I just noticed that the Humane Society has put together a rather nice page on Animals and Religion and produced a 25-minute documentary called “Eating Mercifully.” The HSUS’s approach to religion is similar to its approach to the public at large: it assumes that principles of compassion and merciful treatment are already embedded in our moral tradition(s) and that the task is to strive for greater consistency and wider application. This has always struck me as more plausible and realistic than demanding a wholesale moral revolution.
Category: Theology & Faith
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God is love: a workable theology
A few days ago bls at The Topmost Apple posted a critique of this First Things article by Philip Turner on the “unworkable theology” of the Episcopal Church. In Turner’s view, liberal, mainline Protestantism prizes “inclusion” above all else and thus has reduced God to “love, pure and simple.” In response, bls pointed out that, in fact, liberals are not quite as squishy and non-judgmental as Turner supposes; they can be quite stern about sins against social justice, for example. She further pointed out that inclusion and salvation are distinct issues and that it’s possible to (and many churches do) emphasize inclusion without being requiring good works for salvation or being universalists. Moreover, many saints and doctors of the church, not to mention the current Pope, seem quite comfortable with saying that God is love, pure and simple.
Christopher at Betwixt and Between followed up with a post defending the view that, in fact, God is love “pure and simple,” and we can’t earn that love. But this doesn’t mean that God’s love leaves us the way we are, as critics like Turner claim. Christopher writes: “Let’s be clear, a response to Love that comes out of Love will bear appropriate fruits in virtues.” Yet the order is critical: we love because he first loved us. Following that, Christopher posted a lengthy meditation on the atonement of Christ (partly in response to a question I asked) and connected this to the ethics of same-sex relationships (which really does seem to be the subtext–or in many cases just the text–of so many of these cris de coeur about decadent liberal churches).
I may have more to say about all this later once things have sunk in a bit more, but I wanted to highlight these very thoughtful and thought-provoking posts.
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Return of a blogger
I’m happy to see that Andy of Sinning Boldly has returned to blogging after a lengthy hiatus. Right now is looks like his focus is a little more on the devotional/spiritual side of things. Welcome back, Andy!
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Pre-Christmas odds and ends
The ATR household is off to visit family for the better part of the next week, so blogging will be light–well, even lighter than usual.
Here’s a sampling of what I’ve been reading ’round the Web lately:
Christopher has several posts on l’affaire Rick Warren that are, as usual, very much worth your time. (See here, here, and here.)
Congrats to John Schwenkler, whose blog Upturned Earth has been absorbed into the ever-expanding conservative media empire that is Culture 11.
Lynn reflects on the movie Milk and how different the atmosphere for gay rights in California has changed since the 70’s (n.b.: a couple of f-bombs).
I thought this article on St. Joseph at Slate was neat.
Jennifer reminds us that it’s T-minus one month till the Lost season premiere! (And don’t forget Battlestar Galactica on January 18th!)
Alan Jacobs and Noah Millman discuss intereligious dialogue at the American Scene. This is something I haven’t given as much thought to as I’d like. (See here, here, and here.)
Tom Engelhardt writes on publishing and reading during a downturn. Also see this: “The Tyranny of the ‘To-Read’ Pile”
George Monbiot on peak oil.
This is interesting: Meat Consumption and CO2 Emissions
Not surprisingly, beef has the highest CO2 emissions per pound, but surprisingly high also are cheese and shrimp. I wonder if transportation was included in the figuring.
This talk from the E.F. Schumahcer Institute was delivered in May, but it still seems entirely relevant to our current predicament.Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring you Christmas wishes from Ronnie James Dio (along with the rest of the Dio-era Black Sabbath line-up).
Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!
Conrad von Soest, Nativity (1404) -
Milton and Christian liberty
Theo Hobson argues that John Milton was a great (and underrated) theorist of a distinctly Christian liberalism. He was a strong proponent of a secular state, but also of a Protestant ethos throughout society:
So was he an early “secular liberal”? Not in the dominant contemporary sense, which assumes that politics should be post-religious. He thought it should be post-ecclesial, but that liberal Protestant Christianity was the necessary foundation of a free society. This must be the national ideology, but it must not be identified with any religious institution. In effect, he was inventing the American approach to church-state relations.
Hobson apparently has a book just out on the subject that looks like it would be worth checking out.
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Rediscovering Correggio
The Post had an article this weekend on the nearly forgotten Renaissance master Correggio (a.k.a. Antonio Allegri) who at one time ranked up there with the likes of Michelangelo and Leonardo.
What makes Correggio stand out is that his work is unconventional, even at times chaotic, by the standards of the day:
Correggio’s paintings are so idiosyncratic and so subtle that they don’t yield the sound bites history prefers, as with Titian (“Brushstroke Guy”) or Michelangelo (“Mr. Classic Nude”). Correggio’s art seems all about resisting simple views, of art or of the worlds it shows. We can’t get an easy handle on Correggio’s pictures, because they’re dedicated to flux, indirection and obliquity. He may have used that combination to stand out from the crowd in talent-packed Renaissance Italy. But, like most artistic choices, it must mostly have depended on this painter’s view of the world.
The ultimate example of Correggio’s unique vision is the huge fresco he unveiled in the dome of Parma cathedral, in 1530, after years and years of work. This is Correggio’s most innovative project, and his most influential. It seems to open up the dome to let us see a teeming host of angels in the sky beyond. (Many Catholic churches now have similar ceilings, probably without knowing that they owe them to Correggio.) And yet, despite the cupola’s stunning special effects, this is also the least legible of paintings. Correggio has taken a standard Christian story — of the Virgin Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven at the moment of her death — and painted it as something so complex, it’s hardly graspable. It may be the perfect picture for a dome: Its floating figures aren’t tied down to a single view, so worshipers below can take it in from any spot. And yet that also means that there’s no stable order to hang on to, no single take-home message you can pull out of its turmoil.
For Correggio, this is heaven: a place where nothing ever settles down and there’s no one way to look at things.
Be sure to check out the accompanying video of the Parma dome here. It’s really spectacular.
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The greening of religion
At “The Immanent Frame,” Roger Gottlieb gives an overview of “religious environmentalism.” Not religious in the sense that conservatives sometimes say that environmentalism is a religion, but environmental concerns and movements emanating from traditional religions.
One provocative claim Gottlieb makes is that, as religions “green,” they move to the left more generally:
There is also a near universal tendency of religious environmentalism to move religions to the left. Inevitably, confrontation with the causes of the environmental crisis leads to a confrontation with global capitalism, militarism, and political repression. To capitalism environmental problems are externalities, and must remain so. To militarists every environmental problem takes a back seat to every military one. And repressive governments are too concerned with maintaining their own power to worry about ecosystem health.
This move to the left extends even to culturally and politically conservative communities. America’s Evangelical community has given rise to the vital Evangelical Environmental Network, and the religious right as a whole has been split over environmental issues, with activists taking well publicized moves to make clear that environmental concern is not solely the province of granola eating old hippies like the author of this essay. A split on this issue, however, portends at least the possibility of a split on others, and in any case necessarily leads to the questioning of unfettered corporate power.
I think one worry this might raise is that this “move to the left” would also mean abandoning the central claims of Christianity or watering them down with some bland, syncretistic “eco-spirituality.” As it happens, I’m currently reading a book called Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology, by Lutheran theologian H. Paul Santmire (Santmire’s more well-known earlier work–which I haven’t read–was called The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology).
Santmire argues that theology can and should thread a middle way between extreme reconstructionists who want to junk the entire edifice of traditional theology and start anew (e.g. the “creation spirituality” of Matthew Fox) and apologists for the traditional anthropocentric status quo. He thinks that Christian theology already contains the resources, if often ignored, to provide the necessary response to the ecological crisis. The term he prefers for his own project is “revisionist,” aiming to be “orthodox but innovative” in mining the resources (er, bit of an ironic metaphor there, I guess) of the tradition. Santmire wants to press for a re-appropriation of the tradition that is less anthropocentric and more theocentric. Or, in other words, to formulate a more thoroughly cosmic vision of the Christian faith. I think this opens a door to a “greening” of faith without abandoning the commitments to classic creeds, doctrines, and beliefs. Christianity doesn’t need to abandon its core beliefs to address environmental issues, but it may need to dig deeper, to the roots of its own confession.
A Thinking Reed 