A Thinking Reed

Category: Personal

  • The church that prays together…

    Since last fall I’ve been helping to facilitate a small community group that meets about once a week primarily to study the Bible (we typically read and discuss the Gospel lesson for the upcoming Sunday), pray and socialize. I guess it’s a “small group” in the parlance of evangelicalism.

    Anyway, one of the things I really like about our group is its theological diversity. We have evangelicals, Roman Catholics, lifelong Episcopalians, one guy who’s Armenian Orthodox, and your scribe. We also range from liberal to conservative. The end result is some really lively and interesting conversation.

    Case in point: last night we were reading this Sunday’s lesson, Luke 20:9-19, a.k.a. the Parable of the Tenants. Somewhat naturally, the conversation turned to Atonement theory. Some of the folks from more evangelical backgrounds were suprised to learn that there were ways of understanding how Jesus saves us besides the theory of Penal Substitution. Another guy mentioned that he didn’t really like to think of the Cross in terms of some kind of payment for sin, but preferred to focus on the idea of God coming into our world and suffering alongside us (e.g. Whitehead’s “fellow sufferer who understands.”). Another said that his Episcopalian upbringing had taught him to emphasize the Incarnation more than the Atonement. For my part, I tried to defend a more-or-less Anselmian account.

    Unsurprisingly, we didn’t come to any consensus, just as the universal church hasn’t. But one of the really valuable things I’ve gotten out of this group is the conviction, and experience, that it’s still possible for Christians with serious theological differences (including differences over things like women’s ordination and homosexuality) to read the Bible and pray together (and head off to the pub for a friendly pint afterwards!). In spite of all the nastiness going on at the macro-level, maybe there are seeds of something hopeful there.

    Also, regarding the Atonement, and in the spirit of the Anglican via media, I’ve often been impressed by the way the Eucharistic Prayer A weaves together different understandings of the Atonement:

    Holy and gracious Father: In your infinite love you made us for yourself, and, when we had fallen into sin and become subject to evil and death, you, in your mercy, sent Jesus Christ, your only and eternal Son, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all.

    He stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world. (BCP, p. 362)

    I really like how this includes elements of an “Abelardian” account of Christ coming and sharing our nature to manifest God’s love, but without losing all talk of sacrifice or satisfaction.

    Obviously all our differences aren’t necessarily going to be resolved in some harmonious whole, but I like to think that there’s something to that idea of holding seeming opposites in a fruitful tension.

  • I always knew I was special

    E-mailed to me from a friend: “Heavy metal ‘a comfort for the bright child’”

    Intelligent teenagers often listen to heavy metal music to cope with the pressures associated with being talented, according to research.

    The results of a study of more than 1,000 of the brightest five per cent of young people will come as relief to parents whose offspring, usually long-haired, are devotees of Iron Maiden, AC/DC and their musical descendants.

    Researchers found that, far from being a sign of delinquency and poor academic ability, many adolescent “metalheads” are extremely bright and often use the music to help them deal with the stresses and strains of being gifted social outsiders.

    I don’t know that I was all that gifted, but one beneficial side-effect I found is that a shared love of the music was a good way of making friends with big scary metal dudes which in turn was a good way to avoid getting beat up by jocks.

  • Am I a conservative?

    Blog-friend Russell Arben Fox of In Medias Res identified this humble blog as one of his “blogs that make you think” per some kind of game/meme that was going around (thanks, Russell!). Of course, few blogs make me think quite as much as Russell’s long, substantive posts on political philosophy written through the prism of his fairly unique brand of left-wing conservative communitarianism, so the feeling is mutual.

    Interestingly (to me if no one else), Russell describes my outlook as “contrarian-if-mostly-conservative-in-some-sense.” I’m not entirely sure I’d “self-identify” as a conservative at this point; heaven knows I’ve spent a lot of time bashing the Bush administration and organized conservatism generally and very little time praising them. But I also don’t really think of myself as a liberal or a leftist. Or, for that matter, as a “moderate” or a “centrist.” Maybe that’s the contrarianism! Or maybe I’m just confused.

    I think I still use certain “conservative” ideas as my template for thinking about politics – ones derived from a blend of libertarianism and traditionalism – but lately I’ve become more friendly to leftish views, as well as certain “green” notions (many of which I’d be tempted to argue are compatible with a kind of “conservatism rightly understood”).

    But clearly political ideals can’t be detached from concrete social and political circumstances. If you think nearly everything the “conservative” party is doing is wrong, then don’t you end up functionally anti-conservative (even if not “liberal”)?

  • Lent for nerds or The desire to possess as alienation from God

    Part of my Lenten fast is that I’m not going to buy any books. This may sound silly, but I’ve found that I often crave books in the way that other people might crave a new pair of shoes or something for their house. Although I (eventually!) read most of the books I buy, I think there’s some deeper and more disreputable feeling that buying stuff serves to alleviate. A sort of anxiousness that the new possession momentarily drives away. Or maybe an Is this a relic of our evolutionary past where securing an important article might have meant the difference between life and death? Or is it an artifact of our capitalist economy and the need to generate new “needs”?

    I’ve also pledged to get rid of some of the books I already have. This has a practical dimension since we’re going to be moving in a few months, but hopefully the letting go of things is a way to combat the desire to possess. I have this pet theory that the anxiousness associated with our desire for security is a important symptom of original sin. Our intended state is to trust our heavenly Father for all that we need, but in our alienation from and inability to trust God we cling to things in a distorted way, and often resort to evil means to secure our being and worth. “Security,” whether it be financial or national, is something of a shibboleth in our culture. By contrast, Jesus’ admonition not to worry about what we will wear or where our food will come from seems the height of hippie irresponsibility.

    The ability to live in this way, though, would have to arise out of a reorientation of our relationship with God. Luther pointed out that, apart from revelation, we’re just as likely to imagine that God has it in for us as that he’s our loving father. So at least one reason for the Incarnation is to demonstrate God’s love for us and to create trust (a.k.a. faith) in us whereby we can live in a restored relationship with God. And the fruit of that restored relationship should be less anxiety about securing our place in this world. This, in turn, should allow us to sit more lightly to what we have, share more freely, and live more joyfully. Given the stubborn persistence of the old Adam, I think we can expect this to be a constant struggle, and one of the benefits of a season like Lent is that we can practice at it.

  • Up from atheism

    Warning: lengthy post ahead!

    I first became a professed atheist at about age 15; I decided that I had seen through all the illusions of those around me, those unthinking, dogmatic, hypocritical, narrow-minded small-town types I had grown up with. I literally announced to my parents that I would no longer be attending church (I had been baptized in a Reformed congregation and my family had attended both a Presbyterian and a Methodist church at various times during my childhood) and that I didn’t believe all that stuff.

    It’s always difficult to really understand why we do anything, I think, and this was no exception. In retrospect I think I was a pretty smart kid who wanted to rebel in some way. Not that I was particularly “rebellious” in any conventional sense: in high school I never drank alcohol or did drugs, and I only had one girlfriend for most of that time. My preferred forms of rebellion were musical (heavy metal, punk rock, angry political rap), sartorial (combat boots, Ramones t-shirt, partly shaved head), and intellectual (atheism, and an adolescent form of general anti-authoritarianism – I remember a friend and I mocking the pro (first) Gulf War propaganda we were fed daily by the in-class “news” program Channel 1). Even “bad” kids – the kind that hung out at the guard rail at the edge of the school parking lot in their Ozzy t-shirts smoking cigarettes – were shocked by open professions of atheism.

    What religious formation I’d had was fairly lukewarm. As I mentioned, the churches we attended were mainline Protestant, but of a fairly staid and traditional stripe. I went to Sunday school at Hillside Presbyterian, sat through what seemed to me like interminable sermons, and went to Vacation Bible School in the summers. I have no tales of fundamentalist horrors; it was the kind of innocuous, respectable mainstream Protestantism that seems to be largely disappearing (for better or worse) in our polarized age. Or at least that’s how I remember it. So, this was no grand gesture of rebellion against a stultifying and oppressive upbringing.

    Anyway, atheism fit with my overall self-image. I liked to think of myself as being more reflective and critical than my peers. I used to no doubt bore my girlfriend to tears with my pontifications on why religion was bunk (too bad there were no blogs then; the poor girl might’ve been spared). I even got into hot water with her parents for (according to them) turning her against religion! (Ironically, the Lutheran Church her family attended is one I now periodically worship at when visiting home.) In high school English I read Joyce, Thoreau, and Huxley and identified with their nonconformist ethos. By senior year I was proudly brandishing my copy of Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ (whether I understood it is another matter). I can only assume that I was pretty insufferable at times.

    By the time I got to college at a state university in northwestern Pennsylvania I was confirmed in my atheism. It simply hadn’t ocurred to me at this point that there was really anything to be said for religion: religion weighed people down with guilt and irrational prohibitions on essentially harmless activities, and it was based on an intellectually unsupportable edifice.

    My first year of college I majored in art. I had aspirations of being an illustrator, maybe even drawing comic books (I was a comic geek from way back). But by the end of my freshman year I was having second thoughts. I had some really good friends who were English majors, and I flirted with switching over, but I had also taken an intro to philosophy course, and that hooked me. Althought the course focused almost entirely on Marxism(!) I was intrigued by the idea of wrestling with the great problems of meaning and existence. By sophomore year I was enrolled as a philosophy major.

    I imagine that many people’s idea of philosophy is that, if anything, it’s likely to turn people against religion. But in my case, as I read Plato, Augustine, the Bhagavad-Gita, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, William James, Charles Hartshorne, Paul Tillich, Miguel de Unamuno, Nikolai Berdyaev, Jacques Maritain, Josiah Royce, Pascal, C.S. Lewis, and a host of others I became less and less convinced that only fools and ignoramuses could believe in a world beyond this one. You may reply that this is a lesson that any normal person would naturally learn as they mature, but I can be a little thick.

    I wish I could say I had an “Aha!” moment where I suddenly became convinced that God exists. Or that I had discovered the one knock-down argument that would convince all rational people of the reality of the divine. Alas, no such luck (though, I did for a brief period of time think that Charles Hartshorne’s version of the ontological argument was sound; I still think there’s something to that…). But what now seems just as important was that I came to see religious belief as something far more substantial and worthy of consideration than my condescending adolescent caricatures would’ve led me to believe. What I thought were knock-down objections turned out to be problems that believers had been considering for hundreds of years and had developed sophisticated responses to. And, moreover, materialistic naturalism, I now started to realize, was far from being a problem-free worldview. Was it able to account for mind, purpose, and value? For the existence and order of the universe itself?

    I had also been impressed by the tradition that I associate with Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, Kierkegaard and others that emphasizes the limitations of our ability to adequately grasp the truth due to our finitude and sin. This is necessary, I think, to balance an overconfident rationalism or dogmatism. All our worldviews have limitations and it’s not obvious that one is demonstrably superior to all the others. The western theistic tradition at it’s best seems to balance the need for confident assertion with the recognition of mystery.

    This is what you might call the “negative” value of philosophy for faith. It can clear away intellectual obstacles to belief, even if it can’t create faith. For me, at least, that was an important step. Though still not a believer, I’d become convinced that the claims of religion were at least worth investigating further.

    I should note that during this entire time I hadn’t set foot in a church for any reason except maybe for the odd wedding. The first time I spent any considerable time in church as an adult came during a trip to England and Ireland during the summer before my senior year in college. As someone from a doughty Protestant background, this was really my first exposure to the beauty of traditional Catholicism. In Dublin I saw the Book of Kells on display at Trinity College and visited Christ Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Although I didn’t worship as such, I was moved in a way I didn’t expect and made aware of the experiential and aesthetic aspects of religion that I had previously ignored. This was only a small part of the trip, but it made an impact on me.

    By the time I left college I had moved firmly into agnosticism (if you can be firmly agnostic!). After a year of work I pursued graduate studies in philosophy at Purdue University in Indiana. I had at least a vague idea that I was interested in philosophy of religion, but took several courses in historical philosophy, delving more deeply into the medievals and the early moderns in particular, as well as 20th century analytic philosophy.

    The kind of philosophy I was being trained in combined analytical rigor with a close attention to historical texts. In other words, I was taught that we can’t dismiss someone just because they lived a long time ago (“the democracy of the dead” in Chesterton’s words) and that we should take their arguments seriously, not just read them as historical curiosities. I struggled with Augustine on free will, St. Thomas on God’s existence, Aristotle and Leibniz on ontology, and Moore and Wittgenstein on knowledge. I was fortunate to be taught by some incredibly sharp people, and, in a few cases, people who were also professing Christians. This challenged me both to become more rigorous in my thinking and to take Christian theism seriously as a live option.

    Again without any major ephiphanies I gradually became convinced that something like classical theism was the best metaphysics going. It just seemed (and seems) to me like the most satisfying explanation for the existence and order of the universe, the fact that we have minds and they find the world intelligible, the existence of truth, beauty, and goodness, our moral aspirations, the occurrence of well-attested religious and mystical experience and the holiness of the saints of all traditions. Not that it doesn’t have its problems, but it seems to me to have fewer problems than its main rivals. T.S. Eliot once reputedly said that he embraced Christianity because it was the least false of the options available to him. I wouldn’t go that far, but there’s definitely an element of skepticism and, hopefully, humility in my embrace of Christian theism.

    This all sounds very intellectualisitic, and I don’t mean to give the impression that I spent every minute of my twenties pondering the imponderables (though I guess as a philosophy student that was part of my job description.). I can’t really say what sort of other things were going on in my life that might’ve affected my thought processes, though undoubtedly personal factors played an important role.

    I had experimented with going to church on a couple of occassions in the late 90s, but it never really took. In fact, it wasn’t until shortly before my wedding (in the winter of 2000) that I began to attend church regularly, and this largely out of obligation. At that time I probably would’ve described myself as a kind of theistic Platonist, but not a Christian. But it turned out that, at least in my case, there was something to Pascal’s advice to “Bless yourself with holy water, have Masses said, and so on; by a simple and natural process this will make you believe, and will dull you – will quiet your proudly critical intellect.” I’d probably put it differently, but the simple discipline of going to church week in and week out gradually had an affect on me.

    Sometime in 2001, precipitated in part by a serious medical issue in the life of a friend, I realized that I believed that Jesus is the Son of God and went into a church near the office where I worked and prayed to him. It wasn’t quite the classic “sinner’s prayer” moment, but I would call it a conversion experience, with the caveat that a lot of groundwork had been laid. In some ways I guess it was an explicit acknowledgement of something that had been going on under surface for some time.

    Since then my religious life has been pretty much bereft of dramatic incident. I’ve attended various Lutheran churches over the course of the last five years up until this past summer when, having just moved to Boston, my wife and I began attending the Church of the Advent (Episcopal). Lutheranism at its best seems to me to combine catholicity of doctrine and worship with the Augustinian understanding of finitude, sin, and grace that comports so well with my skepticism. In doctrinal matters I’m pretty conventional: I don’t have much of an itch for revisionism in Christology or the doctrine of the Trinity (Chalcedon and Nicea sit just fine with me), Atonement (I think some combination of Anselm and Abelard is probably as close to the truth as we’re likely to get), or other doctrinal matters. If anything, the challenge for me now is to rest in the faith of the church and get down to the business of actually living a Christian life. Thinking about religion, however necessary and important, can be a temptation to neglect things like prayer, service, doing justice and loving mercy, developing the virtues of faith, hope, and charity – those sorts of things.

  • ISG museum

    This Saturday we went with some friends to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum here in Boston. I was very taken with this piece by Fra Angelico of the Death and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. Unfortunately the image doesn’t do justice to it – the gold and blue are so bright and vibrant – really lovely. Here’s a fairly decent detail.

    Interestingly, it also turns out that Mrs. Gardner donated the stone reredos behind the High Altar of our parish.

  • New year, new beginning

    Well, after more than two and a half years, I think it’s time to put this humble blog to bed. I didn’t know exactly what direction I wanted to take this blog when I started it in July of 2004, but looking over the archives there definitely seems to have been a trend away from more political blogging toward focusing on faith-related topics. The whole thing has become a bit unwieldy, so I think it’s time for a clean break, to scrape off some of the barnacles as it were. Plus, I think it’s time to drop the corny pseudo-Latin name.

    But fear not, loyal readers! You can continue to get the same incisive blogging you know and love at my new site here. Ideally I’d like to focus less on day to day political and blogospheric tit for tat, and to that end my first foray at the new place will be blogging through St. Augustine’s Enchiridion.

  • Reporting from the road

    I’m in Atlanta, traveling for work, which, ironically, gives me more time to blog since I’m sitting here in a hotel room by myself with nothing to do. Interestingly, I seem to be here at the same time that this is going on, so my hotel is full of well-scrubbed Baptist kids walking around with Bibles. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it’s just kind of surreal – no one in the northeast walks around carrying a Bible. But if any of them try to evangelize me I’ll just brandish my Book of Common Prayer to ward them off.

    On the plane I started reading P.D. James’s The Children of Men. Very gripping and full of Christian themes. Dystopian science fiction is my favorite variety. It’s the first book of hers I’ve read, but I think I recall reading somewhere that James is an Anglican; she certainly takes some shots at modern watered-down versions of Christianity. And some of the heroes are explicitly Christian in their motivation. I wonder how much of that the new movie retains.

    We don’t have cable tv, so whenever I’m staying in a hotel I’m always astonished at how shallow and sensationalistic cable news is. I watched about 5 minutes of the Lou Dobbs show, which seems to be an extended exercise in xenophobia; all of America’s problems, it seems, are caused by foreigners – foreigners overseas who want to take our jobs, or foreigners coming here. Then the inevitable Wolf Blitzer’s show came on. The one spot of serious analysis was when Blitzer had the NYT’s John Burns reporting from Iraq on what a mess the whole Saddam execution debacle has become. Regardless of your views on the death penalty, it’s pretty hard at this point to see it as a victory for democracy or the rule of law, much less a victory for the U.S.

    I also watched a bit of the Gerald Ford funeral coverage. Interesting that he and Jimmy Carter became such close friends (at least to hear President Carter tell it). It’s pretty hard to imagine that happening now – Carter said that he used to give Ford regular briefings on his foreign and domestic policy! I’m not one to get sentimental about presidents or the pomp of our civil quasi-religion, but Ford seems like he was a pretty decent guy. RIP.

    Not much else to report. I think I’m going to raid the mini-bar and get back to The Children of Men.

    P.S. For the record, no Gideon’s Bible in the rooms in the Atlanta Westin. I actually didn’t pack a Bible because I wanted to pack lightly and figured there’d be one in the room. I actually thought hotel-room Bibles were universal. Or is this just cut-rate chains? (Also for the record, hotels in Utah have Bibles and copies of the Book of Mormon.) Maybe I should track down one of those Baptist kids…

  • Just what I always wanted!

    An Archbishop of Canterbury Christmas tree ornament! One of our cooler Christmas gifts, courtesy of my brother-in-law and his wife, who took a trip to Merry ole England this fall.

  • Yet another political quiz thingie

    Your Political Profile:
    Overall: 45% Conservative, 55% Liberal
    Social Issues: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal
    Personal Responsibility: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal
    Fiscal Issues: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal
    Ethics: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal
    Defense and Crime: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal

    (via Haligweorc)

    It’s funny how end up as kind of a centrist on a lot of these quizzes even though I have fairly “extreme” views on a number of issues. It’s just that some are extreme in a “liberal” direction and others are extreme in a “conservative” direction I guess.