Category Archives: church

. . . about snakes

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A greater part. There are good reasons to regard the style manual of the American Psychological Association as the best academic style manual around these days. Chicago is more comprehensive and probably should be everyone’s manual of last resort, but the APA Manual is elegant and practical. I started using it with the third edition back in the 1980s. It’s now in the fifth, and I suspect a sixth edition isn’t far off. Here’s a short section from its guidelines regarding gender bias in language.

Lesbian and gay male are preferred to the word “homosexual” when used as an adjective referring to specific persons or groups, and lesbians and gay men are preferred terms over “homosexuals” used as a noun when referring to specific persons or groups. The word “homosexual” has several problems of designation. First, it may perpetuate negative stereotypes because of its historical associations with pathology and criminal behavior. Second, it is ambiguous in reference because it is often assumed to refer exclusively to men and thus renders lesbians invisible. Third, it is often unclear.

Having said that, I’d like to say as well that Fr. Mark Harris has recently posted the best statement about human sexuality I have yet to read. It too is elegant and practical, entitled “We rise to play a greater part.” It is also pious, in the best sense of that term. Here’s Fr. Harris’ powerful conclusion:

In an age of great venality and greed, in a time in which governing begins by inducing fear, in a country that has tamed the Lord Jesus and domesticated the Scriptures and bought the silence of the churches, I see no virtue or even moral efficacy in the condemnation of committed relationships in which there is some comfort, companionship, joy and sexual delight, simply because those relationships are between two persons of the same sex. Indeed making something of relationships, let us call it making love, is the only adequate response to an age that attempts to reduce everything to owning, grasping, greed, power and war.

Read the entire statement here.

Relativism. Nicholas Knisely has written an incisive piece a few days back about the bugbear of relativism and how shrub and the press misunderstood and mischaracterized Pope Benedict’s statement in regard to relativism as “The Central Problem for Faith Today.” As Dean Knisely puts it, “Apparently the President’s people based the President’s remarks on the title of [this] essay and not the actual text.” An old dig at English professors has it that they know more than you do and if you wait long enough they’ll tell you about it. As a now-superannuated English prof, I’ve always been convinced that physicists really do know more than the rest of us. Still, I’m not sure that uncertainty in physics and epistemological uncertainty have the same basis, though I accept them both as facts. I’m working on some thoughts about some of the Pope’s teaching statements, and I’ll publish them in a bit.

Read the rest of Dean Knisely’s essay here, or here.

Lambeth. I’m grateful to Susan Russell for catching me up with the ABCs plans for tea at Lambeth Palace. Dr. Williams’ statement–read it here–seems mostly benign, calling as it does for a time of prayer and fellowship which he hopes will make all the attendees “better bishops.” And since Bishop Robinson has let all his colleagues off the hook and urged them to attend, I guess I should be grateful that the thing seems to be going forward. But there’s some language about covenants that disturbs me in the ABC’s talk. Here’s part of it.

We don’t want at the Lambeth Conference to be creating a lot of new rules but we do obviously need to strengthen our relationships and we need to put those relationships on another footing, slightly firmer footing, where we have promised to one another that this is how we will conduct our life together. And it is in that light that at this year we are discussing together the proposal for what we are calling a covenant between the Anglican Churches of the world.

This disturbs me because it begs a good many questions. I’d like to know who decided that we need the things Dr. Williams says we need. I told my own Bishop recently that I didn’t want a covenant, any covenant. He said he didn’t either but that one might be forced on us. I don’t want to have to confront that eventuality. Pastor Russell notes the ABC’s admission that Lambeth “has never been a legislative body.” I’m not sure I should take any comfort there, after the Windsor Report.

Moreover, I can’t see what use it will be for the Bishops who attend the Lambeth conference to spend solemn hours discussing a putative covenant when the Bishops who have forced the issue are boycotting and apparently well on their way to organizing a rump third world church that will continue to stick its finger in the eye of the Americans and the British. A covenant, unless it stigmatizes gays and lesbians, is unlikely to make this writer happy. And if Lambeth is indeed “a lost cause for the orthodox,” what’s the point?

on the other side of the border

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This morning I did a Google search for “Jeremiah Wright, who broke the story?” Apparently, there are as many answers to my question as aspiring claimants to various sorts of notoriety. Suffice it to say that everybody under the sun is taking credit for, or is credited with, having made the Wright sound bites available. And as is usual when things go viral on the .net, a kind of vicious reduction has taken place. Pastor Wright has been objectified as a small collection of sound bites, endlessly played. What interests me today is that almost everybody, including Barack Obama, seems to believe that there is an agreed set of cultural norms that Wright has violated, a border that his language has stepped across so that Wright is on one side of an American fence like the one going up along our southern perimeter. Wright has now had to cancel several appearances and speaking engagements, as the objectification has continued.

I think if I were Wright I might get myself some really good lawyers and go after these media types. Wright isn’t a candidate for public office. He has been co-opted into a political campaign for nefarious purposes. He has been knowingly and maliciously misrepresented and mischaracterized. It doesn’t matter that his own words have been used against him in the snippets of memetic imagery that are used to represent him. Snippets such as these invite the supplying of a context, and while many have praised Obama for his speech in response to the phenomenon, most have continued to deprecate Wright. How bad the deprecation can get is perhaps illustrated by the remarks of Victor Davis Hanson and Pat Buchanan. But it’s really not useful merely to point out that Buchanan and Hanson’s claims are racist. They are — but that’s almost beside the point.

On the other hand, the trouble with Wright’s hyperbolic gestures is that they reflect such extreme claims for recognition of (and respect for) group identity that they reify it. And the trouble with that reification and the attendant oversimplification of complex issues, is that they “encourage separatism, intolerance and chauvinism,” as Nancy Fraser puts it in a recent New Left Review article. Still, those who are bothered by Wright’s alleged anti-Americanism etc., might want to take a look at the New Testament: Matthew 23, for instance, where Jesus utters a long rant against the authorities of his people and its principle city, foretelling their destruction by divine retribution for their sins. Jesus’ rants (this one and others) are well within the tradition of prophetic preaching already established in his time, as are Pastor Wright’s. Whether such rants are useful in a social situation seeming to call for cross-racial dialogue, or whether they will help Barack Obama get elected, are separate issues. But Pastor Wright is not a racist or a traitor to his country as he is being portrayed.

And it should be remembered that Pastor Wright is not addressing Barack Obama’s audience in these remarks that have been so widely disseminated. He is addressing a congregation of Americans whose ancestors were brought to these shores via the middle passage. Indeed the long history of the black church in America is not irrelevant here. A few years ago I visited the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, bombed in 1963 by KKK members. There is in the basement of that historic church a fairly large model of a slave ship, intended for use by Sunday School children. In my West Texas Methodist Sunday School, no slave ships were part of any narrative I was asked to assimilate, not even when we sang “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound . . . ” –that was about personal salvation.

Some days before my beloved and I traveled to Birmingham, I had taken a walk down Arsenal Street here in my home town of St. Louis, where race is important–you better believe it. As I was walking, a young black woman came walking towards me with a small child I assume was her daughter. They were chatting and laughing until the mother saw me coming, whereupon she grabbed the child up in her arms and hurried past me, her face averted, no eye contact. The model slave ship at 16th Street Baptist Church marks the real border that divides black and white Americans. The members of that historic congregation in Birmingham, like the members of Trinity UCC, Chicago, like Pastor Wright and the young woman I passed on Arsenal Street, are on one side of that border; and the majority of mainstream Americans are on the other. That’s why Obama had to disown Wright to the extent that he did.

An interesting and persuasive view of Wright, in some ways contrary to mine, is that of Jonetta Rose Barras, who, in a Washington Post piece entitled “He’s Preaching to A Choir I’ve Left,” seems to express enough good will to wipe out the border I have described. “[T]oday,” she says:

there is an entire generation of young people who know nothing of segregation, who see one another as individuals, not as symbols of a dark past. They do not look into white faces and see, as I once did, a burning cross, a white sheet and a vicious dog on a police officer’s leash. This is the coalition pushing for a new America.

Barras’ optimism and good sense give me hope, just as Obama does. If I’m not so optimistic as she is, perhaps that is because segregation and Jim Crow have shaped my life as surely as they shaped the lives of African Americans of my generation. I’m on the other side of the border from Pastor Wright, though I have spent well-nigh sixty years trying to overcome the fact. We were both of us born into a racist society that assigned us to two different categories, and regardless of what friendships we may have or how we may seek to practice good will and love, we remain in those categories. Our racist culture permits nothing else.

If I’m not so optimistic, perhaps it’s because I understand why Obama had to disown Wright. It isn’t just that what Barras calls Wright-speak is “harmful and ultimately can’t provide healing” and is “outdated in the 21st century,” and Obama had to reject that. It’s that Obama had to betray somebody I believe he loves in order to remain within certain norms that have shaped his campaign from the beginning, some of which are the norms of institutionalized racism. Hanson, to whom I allude above, suggests that Obama get himself a 4×4 flag lapel pin and that Michelle Obama conclude every appearance with a chorus of “God Bless America” from now on; and if Hanson means to be funny, the butt of the joke is not the collective of white, working-class Democrats.

So perhaps it’s OK if some of us, who like Pastor Wright are hanging up our spikes and leaving the race to wonderful young folks like Barras — perhaps it’s OK if we hope that Obama will not back down from his limited defense of Jeremiah Wright and will spare the rest of us some space to defend his mentor a bit more enthusiastically than he has done.

more . . .

Obama rises to the occasion

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I believe that my guy’s speech entitled “A More Perfect Union” will be remembered as one of the great speeches — not as a lecture by a religious leader or public intellectual or social critic might be remembered, but as a great speech by a great politican. It does the things a political speech has to do. Chiefly, it addresses itself to all the various stakeholders who own a piece of any argument about race that is made in the public sphere in this country. And it attempts to avoid pitting one group against another.

If I have a criticism it is that I wish Obama’s statement had given his former pastor more benefit of the doubt, and I admire Obama’s refusal to repudiate his friendship. Pastor Wright’s language is perfectly understandable to me as prophetic utterance, even the claim that Jesus was black. His paraphrase of “God Bless America” is spot on, in my opinion, as a critique of the common chauvinistic use of that song to valorize the worst about our country. His claim that the events of September 11, 2001 were the result of US policy is a claim that was made by many others at the time (cf. Amiri Baraka‘s “Somebody Blew Up America,” for instance).

Still, I think this is Obama’s best and most statesmanlike speech to date in the campaign. Here’s a passage close to the heart of it, perhaps:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

I’ve just finished Shelby Steele’s book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, and I think Steele’s analysis goes a long way towards explaining what has just happened in the public drama that is the democratic presidential primary. I don’t agree with Steele’s sharp critique of Jeremiah Wright (of whom he offers a fairly long characterization without once mentioning his name), and I suspect that Steele’s title was one of those dishonest titles editors sometimes stick on books in order to sell them. But Steele’s overall argument about the roles various black leaders play in our present-day racist society seems right to me.

Steele describes Obama as a bargainer, one who gives whites the benefit of the doubt. In this Obama is different from challengers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Both bargainers and challengers provide whites with what Steele calls innocence, or absolution for the sin of racism. Steele further argues that Obama has achieved the status of “iconic negro,” a cultural category that includes such figures as Sidney Poitier and Oprah Winfrey, and for which bargaining is a prerequisite.

It is in this way that Obama is a bound man, in Steele’s view. The mask he wears as a bargainer limits him to being a merely representative man. “His supporters do not look to him to do something; they look to him to be something, to represent something.”

Barack Obama emerged into a political culture that needed him more as an icon than as a man. He has gone far because the need is great. But this easy appeal has also been his downfall. It is a seduction away from character and conviction.

But in the present speech, Obama characterized this iconic function as “the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap,” and emphasized his campaign’s dedication to solving the country’s pressing problems. Here is how a Washington Post editorial puts it today:

Mr. Obama’s speech was an extraordinary moment of truth-telling. He coupled it with an appeal that this year’s campaign not be dominated by distorted and polarizing debates about whether he or his opponents agree with extreme statements by supporters — or other attempts to divide the electorate along racial lines. Far better, he argued, that Americans of all races recognize they face common economic, social and security problems.

And in speaking of solutions to specifically racial problems Obama gave significant mention to the “quintessentially American — and yes, conservative — notion of self-help,” a tip of the hat, perhaps, to Steele and Bill Cosby.

I can’t accept Steele’s apparent conclusion that Obama is trapped, for the same reason Obama gives for rejecting Jeremiah Wright’s pessimism about our country. Steele seems to speak as Wright does, as though our society is static, to paraphrase Obama, as though we live in a society that is not only racist but unalterably so.

But I’m not sure how wedded Steele may be to this conclusion, since he ends his book almost on an upbeat, suggesting that all along he has been speaking not in absolutes but about what Obama has to overcome.

The challenge for Barack Obama is the same as it is for all free people, to achieve visibility as an individual, to in fact become an individual rather than a racial cipher.

At the beginning of the last chapter of A Bound Man Steele asks a question that I think is central to this little book. “[W]hat would a black who was neither a challenger nor a bargainer look like?” I think Barack Obama is every day of this campaign showing us that, as he continues his critique of the Iraq war, as he absorbs negative attacks, seems to learn from his mistakes and grow in judgment, and as he continues with his message of unity in the face of a determined effort by his opponents to racialize him.

* * *

Steele’s title calls to my mind Ilse Aichinger’s wonderful little story entitled “The Bound Man” — I don’t know whether Steele intends a reference. Aichinger’s story is about a man who has been robbed and beaten, and left tied up with a rope. Through a series of experiments he learns to work with his bound condition and the constraints it imposes, and through doing so he aquires a freedom he has never before experienced. “The freedom he enjoyed in this struggle was having to adapt every movement of his limbs to the rope that tied him — the freedom of panthers, wolves, and the wild flowers that sway in the evening breeze.” When he is liberated from the rope in the end, he understands his unbound condition as a loss that in the specific circumstances of the story will lead to death.

I think Obama’s individuality consists in a complex and dynamic adaptation to the constraints imposed by a particular situatedness. I think his relationship with Pastor Wright has likely played an important role in that adaptation, a role akin, perhaps, to the role Ezra Pound played in the life of T. S. Eliot. But the adaptation is Obama’s own, I believe, as Eliot’s was. Of course Eliot was not a politician. Obama has lived an unusually creative life for a politician thusfar, and that’s more a measure of the risk he takes than anything else. However, and in this I think I agree with my friend Timothy Burke, Obama’s creativity is tempered by a fairly hard-edged pragmatism. And I would add that pragmatism is sometimes a willingness to make small claims as one attempts to achieve large goals. For the rest, I think Tim says it very well:

This is what politics is, what politics has to be. This is what transformation needs. Otherwise, the best you can hope for are momentary, transient achievements that are destined to be reversed almost as soon as they are accomplished. There isn’t enough power in the greatest political mobilization imaginable to abolish significant groups of people who experience history and society differently than you and people like you experience it.

— Politics as a spiritual condition, a certain of generosity of spirit. Maybe Pastor Wright will make it into the more perfect union after all.

when the forty days were o’er . . .

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Sunday is Passion Sunday, another Holy Week begun. And I am more than usually skeptical about the certainties of Easter. The week’s collection of news stories complicates my skepticism for me — why do I keep at it, I ask myself, when the core beliefs no longer matter to me and the faith has come to seem a system of pale negations, as it did for Emerson. Part of the answer is simply that I do what I do. What I believe has come to be embedded in the ordinary round of my life, my religion more and more a set of qualifications I fully expect to become meaningless upon my death, closer to me now than it once was. The week’s news doesn’t help me much, but here are some stories that, for one reason or another, stand out.

This week the House of Bishops of my church formally consented to the deposition of John-David Schofield and William Cox. The background of both depositions is the complex of disputes about sex and gender in the present-day Episcopal Church. The House of Bishops also this week reacted to news that an invitation to the Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops is not possible for Bishop Gene Robinson. More sexual politics. In the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis two women who were ordained Roman Catholic Womenpriests were excommunicated, and Catholic Archbishop Raymond Burke continued his efforts to remove Fr. Marek Bozek from his position as Pastor at St. Stanislaus Catholic Church.

I’m in the curious position of supporting the deposition of the two former bishops of the Episcopal Church and deploring the attempts of Archbishop Burke to discipline various members of his flock. If I had to play gotcha with some media type, I’d be caught in a drop-dead contradiction; but my two–let’s call them inclinations rather than positions–are embedded in two different histories that only accidentally come together in my experience. And apropos of one of those histories, I am not awaiting the new Pope’s promised challenge to Catholic educators, expected during his trip to the U. S. next month, with any pleasure. Benedict doesn’t have a good record with respect to academic freedom, and recent events adjacent to the SLU campus, here in St. Louis, don’t give me great comfort either.

Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, was in the news a couple of times this week. First, this video, which Ben Smith calls “deeply racially confrontational,” traveled around the .net, apparently first posted by Fox News. Obama says he “vehemently condemn[s]” the statements in the video in an essay at Huffington Post. They certainly won’t help him get elected or help the United Church of Christ defend itself against the IRS. Funny, the Ferraro comments barely fade from the news and here’s this. It isn’t new, by the way, as Obama points out.

Then there’s this sermon, which I also have from Ben Smith, the sermon from which Obama borrowed the title for his second book, The Audacity of Hope. Smith seems to think the sermon shows a different side of Wright than the one on display in the video, saying the sermon is “much more about private despair and hope than about public life.”

I think The Audacity to Hope has a public dimension, and I also think the sermon fragment I see in the video could be a legitimate prophetic sermon about racism. It isn’t the fact that it is confrontational that is disturbing–it’s the personal attack and the too simple black vs. white argument about Jesus. Still, I share the hope that God knows what it is like to be black in a world run by rich white people, and I share the view that white privilege needs to confront itself. This isn’t a view promulgated just by the United Church of Christ. My own church devotes a special initiative to Dismantling Racism. Many of the materials we use were developed by Mennonites.

So, on Sunday I’ll help read the passion gospel and mark again how the prophetic message has been blunted in Jesus’ sermons and life story, starting with the gospel writers, been rendered “more about private despair and hope than about public life” — for a world that has never liked to be confronted with it’s hypocrisy and injustice. Afterwards I’ll collect my palm and go home, where I’ll put it away on top of the bookshelf.