writing in the dust

"For the rest of the world — the majority who are called to chastity — what are they meant to do..."

Wed, 16 May 2012 05:35:38 -0500

“For the rest of the world — the majority who are called to chastity — what are they meant to do within their Offices? Serve God and others by helping the helpless and companioning the lonely; feeding the hungry; comforting the frightened; really listening to another, even when we’d rather not. In other words, precisely the same things the married folks do, but without the extra gifts, responsibilities, and stresses of children, and without the consolation (and life-creating complications) of sexual intimacy.”

- Elizabeth Scalia

"There are many times when the most pointed political criticism imaginable is to talk about something..."

Wed, 16 May 2012 04:49:39 -0500

“There are many times when the most pointed political criticism imaginable is to talk about something else.”

- Oliver O’Donovan, as qtd. here

"… initially I conceived of my task, as a lgbt/ssa Catholic, as basically a) negative (don’t..."

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:36:04 -0500

“… initially I conceived of my task, as a lgbt/ssa Catholic, as basically a) negative (don’t have gay sex) and b) intellectual (figure out why Church teaching is the way it is). I now think of it much more as the positive task of discerning vocation: discerning how God is calling me to pour out love to others.”

- Eve Tushnet. The shift Eve describes here has helped me more than anything else over these past few years of trying to find a way forward. Please do click through and read the entirety of this excellent post.

a few thoughts here on hospitality and singleness

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:03:57 -0500

a few thoughts here on hospitality and singleness

"If I understand the teaching of the New Testament on this matter, I understand the role of the..."

Mon, 14 May 2012 06:23:35 -0500

“If I understand the teaching of the New Testament on this matter, I understand the role of the Christian as that of being neither a conservative nor an anarchist, but a subversive agent… We do not spend enough of our energies training undercover agents.”

- Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth (via newbigin)

"Once God was incomprehensible and inaccessible, invisible and entirely unthinkable. But now he..."

Mon, 14 May 2012 05:45:39 -0500

“Once God was incomprehensible and inaccessible, invisible and entirely unthinkable. But now he wanted to be seen, he wanted to be understood, he wanted to be known. How was this done, you ask? God lay in a manger and lay on the Virgin’s breast. He preached on a mountain, prayed through the night, and hung on a cross. He lay pale in death, was free among the dead, and was master of hell. He rose on the third day, showed the apostles the signs of victory where nails once were, and ascended before their eyes to the inner recesses of heaven … When I think on any of these things, I am thinking of God, and in all these things he is now my God.”

- Bernard of Clairvaux

"It is a widely accepted norm of moral theology that the Church should not expect the civil law of a..."

Thu, 10 May 2012 09:37:29 -0500

“

It is a widely accepted norm of moral theology that the Church should not expect the civil law of a secular state to approximate in every particular the content of the moral law, stricto sensu. Prudential judgment about what the Church should advocate is needed in every particular case of divergence between the two. Relevant to such judgment is consideration of the degree to which what the Church teaches on the matter is likely to prove comprehensible to the locals. In the America of our day, it is about as difficult (or as easy) to make what the Church teaches about marriage comprehensible and convincing (the latter more difficult than the former) to the educated locals as it is to make the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception or the Real Presence so.

If that empirical claim is right… , then the conclusion strongly suggested by it is that the Church should not, at the moment, oppose legal recognition of same-sex unions. Those who have undergone a profoundly pagan catechesis on these questions will believe and behave as pagans do; it would be good for them and for the Church if the Church were not to attempt to constrain them by advocating positions in public policy based upon the view that what she teaches resonates in all human hearts—because it doesn’t, true though it is.

What the pagans need on this matter is conversion, not argument; and what the Church ought do to encourage that is to burnish the practice of marriage by Catholics until its radiance dazzles the pagan eye.

”

- Paul Griffiths (from his old blog). I recalled this post after hearing the remarks on same-sex marriage that President Obama made yesterday. Griffiths’ stance is the sort of position that will satisfy almost no one, on the left or the right. Nonetheless, I think it’s worthy of careful consideration, if for no other reason than that it highlights the role traditional Christians’ own practice contributes, in large measure, to the implausibility of traditional Christian sexual ethics in the public square.

"No place is free of conflict and bad feeling, and no person has the power to make problems..."

Tue, 08 May 2012 11:06:32 -0500

“

No place is free of conflict and bad feeling, and no person has the power to make problems disappear. Where there is happiness — friendship, adventure, affection, security — there is also, inevitably, disappointment. That’s life.

When you stop to think about it, this is a pretty strong message, and not what you might expect from children’s entertainment. But at the same time, this kind of honest, realistic assessment of human relationships has gone missing from far too many supposedly grown-up movies, which are almost hysterical in their eagerness to dispense comfort, sentimentality and neat, tidy endings. However violent or foulmouthed they may be, most of these commercial entertainments offer soothing scenarios of wish fulfillment. Justice is served. The bad guys pay. Love conquers all. The naughty boys come home from their crazy adventures and find that their mommies still love them. (That’s a plot summary of “The Hangover,” by the way, not of “Where the Wild Things Are.”)

But things are much more complicated in some children’s movies, it seems, where the regressive infantilism of grown-up comedies and action pictures is answered by a grave precocity. A movie like “Where the Wild Things Are” or Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” play a kind of reverse dress-up, disguising adult anxieties in the costumes of innocent make-believe and fanciful spectacle.

”

- A. O. Scott, reviewing the film version of Where the Wild Things Are

This is wonderful. Christopher Walken reading Where the Wild...

Tue, 08 May 2012 09:15:00 -0500

This is wonderful. Christopher Walken reading Where the Wild Things Are. R.I.P. Maurice Sendak. (via @aaronbelz)

I want to be able to read books like this someday.

"Transforming the conversation"

Tue, 08 May 2012 03:21:20 -0500

My friends Ron Belgau and Justin Lee recently led a discussion at Pepperdine University about Christian faith, homosexuality, and gay marriage. Ron has written a blog post (at a new blog where I hope to contribute in the coming months) about his conversation with Justin, and the videos of the Pepperdine discussion are available there.

This conversation is one of the best I’ve seen on the topic. It’s a model of what Richard Mouw has called “convicted civility.” Do please check it out and spread the word!

"One’s entire vocation is an option, an answer to a call that has been heard. It can simply be..."

Mon, 07 May 2012 05:03:56 -0500

“

One’s entire vocation is an option, an answer to a call that has been heard. It can simply be the present condition. It is never a voice that clarifies everything. The dimness inherent in faith never leaves us. There is one thing we can be sure of, that every vocation is always accompanied by a renunciation. One who is married renounces monastic heroism; a monk, the married life. The rich young man of the Gospel is not invited either to marry or to enter a monastery. He had to renounce his wealth, his “having,” his preferences, in order to follow the Lord. Likewise, the “eunuchs” for the Kingdom — whatever meaning might be given to this expression — signal a deprivation, a renouncing, a sacrifice. However, in all the cases of deprivation Scripture speaks of, grace offers a gift; out of a negative renunciation it creates a positive vocation. To renounce one thing means to be totally consecrated to another that this very renunciation allows us to realize. It is not a mutilation at all, but a re-making of the “economy” of a being, put at the complete disposal of a new destiny already loved. All aridity of spirit results from sublimations that are badly assumed, from the forced maimings of a vocation that was poorly understood, from a disguised, paralyzing refusal. From these various modes of inauthenticity where life has no meaning, a passage to a world of true life opens up.

All men seek knowledge, power, joy. Only joy is sufficient unto itself. It comprises and surpasses everything, because it is the symphony of Meaning found, of the “one thing needful” about which the Gospel speaks.

”

- Paul Evdokimov. I’m giving a couple of talks to a group of Christians in London next weekend, and my goal, basically, is to unpack this quote.

"Mystics of other religions might be able to float beyond creation into a sea of sheer divinity. Not..."

Sun, 06 May 2012 08:11:38 -0500

“Mystics of other religions might be able to float beyond creation into a sea of sheer divinity. Not Christian mystics: On the top rung of the ladder is a bit of creation, the glorified but still incarnate Son, a sacrificial Lamb who yet bears the stigmata of a Roman cross and spear.”

- Leithart (via germerian)

"What I tried to convey to my niece when we were in Paris is the truth of Hemingway’s famous..."

Sun, 06 May 2012 08:07:51 -0500

“

What I tried to convey to my niece when we were in Paris is the truth of Hemingway’s famous observation that “Paris is a moveable feast.” Most places are, if by “moveable feast” one means taking into one’s heart the essence of what it means to live in that place, and trying to live it out wherever you may go. For me, I told Hannah, “Paris” is both a place and a way of seeing the world. It means a particular way of approaching beauty, and of living as a kind of art. It is the belief that beauty, however humbly expressed, can and should be a part of everyday life. For me, living out “Paris” means drinking a bottle of cold Sancerre on the front porch in the middle of the warm afternoon, because a friend dropped by, and it seemed agreeable to you both. “Paris” means taking extra time to figure out how you can make something taste better… .

That’s “Paris” to me. A mindful aestheticism.

”

- Rod Dreher, always at his best writing about food and place. (via giftsoutright)

"In the drive to make churches more guy-friendly, we risk confusing cultural (especially American)..."

Fri, 04 May 2012 03:39:36 -0500

“

In the drive to make churches more guy-friendly, we risk confusing cultural (especially American) customs with biblical discipleship. One noted pastor has said that God gave Christianity a “masculine feel.” Another contrasted “latte-sipping Cabriolet drivers” with “real men.” Jesus and his buddies were “dudes: heterosexual, win-a-fight, punch-you-in-the-nose dudes.” Real Christian men like Jesus and Paul “are aggressive, assertive, and nonverbal.” Seriously?

The back story on all of this is the rise of the “masculine Christianity movement” in Victorian England, especially with Charles Kingsley’s fictional stories in Two Years Ago (1857). D. L. Moody popularized the movement in the United States and baseball-player-turned-evangelist Billy Sunday preached it as he pretended to hit a home run against the devil. For those of us raised on testimonies from recently converted football players in youth group, Tim Tebow is hardly a new phenomenon. Reacting against the safe deity, John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart (2001) offered a God who is wild and unpredictable. Neither image is grounded adequately in Scripture. With good intentions, the Promise Keepers movement apparently did not have a significant lasting impact. Nor, I predict, will the call of New Calvinists to a Jesus with “callused hands and big biceps,” “the Ultimate Fighting Jesus.”

Are these really the images we have of men in the Scriptures? Furthermore, are these the characteristics that the New Testament highlights as “the fruit of the Spirit”—which, apparently, is not gender-specific? “Gentleness, meekness, self-control,” “growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ,” “submitting to your leaders,” and the like? Officers are to be “apt to teach,” “preaching the truth in love,” not quenching a bruised reed or putting out a smoldering candle, and the like. There is nothing about beating people up or belonging to a biker club.

”

- Michael Horton

"It is the “good news” aspect [of the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11] that is..."

Thu, 03 May 2012 09:41:03 -0500

“It is the “good news” aspect [of the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11] that is picked up in an interesting way in Acts 2 with the tale of the Holy Spirit’s coming upon the gathered faithful: “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages…. ‘We hear, each of us, in our own native language’” (2:4, 8). Sometimes read as a “reversal of Babel” in anticipation of the new creation, it is better to read Acts 2 rather as a “fulfilling” of the promise of human scattering. It is not that the church will represent a new humanity where all finally get to speak the one language profitably for humankind before God, but rather that the church will enact the new reality so that the ways of God can indeed be lived and shared in every local tribe and tongue. Only a handful of chapters later, in Acts 8:1, we read that “a severe persecution began against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered… throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria.” Again, what seems like the dark workings of judgment turns out to “people the earth,” not in this instance with the human race but with the beginnings of the global church. The goal is not to return to the way things were before the persecution, but to learn to discern the ways of God in the new reality that results. One suspects that much of what happens in the life of the church needs to be seen in this way.”

- Richard Briggs

"But this dynamic that enriches and shapes face-to-face communication depends on each person offering..."

Thu, 03 May 2012 02:49:45 -0500

“

But this dynamic that enriches and shapes face-to-face communication depends on each person offering themselves up to read in certain ways. Our attention intends the other’s body as a nexus of communication, but when the other’s body is not engaged in the act of conversation, dissonance results and presence is broken.

Back to the smartphone. When the smartphone enters into the dynamic it disrupts the body’s communicative patterns. Gestures, eye contact, posture, facial expression — all of it is altered. It no longer means in the way our body is used to perceiving meaning. Perception finds it impossible to achieve an optimal grip on the embodied interaction. And because our bodies give and receive this sort of communication tacitly and often in remarkably subtle ways, we may not be conscious of this dissonance in the act of conversation. We may only register a certain feeling of being out of sync, a certain feeling that something is off. Presence fails to emerge and conversation, of the sort that Turkle champions, indeed, of the sort we all acknowledge as one of the great consolations offered to us in this world — that kind of conversation becomes more difficult to achieve. Given the bodily dimensions of face-to-face conversation, I’m not sure it could be otherwise.

It is not that “social media” in some abstract generic form or the practice of texting in general that threatens conversation. It is the concrete materiality of the device entering into the intentional arcs of our perceiving and meaning-ful bodies engaged in face-to-face communication that is problematic.

”

- Michael Sacasas, “Presence Emerges: Bodies in Conversation” (via Alan)

"I’ve been struck recently by how many of my clients are ashamed to go to their friends for..."

Thu, 03 May 2012 02:36:57 -0500

“

I’ve been struck recently by how many of my clients are ashamed to go to their friends for help: both material or financial help, and emotional support, the love in time of distress which might be thought of as one of the key purposes of friendship. I’ve written before about my own struggle with the temptation to keep my troubles to myself and not seek help because I don’t want to burden others, so I totally sympathize with this dilemma. But as I’m trying to teach myself, love in a time of need is what you have friends for. St. Aelred’s emphasis on transparent honesty with one’s friends may be considered an antidote to the shame we feel at exposing our own needs and weaknesses.

One of the biggest tasks at the center, at least for someone with my style of counseling, is to help the woman find the sources of love and support already available to her in her own life and community. I try to help her identify and strengthen those connections. And I’ve been startled by how often people will identify a friend as a possible source of desperately-needed strength, and then admit that they’re ashamed to rely on that friend. “Well, if she were in need, wouldn’t you want to know?” I ask, and that helps a bit. But the tight old relationships—not only friendship but the fictive kinship relations of godparenthood and godsisterhood, and maybe even the extended-family relationships of cousinhood—seem to be weakening. A renewal of friendship would be good for everybody, but maybe especially good for the poor.

”

- Eve Tushnet

Faces: A Pet Peeve

Wed, 02 May 2012 04:52:00 -0500

Faces: A Pet Peeve

"This disjuncture between Protestantism’s more humbling counsel and the feel-good Word Faith gospel..."

Wed, 02 May 2012 03:27:28 -0500

“

This disjuncture between Protestantism’s more humbling counsel and the feel-good Word Faith gospel became most painfully evident during one of Osteen’s closing perorations. In chilling detail, he recounted the story of a young Tutsi Christian woman who’d hid out in the bathroom of her church pastor’s office at the height of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The machete-wielding Hutu killers who pursued her returned to the pastor’s office every day for 91 days, usually calling out for her by name. At one point, Osteen said, a Hutu militia man was poised to turn the knob on the door to the tiny bathroom where the woman was quartered alongside six other Tutsi believers — but at the last moment, he became distracted and walked away. Finally, when the genocide had been contained, the woman was free, and has been traveling with ministers ever since to testify to the amazing story of her survival. “Nearly 1 million Rwandans were killed in this genocide,” Osteen said as he wound up to the story’s larger moral. “It was very sad.”

Well, no. The Rwandan genocide was something far more than sad — it was a colossal failure of moral and political agency, going back to the German and Belgian colonial partition of the country that set up artificial power conflicts between the nation’s two main tribes. This horror also most certainly came about thanks to the wretched failures of the Clinton administration and other Western powers to arrest a well-documented string of massacres, even as senior U.N. officials such as Lt. Gen Romeo Dallaire, the leader of the agency’s Rwandan peacekeeping mission, implored them to.

For Osteen, of course, the story of this woman’s survival was a divine miracle. But if this one survivor was enjoying the loving favor of an omnipotent God, what are we to conclude that this same God thought of the more than 800,000 Rwandans murdered in the genocide? Was their faith wanting? Was God planning unparalleled new successes and joys for their surviving family members? Are these the people Osteen has in mind when he exhorts his listeners not to be victims, but victors?

”

- Chris Lehmann

"If Jesus is present with us then his identity is not something lost in the passing of time, nor is..."

Tue, 01 May 2012 07:50:50 -0500

“If Jesus is present with us then his identity is not something lost in the passing of time, nor is the ‘relevance’ of his speaking something to be recovered through our historical and hermeneutical dexterity. Jesus is not someone slipping further and further into the past. Jesus doesn’t have to be made our contemporary. The ascended Jesus makes us his contemporaries. He is alive, and as the Fourth Gospel makes clear, he is alive precisely as the historical figure who died on a Roman cross (Jn. 20.25-27). In this sense, Jesus’ resurrection appearances to his disciples represent not a new coming, but are better viewed as the revelation that the life he led and the ministry he fulfilled in Galilee and Jerusalem is indestructible. This is what Mary is startled to see in the garden: not that with Jesus’ resurrection there is another coming, but that the risen one speaking to her is the same one who spoke to her previously.”

- Angus Paddison