SCJToday

I Hope Parents Leave This Behind

The Left Behind book series is going digital. Left Behind: Eternal Forces, the video game version of the  book series by the same name, is predicted to be a best seller this Christmas. Apparently many Christians will commemorate the birth of the Prince of Peace by giving their children the opportunity to violently re-Christianize a post-apocalypitc America. The Times offers the following description of the game's objective:

Gamers pit battles between the paramilitary Christian Tribulation Force and the grey, faceless Global Community forces of the Antichrist, said to be modelled on the United Nations...If the Christians fail to convert others to their religion they must kill them in order to progress to the next level, dismissing any other form of religion.

I'm wondering if there are different point values for slaying different types of infidels. Is one rewarded more handsomely for slaying a Muslim or a Scientologist? Incidently, Roman Catholics are among those in the game that must be converted or slain with extreme prejudice. I'm guessing this game won't be a hit at ecumenical gatherings.

I can't think of a better case for amillenialism.

 

A New Bloody Bond

Ok I'll admit, when it was announced that Daniel Craig was the new Bond I was decidedly discouraged. I came across this site which expressed many of my own sentiments and reservations. But after reading this review   in The Telegraph I am more hopeful that this will be a decent cinematic experience. This paragraph was what did it for me:

There is no sexual innuendo in this film; Craig's Bond is more sophisticated than that. And the film makers have been sure to show the consequences of violence — he bleeds.

I personally am all for a sophisticated, bleeding Bond. But oh how I still miss Pierce Brosnan. Connery and Brosnan will always be my Bonds. But maybe Craig can make 007 his own. Let's hope so. See you at the movies.

Yes, I'm On The Obama Band Wagon

Barack Obama is the new black. I am of course not referring to his race when I say he's "the new black". I am just pointing out that there is nothing more fashionable for amateur, arm chair politicos than to be interested in (dare I say infatuated with)  Senator Barack Obama. Many progressives treat his increasing political popularity as if it signals the second coming (not of Christ, but of Clinton). Being a bit of a contrarian, and a tad bit cynical where politics is concerned, I'd love to be a naysayer where Obama is concerned. I'd love to be one of those people who early on claims that they were never taken in by the charm, the mystique, and yes the hype surrounding the young Senator from Illinois. Bit I cannot. I am officially on the bandwagon.

The nail in the coffin for me, or for my cynicism, was Obama's performance on Meet The Press. (The interview can be downloaded below.) Tim Russert is not an easy interviewer. He is often relentless with interviewees, regardless of party affiliation. Obama rose to the occassion. His candor was refreshing. He was honest, clear, and charitable. His ability to critique (devistatingly) the current administration and its policies, while at the same time expressing his own personal like for the President was absolutely amazing. He even praised Reagan as a great president, despite his dislike of many of Reagan's policies. The highpoint of the interview was when he talked about the obselete nature of the way that politcal debates have been framed since the 60's. His example was big vs. small government. Obama thinks that the emerging generation is pragmatic as opposed to ideological, and wants smart government. I couldn't agree more.

In today's edition of the NY Times, Bob Herbert, like so many pundits encourages Obama to put off a presidential run. Why? Because Obama lacks experience. Certainly true. But Herbert recommends more time in the Senate. Chair a powerful committee, get more beltway time under the belt, then run. But Kerry was a senior senator, as was Bob Dole. That didn't help either of them. The last senator that won a presidential bid was a young, inexperieced, but visionary JFK. Mr. Obama please ignore the pundits. You are a moderate progressive with pragmatic sensibilites who can speak to religious people (he noted on Meet The Press how effective the evangelical community has been with regard to Darfur). Worse case scenario, you don't get the nomination and wind up with a VP nomination, and then you're part of a losing Democratic ticket. Did it kill the politcal future of a young John Edwards....? What do you have to lose? In a word...nothing!!!

 

Download nbc_news_meet_the_press_10222006073512.mp3

Did Benedict Blow It?

Pope Benedict XVI has been the subject of a media blitz over the past few weeks because he uttered the following words in an academic lecture:

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached".

The context of this quote is largely obscured in most of the press coverage. Most sources do acknowledge that Benedict was quoting a medieval Byzantine emperor. But these same sources don’t do a good job of explaining how the quote related to the rest of Benedict’s lecture, in which he was arguing for a particular understanding of the relationship between faith and reason.

The lecture begins with Benedict’s reminiscing about his days as a young faculty member at the University of Bonn. The University was proud of its two theological faculties, and it was clear that, “by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of the ‘universitas scientiarum’, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole.” The collegial relationship between faith and reason that Benedict describes so nostalgically is in jeopardy in his mind, largely because of a reductionistic understanding of reason that predominates the Western European consciousness. Before Benedict goes on to diagnose the problem in detail, he ventures into the 14th century, referencing a recent work by another German scholar. This brief section of the lecture is the part that contained the quote that has caught the world’s attention.

The work in question that Benedict was referencing is an edited collection of the arguments between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam. The context of the controversial statement is worth quoting in detail:

In the seventh conversation-controversy, edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threaten. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without decending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".

Benedict summarizes the emperor’s argument succinctly: “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.” He then goes on to point out how this would be self-evident to the emperor, but not to his esteemed Islamic interlocuter:

The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

Benedict points to a parallel line of thinking in the Christian tradition, referred to as nominalism. Arising with Duns Scotus, the nominalist tradition holds that we can only know what God has willed, but not so much why God willed it. God could have willed the opposite of everything we know God to have willed. This line of thought is similar to the one described by Ibn Hazn. It’s danger in Benedict’s mind is that it could lead to an image of God as capricious, “not even bound to truth and goodness.” “God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions.” In other words, God could really have been (or even may turn out to be) much different than we would surmise based on God’s own self-revelation in and as Jesus Christ. Church tradition has by and large wanted to resist this stream, as Benedict points out:

As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language (cf. Lateran IV). God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as “logos” and, as “logos,” has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is “logos.” Consequently, Christian worship is “spiritual” worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).

The rest of Benedict’s lecture concerns a reductionstic form of Western reason that excludes questions about God and the moral life, rendering them “unscientific”. Traditionalist Islamic thought with its strong emphasis on God’s utter transcendence and the sort of reductionistic forms of secular reason which Benedict critiques may seem to have very little in common. But Benedict does mean to draw a connection. Traditional Islamic theology and secularized western rationality assert that there is no connection between divine and human reason. Whether this is because God is so transcendent that our intellectual categories are meaningless when considering divine things or because the lack of empirical data for God’s existence renders discussion about divine things non-sensical, the result is the same: human reason guiding and driving ethical decisions absent from divine rationality.

The lecture is well worth reading. I wouldn’t have used the quote that enflamed much of the Islamic world, but the point in question is one fairly put to one with whom you are involved in inter-religious dialogue. Let's be in prayer that the dialogue that seems to be unfolding as a result of Benedict's controversial lecture is a fruitful one marked above all by charity and empathy.

Are Suburbs Evil?

“Suburbs provide a spatial pattern of social life that, in my view, actively erodes the interactive social foundations of everyday life, thereby, in time, leading  to an erosion of democratic  sensibilities and democratic life. Whereas urban environments are characterized by diversity, a density of social interaction, and a constant exposure to difference and newness capable of spawning a sense of openness  and constant sense of newness, and ways of innovating and exploring what Georg Simmel referred to as “the technique of life,” suburban life is characterized by an isolation from those very activities and external forces. It is defined by the fact that one can isolate oneself from community; it is the spatial manifestation of the liberal political and cultural utopia: to be able to separate public and private at one’s own whim and be able to live unencumbered  by the various obligations of public and social life.”

This is a passage from a recent piece by Michael J. Thompson entitled “How Suburbs Destroy Democracy", publish in MONU. Obviously Thompson does not write as a detached or disinterested analyst. He is pro-urban, skeptical about the benefits of an increasingly suburbanized America. He also paints with broad brush strokes here and there. Still the piece is well worth reading.

Thompson, building on the work of other scholars, describes what some are calling the rise of the “new Puritanism” in American life. The new Purtianism is less about traditional family values (although in many parts of the country the suburbs are certainly bastions of conservative cultural values) and more about a central focus on the family itself. The desire to “intensify familial relations through the simplification of social environment” is, according to Thompson, the goal of suburbanization. “Suburbanization winds up leading an erosion of diverse communities, and the emergence of the possibility for individual isolation within the framework  of a uniformly homogenous society.  For them,  as with some other critics of the time, this was leading to an aimless and indeed empty social and cultural life which was something  wholly new in modern life and individual consciousness.” The cultural effects of suburbanization bleed into political ones. “The increased emphasis on individual and family life has led to a new provincialism that becomes ignorant of other cultures even as  the world becomes increasingly global and  interdependent in nature.  Urban areas provide increased access to newer, denser social  networks and expose their inhabitants to difference and modern urban life tends to have more liberal, more tolerant political values  as opposed to suburban and rural areas effects on critical political reflection and  participation.”

Suburbanization undermines democratic culture in two ways. First, it decidedly tips the balance of the pursuit of self-interest on the hand and participation in civil society on the other. A lack of rich cultural institutions in the suburbs leads to a radical privatization of life. Lack of shared public space it is argued leads to a lack of a shared public life. (Unlike the city, where people sit on stoops and porches, the suburban sphere of leisure is the private and secluded back deck.) A lack of public cultural institutions, the sort that are the foundation of modern liberal democracy, results in suburbanites dividing their time between the work and family spheres, arguably the least democratic spheres in American life.

There are certainly exceptions to Thompson’s rules. My wife and I found Princeton to be a cultural hotbed that fostered values we found progressive and tolerant. And the rise of the metropolitan area often makes it difficult to discern just where city ends and suburbs begin. But generalizations aside, I’m glad I live in the city, although the city wage tax in Philadelphia might one day drive me to the cultural wasteland Thompson loathes.

seems like a cool conference...

This looks like an interesting conference. I may just be there.

Joementum

According to recent polls Senator Joe Liebermann leads his opponents Ned Lamont, the recent winner of the Democratic primary in Connecticut, and Republican Alan Schlesinger by a margin of 12 points. After losing the primary to Lamont, who publically opposed the war in Iraq, Liebermann vowed to stay in the race as an independent. Right now, it seems as if Liebermann might very well prevail in this race.

My feelings on this development are mixed. On the hand this seems like a positive development on the American political landscape. It often feels as though the two-party system bi-furcates political issues to such a degree that there is no place for a sufficiently nuanced position or perspective. And yet, most of think of ourselves a centrists. So when a moderate Democrat is leading in a general election because he is able while running as an independent to garner broad based support from across the political spectrum, part of me wants to rejoice. Perhaps this is a sample of things to come. Dare we hope for a more textured political system and culture, one where a new broader center is carved out by an array of political voices? This would be well worth celebrating!

But the center emerging, the center which might very well propel Senator Liebermann to victory, is one that is not worth celebrating. It is a center formed by a shared commitment to zealous prosecution of the current war on terror. The war on terror's advocates are convinced that premptive wars which leave sovereign states on the brink of civil war and disproportionate military responses that cripple an entire nation actually curb terrorist activity, rather than creating the sort of social conditions that encourage it. Lord have mercy...

do you need to confess?

If so then do I have the public art project for you. A group of artists are setting up confessionals in prominent public places throughout the city of Philadelphia. It appears that people will actually be able to leave written confessions somewhere "in" the confessionals. For more information, go here.

Trinitarian Pastoral Care

It seems to me that in a pastoral situation our first task is not to throw people back on themselves with exhortations and instructions s to what to do and how to do it, but to direct people to the gospel of grace—to Jesus Christ, that they might look to him to lead them, open their hearts in faith and in prayer, and draw them by the Spirit into his eternal life of communion with the Father. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is the grammar of Romans 8—the grammar of grace, the grammar of our pastoral work. The first real step on the road to prayer is to recognize that none of us knows how to pray as we ought to. But as we bring our desires to God, we find that we have someone who is praying for us, with us, and in us. Thereby he teaches us to pray and motivates us to pray, and to pray in peace to the Lord. Jesus takes our prayers—our feeble, selfish, inarticulate prayers—he cleanses them, makes them his prayers, and in a “wonderful exchange” (mirifica commutatio—commercium admirable) he makes his prayers our prayers and presents us to the Father as his dear children, crying: “Abba Father."

                                            -James Torrance, Worship, Communion & The Triune God of Grace, 46.

Conversion

I made the move, and I'm not looking back (Lk 9:62)....