I received an e-mail alerting me to this list of books dealing with animals and religion. I’m not precisely sure why it’s on the site that it is (a site dedicated to online education programs), but it’s a good list. In fact, I’m adding Laura Hobgood-Oster’s The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals–a book I was previously unaware of–to my personal “to-read” list.
Author: Lee M.
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Five essential theology books
Michael Westmoreland-White, riffing on this Christian Century article, asks folks to list “five essential theological works” from the past 25 years. (Actually, I think there was a meme on a similar topic circulating the theo-blogosphere a few years back.)
Anyway, not being a theologian, or professional churchly type of any sort, I’m not really qualified to judge the “best,” or “most influential” works of theology. So instead I’ll list five theological works published in the last 25 years that have had a significant influence on me (in no particular order).
– Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theology This was my first in-depth exposure to feminist theology. Depending on who you ask, Johnson is either a dangerous radical who wants to overturn Christian tradition or a timid reformist who can’t face up to the inherently patriarchal nature of Christianity. I think she’s written a convincing book about how gender shapes theological language that at the same time breaks open new space for seeing God in ways that are less beholden to dead metaphors.
– Clark Williamson, A Guest in the House of Israel: Post-Holocaust Church Theology As I wrote in my summary post about this book, it forced me to look closely at the issue of anti-Judaism in Christian theology. Supercessionist thinking is still embedded in much Christian theology and practice, left, right, and center. This book convinced me that becoming aware of it and rooting it out remains a hugely important task for the Christian community. Just as importantly, though, in articulated an understanding of the gospel that is rooted in the Christian tradition without being exclusivist.
– Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology Regular readers won’t be surprised to see a book from Linzey on this list. This is his most sustained engagement with the theological tradition, one in which he tries to show that an orthodox, trinitarian conception of God not only permits, but requires us to re-think our views of non-human animals, but to radically change our practice.
– Robert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the GospelThis one’s kind of a cheat because the book was originally published in 1982. But the edition I read was the one reissued by Wipf & Stock in 2002, so there. Anyway, Jenson’s work was my first exposure to a sustained critique of the influence that Greek metaphysics and its attendant assumptions about time, eternity, and power had on the Christian doctrine of God. I don’t share all his conclusions (or his social conservatism), but the idea that God shares in–and even defines the divine identity through–the history of God’s creatures, rather than standing aloof and unmoved, is one that has stayed with me. Plus, it seemed like I should have at least one Lutheran on here (even if it’s an idiosyncratic one like Jenson).
– Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning I don’t consider myself a “Girardian,” but I think once you’ve been exposed to Girard’s way of looking at the world–at violence, sacrifice, and the sacred–you see things differently. Girard sometimes seems to be offering an overly simplistic, mono-causal account of religion. Nevertheless, particularly in this work, he shows how the gospel can convey the power to overcome the violence that simmers just beneath the surface of human society. I’m not even sure this book counts as theology properly speaking, but if nothing else we can point to the ways that the brilliant James Alison has applied Girard’s insights to theology.
I also feel like there should be something about the historical Jesus on this list, but I don’t know that there’s one book I would single out (Luke Timothy Johnson, Marcus Borg, and Dale Allison have all been influences here, despite–or maybe because of–their disagreements). I would also want to cite something in the religion and science dialogue (probably Ian Barbour’s book).
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Jonathan Safran Foer keeps it real
One thing that Eating Animals author Jonathan Safran Foer does really well in this debate about vegetarianism with celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain is to keep bringing the discussion back down to earth from Bourdain’s hyper-idealized view of meat-eating. Safran Foer’s not interested in arguing that meat-eating is always, everywhere, and under any conceivable circumstances wrong; he’s more interested in making people aware of the horrors of modern factory farming, which, after all, is the method by which upwards of 90 percent of the meat consumed by Americans gets produced. Bourdain waxes poetic about meat-eating as a convivial celebration of human commonality, but Safran Foer keeps presenting the listener with the stark reality that makes all that cheap meat possible–an industry that wreaks havoc on animal, human, and environmental well-being.
(Incidentally, the quip attributed to Bourdain at the beginning of the show, to the effect that humans were designed to chase down “smaller and stupider” creatures makes me wonder how many of his meals Bouradain has personally chased down.)
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Stendahl on glossolalia
Krister Stendahl has a really interesting essay in Paul among Jews and Gentiles called “Glossolalia—The New Testament Evidence.” He argues that what we usually call “speaking in tongues” was a widespread part of early Christian expeience that was later damped down by the institutional church. He maintains that glossolalia as discussed in Paul’s letters were an “ecstatic” form of religious experience that is proper to Christianity.
It seems to me that the witness of the New Testament texts as to the phenomenon called glossolalia is quite clear and quite simple–and quite up to date. The various texts carry with them a certain critique of the situation today. The history of our main traditions is one of fragmentation and impoverishment within the Christian community. As I read Paul it seems to me crystal clear that if the Presbyterians and the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, and all the “proper” Christians, including the Catholics, did not consciously or unconsciously suppress such phenomena as glossolalia, and if other denominations did not especially encourage them, then the gifts of the Spirit–including glossolalia–would belong to the common register of Christian experience. (p. 121)
He also says that it’s a mistake to separate charismatic experience from Christian witness against injustice because the one time the NT promises that the Spirit will provide Christians with words to speak is when testifying to the faith before the authorities.
There are those who identify the public impact of the Spirit with spectacular religious exhibitions on TV and maximum publicity for evangelistic campaigns, while casting suspicion over those who challenge the authorities by their courageous witness to Christ’s justice in the courts. It seems that the biblical model is the opposite one. In the courts is the confrontation that has the promise of the Spirit. (pp. 120-121)
Stendahl–a Lutheran–is no charismatic, but he says that the church needs them because “light-bulb wattage” faith isn’t sufficient to meet the difficulties that the world faces. He also thinks, however, that charismatics would benefit from incorporation into the broader church so that they can be nurtured into a more mature faith that doesn’t rely exclusively on “peak experiences.”
I take it that this essay must’ve been written prior to the inroads made by the charismatic movement into the mainline denominations. Still, I think it has relevance since it would be a stretch, to say the least, to maintain that most mainline churches honor charismatic experience as something normal and desirable. I’m about the least “charismatic” guy around (in the theological sense!), but even I resonate with Stendahl’s point that we mainlainers are extremely wary of the more ecstatic forms of religious experience. He makes the intriguing suggestion at the end of the piece that charismatic phenomena like glossolalia belong to the same spectrum of experience as mysticism–both are forms of living religious experience that a religious tradition should want to nurture.
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“Self-awareness is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon”
From Wired, a report of laboratory monkeys (rhesus macaques, to be specific) that have shown signs of self-recognition (and thus potentially self-awareness):
In the lab of University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Luis Populin, five rhesus macaques seem to recognize their own reflections in a mirror. Monkeys weren’t supposed to do this.
“We thought these subjects didn’t have this ability. The indications are that if you fail the mark test, you’re not self-aware. This opens up a whole field of possibilities,” Populin said.
Populin doesn’t usually study monkey self-awareness. The macaques described in this study, published Sept. 29 in Public Library of Science One, were originally part of his work on attention deficit disorder. But during that experiment, study co-author Abigail Rajala noticed the monkeys using mirrors to study themselves
The article goes on to point out that self-awareness, long thought a unique identifier of human beings, isn’t an all-or-nothing phenomenon:
So-called mirror self-recognition is thought to indicate self-awareness, which is required to understand selfhood in others, and ultimately to be empathic. Researchers measure this with the “mark test.” They paint or ink a mark on unconscious animals, then see if they use mirrors to discover the marks.
It was once thought that only humans could pass the mark test. Then chimpanzees did, followed by dolphins and elephants. These successes challenged the notions that humans were alone on one side of a cognitive divide. Many researchers think the notion of a divide is itself mistaken. Instead, they propose a gradual spectrum of cognitive powers, a spectrum crudely measured by mirrors.
Indeed, macaques — including those in Populin’s study — have repeatedly failed the mark test. But after Rajala called attention to their strange behaviors, the researchers paid closer attention. The highly social monkeys only rarely tried to interact with the reflections. They used mirrors to study otherwise-hidden parts of their bodies, such as their genitals and the implants in their heads. Mark tests not withstanding, they seemed quite self-aware.
I would think that this kind of sliding scale of cognitive abilities is just what evolutionary theory would lead you to expect. After all, it posits a continuity between human beings and other forms of life.
I’d also add that creatures with self-awareness probably shouldn’t be kept in labs and have electrodes stuck in their heads. (Though, ironically, laboratory conditions probably made it more likely that we’d discover their self-awareness.)
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Judgment and weakness
Judgment is the time when God finally brings in the verdict. The question, then, is not how one balances off mercy and judgment, but for whom is judgment mercy and for whom is it threatening doom. For God’s people God’s judgment is salvation. But who are God’s people? Is it not consistently true in the Bible that the only time that language about “God’s people” really functions, the only time it is allowed to stand up without the lambasting critique of the prophets, is when it stands for the little ones, the oppressed, the suppressed, the repressed? Is it not true that all language about a chosen people becomes wrong when applied outside the situation of weakness?
In other contexts, this was also Paul’s great lesson to the triumphalist and self-assured Christians of his time, to the super-apostles who in his judgment, were overconfident. To them Paul said that for him the Lord’s grace was sufficient: “…for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9-10). Such an exploding of the concept and image of strength is perhaps the simplest and most overarching message of the life and death of Jesus.
–Krister Stendahl, “Judgment and Mercy,” Paul among Jews and Gentiles, p. 102.
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Stendahl’s rules
Krister Stendahl was a Swedish Lutheran theologian, New Testament scholar, and ultimately a bishop of the Church of Sweden. He’s probably best known for arguing that St. Paul’s letters were responding to a specific context–namely the relationship between Jews and Gentiles and his mission to the latter. According to Stendahl, much Western theology (Lutheran in particular) has misunderstood Paul by projecting onto him later conflicts, such as Luther’s with the Catholic Church, resulting in an overly “psychological” understanding of Paul’s teaching on faith and justification (the “introspective conscience of the West” as he puts it). Stendahl’s argument was an important impetus for the so-called new perspective on Paul. His book Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, which coincidentally I just started reading, collects some of his best known essays on this general topic.
But I didn’t know–until Christopher noted it in a comment–that Stendahl is also known for three “rules” for interreligious dialogue:
(1) When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
(2) Don’t compare your best to their worst.
(3) Leave room for “holy envy.” (By this, Stendahl seems to have meant that we should be open to finidng attractive or truthful elements in other religions that aren’t necessarily present in our own.)
According to Wikipedia, Stendahl articulated these rules during a press conference in which he was responding to opponents of building a Mormon temple in Stockholm. Stendahl’s rules call for just the kind of approach to other religions that I was commending here.
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A world without carnivores?
I meant to link earlier to this piece from the NYT Opinionator blog by philosopher Jeff McMahan. He poses the following question:
Suppose that we could arrange the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, replacing them with new herbivorous ones. Or suppose that we could intervene genetically, so that currently carnivorous species would gradually evolve into herbivorous ones, thereby fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy. If we could bring about the end of predation by one or the other of these means at little cost to ourselves, ought we to do it?
McMahan concedes that we lack both the knowledge and wisdom to carry this out, but he speculates that we may have it one day and that decisions about which animal species to save and which to allow to become extinct may be forced on us by our ever-increasing environmental footprint. He argues that it makes sense to see carnivorous predation as a “flaw” in nature, one that we would–other things being equal–be better off without.
A Thinking Reed 