WALLPAPERS(by munawar 9949935350)

Gardens come back from their sleep.

The lovely Amy Sullivan replies to the great debate.

OpinionEditorials.com %u2013 N.C. Church %u2013 Democrats Need Not Apply - Ford

The last couple of posts have been about how church-goers engage with the rest of the world. I thought I should just post a straightforward statement of the hostile view: <a href=”http://www.jonsquillministries.org/about.htm” Dr. Michael Ford of Covington Theological Seminary believes that the church in North Carolina has a right and a duty to kick Democrats out of its ranks.

Paul has plenty to say about expelling the immoral. It’s one reason he thinks that Christians have no business judging non-Christians.

Political Split Leaves a Church Sadder and Grayer - New York Times

Hi there - Joe, thanks for your comments; Abby, thanks for your statements.

Progressive Christians tend to spark a lot of sensitivity both to the right and the left. On the Right we tend to scare a lot of people (including my mother) who aren’t yet convinced that there’s a lot of coherence to our positions. See the recent responses to the Nerve article discussion below. They’re not sure that one can be open to change while still keeping values, that one can understand coastal culture for its egalitarianism while still complaining about some of its excesses, like the occasional reaction against all forms of institutionalized religion — which is one reason I wanted to start this blog.

On the secular Left there are a lot of individuals who have been scarred by coming up against the worst of hierarchy, the worst of corruption and power in the guise of benevolence. Those scars are real and we have to acknowledge them. I find a gap of compassion in reactions like that of Anonymous (further below, reacting to Nerve) who can in no way understand why the church has come under attack in the last fifty years, or why Christians in Oklahoma should feel compelled to apologize to the armies of college professors, secular activists, Jews, Muslims, and hipsters who resent church political privilege in America. The critiques of coastal society, postmodernism, radical leftism, and feminism have their limits, but at their heart they represent a utopian impulse to reform a society that has failed them — failed to stop the abuses of power they’ve seen, failed to stop certain of its ministers from actively encouraging actions of hate, categorically failed over centuries, over an array of problems. See above about the Democrats voted out of the church in North Carolina.

The church is a human institution composed of an extremely diverse body of grass-roots activists united by symbols that remind them that they’re supposed to work together. Among Catholics, the pope functions primarily as such a symbol: his edicts are overtunred by successive popes; pope after pope has sponsored whores and wars and torture. But the pope stands in to insure some possible unity of discourse between elitist Jesuits and leper-washing Franciscans. The church is a human institution about making people with different ways of loving the world come talk to each other. This is a foolish, terrible, pointless exercise. It’s a lyrical gambit. It’s a utopian mission. It may be doomed to fail. It certainly, like Democracy, creates as much secrecy and warfare as it hopes to destroy. But maybe some of us, as individuals, have less hope for other institutions. And some of us need the lyric voice of its hope: that we can and should talk to the redneck and the elitist about each of their utopian vision, that some common ground is possible, especially if they are called back to talk about Jesus the washer-of-lepers and healer-of-the-sick.

The church is a human institution. God isn’t human. I have hope for the church in the long run: in eternity, where God reigns, the argument that we should be talking and caring and giving and celebrating and arguing together ought to produce something good. In its founding texts, the church stands for this kind of openness within its walls. The same utopian argument underrides all hopes that civil society will build a better world, that Enlightenment makes for a better world, that democracy improves lives, that the free market could save mankind: systems of openness closed to everything on the outside, staking everything on the hope that they can set the world right. For the Christian there was already a revolution, already an event and a sacrifice: the irreversibility and severity of that event makes it the one path, the one gateway through which the Christian goes forward. There is no other way but this. If I don’t grasp that revolution, I grasp nothing.

I didn’t plan to write a defense of the church here. Abby’s right: in the church we take the liberty of assuming that we have offered a place for free exchange. We want to talk to other people who have the same assumptions about the worth of other human beings and the significance of one revolution, in much the same way as secular humanists all accept the French Revolution as the starting point of something called “modernity” which is always better than the world that came before it. The Secular humanist has a hard time having the conversation about how relative modern democracy is to the world that came before. If he accepts the relativism of tradition and modernity, he can no longer judge his actions and communities based on how far they enable individual liberty. The Christian has a hard time engaging other systems of belief. If she acknowledges the relativism of Christianity against the Other Spiritual Regime, she has a hard time judging her actions and communities relative to how hard they conform themselves to the commandments to compassionate love.

There’s much more there to be discussed: about how evangelical the Christian should be, how much she has a duty to cure all the souls in the world or to make them conform. This is a long discussion. Suffice it to go into shorthand. Augustine said that Christians are citizens of two cities: both the church and the state claim their participation. The Christian can’t leave the City of Man until her death. And she has the duty and responsibility to behave appropriately while a citizen of that regime.

In this blog I expect to talk not only to Christians but to the great swarm of progressive secularists who compose most of my friends, colleagues, and peers, out here on the coastal city. Without doubt, aside from religion, I owe you the respect due you in civil society. I can share with you what I know about the world, what works, what fails; but I’m compelled to share with you nothing. I have to acknowledge the evil that’s been done against gays and women, the losses to the world, the evil suffered by any man or woman personally at the hands of an individual or group that believed themselves inspired by my God.

According to the bounds of my religion my duties are separate and different. I must listen attentively and lovingly to other Christians — even if they seem to be filled with hate, I have to keep listening and engaging them and arguing them, acknowledging the common ground wherever it lies, challenging them on our differences. It’s one of the earliest commandments of our church that I do so, in order that if I’m right, I eventually change them. But outside the church, my religion gives me duties. I have to acknowledge your worth: I have to respect you, defend you, and if you brush close to my experience: suffer with you, love you, work for your benefit, pray for you, encourage you. I must share with you the joys of my life and offer you my sympathy and wisdom if they’re appropriate, withold them if they’re useless. I must practice good works. I must listen. I have no business judging you: only judging my actions as they relate to you.

For the Christian, there was one historical event. Do I judge your grasp on our history? I have a duty to offer you what I know about. I have no right to judge you against it. The teacher judges the student who has enrolled, and talks to the woman on the subway, to whom he owes a different, and no less important, kind of love and humility.

We’ve talked about “excuses” made by secularists who don’t want to have a serious conversation about progressive Christianity. I have lots of excuses for not moving back to Texas, some of them good ones. But yes, I want secularists to challenge Christians. I want Christians to challenge Christians. And Christians secularists.

People claim that there are a lot of reasons for turning away from the church as a liberal. But I don’t buy most of the excuses. I don’t buy the irreconciliable philosophical problems, the “I read Dostoevsky” and then God was impossible, the “I learned about the crusades” and then joining a church was impossible. Modern thinking Christians read Nietzche and Wittgenstein. They know about the crusades. They know that all organizations have problems, and all power corrupts. They also are over the 1960s critique of all organizations and all power. But this isn’t about the church, this is about the people who bristle.

When I ask them why they bristle, there are two statements that come up again and again without sounding like they were ripped off of some high school teacher encouraging sixteen-year-olds to think for themselves for the first time.

One: I wanted to have sex before marriage, and the priest told me it was wrong. Variations include: abstinence campaigns not working in the face of AIDS, etc., do Christians want people who behave slightly differently but still with love to suffer and die?

Two: I found damnation hard to handle. Resurrection? Afterlife? Does God really want you to burn amidst devils for all of eternity for that one traffic violation? a) it is absurd, how very like a cartoon. b) this is blatant manipulation of dumb people to make them Christians. c) this is mean! (see below for brief commentary on death, esp Abby’s comments to my post)

So you see, Sex and Death are a great problem for the Church, liberal or conservative, if it’s going to convince thinking, compassionate people that Christianity has anything to offer.

Let me go way out on a limb and say that some part of these issues is weird. I don’t care what my friends believe about sex and death. I have reasonably moral friends who care deeply about each other, and the views of the Christians aren’t necessarily much different from those of the non-Christians. There are the fundamentalists way back home who express a strangely punitive attitude (God damns x group, let the brown people multiply and get sick) which I find totally unreconciliable with Christ’s teaching. Because of my religion and upbringing, I have a different view of sex and death, and I’ve never found them in conflict with Jesus’s two commandments to love God and serve your neighbor. I believe that loving sexual relationships outside of marriage -can- be the expression of a love that promotes an attitude humility and kindness in the world, and I believe in Eternal Life as a profound metaphor for the state of the soul when it’s with God (see below).

But forget me. There are theological arguments for and against premarital sex. I’m not a theologian, and I’m not holding myself as a model Christian, statements that seem to be repeated about every three blog entries here.

Fortunately for everyone else, there’s Anonymous Preaching Stud , a friend of mine on the web, who’s a little better than I am at explaining a bit about why modern views on sex and death are condoned, practiced, and even embraced by a lot of modern Christians. Check it out. Anonymous Preaching Stud is just getting started, but he has a lot to say. There’s been a lot of theology about what sex means to the Christian, there’s been a lot of learning from gay people who have thought about open, loving relationships more carefully than straight people ever have; Anonymous Preaching Stud knows his stuff. The point isn’t, or shouldn’t be, that the church damns secular sex and death, but that it has a good way of thinking through them.

Which is a lot about what my blog is about. I don’t see Jesus keeping us away from the world, Jesus who kissed lepers and hung out with prostitutes. I see Christ calling us to change our attitude towards the world and towards what we’re supposed to do in it.

About my own experience and what this has done for me. I was dating a really sweet photographer who freaked out right before I came home from New Haven and broke up with me. I wanted to blog about it because I was trying to clear up in my head all the lessons of Lent about how loneliness is a human condition, how a Christian isn’t necessarily less lonely but copes with loneliness by talking to God and expressing love whenever possible. I wanted to blog because I was figuring out how Christianity was actually relevant to my modern love-life: it told me, among other things, to handle the end of relationships by continuing to express gratitude and love, what it means to be single and Christian: I think it means being grateful for others’ company. I think it means acknowledging their freedom to find their calling wherever. I think it means leaving open the possibility of God acting between two people to make a promise and act to make great plans to serve the world together. But in reverence to the importance of that relationship, it’s just as important to love and let go.

The fruit of acting with responsibility and love is pretty serious. The photographer and I are pretty good friends still, and you can find heartfelt posts below about how deeply grateful I am still for his presence in my life, and how much I want him to thrive. I’m over it, and I give thanks to that seasons of meditation for allowing me the most graceful breakup I’ve ever had. I guess I’ve always had a history of falling with determination and taking rejection pretty hard, and it’s made me pretty crabby in a state of rejection in the past. I wanted to get past handling rejection with bitterness.

Preachers and historians and the media think the church is being ignored by educated people for various reasons: the success of Enlightenment, total irrelevance of mystery to modern life, “removing the mystery” from the universe by answering too many questions with God, not being able to deal with evil and war. Personally I’ve found the church to in fact reconcile all of these problems: reason with tradition, individual interactions with the community, evil with good. I’ll go further than that. I think the church doesn’t have more or fewer answers to the major questions of existence than psychology, astrophysics, and philosophy put together. The church has interesting way so fhandling peculiar problems like how to express gratitude and love, problems which aren’t handled so well by the others.

Just as the Enlightenment separated the State from the Church, it also effectively made the Church think through separation of church and state as well. We no longer believe that theologians should be the sole authorities on geology and astrophysics. We acknowledge those as separate kinds of expertise that don’t challenge the Church’s authority to speak to the soul. But there are domains where expertise is shared: both political science and the Church have a lot to say about how communities act and what’s desirable. Both the Church and Psychology have a lot to say about what the human soul needs. Since at least 1750 people inside the Church have been thinking about how best Christians can think about how to incorporate both theology and other kinds of secular knowledge in their lives. Since at least 1850 Christians have been thinking about how to incorporate modern understandings of women’s freedom, the body, sexuality, and culturally diverse families, with their views of responsibility and love as received from Christ.

But we’ve been embarrassed to talk about it: embarrassed because the 1960s revolutions in sexuality and gender were so drastic that many moderates felt left behind, wanted a pure Christianity that simply kept the old patterns of demographics.

In 2005 we’ve all seen enough statistics to know that teaching abstinence doesn’t work; we’ve read enough Freud to acknowledge sex as something human and beautiful that creates deep rifts for the soul if blocked off and crushed. Now it’s time we did some talking about how a Christian who cares about the spiritual and emotional health of herself and her partner should deal with sex. Go, Anonymous Preaching Stud , go!

Michael Barlowe, canon at Church of the Advent, celebrated his fiftieth birthday this morning by delivering a sermon on Eternal Life. Eternal Life, he said, was what we are kept in by grace. Eternal Life is the state of oneness with God’s creation, as Christ at Pentacost begs for the spirit to descend upon his apostles and “make them one” even as Christ is one with the father. Eternal Life is then about community, sustained passion, all happinesses and joys lifted up and shared with each other, all sins and bitterness put into a place where they can be reconciled.

Damnation, say the angry atheists, is what keeps them from belief. I can’t remember the last time I was in a church where damnation was preached about. The church as it exists in civil society has come a long way since its medieval origins and the abuse of the metaphor of hellfire. Hellfire may rage in politics, in academia, in unkindness and disconnection, but neither hellfire nor Eternal Life are certainties for most of the Christians I know, as a physicla location to which living bodies are resurrected. They are certainties of experience: and as such, metaphors that may tell us a lot about the good life and what is worth leaving behind us. We become one with Eternal Life such that Eternal Life lives after us.

On the other hand, woe be us if this means nothing more than the “Eternal Fire of Purfication” to which the bodies of cremated penitential middle-class posers are consecrated in Graham Green novels. Give us Eternal Life. Save us from pettiness. Save us from stupid metaphors, and abusive vicars, and paranoid fantasies of demons and angles. Isn’t that the prayer?

Le Fr%uFFFDmok / FRMK Editions, a Belgian publishing house, has put together an office for producing utopias. This is what it looks like.

Cabinet Magazine, the youngest best hope of little magazines, has apparently just come out with its issue on imaginary places. Stratego extends its warm congratulations.

For any of you not keyed in enough to have made the acquaintance of this wonderful little journal, we exhort you to remedy the situation immediately. Here, a link to the history of timelines, as curated by a delightful alumnus of the Berkeley Department of History.

Bayou
Originally uploaded by Chiceaux.

I regress to nostalgia for the swamp whenever I feel overworked, harried, unreal. Swamp country holds something for me: apathetic, magical, disconnected, stark, human. Hurricanes and alcohol and crime, deteriorating land of poverty, necessity; it was a bad joke growing up in Texas, from which plastic kingdom we looked past the deteriorating roads and gateways sinking in kudzu into the fairy-tale land of poor relatives and cynical grandparents, the land where history started and reality stopped.

Last night I held the head of a friend from Baton Rouge who had cut off my joke about Louisiana with this — “It’s awful. All of my friends are coke addicts. Everyone’s down. I don’t ever want to go back.”

Social Redemption is looking into what technology to use to get its people talking together. We’re hoping to eventually provide a service — newsfeeds, email newsletters, links to blogs and statements — rather than a total platform to which grassroots activists have to conform. The social gospel in Florida need not look like the social gospel in California, but it’s time that the non-radical-fringe stood up to be counted.

Just a note here to say that we’re checking out the world of wikis, editable webpages where invited communities can share calendars, networks, photographs together. Thanks to Danah Boyd for directing us to Civic Space , responsible for networking the Dean Campaign, now turning towards grass roots of every sort. We’ll see how it works.

God is in here detail
Originally uploaded by josh lyon.

Mother, stop reading. This goes down as a public confession. Kudos to Jory, who asked a good question.

Liberal Academic Christians are rare, but deconstructionist-obsessed, alcohol-swilling lovers of dance who attend church however hungover, those are rare indeed. I get asked about it a lot. I don’t know what sort of an advocate I am for the One God or the True Cross. I’m a historian, not a priest: I don’t have to live a model life, and I’m not interested in holding myself up as a model of salvation and rectitude. I live a private life where the Church has always been important, and I’ve typically been reluctant to speak about those interior transformations for fear of being mistaken for one of the Bible-thumping convert-monkeys. But there’s a time and a place for speaking about the interior life in public. Justice Sunday signalled to a lot of people that it was about time liberal Christians started talking. I can tell you what I think the Church means to me, and what the Church means to America.

I spent most of my education among East coast meritocrats for whom giving up God and other mythologies was a huge part of their initiation into the power machine. From a pragmatic level it’s unwise to have an elite that disconnected with the experiences of the rest of the country. The Christian middle needs to reclaim its public face from the reactionaries who have co-opted the name of the church.

But more important by far is how one’s actions, beliefs, and every-day kinds of thoughts coaelsce with one’s beliefs about the world. The mathematicians and historians I’ve known have always been angry atheists, wanting to build everything from the ground up in each generation, willing to dismiss collective, thousand-year-old rituals to the position of performance art, in the hopes that individuals would then wake up from the moment and start thinking for themselves. A different kind of historian and a most astrophysicists I know have been theists of a certain kind, in awe of the limits of knowledge. From the standpoint of a certain kind of folklore and anthropology, I have no words to describe the power of collective languages to describe aesthetic or spiritual experience. Art for art’s sake doesn’t get me there. Art as individual genius doesn’t make sense to me — I spend too much time looking at how genius borrows from the collective. The collective as point of access to a reality that transcends the human — there’s where I stand happy. Maybe my reverence has a little bit of Ludwig in it too.

One of the first points is basic: Tillich says that there can be no such thing as an atheist human, because to be human is to feel attached and aesthetic urges beyond anything that adheres in the material worth of the thing.

But Tillich’s an atheist’s theologian. Why the tradition? Maybe because we think more nuancedly through traditions, because all sorts of revelations come through them: the history of our language, our idea of self and society. Enlightenment said we broke free and could start all over again, but historians of the Enlightenment love proving how that revolution got bogged down in exactly the same hierarchies as before.

Inside the tradition itself there are hundreds of compensations, contradictions, disavowals, excuses, escapes for subverting hierarchy and providing alternatives. I don’t have total faith in the tradition, but I have less faith in the power of Enlightenment to set us free from the self, or from the banality of a material existence not worth having. And finally, why the tradition; because in every encounter with the meritocracy, success, praise, innovation, creativity, and reward, I find myself sick with loneliness, and dizzy from not being able to share my stories. In the language of tradition that awful loneliness is relieved, if only for a couple of hours every week. I’m too human and I can’t escape from it.

Part of coming to terms with that was to swear off my parents’ puritan boot-strap ethics and dive into alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine, nothing harder or softer, but drugs that fix me to the moment, remind me daily of my fragility. Because without them I spin into paranoid fits of imagining that this one career, person, or event is going to be the one, the only one, that can save me. As an aside, I gave them all up for Lent as a way of testing my dependence, or maybe trying to make more internal sense. I spent two months in blizzarding Connecticut without the drugs, without friends, plowing out buckets of research, coming face to face with every paranoid fear I’ve ever had in my life. So what: coming back to California was like diving into warm water, and having acknowledged how weak and lonesome and pointless I could feel by being nothing but a research machine, it was nice to come back, drink a whisky, light a cigarette, and talk about seizing the day. But I also find that I’m more on tea than coffee, am happier without dehydration, smoke rarely, and drink when there’s company. All pretty modest these days really. But I take comfort in knowing that there’s the out, when I’m too much in my own head.

Jesus is Proud of You
Originally uploaded by stateofmind_77.

I’m not alone talking with my blogging obsession about sex and God. But not everyone is as nice as I am. Nerve.com, the hipster singles joint for light porn and witty political commentary, recently released its “Moral Values Issue.” Like a lot of hot young curators (including Topic Magazine ) the frisson is less in seeing the world another way than in seeing the most obscure shitholes the world has to offer. In short, Nerve.com offers essays on what a Moonie marriage is like, on Iranian women and sex, and here - on nuns masturbating. Great commentary on the human condition it isn’t. A titillating concateny of commentary on the diversity one could encounter given endless libido and a bottomless travel budget, it is.

So it should come as no surprise that the above-linked article on nun masturbation has scraped together an altogether eclectic sampler of Christian contemplative writing over ten centuries to paint a picture of the horny nun dreaming of sucking down the Savior. The readers of Nerve are well-educated enough to be suspicious of the establishment, but adolescent enough to find this amusing. Since reading I have been daily plagued by recollecting and snarfing at the phrase “divine foreskin.’

But it still worries me. So why don’t I find it amusing, you ask. Saint Theresa of Avila dreaming about sticking her fingers in the Redeemer’s wounds is as erotic and cross-gender an image as they come. But look: I remember vividly when I was fifteen and a gentle old professor of theology smilingly told me that I might like Theresa, whose ecstasies everywhere mingle devotion for God with the ravings of an obsessed lover. There’s a thick and strong tradition of romantic and even sexual love mirroring the relationship between God and the soul. Best known among twenty-somethings in America is the Sufi tradition embodied by Hafiz and Rumi. But in the West we have Theresa, let alone Abelard suckling on the teats of many-breasted Sapientia. And the tradition goes back far. In the Song of Songs, God says to the soul, How beautiful you are, my beloved.

It still all might be repressive and nasty, as the Nerve readers expect. It might b nuns masturbating in their cells and damning the civilians dancing on the rain-slippery pavement beyond the convent walls. Maybe in its most primeval, pagan roots there’s an ackowledgement of the divine in every physical incarnation, yeah down to the prostitute, leper, and drug-dealer, all pathetic and glorious embodiments of human weakness. Judgment of the fallen comes later. Judgment comes only when good Christians try to figure out how they should act towards the girl in the bed with them (do you have to marry her if she’s pregnant and broke?). Or when they have to legislate against drugs, prostitution, and disease — cases where the legislation, historians tell us, often drives the problem underground and makes the condition worse. But primarily the Christian is not a judge, not a Caesar, not in an earthly army; the Christian slips away and back into the realm of fantasy, of open wounds and delicious sores, where all kinds of compassion are infinitely possible.

Maybe we disown the image altogether. The image of a divine lover comes with too much repression, as Nerve intuits, and perhaps with too much heated beating of the soul into a wanton fury. My colleague theologian says he dislikes the Christ-as-lover image strictly because he can’t imagine God as somehow separate from the human condition.

But the wooing of God, absent presence resaught and revisited; this is true to the experience of most people I know, with their lapses of faith and grace — coming into happiness and flow and then falling altogether out of it again. It is also typical of the lapses of presence we have with the rest of the world, both with the individuals around us and with larger social involvement. Evn as a class, progressives fall out of engagement with the nation while working at the grassroots, then similarly the latter. The neediness and lapsing and crazed seeking of the lover in heat are part of the human condition; maybe its nastiest, most debased, most passionate, least controlled, and possibly most beautiful. Even Casanovas try to quarantine it, lest one amour devour them entirely. So the idea that God is with us in bed: that most human, most fragile condition, most tempted, at once, the most potentially greedy and generous condition imagineable: that, I think, must be true of a Comforter and Redeemer who has given everything to save us from the sin of selfishness. The salvation that reaches us down there, when we’re most likely totake advantage of another person, and most struck by the other’s beauty, that’s a salvation indeed.

Alright, okay, I admit taht I went through a longer-than-normal hiatus from blogging after realizing that my mother was reading. “Have no illusions! Whatever you post is public!” says Mom. But much as I love her, the maternal public is very different than the anonymous public, whatever their presumptions and prejudices. Mother will always love me, which is a kind of responsibility in and of itself. I don’t really care about the public, and sort of cleave to the challenge of changing their minds. So here we go, back to what I’ve been thinking about during the last week and always, somewhere near the intersection of landscape, theology, and the urban hipster scene.