I’ve really been enjoying the AV Club’s series “Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation?” It looks at the rise (and fall) of 90s alternative rock. The most recent installment on Kurt Cobain’s suicide and its aftermath is particularly good. (And I agree that Soundgarden is underrated!)
Month: November 2010
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Follow-up on Suchocki and pluralism
Kevin Kim (a.k.a. the Big Hominid) has some thoughts and questions riffing on my post about Marjorie Suchocki’s Divinity and Diverstiy. I think Kevin pinpoints a certain ambiguity in Suchocki’s position, one that I wrestled with.
It seems to me that Suchocki could either be characterized as a pluralist or as a modified inclusivist. This ambiguity is most pronounced, I think, in her treatment of the competing truth-claims of different religions. On the one hand, Suchocki affirms the existence of God and describes other religions as culturally conditioned responses to God’s call and presence in the world. This sounds like an inclusivist position, at least to the extent that it implies that the truth is more fully revealed in Christianity (or at least in theistic traditions generally) than in non-theistic traditions.
On the other hand, Suchocki also argues that the conceptual articulations of the various religions are abstractions from and grow out of the soil of a more immediate experience of ultimate reality and that, when detached from that experience, it doesn’t really make sense to ask if one is “truer” than another. That sounds a lot like a “constructivist” position in the mold of John Hick, where ultimate reality is ineffable and the various religions are cultural responses to the Real. Ultimately, it’s not clear to me that these two tendencies are fully compatible.
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What kind of populism?
The premise of this Newsweek article is that Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) is poised to become the leader of a bloc of conservative Senate Democrats–who, not coincidentally, are up for reelection in 2012–in opposing aspects of President Obama’s “progressive agenda.” Webb, we’re told, is a “Jacksonian populist” who thinks that Democrats don’t pay enough attention to the white working class and are too deferential to the “upper crust of academia and the pampered salons of Hollywood.”
Now, maybe there’s more to this than meets the eye, but my litmus test of genuine populism goes beyond denouncing “cultural elites” to actually taking on the economic royalists who wield much of the real power in America. And yet, despite all Webb’s concern for the working class, I didn’t see the following words appear anywhere in the article: banks, foreclosures, Wall Street, jobs, off-shoring, outsourcing, or inequality. Surely any populism worth the name, if it isn’t just a stalking-horse for right-wing cultural resentments, should address these issues?
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Toward a Christian affirmation of religious pluralism
Over the holiday weekend I read Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki’s Divinity and Diversity: A Christian Affirmation of Religious Pluralism. Though it only clocks in at about 120 pages, it’s one of the better books I’ve read on the subject.
Suchocki, professor emerita of the Claremont School of Theology and a noted process and feminist theologian, takes an different approach than many pluralists by arguing that we find support for religious pluralism in certain core Christian convictions. These include God as creator, God as incarnate, humanity as created in the image of God, and the reign of God as the goal of earthly community.
Using a process-relational model of creation, Suchocki argues that God creates the world by evoking a freely given response from creatures, not by unilaterally determining what happens. Because of this element of free play, creation displays great diversity. The diversity of religion–humanity’s response to the sacred–is one aspect of this. This same creator God is “radically incarnate” in creation: by presenting possibilities for creatures to realize, God allows them to incarnate an aspect of the divine, if only in a limited and partial way. The great religious traditions are instances of this kind of culturally conditioned response to an experience of God. While they may seem to conflict, or even to be incommensurable, at the level of conceptualizations, these concepts are abstractions from an experience of the God who is deeply present in the world.
In contrast to much of the Christian tradition, Suchocki argues that the imago dei should be understood as a collective characteristic of the entire human race, as opposed to a more individualistic understanding. She bases this on the trinitarian nature of God as a community of irreducibly different persons. It is only by creating a community of diverse communities, not by erasing difference, that humanity fully images the divine. Similarly, the reign of God is the state of affairs characterized by transcending the preference for “our kind” and fostering the well-being for all, including the stranger. The stranger is welcomed as a stranger, not by being assimilated and required to sacrifice that which makes her different.
All of these considerations, Suchocki maintains, point toward religious diversity as good and as part of God’s will for humanity. The great religions are free responses to the experience of the sacred, which are rooted in genuine experience of God. To live up to our calling to reflect the image of God, we should welcome and celebrate difference, including the religious “stranger,” rather than require everyone to profess the same faith.
Suchocki considers the implications of affirming religious pluralism for two key issues: salvation and mission. Regarding the former, she contends that Jesus truly mediates saving grace, but that doesn’t mean that only Jesus does so. The divine presence manifests itself within and adapts itself to locally prevailing conditions. The questions that other people ask may not even necessarily be the ones that Christianity answers (she points out that some Eastern traditions are more concerned with eliminating suffering than sin, for instance). Jesus reveals God’s love and the life of humanity truly united to God, and the power of this grace-full event is amplified by the texts, traditions, and stories that have emerged in its wake. But this doesn’t mean that no other stories or traditions have the power to save.
The implication for mission is that Christians should not seek to convert others (though conversions may still happen, of course). Instead, they should aim to form friendships with those of other faiths and to share what is most valuable in their tradition, as well as being prepared to learn from the religious other. This creates a very real possibility of mutual transformation. At the very least it should lead to deepened understanding and a willingness to work together for the common good.
What I like about Suchocki’s position is that, unlike some pluralists, she doesn’t try to assume a “view from nowhere”, outside of any particular tradition. Too often, this results in a kind of lowest-common-denominator theology or a covert attempt to impose the standards of one tradition on others without acknowledging it. Instead, Suchocki is contending for religious pluralism on explicitly Christian grounds. More traditional Christians will take issue with some of her conclusions, particularly her apparent relativizing of the salvific importance of Jesus. And I think it’s fair to ask how we’re supposed to maintain that the Christian tradition is normative for us once we’ve made such relativizing moves. However, I think she makes a strong argument that the diversity of religions may be God’s will and that Christians should stop thinking that the ideal would be for all other faiths to vanish because everyone converted to Christianity.
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Giving thanks?
Obviously, if you’re going to eat meat this is the way to do it. Still, I’ve always found the idea of “giving thanks” to an animal when you kill it to be kind of weird and self-serving. After all, it’s not like the animal has a choice.
(Video at the link is fairly graphic.)
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The German miracle?
Mixing social democratic values with Jimmy Stewart localism, Germany’s economy is running rings around America’s. “What we have here is stakeholder capitalism, not shareholder capitalism,” says Hubner. And like most mittelstand [i.e., a family-owned small and mid-size manufacturing firm] owners, he adds: “I live where my company is located. I want a good image in the town I live in.”
Read more here.
I’ve long been intrigued by the “social market” model that prevails in Germany, which seems to provide a genuine third way between socialism and American-style devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism–one that prizes solidarity and stability over “creative destruction.” It also seems to be different in important ways from the much-touted “Nordic” model, which combines relatively light market regulation with a generous welfare state and a strong commitment to individual autonomy. U.S. conservatives and libertarians have a habit of yelling “Socialism!” at any departure, no matter how minor, from laissez-faire purism. But the fact is, there are many different models of workable mixed economies, some of which seem to outperform the U.S. model when it comes to equity and well-being. This isn’t to deny that there are trade-offs and that these models also have their problems, but if Americans were more informed about these other models, we might make better political choices.
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But I thought he was the new Hitler!
Looks like Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be on the way out.
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Things to be thankful for
My friend Chris Hayes guest-hosted Rachel Maddow’s show last night and did a cool segment on things to be thankful for in American public life. You can watch it here.
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Revolt of the elites
The American Prospect’sAdam Serwer has a good piece on the recent anti-TSA backlash, noting that the American public’s ire has only been aroused at government infringements on personal liberty now that it seems to be affecting solid middle-class (read: economically privileged, white, non-Muslim) citizens.
The amount of freedom Americans have handed over to their government in the years since the 9/11 attacks is difficult to convey. We’ve simply accepted the idea of the government secretly listening in on our phone calls and demanding private records from companies without warrants. Many shiver at the notion of trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts, and even at the idea of granting the accused legal representation. The last president of the United States brags openly about ordering people to be tortured, and the current one asserts the authority to kill American citizens he believes to be terrorists overseas.
But most of these measures are either invisible enough to put out of mind or occur outside of what most Americans can imagine happening to them. As long as it’s just Muslims being tortured and foreigners being detained indefinitely, the price we pay to feel secure seems all too abstract. The TSA’s new passenger-screening measures just happen to fall on the political and economic elites who can make their complaints heard. It’s not happening to those scary Arabs anymore. It’s happening to “us.”
I’ll add one other data point that goes un-mentioned in Serwer’s article: our comfort with (or indifference to) the fact that we’ve been killing thousands of foreigners abroad in two wars for nearly a decade, all for the promise of “greater security.” This despite the fact that our leaders rarely bother to make the case that those wars have actually made us safer, or that they were worth it in terms of their costs and benefits. (To say nothing of their morality.)
A Thinking Reed 