspective, it can appear equally nuts to worship a guy who managed to get himself arrested, beaten, and executed: what’s so great about martyrdom? Isn’t that rationalizing failure?

Read the rest HERE

So you want to read Karl Barth...

So you want to read Karl Barth....click HERE, from  Der Evangelische Theologe

Every now and then I am asked for advice about studying Karl Barth. So, I thought that I would share some of my standard advice here. But, before I do that, let me just say that I am by no means a Barth expert as compared to the people whose books I will mention below. I would be thrilled to find myself in their league one day, but as of yet that remains a distant dream. Still, I have been reading Barth for long enough, and under the supervision of a number of the scholars that I will mention below, that I think I can provide a decent orientation. 

I have never read Karl Barth before. Which of his books should I read first?

Barth’s most famous work is the monumental 13-volume Church Dogmatics. Reading the CD with understanding is not an easy thing, so you definitely do NOT want to start here. Luckily, there are two smaller works by Barth that serve as helpful introductions to his work. 

1. Evangelical Theology: An Introduction - Based on the lectures that Barth delivered during his 1962 visit to the United States, this volume represents the mature Barth at his most irenic. It is perhaps my favorite of Barth’s works, and I have read it a number of times.

2. Dogmatics in Outline - Written earlier in Barth’s career, this volume is commentary on the Creed.

I am ready to read Barth’s Church Dogmatics! What strategy should I use for tackling this 13-volume monster?

Perhaps the best way to read the Church Dogmatics is chronologically. Start with I/1 and work your way through to the end. But, this is not how I did it, and I don’t think that it is the best way to do it unless you know that you will read through the whole thing. You don’t want to start, read a couple volumes, and find yourself stranded somewhere in the middle. So, although this is probably the best way to do things, it is not the most efficient. Here is what I recommend.

1. Begin your foray into the Church Dogmatics with II/2. It is within this volume that Barth develops his famous (and infamous) reconfiguration of the doctrine of election.
2. Next, head on over to volumes IV/1 through IV/3. Church Dogmatics IV is almost a dogmatics unto itself, and this is some good material. Be careful with IV/4, however, as I’m not a big fan and think that it departs in certain ways from many of Barth’s best insights.
3. Finally, head back to the other volumes and begin to plug up the gaps. Maybe you will head over to III for the doctrine of creation, to II/1 for a discussion of God’s attributes, or to I/1 for the doctrine of the Trinity. By this point you will know enough of Barth to make your own decisions about these things!

I’ve been reading in the Church Dogmatics, and I want to get deeper into the conversation about Barth. Could you tell me about some of the important secondary literature?

Sure! Here is a brief run-down on a few of the most important books. They are all must-reads. For more information on Barth studies secondary literature, watch the book reviews on theCenter for Barth Studies website. 

• George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology - This is the one book that you want to read before jumping into the Church Dogmatics. It will teach you all the important landmarks and pathways.
• Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology - This is currently the standard account of Barth’s development, and it won its author the Karl Barth Prize.
• John Webster, Barth - A very good introduction to Barth’s work as a whole, with a nice opening chapter that provides an overview of his life. Webster has written many excellent books on Barth, this is simply the best place to start with him. But, I highly recommend all his other books as well.
• George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth - The essays in this volume are good introductions to various aspects and topics in Barth and Christian theology in general.
• John Webster (Ed), Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth - A collection of essays on Barth by many leading Barth interpreters.
• Eberhard Jüngel, God's Being is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth - Jüngel is the most important German Barth scholar, and this is perhaps his best-known work. It is a very difficult volume, but it rewards the careful reader.
• T. F. Torrance, Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian - An overview of Barth’s theology by Barth’s theology by the most important first generation English interpreter of Barth.
• Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation - This is one of the first important pieces written about Barth. It is still valuable even though McCormack has called Balthasar’s developmental interpretation seriously into question.
• G. C. Berkouwer, The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth: An Introduction and Critical Appraisal - Another old standard, and one with which Barth actually interacted with some care.

I hope that this has been helpful. It is my personal conviction that if you read all this material, you will be well on your way. If this is not enough, or if you want to pick my brain on any particulars with reference to Barth, feel free to e-mail. I’ll do my best to answer on the basis of my own very limited knowledge.

UPDATE: David Guretzki has written and made available on his blog a 'Primer' for those who are looking to read Barth's CD for the first time. 

Images of Chimayo - Santos Woodcarving Popsicles

10 Minutes with … Stanley Hauerwas

From Religion News Service Blog at religionnews.com

(RNS1-NOV4) Ethicist Stanley Hauerwaus is an expert on just war theory and believes Christians have been too passive about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For use with RNS-TEN-MINUTES, transmitted Nov. 4, 2009. Religion News Service photo courtesy of Duke Divinity Schoo.

November 4, 2009

NEWS FEATURE

10 Minutes with … Stanley Hauerwas

By Kevin Eckstrom

DURHAM, N.C. (RNS) Remember that book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”? Let’s just say that Duke University ethicist Stanley Hauerwas has been hugely influential, but that doesn’t mean his salty tongue has made him a lot of friends along the way.

Hauerwas, a self-described Christian pacifist, is an expert on just war theory. As Hauerwas sees it, not only did Iraq and Afghanistan fail to meet the criteria of a just war, but neither did World War II. Now, as the Obama administration weighs its options in Afghanistan, Hauerwas remains decidedly pessimistic not only about American prospects, but also American morality.

Hauerwas, 69, talked about his view on war and peace, his dismal assessment about the state of America’s churches, and why President Obama isn’t likely to come calling. Some answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What should President Obama do about Afghanistan?

A: Afghanistan was understood to be part of the war against terror, and that was a decisive mistake because as soon as you said we are at war, you gave Osama bin Laden what he wanted—he became a warrior, and not just a murderer. I would be much happier with a whole reconsideration of our involvement there—not as a war, but as a police function, and how the police might intervene to arrest bin Laden. I know that sounds utopian, but just try thinking you’re going to win a war in Afghanistan. I can’t imagine anything more utopian than that. Ask the British. Ask the Russians. It’s never going to happen.

Q: With seven years of hindsight, was Afghanistan ever a just war?

A: Afghanistan has the possibility of being limited in a way that might make it a bit more justifiable, but it’s still not clear what we’re fighting for. It’s so deeply ambiguous that it’s hard to fit into just war criteria. The very idea that you begin to assess the justness of a war after the war is already going to happen, I’m sorry, it’s already too late.

Q: How would you assess the church’s response to the Iraq war?

A: Awful. Christians—and it started with Sept. 11, as soon as we said we are at war—Christians said “that’s us.” We never asked the hard questions about the war on terror, and that is, I think, why Iraq happened. It has everything to do with the inability to distinguish between the Christian “we” and the American “we.”

Q: So does the church need a service of repentance?

A: The church has lost its ability to be a disciplined community because we’re now, religiously, in a buyer’s market. Christianity has to bill itself as very good for your self-realization, and that’s killing us because we’re not very good for your self-realization. We’re good for your salvation, which is not the same thing. Hopefully God is making sure that we’re not going to survive in the position we’re currently in.

Q: What kinds of questions should be we asking now about Afghanistan?

A: We need to ask them to tell us the truth. Tell us that we’re engaged in an unwinnable business here, but we have these kinds of political stakes and we want to achieve those, and people are going to die for ambiguous political ends. Just tell us the truth.

Q: What should be the church’s role in the debate over Afghanistan?

A: Let’s start with people in our congregations who are connected with the military, and ask them how they can justify that. Let’s start there. I have high regard for people in the military, but very seldom are they asked to justify what they’re doing.

Q: So every Christian is called to be a pacifist?

A: Yes, absolutely.

Q: So how do you respond to people who say that’s unrealistic?

A: Try lifelong monogamous fidelity in marriage. Do you think that’s realistic? Yet we do it. I’m not terribly cowed by the charge of being unrealistic.

Q: If Obama were to call you for advice on Afghanistan, what would you say?

A: I’d say you have to tell the American some really hard truths, namely that the war on terror was a mistake and we’ve got to start, as Americans, learning to live in a world that we don’t control. That’s not going to make you very popular.

Q: So you’d be politically toxic to the president of the United States?

A: Yeah, I would be. Just like (former Obama pastor) Jeremiah Wright. I hope I’m absolutely as toxic as Jeremiah Wright.

Q: Why?

A: Because I think what I’m saying is what Christians should be saying.

Q: The hard truths?

A: Absolutely.

Happy 123rd Birthday, Karl Barth! ~ International Karl Barth wiki day

From the wonderful "Faith and Theology" Blog

International Karl Barth wiki day

Today is the 123rd anniversary of Karl Barth’s birth. To mark the occasion, I’m naming this the International Barth Wikipedia Day. Unfortunately Barth’s wiki entry is very sketchy, piecemeal and mediocre. Since so many of us here are interested in Barth, why don’t we head over today en masse and try to improve this entry? You could add some biographical info, or some details about Barth’s theology, or a summary of contemporary debates in the field. Or you could find something useful in the (much more substantial) German wiki entry, and translate it into English.

Wikipedia has increasingly become the first source of information for all sorts of inquisitive people – so let’s try to make this a worthwhile and informative entry.

Thanks to Dave Bruner for emailing me with this suggestion.

God is no stop-gap, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

By Dietrich Bonhoeffer

How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know; God wants us to realize his presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved. That is true of the relationship between God and scientific knowledge, but it is also true of the wider human problems of death, suffering, and guilt. It is now possible to find, even for these questions, human answers that take no account whatever of God. In point of fact, people deal with these questions without God (it has always been so) and it is simply not true to say that only Christianity has the answers to them.

As to the idea of ’solving’ problems, it may be that the Christian answers are just as unconvincing—or convincing—as any others. Here again, God is no stop-gap; he must be recognized as the center of life, not when we are at the end of our resources; it is his will to be recognized in life, and not only when death comes; in health and vigor, and not only in suffering; in our activities, and not only in sin. The ground for this lies in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. He is the center of life, and he certainly didn’t ‘come’ to answer our unsolved problems. From the center of life certain questions, and their answers, are seen to be wholly irrelevant. In Christ there are no ‘Christian problems.’

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Church: Dynamic Ecclesiology of Communion - Bonhoeffer, Cone, Williams - on Wordle

I put my Master's thesis through "wordle" and this is what I got:

pretty cool...click on the image above for higher res (more visible) version

~The Rev. Peter M. Carey

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (4 February 1906-9 April 1945

“But it is not we who build. He wills to build the church. No one builds the church but Christ alone. Whoever is mindful to build the church is well on his way to destroying it; for he will build a temple to idols without wishing or knowing it. We must confess - he builds. We must proclaim - he builds. We must pray to him - he builds. We do not know his plan. We cannot see whether he is building or pulling down. It may be that the times which by human standards are times of collapse are for him the great times of building. It may be that the times which from a human point of view are great times for the church are times when it is pulled down. It is a great comfort which Christ gives to his church: you confess, preach, bear witness to me, and I alone will build where it pleases me. Do not meddle in what is my province. Church, do what is given to you to do well and you have done enough. But do it well. Pay no heed to views and opinions, don’t ask for judgments, don’t always be calculating what will happen, don’t always be on the look-out for another refuge! Church, stay a church! But church confess, confess, confess! Christ alone is your Lord, from his grace alone can you live as you are. Christ builds. And the gates of hell shall not prevail against you.”

No Rusty Swords (London: Collins, 1970), p. 212.

Advice for theological students: ten steps to a brilliant career

Ever fancied yourself a theologian? Ever wondered if you should pursue a degree in theology?

The quite brilliant Ben Myers, over at the "Faith and Theology" blog has this advice for those seeking to be excellent theological students...just absolutely beautifully funny and irreverent (and wise!)

Check out an excerpt below, or read it all HERE.

~ The Rev. Peter M. Carey

Advice for theological students: ten steps to a brilliant career
by Ben Myers, at "Faith and Theology" blog

1. As a theological student, your aim is to accumulate opinions – as many as you can, and as fast as possible. (Exceptional students may acquire all their opinions within the first few weeks; others require an entire semester.) One of the best ways to collect opinions is to choose your theological group (“I shall be progressive,” or “I will be evangelical,” or “I am a Barthian”), then sign up to all the opinions usually associated with that social group. If at first you don’t feel much conviction for these new opinions, just be patient: within twelve months you will be a staunch advocate, and you’ll even be able to help new students acquire the same opinions.

2. At the earliest possible opportunity you should also form an opinion about your favourite theological discipline: that is, you should choose your specialisation. To communicate this choice to others, you should dismiss as trivial or irrelevant all other disciplines: the systematic theologian should teach herself to utter humorous remarks about the worth of “practical” theology, while the New Testament student should learn to hold forth emphatically on the dangers of systematic theology; and so on.

3. As far as possible, you should try to avoid all non-theological interests or pursuits. All your time and energy should be invested in reading important books and discussing important ideas. (Novels in particular should be avoided, as they are a notorious time-waster, and they furnish you with no new opinions.)

4. Every successful theological student must master the proper vocabulary. All theological conversations should be peppered with these termini technici (e.g. “Only a demythologised Barthian ontology can subvert the différance of postmodern theory and re-construe the analogia entis in terms of temporal mediation”). The less comprehensible and more sibylline the sentence uttered, the better. There are some stock-in-trade terms that are de rigueur (e.g. perichoresis, imago Dei, Heilsgeschichte, Bullsgeschichte), but the really outstanding student should find creative ways to deploy a wide range of foreign polysyllabic words. Phrases of Latin, Greek or German derivation are particularly prized. (Those of Hebrew of Syriac extraction should be used more sparingly – they are usually greeted with some puzzlement, or with cries of “Gesundheit!”)

5. Now that you’re a theological student, you will discover that the world is filled with people who don’t share your new opinions. Every conversation should thus be viewed as an opportunity to persuade others of their simple-mindedness and to convert them to a better understanding. If you’re feeling shy about this, you should start by practising on your family and closest friends. And it’s not always necessary to engage in a full-blown discussion; at times a single Latin term or a knowing smirk is all that’s required to demolish another person’s argument.

Read the other five steps HERE

Barth’s “Rules for Older People in Relation to Younger”

from "Der Evangelische Theologe blog

I, for one, know quite a few parents and teachers that would quibble with much of this advice, but the tendency to meddle probably leads to these quibbles...I need to give all of this some thought...

Rev. Peter Carey

Barth’s “Rules for Older People in Relation to Younger”

A Late Friendship: The Letters of Karl Barth and Carl Zuckmayer (Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1982), 45.

1. Realize that younger people of both sexes, whether relatives or close in other ways, have a right to go their own ways according to their own (and not your) principles, ideas, and desires, to gain their own experiences, and to find happiness in their own (and not your) fashion.


2. Do not force upon them, then, your own example or wisdom or inclinations or favors.


3. Do not bind them in any way to yourself or put them under any obligation.


4. Do not be surprised or annoyed or upset if you necessarily find that they have no time, or little time, for you, that no matter how well-intentioned you may be toward them, or sure of your cause, you sometimes inconvenience and bore them, and they casually ignore you and your counsel.


5. When they act in this way, remember penitently that in your own youth you, too, perhaps (or probably) acted in the same way toward the older authorities of the time.


6. Be grateful for every proof of genuine notice and serious confidence they show you, but do not expect or demand such proofs.


7. Never in any circumstances give them up, but even as you let them go their own way, go with them in a relaxed and cheerful manner, trusting that God will do what is best for them, and always supporting and praying for them.

Karl Barth on preaching

Karl Barth on preaching (hat - tip to Inhabitatio Dei):

“Preachers must not be boring. To a large extent the pastor and boredom are synonymous concepts. Listeners often think that they have heard already what is being said in the pulpit. They have long since known it themselves. The fault certainly does not lie with them alone. Against boredom the only defense is being biblical. If a sermon is biblical, it will not be boring. Holy Scripture is in fact so interesting and has so much that is new and exciting to tell us that listeners cannot even think about dropping off to sleep.”

–Karl Barth, Homiletics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991), 81.

the MadPriest on Yalewarts

The MadPriest is at it again, and has me laughing so hard at his recent postings that I can hardly breathe....so, here is just one of his many many wise, funny and downright MAD postings (and it seems as though most of it is actually from CNN!)

From CNN:

J.K. Rowling has retired Harry Potter, but the fictional boy wizard lives in on college classes across the country where the children's books are embraced as literary and academic texts. Her books are often analyzed in the context of other relevant texts. Drawing on their expertise in theology, children's literature, globalization studies and even the history of witchcraft, professors have been able to use Harry Potter to attract crowds of students eager to take on a disciplined study of the books.

Danielle Tumminio, a Yale Divinity School (photo - left) graduate student and the instructor for Yale's Harry Potter course "Christian Theology and Harry Potter," said her academic background in literature and theology, combined with her personal interest in the books, inspired her to design the course. The course uses all seven Potter books and the students examine Christian themes such as sin, evil and resurrection.

Although Yale's course is its first Harry Potter-themed offering, other universities, including Georgetown University, Liberty University, Pepperdine University, Stanford University, Lawrence University, Swarthmore and Kansas State University, also have integrated the series into their curricula.

Cat Terrell, a student in Tumminio's course at Yale, said regardless of whether the books are worthy as literary texts, they have helped enhance her understanding of other academic disciplines, including theology.

"If somebody says this isn't worth a Yale class, I would say if we were just reading the Harry Potter books for their literary merit ... I would probably agree with them. [But] the lens of the Harry Potter books actually makes theology ... easier to understand," she said. "It's amazing how many connections you can draw between the theology that we're reading outside of class and the Harry Potter that we've known for 10 years."

In later modules the students will learn how to do joined up writing and tie their own shoe laces.

Check out the Seminar (on Conflict Ecclesiology)!!

There are some good posts and discussion over at the Seminar on Conflict Ecclesiology .... come on over and let us know what you think!

I think the discussion on "discernment" is a very interesting one, as we (in the churchy world) use this term, discernment, a great deal -- perhaps without much common understanding of it ...

Come on over, and put in your 2cents!

Peace, Peter

Stanley Hauerwas on September 11

From Duke.edu a campus reflects on September 11th


Stanley Hauerwas


September 11, 2001: A Pacifist Response


I want to write honestly about September 11, 2001. But it is not easy. Even now, some months after that horrible event, I find it hard to know what can be said or, perhaps more difficult, what should be said. Even more difficult, I am not sure for what or how I should pray. I am a Christian. I am a Christian pacifist. Being Christian and being a pacifist are not two things for me. I would not be a pacifist if I were not a Christian, and I find it hard to understand how one can be a Christian without being a pacifist. But what does a pacifist have to say in the face of terror? Pray for peace? I have no use for sentimentality.

Indeed some have suggested pacifists have nothing to say in a time like the time after September 11, 2001. The editors of the magazine First Things assert that “those who in principle oppose the use of military force have no legitimate part in the discussion about how military force should be used.”¹ They make this assertion because according to them the only form of pacifism that is defensible requires the disavowal by the pacifist of any political relevance. That is not the kind of pacifism I represent. I am a pacifist because I think nonviolence is the necessary condition for a politics not based on death. A politics that is not determined by the fear of death means no strong distinction can be drawn between politics and military force.

Yet I cannot deny that September 11, 2001, creates and requires a kind of silence. We desperately want to “explain” what happened. Explanation domesticates terror, making it part of “our” world. I believe attempts to explain must be resisted. Rather, we should learn to wait before what we know not, hoping to gain time and space sufficient to learn how to speak without lying. I should like to think pacifism names the habits and community necessary to gain the time and place that is an alternative to revenge. But I do not pretend that I know how that is accomplished.

Yet I do know that much that has been said since September 11, 2001, has been false. In the first hours and days following the fall of the towers, there was a stunned silence. President Bush flew from one safe haven to another, unsure what had or was still to happen. He was quite literally in the air. I wish he might have been able to maintain that posture, but he is the leader of the “free world.” Something must be done. Something must be said. We must be in control. The silence must be shattered. He knew the American people must be comforted. Life must return to normal.
So he said, “We are at war.” Magic words necessary to reclaim the everyday. War is such normalizing discourse. Americans know war. This is our Pearl Harbor. Life can return to normal. We are frightened, and ironically war makes us feel safe. The way to go on in the face of September 11, 2001, is to find someone to kill. Americans are, moreover, good at killing. We often fail to acknowledge how accomplished we are in the art of killing. Indeed we, the American people, have become masters of killing. In our battles, only the enemy has to die. Some in our military are embarrassed by our expertise in war making, but what can they do? They are but following orders.

So the silence created by destruction was soon shattered by the need for revenge—a revenge all the more unforgiving because we cannot forgive those who flew the planes for making us acknowledge our vulnerability. The flag that flew in mourning was soon transformed into a pride-filled thing; the bloodstained flag of victims transformed into the flag of the American indomitable spirit. We will prevail no matter how many people we must kill to rid ourselves of the knowledge Americans died as victims. Americans do not die as victims. They have to be heroes. So the stock trader who happened to work on the seventy-second floor becomes as heroic as the policemen and the firemen who were doing their jobs. No one who died on September 11, 2001, gets to die a meaningless death. That is why their deaths must be revenged.

I am a pacifist, so the American “we” cannot be my “me.” But to be alienated from the American “we” is not easy. I am a neophyte pacifist. I never really wanted to be a pacifist. I had learned from Reinhold Niebuhr that if you desire justice you had better be ready to kill someone along the way. But then John Howard Yoder and his extraordinary book The Politics of Jesus came along. Yoder convinced me that if there is anything to this Christian “stuff,” it must surely involve the conviction that the Son would rather die on the cross than for the world to be redeemed by violence. Moreover, the defeat of death through resurrection makes possible as well as necessary that Christians live nonviolently in a world of violence. Christian nonviolence is not a strategy to rid the world of violence, but rather the way Christians must live in a world of violence. In short Christians are not nonviolent because we believe our nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but rather because faithful followers of Christ in a world of war cannot imagine being anything else than nonviolent.

But what does a pacifist have to say in the face of the terror September 11, 2001, names? I vaguely knew when I first declared I was a pacifist that there might be some serious consequences. To be nonviolent might even change my life. But I do not really think I understood what that change might entail until September 11. For example after I declared I was a pacifist, I quit singing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” I will stand when it is sung, particularly at baseball games, but I do not sing. Not to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner” is a small thing that reminds me that my first loyalty is not to the United States but to God and God’s church. I confess it never crossed my mind that such small acts might over the years make my response to September 11 quite different from that of the good people who sing “God Bless America”—so different that I am left in saddened silence.

That difference, moreover, haunts me. My father was a bricklayer and a good American. He worked hard all his life and hoped his work would not only support his family, but also make some contribution to our common life. He held a war-critical job in World War II, so he was never drafted. Only one of his five bricklaying brothers was in that war, but he was never exposed to combat. My family was never militarized, but as Texans they were good Americans. For most of my life I, too, was a good American, assuming that I owed much to the society that enabled me, the son of a bricklayer, to gain a Ph.D. at Yale—even if the Ph.D. was in theology.

Of course there was Vietnam. For many of us Vietnam was extended training necessary for the development of a more critical attitude toward the government of the United States. Yet most of us critical of the war in Vietnam did not think our opposition to that war made us less loyal Americans. Indeed the criticisms of the war were based on an appeal to the highest American ideals. Vietnam was a time of great tension, but the politics of the antiwar movement did not require those opposed to the war to think of themselves as fundamentally standing outside the American mainstream. Most critics of Vietnam (just as many that now criticize the war in Afghanistan) based their dissent on their adherence to American ideals that they felt the war was betraying. That but indicates why I feel so isolated even among the critics of the war in Afghanistan. I do not even share their allegiance to American ideals.
So I simply did not share the reaction of most Americans to the destruction of the World Trade Center. Of course I recoil from murder on such a scale, but I hope I remember that one murder is too many. That Americans have hurried to call what happened “war” strikes me as self-defeating. If this is war, then bin Laden has won. He thinks he is a warrior not a murderer. Just to the extent the language of war is used, he is honored. But in their hurry to call this war, Americans have no time for careful discriminations.

Where does that leave me? Does it mean, as an estranged friend recently wrote me, that I disdain all “natural loyalties” that bind us together as human beings, even submitting such loyalties to a harsh and unforgiving standard? Does it mean that I speak as a solitary individual, failing to acknowledge that our lives are interwoven with the lives of others, those who have gone before, those among whom we live, those with whom we identify, and those with whom we are in Christian communion? Do I refuse to acknowledge my life is made possible by the gifts of others? Do I forsake all forms of patriotism, failing to acknowledge that we as a people are better off because of the sacrifices that were made in World War II? To this I can only answer, “Yes.” If you call patriotism “natural,” I certainly do disavow that connection. Such a disavowal, I hope, does not mean I am inattentive to the gifts I have received from past and present neighbors.

In response to my friend I pointed out that because he, too, is a Christian I assumed he also disdained some “natural loyalties.” After all he had his children baptized. The “natural love” between parents and children is surely reconfigured when children are baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ. Paul says:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in the newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.²

Christians often tend to focus on being united with Christ in his resurrection, forgetting that we are also united with him in his death. What could that mean if it does not mean that Christians must be ready to die, indeed have their children die, rather than betray the Gospel? Any love not transformed by the love of God cannot help but be the source of the violence we perpetrate on one another in the name of justice. Such a love may appear harsh and dreadful from the perspective of the world, but Christians believe such a love is life-giving not life-denying.

Of course living a life of nonviolence may be harsh. Certainly you have to imagine, and perhaps even face, that you will have to watch the innocent suffer and even die for your convictions. But that is no different from those that claim they would fight a just war. After all, the just warrior is committed to avoiding any direct attack on noncombatants, which might well mean that more people will die because the just warrior refuses to do an evil that a good may come. For example, on just-war grounds the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were clearly murder. If you are serious about just war, you must be ready to say that it would be better that more people died on the beaches of Japan than to have committed one murder, much less the bombing of civilian populations.

This last observation may suggest that when all is said and done, a pacifist response to September 11, 2001, is just one more version of the anti-American sentiments expressed by what many consider to be the American Left. I say “what many consider” because it is very unclear if there is a Left left in America. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the support to the war on terrorism given by those who identify as the “Left.” Yet much has been made of the injustice of American foreign policy that lends a kind of intelligibility to the hatred given form on September 11. I am no defender of American foreign policy, but the problem with such lines of criticism is that no matter how immoral what the American government may have done in the world, such immorality cannot explain or justify the attack on the World Trade Center.

American imperialism, often celebrated as the new globalism, is a frightening power. It is frightening not only because of the harm such power inflicts on the innocent, but because it is difficult to imagine alternatives. Pacifists are often challenged after an event like September 11 with the question, “Well, what alternative do you have to bombing Afghanistan?” Such a question assumes that pacifists must have an alternative foreign policy. My only response is I do not have a foreign policy. I have something better—a church constituted by people who would rather die than kill.

Indeed I fear that absent a countercommunity to challenge America, bin Laden has given Americans what they so desperately needed—a war without end. America is a country that lives off the moral capital of our wars. War names the time we send the youth to kill and die (maybe) in an effort to assure ourselves the lives we lead are worthy of such sacrifices. They kill and die to protect our “freedom.” But what can freedom mean if the prime instance of the exercise of such freedom is to shop? The very fact that we can and do go to war is a moral necessity for a nation of consumers. War makes clear we must believe in something even if we are not sure what that something is, except that it has something to do with the “American way of life.”

What a gift bin Laden has therefore given America. Americans were in despair because we won the cold war. Americans won by outspending the USSR, proving that we can waste more money on guns than they can or did. But what do Americans do after they have won a war? The war was necessary to give moral coherence. We had to cooperate with one another because we were at war. How can America make sense of what it means for us to be “a people” if we have no common enemy? We were in a dangerous funk having nothing better to do than entertain ourselves with the soap opera Bill Clinton was. Now we have something better to do. We can fight the war against terrorism.

The good thing, moreover, about the war on terrorism is it has no end, which makes it very doubtful that this war can be considered just. If a war is just, your enemy must know before the war begins what political purpose the war is to serve. In other words, they need to know from the beginning what the conditions are if they choose to surrender. So you cannot fight a just war if it is “a war to end all wars” (World War I) or for “unconditional surrender” (World War II). But a “war on terrorism” is a war without limit. Americans want to wipe this enemy off the face of the earth. Moreover, America even gets to decide who counts and does not count as a terrorist.

Which means Americans get to have it any way they want it. Some that are captured, for example, are prisoners of war; some are detainees. No problem. When you are the biggest kid on the block, you can say whatever you want to say, even if what you say is nonsense. We all know the first casualty in war is truth. So the conservatives who have fought the war against “postmodernism” in the name of “objective truth,” the same conservatives that now rule us, assume they can use language any way they please.

That Americans get to decide who is and who is not a terrorist means that this is not only a war without clear purpose, but also a war without end. From now on we can be in a perpetual state of war. America is always at her best when she is on permanent war footing. Moreover, when our country is at war, it has no space to worry about the extraordinary inequities that constitute our society, no time to worry about poverty or those parts of the world that are ravaged by hunger and genocide. Everything—civil liberties, due process, the protection of the law—must be subordinated to the one great moral enterprise of winning the unending war against terrorism.

At the heart of the American desire to wage endless war is the American fear of death. The American love of high-tech medicine is but the other side of the war against terrorism. Americans are determined to be safe, to be able to get out of this life alive. On September 11, Americans were confronted with their worst fear—a people ready to die as an expression of their profound moral commitments. Some speculate such people must have chosen death because they were desperate or, at least, they were so desperate that death was preferable to life. Yet their willingness to die stands in stark contrast to a politics that asks of its members in response to September 11 to shop.

Ian Buruma and Vishai Margalit observe in their article “Occidentalism” that lack of heroism is the hallmark of a bourgeois ethos.³ Heroes court death. The bourgeois is addicted to personal safety. They concede that much in an affluent, market-driven society is mediocre, “but when contempt for bourgeois creature comforts becomes contempt for life itself you know the West is under attack.” According to Buruma and Margalit, the West (which they point out is not just the geographical West) should oppose the full force of calculating antibourgeois heroism, of which Al-Qaeda is but one representative, through the means we know best—cutting off their money supply. Of course, Buruma and Margalit do not tell us how that can be done, given the need for oil to sustain the bourgeois society they favor.

Christians are not called to be heroes or shoppers. We are called to be holy. We do not think holiness is an individual achievement, but rather a set of practices to sustain a people who refuse to have their lives determined by the fear and denial of death. We believe by so living we offer our non-Christian brothers and sisters an alternative to all politics based on the denial of death. Christians are acutely aware that we seldom are faithful to the gifts God has given us, but we hope the confession of our sins is a sign of hope in a world without hope. This means pacifists do have a response to September 11, 2001. Our response is to continue living in a manner that witnesses to our belief that the world was not changed on September 11, 2001. The world was changed during the celebration of Passover in a.d. 33.
Mark and Louise Zwick, founders of the Houston Catholic Worker House of Hospitality, embody the life made possible by the death and resurrection of Jesus. They know, moreover, that Christian nonviolence cannot and must not be understood as a position that is no more than being “against violence.” If pacifism is no more than “not violence,” it betrays the form of life to which Christians believe they have been called by Christ. Drawing on Nicholas Berdyaev, the Zwicks rightly observe that “the split between the Gospel and our culture is the drama of our times,” but they also remind us that “one does not free persons by detaching them from the bonds that paralyze them: one frees persons by attaching them to their destiny.” Christian nonviolence is but another name for the friendship we believe God has made possible and constitutes the alternative to the violence that grips our lives.

I began by noting that I am not sure for what I should pray. But prayer often is a form of silence. The following prayer I hope does not drown out silence. I wrote the prayer as a devotion to begin a Duke Divinity School general meeting. I was able to write the prayer because of a short article I had just read in the Houston Catholic Worker by Jean Vanier.⁴ Vanier is the founder of the L’arche movement—a movement that believes God has saved us by giving us the good work of living with and learning to be friends with those the world calls retarded. I end with this prayer because it is all I have to give.

Great God of surprise, our lives continue to be haunted by the spectre of September 11, 2001. Life must go on and we go on keeping on—even meeting again as the Divinity School Council. Is this what Barth meant in 1933 when he said we must go on “as though nothing has happened”? To go on as though nothing has happened can sound like a counsel of despair, of helplessness, of hopelessness. We want to act, to do something to reclaim the way things were. Which, I guess, is but a reminder that one of the reasons we are so shocked, so violated, by September 11 is the challenge presented to our prideful presumption that we are in control, that we are going to get out of life alive. To go on “as though nothing has happened” surely requires us to acknowledge you are God and we are not. It is hard to remember that Jesus did not come to make us safe, but rather he came to make us disciples, citizens of your new age, a kingdom of surprise. That we live in the end times is surely the basis for our conviction that you have given us all the time we need to respond to September 11 with “small acts of beauty and tenderness,” which Jean Vanier tells us, if done with humility and confidence “will bring unity to the world and break the chain of violence.” So we pray give us humility that we may remember that the work we do today, the work we do every day, is false and pretentious if it fails to serve those who day in and day out are your small gestures of beauty and tenderness.

Notes

1 “In a Time of War,” First Things (December 2001).
2 Romans 6:3–5.
3 New York Review of Books, January 17, 2002, 4–7.
4 “L’arche Founder Responds to Violence,” Houston Catholic Worker, November 16, 2001.

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The South Atlantic Quarterly 101:2, Spring 2002.
Copyright � 2002 by Duke University Press.