Agosto 2004 Archives

Jürgen Habermas on the current American political spectrum. (Logos)

The militarization of life domestically and abroad, the bellicose policies which open themselves up to infection by their opponent’s own methods, and which return the Hobbesian state to the world stage where the globalization of markets had seemed to have driven the political into the wings, all this the politically enlightened American populace would have overwhelmingly rejected, if the administration had not, with force, shameless propaganda, and manipulated insecurity, exploited the shock of September 11. For a European observer and a twice-shy child such as I, the systematic intimidation and indoctrination of the population and the restrictions on the scope of permitted opinion [...] were unnerving. This was not “my” America.

The Scholarly Lecture: How to Stand and Deliver (Chronicle of Higher Education).
The same instruction should be given for preachers.

I took the kids to a lookouts game on Sunday afternoon. We spent most of the afternoon moving from row to row of the grandstand seats hunting shade. At one point we moved from one side of the field - fairly close to the action, to the other side - way up in the stands. At that point Antonio said somthing like "The players are bigger up here" I totally didn't understand what he meant. He repeated. "Aren't the players so much bigger when we are up here?"

I realized he was talking about perspective. An art teacher in the row below us said "Man he's asking the right questions, isn't he?" I think he had the concepts mixed up - thinking that as you moved away from objects, they got bigger. So he thought that the players were really big, since they now appeared smaller. (or something like that)

"No, Antonio - as you move away the players appear smaller - but they are still the same size, somewhere between how tall you are and how tall I am." I'm not sure he got the difference, but it left me amazed at the way our teaching is coloring his perspective of reality. What responsibility.

On another note - he was quite disappointed that we didn't catch a pop foul. "Papi - next time will you get two baseballs? So I can have one and Elena can have the other?" Uff - the crushing weight of elevated exectations...

Refered to this article before when I read it - now its available online!!!

Others have critiqued the contemporary poverty of public spaces in our land. I rued the day that a decaying golf course in our neighborhood was paved over and opened as a Wal -Mart instead of being saved as public green space.

However, there is another phenomenon that bears commenting, and that is the privatization of public spaces. Every time I fly these days, I am amazed at how airport terminals are full of cell phone use. Everyone seems to have a phone to thier ear and is chatting away. I commented to Marialice last weekend that cell phones made for less lonliness but more isolation in public spaces. I'm sure they all feel so much more connected, but no one turns to talk to a stranger anymore. It is as if every individual is walking in their own private bubble - oblivious of the world around because they are attuned to thier own private circle.

We have good friends who just moved to Orange County - she exclaimed to us that every time she has to wait for her daughter at school there seem to be very personable folks who might become great friends - but instead have thier heads stuck in a cell phone (or worse, appear the lunatic by talking to no one at all, because they have one of those invisible ear buds connected to thier hip phone).

We resisted getting a cell phone because we didn't want to be that available - now I wonder if there is a civic virtue in ignoring the cell phone and turning to the stranger and asking - "how are you?"

This year we are passing a whole set of 10 year anniversaries, culminating with ten year's of marriage next May. It is great to reflect on that luminous time when possibilities started growing, blooming, dawning into the actuality of reality. There was an emotional roller coaster in those days - as the dream that had died slowly came back to look me in the face, smile and say "yes"

I had been in Spain for two years working with Grupos Biblicos Universitarios (International Fellowship of Evanglelical Students) and had essentially put the idea of a future with Marialice out of my mind. However the counsel of a wise friend encouraged me to look for a future, to push for an definitive answer rather than simply let distance and indifference provide a de-facto one. He said "Ministry will wait, a woman won't" (Words Marialice has loved ever since).

So ten years ago I returned from Spain, knowing that whatever dream and friendship we had was moving forward. We enjoyed the reunion, we enjoyed the slow and easy converstaion done without the pressure of phone bills, we enjoyed the touch of growing dreams. And within 6 weeks I was able to say "Marialice - it's not a matter of if, but of when I'm going to ask you to be my wife"

As a friend said yesterday, "You've been with her ever since!"

What I blogged yesterday is better said by By Christopher Leerssen at PCA's nifty new online rag.

If I can leave my office, walk directly into the parking deck, zoom home on the freeway, into my garage and onto my couch, it is easy to be indifferent to the hungry, lost souls outside in the world.

Last week I took the bus home from work and walked the 5 blocks from the corner of Brainerd and Germantown to our house. I walked past a stretch of land that is empty because the slope makes it unfeasible for construction, I was immediately aware of the trash in the brush – bottles, cans, bags, glass, plastic, paper – just lots of trash. It struck me that if I had been driving up that street I would not have noticed the empty lot, say nothing of the trash.

Living life at accelerated pace allows us to ignore the reality of a fallen world. We can go from protected familiarity to protected familiarity – from home to work, from health club to church, from shopping mall to friendly house – without ever really seeing the world that’s in between, without having to confront what is ugly, broken and lost.

Even when I ride my bike I don’t see things as carefully as you do on foot. There is an aspect of separation, of distance from what’s going on around me when I ride. There is a factor of concentration – of necessary focus required in the skill – that does not permit one to really focus on the reality around. It is only when walking that you can both mindlessly move while focusing on what is really around you.

I have a suspicion that our evangelical world does not recognize how fallen the world really is because we have isolated ourselves in the middle class bubble of automotive life. Our heart does not break because we do not ever see the harder edges of our reality except through the flickering and distant images of the television. We pat ourselves on the back thinking things are really pretty much ok, and other than those pesky pockets of malfeasance in the ghettos or the middle east – this world is pretty much redeemed.

We need to start walking through our world.

We flew to San Diego for a wedding last friday. I thought we'd have time and internet access to post some further thinking, but neither occured because of the siren call of the beach. We went every day!

I used to post reading material in the sidebar. But now have integrated it into the main section of the blog. Here is what was in the sidebar when I made the move.

Comment: Sphere Sovereignty 101

Open Source Theology: Preparatory Material for NT Wright Conference

New Yorker: Barak Obama profile

Orion: Wendell Berry letter to John Kerry

Comment: August 2004

New Pantagruel: Christian college professor flunks worldview test?

I have always loved the work of Wendell Berry – the deep connection to place, to a language, to a community, a way of life. His siren call for Americans to return to simpler life, to more just ways has always struck me as completely appropriate and completely impossible all at the same time. Like a call to see the world upside-down: Interesting, and meaningful, but so completely unlike my experience as to be rendered completely impossible.

Yesterday, on the word of Milosz’s death – I picked up a volume of his collected essays. I realized the essential difference between Berry and myself – the notion of exile. Berry has been able to build his life around one place, and his writing and thinking is informed by that experience. Milosz (and I) are informed by the experience of transience – of radical movement – of the impossibility or returning to a place called home. So when you say our work is less “grounded” than Berry’s work – there is good reason.

In his essay “Notes on Exile” Milosz writes:

Imagination, always spatial, points north, south, east, and west of come central, privileged place, which is probably a village from one’s childhood or native region. As long as a writer lives in his country, the privileged place, by centrifugally enlarging itself, becomes more or less identified with his country as a whole. Exile displaces that center or rather creates two centers. Imagination relates everything in one’s surrounding to “over there” – in my case, somewhere on the European continent. It even continues to designate the four cardinal points, as if I still stood there. At the same time the north, south, east, and west are determined by the place in which I write these words.

Imagination tending toward the distant region of one’s childhood is typical of literature of nostalgia (a distance in space often serves as a disguise for a Proustian distance in time). Although quite common, literature of nostalgia is only one among many modes of coping with estrangement from one’s native land. The new point which orients space in respect to itself cannot be eliminated, i.e., one cannot abstract from one’s physical presence in a definite spot on the Earth. That is why a curious phenomenon appears: the two centers and the two spaces arranged around them interfere with each other or – and this is a happy solution – coalesce.

Milosz explains well the difficulty I find reading Berry, why I can both see things one way and another, why it is not hard for me to think through the values of contrarian positions. Not having known a single set of cardinal points – I have yet to have that happy experience of coalescence.

Fascinating discussion this morning with Kevin Luce comparing church experiences of Mars Hill in Seattle and New City here in Chattanooga. Among a number of dimensional differences we emerged with the suggestion that some churches are more about the doing, and others are more about the being.

Now neither of our churches are at the extreme of liberal social gospel (only do) or hypercalvinist isolation (only be), but some exploration or nuance is in order. I find that a church that does not have proper emphasis on its discipleship becomes a revolving door. A church that does not have a proper emphasis on its influence becomes staid and ingrown.

Our church practices a “discipleship in the work” model where spiritual growth and connection to the church occur in the doing. I worry about two things in that model. If we do not have a dedicated clearing house for promoting involvement, or a very focused effort on the part of staff and leaders to ensure that new members or visitors are plugged in – then there is no real encouraged discipleship, and the myth is perpetuated that New City is a hard place to get connected. The additional complication with our church is that a very rich socio-economic and racial diversity does not contribute easily to relationships of genuine fellowship and accountability. There is a lot of effort required to come together and work on the being. While this is not insurmountable, and our challenge is to prepare folks on all sides to surmount it – it has presented obstacles in the success of small groups throughout our church.

Kevin described what he saw in Seattle as the primary being model led to less and less outward public ministry. That is dangerous – but again, the call from the leadership needs to be “what is your discipleship calling you to do in ministry?” “What is your being moving you out to do?”

I think the reality should be that a church that seeks to be a “being” church, should always be “doing” - reaching out to others in order that more might “be.” While on the other hand, a church that seeks to be a doing church should always be intentionally reaching out to encourage the “be” of those met through ministry. One won’t work without the other.

Ever since reading The Politics of Jesus and Resident Aliens in college I have felt somewhat intuitively aligned with Stanley Hauerwas. Now my training has been philosophical and rhetorical rather than theological and so that is why I say intuitive. On the other hand, my faith community has convinced me of basic Reformed theology in terms of theological basic of sovereignty and salvation (New City is solidly in the PCA). I've never really been forced to sit down and assess my contradictory intuitive thinking positions or reflect theologically in community about the implications and issues associated with these positions. (This not only speaks to my education - but my poverty in community - but that is another story).

In the past several months, as I have been reading the Canadian Neo-Calvinists. I have begun to struggle with the points of difference between these two theological and ethical / political positions. The struggle takes two dimensions: 1. How different is Anabaptist pacifism as practiced by Hauerwas from Neo Calvinist cultural engagement as promoted by Kuyper? Then 2. Where do I find myself landing on those issues? I don't have time for either assessment in much detail, but here are some broad brush approaches:

1. My impression is that Hauerwas is seen as making a radical critique of society from a perspective of separation. Kuyper, on the other hand, declares "?There is not a square inch that is not under the sovereignty of God and should not be redeemed."? Kuyper and the Neo-Calvinists take a more hopeful, optimistic view of cultural engagement while Hauerwas and the Anabaptists take a more pessimistic view. Was Kuyper?'s Netherlands an accident of history ? ir-repeatable in contemporary cultures ? or was it a model, to be hoped for and worked towards? Is Hauerwas right in his notion of remnant theology, being comfortable with a limited church that stands outside the culturally engaged world?

2. It is a commonplace to see Calvinists as conservative politically ? and Anabaptists as radically liberal in matters of justice, ethics and economics. A very caricatured reflection would show Calvinists taking cultural influence and engagement to mean economic, expressed in neoliberal market / trickle down theory supported by the conservative politics that work on removing the societal or governmental barriers to wealth creation. On the other hand, Anabaptists are usually on the front lines of social action and cultural engagement around justice and peace issues. Now to be fair, the neo-Calvinists I am reading these days (Borger, Strauss, etc) present a firmly different perspective on social action. They do not seem captive by involvement in the market and by right wing or libertarian politics. But I wonder if that is the exception or the rule. What is so attractive about their work is that it is refreshingly different than typical evangelical worldview thinking (see the new pantagruel).

3. The possibility of natural law. Hauerwas definitively rejects natural law as a possibility and I intuitively follow that construction - as he follows Barth. I agree with Newbigin about the socially constructed nature of discourses of rationality - this impacts the possibility of using natural law as a point of common origin in ethical and theological discussion. I need to review the Neo-Calvinist proposal in relation to natural law. I very much like this statement "?Ethics for Hauerwas stands exclusively on the basis of the story about God that Christians learn from the Bible within the context of a covenant community".? I think that Gideon Strauss would agree with this, but I don?t know.

4. Church as polis in a non polis world. The Sphere sovereignty notions of Kuyper very much informs Max Stackhouse'?s critique of Hauerwas. We cannot let the church become only a political entity that is held separate from the broader culture ? especially in an age when non political (non state) entities are having more and more impact over the cultural objects of our day. Since Stackhouse is the chair of the Kuyper institute at Princeton - I'd expect the influence. (Note to self - explore Stackhouse's ideas about technology and culture exposing a positive postmodernism)

5. A rejection of the ?here there? dualism concerning heaven. NT Wright ? in re-appropriating a Hebrew world view in his interpretation of Jesus and Paul convinces me again of the inappropriate nature of setting aside the present looking toward the future. Again Hauerwas would probably disagree with a characterization of his theology in this vein, but I am more and more strongly convinced by Kuyper?s "?every inch"? model of comprehensive interaction with culture.

There is more but this is what time allows.

It might be an inch deep and a mile wide - but these are amazing: Brainsnacks

In this month's comment magazine Gideon Strauss talks about ten developments in culture that he appreciates. Discussing emerging business visionaries he says:

Visionary business entrepreneurs [...] are changing the way business works. In so doing, they are providing models for the renewal of the economic sphere and of the most powerful institution in modern society: the marketplace.

We live in a neigborhood full of socio economic diversity. Our street is pretty much an 50/50 racial representation, and has a broad range of professional and blue collar lifestyles. Around the corner from us is fairly run down rental property and streets full of smaller unkept bungalows. I enjoy this diversity every time I ride my bike. It is one of the reasons we moved here. We believe in mixed income housing, we want to be involved in cross cultural and interracial relationships, we want our children to be confortable and conversant here.

Then, yesterday we recieved the word that a develolper is planning to convert three apartment buildings at the end of our street into Section 8 housing. A neighbor down the street said "he's basically holding a gun to our heads demanding $20,000 of equity from our homes." I don't like the idea of being updside down on my mortgage. I imagine the scenes of instability and chaos usually associated with public housing and don't like the idea of my children being this close. I hope it will all go away...

Do you see the cognitive dissonance? I question my nimby attitudes. I've read Kunstler on the need and value of diversity of use and income in traditional development. I recognize that properly conceived, this sort of development is a good thing. I really do want a neighborhood that expresses diversity. However, I am troubled by the way section 8 housing encourages single parent households, property mismanagement by both tennants and land-lords, and systemic behaviour of dependence and lack of personal initiative. Section 8 housing is not the way to improve the diversity to our street. Its not the way to provide mixed income housing that promotes dignity and personal ambition for tenants. And oh yes ... I do want a neighborhood where my property values are appreciateing. When I want to move in 2 years - I don't want buyers to say "love the house, but couldn't live on the street."

On sunday Randy Nabors preached on the true nature of Faith (from the end of Hebrews 11). He talked about the victory we like to see in faith (Oh YES!), but then exposed the reality that faith is often full of sacrifice, that we will not see promises fulfilled on this side and that our hope needs not be here and now (Uh Oh - Oh NO!). I am convinced that faithfullness in this case is reaching out to brothers and sisters who are very different than myself - even if the sacrifice means less property value in my home - means not being able to think of selling this house for 5 years - means not expecting an idyllic neighborhood play zone for my kids. In the larger scheme of life - these are but nits, but this morning they hit me hard in the gut.
So the rubber of my faith meets the road of sacrifice and I don't like the burn....

In Byron Borger's list of reccomended books in preparation for the November election he includes this preface:

I will describe some titles that will help Christian reflection on our civic duties, a biblically-shaped vision for government and some handles on thinking about political issues in our post-Christian and pluralistic times. For those who are already ducking for cover, these are not titles about “taking back our Christian country” or those of an arrogant or triumphalistic approach which swerves toward an imposed theocracy.

As always in these pages, I offer books which we trust will help thoughtful and engaged people of faith walk a third way, seeing a Godly and biblical alternative to the extreme poles and ideologies of our cultural landscape. In the realm of politics, I'd say, we want to offer books which tend to both reject the liberal social gospel and the conservative religious right. Neither do we want to yield to the hegemony of the secularized “naked public square” nor revert to some insistence that this is a Christian country (an assertion which is, in any case, historically inaccurate and doctrinally unfaithful).

We really don't care as much about partisan labels as exploring how a biblical worldview would shape our social concerns and our sense of the principles involved, and then the possible policies that emerge from those principles.

I very much agree with his position here. I do look for that third way. But what is tragic is that the reflection on policies emerging from the principles consistent with my christian perspectives lie so broadly across the limited spectrum of political party positions. I have had to prioritize the different policy positions and in that way start making decisions about political action supporting separate parties. In addition, I have to look at how successfully the two parties have implemented policies that I find essential to a biblical worldview. My feeling is that Ronald Reagan paid lip service to life politics in order to gain a following, and then was either unwilling or unable to move the decision forward. The same can certainly be said for Democratic inability to really make changes in policies of world justice (Clinton does still have Ruwanda on his head).

So you won't see "Blog for Bush" or "Kerry Edwards" on this blog. At least not yet.

The exercize introduced by Gideon Strauss and Steven Garber to consider quickly 50 things one loves is a good tool, and I quickly wrote up a list and then thought about it through the day, making additions and subtractions. I think my list is actually at 53 things - but then again who is counting.

But -- some things I recognize about myself in this exercize.
1. Part of my multicultural heritage (In the lingo of the missionary kids - a heritage of a third culture neither of your parents home or of the country where you grew up - but your very own third culture) is a fundamental cameleon nature. My wife noticed it when we first started dating. I would talk to the local Tennessee good old boys in an appropriate language, epxression - even accent. I'd talk to the intellectual northerner in appropriate diction. (I can even remember struggling not to mock my friend Nigel from Ireland - the impulse to work at being like him was so strong). While language is one thing - loves, life views, values and beliefs are another. Yet I find my first impulse is to make myself over in the image of those I think might view me, read me, interrogate me. I faught that in my list. I consciously did not include Kuyper or NeoCalvinism.
2. The literary and high culture bug gets me. There are memories I treasure, images I found significant at one moment, and movies I loved - these I included just because I wanted to. I'm not sure that my life's passions are changed by a mountain view - but they are there. Maybe Kieslowski will come off sometime - but not today.
3. Today my loves are influenced by my vocation rather than the other way round. Strauss quotes the Buechner idea that I have always found deelpy appealing and troubling.

The intersection of our deep gladness and the world's deep hungers is - as Frederick Beuchner says - the place where we should listen for our vocation, or calling.

So without further ado... 50 things I love below the jump....

One of the great joys that I take in my oldest daughter is her love of reading. At 6 she is already reading voraciously. We went to the library Monday night and she got 7 books – childrens books they were – but still 7 books. When I went home for lunch on Tuesday she told me she had read them all! In the last year she has read Charlotte’s Web and two of the Narnia books - all on her own. We've been reading the Little House series as a family, and every time we read she sits right beside me, reading along to see when I make a mistake. I see in her a love of reading that I want to cultivate and engage. I want to see her reading widely and thinking critically. I want to talk engagement and interaction with her.

I need to start by asking questions about what she is reading and the ideas that she is learning from them. Narnia is especially apt for this in as much as the allegory and images connect to familiar themes from her Sunday school. But the other general fiction is just as open for interrogation.

I am learning to be a more critical reader. I am working on thinking through my reading and reacting to it in careful consideration. Some of that is finding its expression on the pages of this blog. I want my daughter to begin the same habits.

But of course she is only 6.

In the life of each of our children, I have lamented the moment when vocalization becomes words, and we lose the abstract and beautiful intonations of meaninglessness. I rue the moment mostly because I haven’t recorded the sounds for posterity and post production. They are absolutely musical (Don’t you love the background of Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Beautiful?) and I wish I could go back and listen again to the coos and garbles.
I will miss this: In the last several months Liliana’s habit has been to call me - “Papi…” – and after capturing my attention and focus – she would intently tell me something equally serious and incomprehensible. She meant it all. It was so important. Her eyes would meet mine and reinforce the seriousness. Her head would nod reinforcing the statement. And all was simply hers to know.
Now Liliana is starting to make sense. We go across the bridge and its “waaer” we get ready to go out and she brings her “shoos”. After helping Marialice in the garden she said “bye matoes.” And so now – the requests become mine to figure out. The seriousness becomes mine to uncover. The challenge of communication becomes really understanding. I have emerged from the safety of her inability and now must recon with the requirement of her words.

Not that I mind at all – but it is another phase in connecting with my youngest child.

My friend Jeff Clark wrote me today asking about my nephew, born last month to the Guerrico – Hatch cross cultural connection. He asked “Is Nico bilingual yet?” I laughed because in a sense he is. His coos and cries communicate equally well in English and Spanish in ways that his words will never do.

I'm facing the political decisions of November -- leery of both my private intuitions and the public pressures. I need a reading list.

I'm going to start with the reccomendations of Byron Borger . What would you add?

Two Notes today from Howard Taylor's time tips

DEFINITION OF INSANITY
Doing the same things over and over again but expecting different results.

IMPORTANCE OF MEAL TIME
A University of Michigan study found that more shared meals at home was the single biggest predictor of higher achievement scores and fewer behavioral problems among kids. (Toronto Star, Sunday, June 13, 2004.)

In his ongoing reflections on the beginning of a christian law school, Bruce Green writes this morning about how a distinctively christian law school is shaped by the Christian Intellectual Tradition. He states:

While I cannot recall its origin, I have come to believe that, perhaps, the most fruitful way of thinking about the Christian intellectual tradition is in terms of two aspects: (1) the coherent legacy of orthodox Christian belief applied to various disciplines traced across the centuries through the thought and work of key individuals; and (2) the way of thinking and engaging in the intellectual life that is the outcome of centuries of experience and critical reflection.

The legacy of orthodox Christian belief begins with the Holy Scriptures as the authoritative foundation. Through the consensual memory of the church, reflected in the formulations of the great church councils of antiquity, and in the broader sense the whole body of patristic writings, in the course of time, arrives at certain interpretations and classic (i.e., conforming to the best authority) formulations. This does not prevent later developments in doctrine but form a touchstone against which later developments are to be seen and judged. The writings of medieval and modern theologians and thinkers become classic by virtue of their consistency with the Holy Scriptures as affirmed by the historic Christian community. In other words, a view is considered within the Christian intellectual tradition if it conforms to the teaching of the Holy Scriptures as those Scriptures have been consistently understood by key Christian thinkers through the ages.

There is no room for untethered private judgment in the Christian intellectual tradition. One may entertain private viewpoints at will, but they are more or less persuasive by virtue of their rootedness in the historic understanding of the Bible. Thus, it is, and will be, our position that the duty of those in a distinctively Christian law school is to show how true knowledge flows from the Creator through the specific body of knowledge known as law. In so doing, we will seek to illustrate the soundness of our approach by its coherent legacy that starts with the Holy Scriptures and is traced across the centuries in the thought of orthodox thinkers. A Christian educational institution does not create its own authority; it receives a tradition and perpetuates it in the various disciplines it undertakes to teach.

I find two challenges here.
1. The legacy of orthodox belive, in a consensual fashion ends with the councils of the church, and while we must recover the Orthodox interest in the patristic writers and reflect on thier word for our day, we cannot ignore the influence of 1500 years of intellectual tumult often carried on in the name of christian tradition - and rarely emerging with consensus. When I see policy judgements emerging from a law school, I imagine they will be informed by more recent thought, and I worry if there is no confession of the incorporation of those traditions into policy.
2. No room for untethered private judjement? While judgement is informed by a rootedness, there is always judgement going on. We cannot get away from the subjectivity of interpreting the tradition - indeed reshaping the tradion we are in.

I agree that we should always be looking to the authority of our scriptures and the traditions that inform our christian history when we approach trades like law, or parenting or evanglism - but the plural versions of the faith that have emerged, like a river that has carried much rock and now is settling down in those briaded channels, must be recognized.

I'm showing a pluralistic, polychromatic vision of faith and belief in this suspicion of agressive worldview thinking. Informed by an understanding of God who includes Jim Wallis and Jerry Falwell among his faithful, A God who loves the anabaptist pacifist antiglobalization protesters as well as the conservative god and country warbloggers. I'm informed by Baktihn, by Dostoyevsky, by Roger Lundin and by my private untethered judgement.

Am I wrong? maybe....