Back on tbe Blog

My Mum's a big Oprah fan, and Im a big Bono fan. So when today she played me a tape of Oprah shopping with Bono at the launch of the Red campaign in Chicago, we both should have been pleased. Now I've been an admirer of Bono for about 25 years. I don't for a moment question his motives, and realize that having seen the Aids crisis in Africa close-up he's willing to make a complete idiot of himself if it means getting drugs to people in desparate straits. Now, I really admire that. However, what I saw on Oprah made my stomach rather queezy. (And not only mine). Imagine the idea of guilt-free shopping... shopping that will save the world (and make a hell of a lot of money for The Gap, Apple, Converse, Motorola, and Armani)! Great publicity for the corporates. And imagine people coming into a store to buy a red shirt and coming out with much more besides. On the Oprah show, it was like a drunken orgy of shop-till-you-drop, but with no head-splitting hangover. Oprah buying ten of everything (with Bono sheepishly following behind) then turning to the audience with tear-filled eyes (intercut heart-breaking pictures of Aids orphans) saying buy red and save lives.

Needless to say, I was deeply bothered.

So here's my question: insofar as global capitalism is the nurturing soil of the empire that maintains Africa's people in bondage, is Bono not engaging in a massive legitimation of savage capitalism, and thereby assuaging the conscience of the Beast? Are not The Gap, American Express, and the like analogous to the cult parodied in Revelation 13 as the "False Prophet" who compells people to obtain a special mark, else they can neither buy nor sell? Can "ethical" capitalism save the world from the effects of "savage" capitalism? It reminds me of that other argument about [usually our] "righteous" and "just" violence saving the world from [usually their] "terrorist" violence.

Here's what complicates things even more. Anyone who's lived in Africa has seen the vibrant local and informal economies (following de Certeau we might call them economies of "space") insinuating themselves into "mainstream" places, doing battle with the shopping malls Oprah delights in, and selling fake Gap, Levis, and other wares. I remember well the traders that used to camp outside Cavendish Square in Claremont, Cape Town, creating a wonderfully African scene in the midst of Euro-posh elitism.) Here was a contestation of capitalism that was grassroots... and deeply subversive (as ongoing struggle over permits testified). Can it be that the Gaps and Converses of the world are feeling the pressure?

Maybe this is just sour grapes from someone who has also seen massive poverty in Africa and is aware of how much more he ought to be doing (or maybe it's plain old-fashioned Nietzschean raissentiment). I don't know. I do agree with those who say we should be suspicious of celebrity colonialism, even though they sometimes overstate their case. I'm also aware that such suspicion can easily mask either a sense of powerlessness at the scope of the problem or just plain suppressing justified guilt. After all, the migrant labour system that made gave Aids the opportunity to do its worst is the very same system that mined and drained the wealth of Africa and sent it northward.

George Grant used to warn his students "when you sleep with Nietzsche, it's always you that end up pregnant." Could the same be said of transnational capitalists? If so, I hope Bono's using protection. He'll be in my prayers. In the meantime I'll say no thanks to the red iPod (and the measly ten bucks Apple will send to Africa on my behalf) and look at more constructive avenues.

I'm still around!!
The end of the semester has left me a little too breathless to blog. I've now just finished teaching my first spring semester intensive course and am getting ready (once I mark the final exams) to teach the second. (Note to self: never do this back-to-back again!) In the meantime, when I'm not teaching, preparing lectures, marking, or sleeping, I'm amusing myself by watching again the third season of Buffy (which just keeps getting better with each viewing) and following the Edmonton Oilers' quest for the Cup. This July I head to Calvin College to participate in their summer Seminars in Christian Scholarship program. I'm also preparing for that, in-between the other stuff, by reading Bill Cavanaugh's Torture and Eucharist, which I highly recommend (though not while watching Buffy).

BTW I have serious DVD envy: the complete Buffy set has recently been released. Maybe that extra money from extra teaching...

Rejoicing... though kinda qualified
This morning I woke to the sound of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw announcing that the Christian Peacemaker hostages had been freed by a multinational military operation.

What wonderful news to hear of the release of James, Harmeet, and Norman! And wonderful too that the "operation" was carried out without violence, though I'm not sure that this was done to honour the requests of the CPT team in the declaration I blogged on earlier or simply a fortunate circumstance attending the fact that the kidnappers were gone by the time the rescuers arrived. Indeed, the "rescue" of Private Jessica Lynch makes one inclined to doubt the official reports of "successful" operations until all the facts (including the stories of the captives) are in.

The real qualification, of course, is the fact that one of the hostages was brutally murdered, and we should remember Tom Fox even as we rejoice with the families of the freed ones. I'll remember Tom's witness as I give thanks this evening. I'll also remember with thanksgiving the many Muslims who lobbied for the release of the hostages.

The Apostle of Ireland

... AKA St. Patrick. This is the day each year I trot out my Guinness shirt and green trousers in aknowledgement of the Christianization of the land of my birth. The form of Christianity that developed in Ireland after St. Patrick continues to hold great appeal to me and to many others around the world. Few realize the role of the Irish scholars in medieval monasteries who preserved much of the learning of antiquity during Europe's so-called "Dark Ages". Thomas Cahill spins a breathtaking account of that in How the Irish Saved Civilization. But it all began with a slave boy who was called by God... and the land. And there's no replacing the confessio of the man himself for a reading on this day (accompanied with a good draught of the black stuff). Here's an extract:

I cannot keep silent, nor would it be proper, so many favours and graces has the Lord deigned to bestow on me in the land of my captivity. For after chastisement from God, and recognizing him, our way to repay him is to exalt him and confess his wonders before every nation under heaven.

For there is no other God, nor ever was before, nor shall be hereafter, but God the Father, unbegotten and without beginning, in whom all things began, whose are all things, as we have been taught; and his son Jesus Christ, who manifestly always existed with the Father, before the beginning of time in the spirit with the Father, indescribably begotten before all things, and all things visible and invisible were made by him. He was made man, conquered death and was received into Heaven, to the Father who gave him all power over every name in Heaven and on Earth and in Hell, so that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and God, in whom we believe. And we look to his imminent coming again, the judge of the living and the dead, who will render to each according to his deeds. And he poured out his Holy Spirit on us in abundance, the gift and pledge of immortality, which makes the believers and the obedient into sons of God and co-heirs of Christ who is revealed, and we worship one God in the Trinity of holy name.

For the rest, go here.

Counting the cost and paying the price


I was deeply saddened by the news that Tom Fox's body had been found in Iraq today. Sometimes the phrase "blessed are the peacemakers" can become so cliched. It is read as "blessed are the idealists" or more negatively "blessed are those too scared to fight." But real peacemakers live in the in-between spaces. They are those who interpose themselves in situations of conflict and in doing so bear witness to the One who gave himself to stop the cycles of retribution and vengeance. It's a strangely appropriate Lenten thought.

Here's a statement by Tom Fox, given last March, showing that he and his colleagues did indeed count the cost:

We, members of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) in Iraq, are aware of the many risks both Iraqis and internationals currently face. However, we are convinced at this time that the risks, while significant, do not outweigh our purpose in remaining.

Many Iraqi friends and human rights workers have welcomed us as a non-violent, independent presence. During the previous year they asked us to tell their stories, since they could not easily be heard, nor could most flee to a safer country. We continue to act as a resource to connect citizens of Iraq with human rights organizations, both local and international, as well as accompanying them as they interact with multinational military personnel and Iraqi provisional government officials.

As a peacemaking team we need to cross boundaries, help soldiers and other armed actors be humane, and invite them to refuse unjust orders. We need to help preserve what is human in all of us and so offer glimpses of hope in a dark time.

We unequivocally reject kidnapping and hostage-taking. In such an event, CPT will attempt to communicate with the hostage-takers or their sponsors and work against journalists' inclination to vilify and demonize the offenders. We will try to understand the motives for these actions, and to articulate them, while maintaining a firm stance that such actions are wrong. If appropriate, CPT will work with diplomatic officials from our representative governments to avoid a violent outcome.

We reject the use of violent force to save our lives should we be kidnapped, held hostage, or caught in the middle of a violent conflict situation. We also reject violence to punish anyone who harms us. We ask for equal justice in the arrest and trial of anyone, soldier or civilian, who commits an act of violence, and we ask that there be no retaliation on their relatives or property. We forgive those who consider us their enemies. Therefore, any penalty should be in the spirit of restorative justice, rather than in the form of violent retribution.

We hope that in loving both friends and enemies and by intervening non-violently to aid those who are systematically oppressed, we can contribute in some small way to transforming this volatile situation.

(Signed)
Tom Fox, Springfield, VA
(plus other members of the CPT Iraq team)

Tom was a Quaker, an accomplished musician, and a grocer. You can read a bio here. I'll be remembering in prayer this new Christian martyr, as well as the members of his team still in captivity: Harmeet Singh Sooden, James Loney, and Norman Kember.

The Secular Religion of Blair and Bush
The fact that my lenten discipline includes things with screens means that my blogging is going to be a little sparse till Resurrection Day (though thankfully there are also little resurrection days, aka Sundays in Lent...). The following op ed piece comes via Jamie Smith's blog, and represents a nice example of theologians of the Radical Orthodoxy tribe engaging the "public" sphere. The authors are Philip Blond and Adrian Pabst:

Secular Britain was shocked last weekend when Prime Minister Tony Blair said that God would be his judge over the war in Iraq. Similarly, President George W. Bush has often used God to justify the war on terror as a religiously blessed and righteous campaign against "evil doers." Predictably, those who oppose the war view themselves as secular progressives untainted by religious fundamentalism and the madness it produces.

Unfortunately for liberals, the origins of Bush's and Blair's religious convictions lie not within Christianity but rather within the history of Western modernization and, most important, within contemporary liberalism itself....

To read the rest, go here.

Here are a couple more things from Blond and Pabst. The first follows on the same theme as above. The second hearkens to Cavanaugh's work I noted a couple of weeks ago.

• "Why the West Gets Religion Wrong"

• "Europe Needs to Start Thinking Locally"

Ich Bin Ein Newfoundlander
You'd have to be a stone not to have been moved by the victory of the Gushue rink at the Olympics today, or the scenes in St. John's afterward. Thanks, boys, for making all our days.

A PostModern Celebration of Discipline

With Lent just around the corner, many Christians turn to the question of Lenten disciplines (click here for a fabulous resource). Relatively few, however, see such disciplines as political practices that both constitute and substantiate a Christian selfhood. In this regard, Jamie Smith offers Michel Foucault as a somewhat unlikely ally (perhaps akin to Merold Westphal's invocation of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche as "atheists for Lent"), and furthers our engagement below with Romans 12:

I suggested that Michel Foucault’s critique of our contemporary "disciplinary" society echoed St. Paul’s concerns about accommodation to the forces of pagan culture. Like Morpheus in that respect, Christ’s redemption also frees our minds — and hearts and imagination — from the controlling forces that want to enslave them to other ends. The same call is repeated here in Romans: we are not to be conformed to "this world," but, rather, we are to be transformed through renewing our minds. Foucault would utter a hearty "Amen!" to Paul’s critique of "conformity" here. So both Paul and Foucault preach a message of freedom that leads them to be critical of what we might call "the culture of empire."
However, today I want to qualify this by explaining why I think that freedom is a bad idea. Or more specifically, since it doesn’t really matter what I think, I want to suggest that according to the New Testament, what Foucault calls "freedom" is just one more idolatry. While Paul and Foucault might be similar in their critique of the current configuration of our "disciplinary" society, what they envision as an alternative is quite different.

Read part 1: "Free Your Mind": The Postmodern Pauline Message in The Matrix" here
Read part 2: "Why Freedom Is a Bad Idea: A Postmodern Celebration of Discipline" here

Now that it's over...

... and Canada has crashed out of hockey at the Olympics [sniff], folks up here may be trying to figure out what to watch on TV to fill-out reading week. Well just in time comes Tyler Williams and his essential movies of 2005 for theologians.

At any rate, watching them is probably more edifying than listening to the sports pundits make excuses--though I find that hard to resist. Was it leadership? Can a bunch of overpaid bums team of great individuals overwhelm a team playing greatly as a team? Would Mario's presence have made a difference? Why, with sharpshooters like Sakic, Iginla, and Thornton, couldn't we score? Our goalies kept it close. Russia was better. Hell, Switzerland was better...

But let's not forget that this is a fabulous day in other competitions--competitions, alas, that don't feature so highly in legitimizing Canadian identity: a gold and two silvers today in skating, a gold in skiing, and a place in the finals in men's curling, and still a chance for a bronze in women's curling.

The Agnostic Christian Reformed Church
One of my students is "co-founding-pastor" of The Agnostic Christian Reformed Church, a new group on MSN. Here's the manifesto:

"We do not aim at a conclusion but an opening. We do not seek a closure but an opening up." - John D. Caputo

Welcome to this group, I suppose. The Agnostic Christian Reformed Church was an insidious and nebulous idea, forged by myself and the Church’s cofounder, Sir Trevor Tuininga, Esq. Thus far, it has proven to be a classical example of one of my great ideas: a fantastic name with fantastic hopes attached to it, but without any real goal orpragmatic manifestation in sight. Hopefully, the formation of this group will be a step in a different direction… a motion forward into life, as it were. With any luck, the scope of conversation will broaden somewhat, and ideas will manifest themselves on this board; hopefully, this will provide a forum for discussion that the insecurities of ortho-doxy cannot allow… life must remain both alive and believable.

Gods be praised if anything constructive or even mildly entertaining comes of this,
Daniël

Daniel tells me that (in the spirit of Derridian openness) all contributions--even I assume "ortho-dox" ones--are welcome.

Bonhoeffer

I haven't blogged on Dietrich Bohoeffer's 100th birthday, though it has been on my mind. Showing the excellent Doblmeier documentary to my students last week made me think afresh his relevance for our time. I have blogged on Rowan Williams, and just noticed his opening address to the International Bonhoeffer Congress. It dovetails nicely with the theme of the last couple of blogs here:

"... to live in the climate of authentic spiritual discipline is to be ‘re-educated’. To adore God for God’s own sake, to bring one’s sins daily before God and the neighbour, to make one’s own the language of Scripture, especially psalmody – all this apparently irrelevant activity is part of opening ourselves up to the transforming word. It is useless and worse than useless when it becomes a way of protecting believers or of denying the acuteness of the world’s pain; so, when the Confessing Church began, step by step, to ‘normalise’ its relations with the Reich, Bonhoeffer spoke out against it as he had spoken out against the state church of the mid-thirties. But this does not mean that he thought the disciplines of Finkenwalde had been a mistake or a false start.

"In a context where, as we are so often reminded, spirituality has become a major interest, Bonhoeffer obliges us to ask what the transforming potential is of any practice or tradition. Does it transform only the individual’s sense of well-being? Then it is merely ‘piety’. But if it enables each believer to stand alongside other and alongside the forgotten, it is on the way to allowing the action of God to make itself manifest. And that is the entire point of spiritual discipline – not the cultivation of a private self, but the renewal of the world by God, a transformation of all the conditions of human speaking and relating. ‘The event of Whitsuntide thus does not consist primarily in a new religiousness, but in the proclamation of a new creative act of God…It is not for a moment a matter of putting the religious before the profane, but of putting God’s act before both religious and profane’ (The Way to Freedom, 47).
"

Read the rest of the address here

Read a sermon on Bonhoeffer which +Rowan preached at St Matthäus Church, Berlin at a service to mark the centenary of Bonhoeffer's birth here

"How to be a Global Village Idiot"


Ever since his provocative article on "The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State" found its way into my dissertation about ten or so years ago, one of my favourite writers in the tradition of Radical Orthodoxy has been William T. Cavenaugh of St. Thomas University. With Daniel Bell Jr., Cavenaugh is rethinking Liberation Theology for our present context, and like Bell is firmly grounded in the practices of community through work with the base Christian communities in Latin America. Here's a quote from another article which expands on the meaning of Eucharist as central Christian practice in light of globalization:

"... I believe that much of the Christian confusion over globalization results from a neglect of the Eucharist as the source of a truly Catholic practice of space and time. Globalization marks a certain configuration for the discipline of space and time; I would like to juxtapose this geography with another geography, a geography of the Eucharist and its production of catholicity.... I will argue that globalization is not properly characterized by mere fragmentation, but enacts a universal mapping of space typified by detachment from any particular localities. This is not a true catholicity, however, for two reasons: first, this detachment from the particular is actually used as a discipline to reproduce divisions between rich and poor, and second, it produces fragmented subjects unable to engage in a catholic imagination of space and time. [I then show] that the Eucharist produces a catholicity which does not simply prescind from the local, but contains the universal Catholica within each local embodiment.... In the complex space of the body of Christ, attachment to the local is not a fascist nostaligia for gemeinschaft in the face of globalization. Consumption of the Eucharist consumes one into the narrative of the pilgrim City of God, whose reach extends beyond the global to embrace all times and places."

Interested in reading the rest? Go here.

The Liturgy in Transformation: A Clarification

In my last post, I'm afraid I may have created the impression that liturgy needed to be legitimated in terms of something outside of itself (its role in forming a worldview, its statement to the culture about power and truth, its contesting of the political, etc.). That would be wrong. I worship God because, as a creature (in the words of the Book of Common Prayer), "it is meet and right so to do." I like the "no BS" way Stanley Hauerwas puts it:

The Catholics had asked me to speak about liturgy as moral formation, but I thought that very way of putting the matter was a mistake. Liturgy is not something done to provide moral motivation. The liturgy is how the church worships God and how from such worship we become a people capable of being an alternative to the world. That is why the language of the liturgy is so important. Nothing betrays the love of God more than the inelegance of the language Christians use in their worship. Some Christians seem to think we can attract people back to Christianity if we try to compete with TV, but when you do that you have already lost. The only result is that Christian worship becomes as banal and ugly as the rest of our lives.

I think it would be terrific if on entering a church people would think, "This is very frightening." God, after all, is frightening. Recently, I had a debate about the interpretation of the Bible at Southeastern Seminary in Wake Forest. One of my graduate students, a Roman Catholic, went with me. When we entered the church where the debate was to be held, she said, "Wow, is this someone's living room?" So "fundamentalists" want to make people feel at home--a home, moreover, that looks more like the living rooms of the 1950s. It is no wonder you are tempted to put an American flag in such "sanctuaries," because at least the flag adds some color. Unfortunately, the colors, at least when they are part of the same piece of cloth, are not liturgically appropriate.

Read the rest of the interview here.

I think Daniel's comment (if I read between the lines) gets at the rather pathetic ways churches bend over backwards to be "culturally relevant" (and in doing so become less relevant to him). Someone once told me that when the church tries to be relevant, it only shows how "irrelevant" it really is. I would add to Hauerwas' "1950s living room" churches that imagine sacred space along the lines of AA meetings, movie theatres, and shopping malls--all in the name of being relevant or "seeker friendly". I wanted to blog about this earlier in the year after visiting a good friend's church complex which was built like a corporate HQ, with a movie theatre-type sanctuary, individual lift-up seats, coffee cup holders instead of bible and hymnbook racks, and nary a symbol in sight. It was impressive, in a non-churchy way. (Now, of course I'm only talking about the physical space, not the actual Sunday morning worship service. Though these can't really be separated, I realize I don't have the full picture). Perhaps I'll dig my thoughts out sometime, and invite my friend's response.

Until then, I'll keep ramblin' on.

Transformation

OK: so this is the sort of word that folks in my circles love to throw around. In fact, it's the favoured self-description of the neo-Calvinism that has played such an important role in the development of my understanding of Christianity. "The Transforming Vision" is, it turns out, a Reformational/neo-Calvinist version of the biblical worldview. And I happlily embraced (and continue to embrace) that vision. But in the past few years I've become more and more restless with the weak view of the church that seems to go with the Reformational tradition. I remember myself struggling with the redundancy of church while studying at ICS: why bother with worshipping on Sundays when I'm worshipping in the library, in the seminar room, in the coffee shop, etc.? That more recent restlessness is due, in part to my immersion in Anglo-Catholicism at King's College Halifax, in part to my mentors in Anglicanism, Paul Friesen and John Stephenson, and in part to the influence of Rowan Williams, IMO currently the world's greatest English-speaking theologian. Anyway, a devaluing of the church may be understandable, given the dualism that the followers of Kuyper had to confront on their arrival in Canada, where "heavenly" and "spiritual" matters were the province of the church and "earthly" and "material" matters were the province of the state or economy. But neither were the Kuyperians helped by that nasty visible/invisible church distinction that Kuyper inherited from the Reformers. In that view, the "true Christians" (which are individual "souls") are known only to God... which makes the "true Church" an invisible (and mystical) rather than visible (and embodied) reality. A disembodied body, as it were.

However, some within the Reformational tradition (notably the prolific and brilliant young philosopher Jamie Smith of Calvin College) are beginning to recover the importance of the church as visible, worshipping, liturgically formed community which grounds and shapes this transforming vision. Sylvia Keesmaat and Brian Walsh, two friends who have influenced me deeply, are pushing the necessity of community as well, though taking a somewhat different approach from Smith, invoking communitarians such as Stanley Hauerwas and Wendell Berry. (Walsh has also responded strongly to individualist and intellectualist misreadings of The Transforming Vision here). In Smith's case, he's doing it in dialogue with one of the most interesting theological movements of the present time: Radical Orthodoxy. Indeed, a couple of years ago he and Jim Olthuis (my mentor at the Institute for Christian Studies) organized a conference bringing leading lights in the Reformational and RO movements together. The proceedings have now been published here.

All that said, in all this we're really only rediscovering now what Paul knew 2,000 years ago when he uttered those words we Reformationals prize so much: "I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God (in grafting Gentiles into the one community of faith) that you present your bodies as living sacrifices, wholly acceptable to God (a counter to the cult of ancient Israel which excluded Gentiles), which is your spiritual worship. And do not be conformed to this world (he'll talk about this in ch. 13), but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, that you may discern what is the will of God (be followers of torah), what is good, and acceptable, and perfect" (Rom 12:1-2). We usually stop there and talk about transformation and renewal in all spheres of life: the political, the moral, the scholarly, aesthetic and cultural, etc. What we miss, I think, is Paul's going on to talk about life not in society, but within the church community, and only then the church community's relation to the empire (ch. 13). But then he quickly returns to the question of life in the church community again (the weaker brother in ch. 14).

It sounds obvious. What it means to be transformed is birthed and demonstrated in the life of a community constituted by worship (12:1), by the sharing of ministries (12:3-8), by the maintenance of (counter-imperial) baptismal identity in the disciplining of desire (13:8-14, c.f. Col 3:5-11) and table-hospitality (ch. 14) and in the midst of all this demonstrating this new life to the powers that be (13:1-7). Does this mean that the transformation Paul has in mind is specifically for the church, and not for the state (empire)? Does Paul even envision a transformation of the state (empire) as he imagines a world in which God is all-in-all? He doesn't seem to. From the description of the church, he goes right to a doxology which picks up where he left off in ch. 11, praising the God who has fulfilled his purposes in creating one new community, of Jews and Gentiles (15:7-12).

This reading seems to run counter to some of my Reformational sensibilities, which have taught me to look to the state as polis, the creationally-ordained place where justice is to sought (and thus where Christians concerned for justice should act). But I wonder... do we thereby overlook the church as counter-polis (here Hauerwas is especially helpful)? After all, the state also seeks to (trans)form our subjectivity in terms of its own ideological purposes. I know classical Reformationals will be screaming structure/direction at me by this point! But can a Christian organization--whether an academic institution, labour organization, or political advocacy agency--maintain its Christian identity apart from those very "churchy" practices of baptismal identification, eucharistic hospitality, and liturgical celebration of the alternative power-centre of the universe? (And a word to any King's students who may be reading this: chapel is not an "option" if you take this Christian formation stuff seriously; it's "essential.")

I'll stop ramblin' now.

I'm contemplating some research into this in the southern African context, where African Initiated churches functioned as a kind of counter-polis to the state during apartheid, and continue to do so. In the meantime, any comments are welcome!

Back (finally!)

It's been a long time between blogs and I've lots to write. For now, check out this link to a hilarious video that asks the musical question: what if the Federation had a starship with an all-Scottish crew?

Click to watch: Scottish Star Trek