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Today’s Inquirer ran an interview with an Iraqi Catholic priest who is working to secure a constitution for Iraq that separates religion and state.

As part of a religious minority (Christians constitute about 3 percent of Iraqis), editor of a theology journal, member of Baghdad’s literati, social activist, and dogged bridge-builder across faiths, [The Rev. Yousif Thomas] Mirkis brings an unusual perspective to the conflict. In a recent interview during his Philadelphia stop, the 56-year-old Dominican pressed his urgent case for a new Iraq “beyond ideology.”

Like many others, Mirkis believes the United States “succeeded in making war but didn’t succeed in making peace.” Still, he says, Saddam needed to be toppled, and Mirkis is not eager to have coalition forces pull out soon. He leaves it to Americans to hash out American policy, focusing instead on the volatile realities of Iraqi society that preceded the occupation and will outlast it.

Inquirer: Since the war, Christians have suffered attacks from extremists. Was it different under Saddam Hussein because his regime was secular?

Mirkis: Yes, but I cannot compare our situation before and now. Saddam’s government was never afraid we could collapse the regime, so we weren’t enemies of the regime. We wanted only to live peacefully.

But it was a big prison. Christians were doctors, engineers, but we didn’t feel involved in politics. Politics was prohibited for everybody who was not with the regime. Now, the situation is very different. We can be a target for all kinds of fundamentalism, terrorism, even gangs who are now free to kidnap people, to take money. The ancient peace was false. The new chaos is not to compare with it.

Inquirer: Many Christians are fleeing the country now, right?

Mirkis: Some try. Others cannot go because they have no economic possibility. And there are those who don’t want to go because they believe their place is in Iraq and they can do something.

I like this third kind and try to encourage them. Yes, stay, but we have to change our mentality. We are not only 2 to 3 percent of the population. We have between 30 and 40 percent of the high [college] diplomas. Twenty percent of doctors in Iraq are Christian, 30 percent of engineers and architects. And we can have another role in this society.

Inquirer: Are Christians involved in drafting Iraq’s constitution?

Mirkis: Yes, we have at least two among the 71 members of the constitution [drafting committee]. Before I left, I spent one month gathering interviews about the constitution with different kinds of people, not only Christians. By Internet, and with readers of my magazine. Fifteen percent of my readers are Muslims. I asked about 600 people 40 questions.

Inquirer: What were the main findings?

Mirkis: They didn’t want to speak about “minorities.” We all belong to Iraq, so that word is very bad. Until now, in our identity cards we wrote the religion. We don’t want it anymore… . There is something that can unify all our religious denominations, which is Iraq. Our model is Switzerland, which is four nations with four languages. Why can’t we do it like them?

[…]

Inquirer: What are the consequences for Christians if Islam becomes the official religion of Iraq?

Mirkis: We are afraid, because they can oblige our women to wear the veil. They can oblige the population not to drink alcohol. The situation of women is dangerous, not only the Christian woman. Even if the [Saddam] regime was difficult, the situation of women was rather good… . The problem is, 35 years of terrorism under the regime created a kind of passivity in the Iraqi population. People are frightened. They have not enough strength to go in the streets to make manifest against this kind of decision.

Inquirer: What can the American church do?

Mirkis: Pray for us. Not only the church, but all Iraqis who suffer too much. We need to take some rest.

When you read stuff like this it’s hard not to conclude that we have an obligation to stay on and try and help make something decent out of this mess.

The Inquirer ran a story this morning touting signs of John Roberts’ possible “liberalism.” According to the story, one of the pieces of evidence for his alleged liberalism was his advising President Reagan to strongly and unequivocally denounce abortion clinic bombers when working as White House legal counsel.

As a legal adviser to President Ronald Reagan, Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. joined a scathing denunciation of abortion-clinic bombers and urged Reagan to stay out of an effort to post tributes to God in Kentucky schools.

Roberts’ advice, in documents obtained by the Inquirer Washington Bureau before their public release later this month, might help him counter critics who portray him as a doctrinaire conservative. Abortion-rights groups and groups that advocate a clear separation between church and state oppose his nomination.

[…]

“The president unequivocally condemns such acts of violence and believes that those responsible should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” their draft reply said. “No matter how lofty or sincerely held the goal, those who resort to violence to achieve it are criminals… .

“Neither the cause that these misguided individuals mistakenly believed they were serving, nor the target of their violence, will in any way be considered to mitigate the seriousness of their offense against our laws.”

Now, call me paranoid, but isn’t the irresistible implication here that it’s chiefly liberals who are opposed to the bombing of abortion clinics? If strongly favoring the full prosecution of clinic bombers is taken to be prima facie evidence of Roberts’ “liberal streak” doesn’t it follow that the Inquirer thinks that conservatives generally favor the bombing of abortion clinics? Or at least aren’t really strongly opposed to it?

(See here for previous post.) Suppose we grant that Allen’s description of the “experience of perfect love” – a loving apprehension of the givenness of beings which don’t exist for our sake or to be of use to us, but which have their own integrity and goodness – correspondes to a real, if fleeting, part of human experience. Why should this experience be taken to be particularly revelatory of the nature of reality in general? Why privilege this experience over those of pain, futility, hatred, boredom or any of the myriad other states that make up our experience?

Allen says that a portrayal of the universe such that the experience of perfect love is central is necessary “for one experience among many to be given overriding importance, as the one experience that allows all others to be ordered around it. Given an appropriate view of reality, we see how it is that the experience is the correct one for people to have as their goal and standard. To give it a setting, then, allows us to understand how that experience may be a bearer of truth” (p. 40).

This may sound like he’s begging the question. After all, why construct a picture of the world specificially to provide pride of place to one kind of experience? Following Iris Murdoch, he says that one reason to trust the experience of perfect love as a truth-bearing experience is that it enables us to take a more realisitc perspective on things. When I realize that I am just one particular thing in the universe rather than that around which everything else revolves, when I see other things and people as having their own integrity and goodness quite apart from any use they might be to me, I attain a truer understanding of the world. “The experience of perfect love is a bearer of truth precisely because we are but one reality among many others” (p. 40).

But his purpose, at least at this point, is not to compel us to accept this account of reality, but rather to show how an interpretation of reality that takes perfect love as its animating principle can be a “plausible and attractive one, and this view can be used as one standard in the evaluation of other theological interpretations” (p. 57-8).

Although he doesn’t elaborate at this point, part of what I take him to be saying is that our interpretation of reality is “underdetermined” by the “data” of human experience. That is to say, our experience doesn’t “force” any one interpretation on us, but allows for a multiplicity of views about the ultimate nature of reality. So how we determine which view will guide our lives depends, at least in part, on factors like “attractiveness.” He maintains that Christian teachings shed a certain light on our experience and can show us why love matters. “If love matters, this doctrine matters, since it expresses love on a cosmic scale; love does matter, as we have seen, because to perceive from a moral position is to perceive more realistically” (p. 45).

Allen goes on to explain how the doctrines of creation ex nihilo and the Trinity portray a God of perfect love. “Prior” to creation (if we can talk that way) God, while alone, lacked nothing. He exists in perfect, self-sufficient blessedness. Creation, then, is an act motivated entirely by God’s love. God freely ushered into being a universe of creatures and delights in their existence. Rather than an abstract piece of speculative metaphysics, the doctrine of creation shows us what it means for God to be a God of love. What this picture of reality allows us to do, Allen thinks, is to test competing views to see if they can make adequate sense of our experience.

One thing I like about Allen’s approach is that he’s “postmodern” enough to realize that he’s not going to offer an argument that will compel any sufficiently rational person to accept the truth of Christianity. And he also realizes that the hegemony of the Enlightenment account of truth and rationality is waning. But that doesn’t mean that Christians should retreat into their own little cultural-linguistic enclave where there is no point of contact between the Christian account of reality and general human experience. No amount of post-modern hand-waving is going to prevent people from asking the question But is it true?

Nice article on Flannery O’Connor in the Washington Post. I’ve had an affection for O’Connor since I took a class on her in college. I had never read her before then and was just trying to fill up my course schedule. The Library of America edition of her works contains everything she wrote, I think.

This anecdote O’Connor recounts in a letter about a conversation on the Eucharist with writer and critic Mary McCarthy is great:

“Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the ‘most portable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’ That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”

This article from the Christian Century gives the lay of the land on the homosexuality issue in the ELCA as we go into the churchwide assembly this month. Despite what the article says, I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up with essentially the status quo. A “local option” has been vigorously opposed by some of our top theologians (Robert Jenson, Carl Braaten, etc.) as theologically and ecclesiologically incoherent. And a full-fledged overturning of the existing policy seems even more unlikely.

Toward the end of the article my old pastor Jeff Johnson is quoted:

To Jeff Johnson, the openly gay pastor of the University Lutheran Chapel at the University of California at Berkeley, “the trajectory of the church is clearly moving in a progressive direction.”

His bishop, David G. Mullen, has chosen not to remove at least 13 openly gay, lesbian or bisexual pastors serving in the Sierra Pacific Synod, said Johnson, who cochairs Good Soil, a Lutheran gay alliance. “The current policy of the church really serves no one,” Johnson said.

“The progressive wing is frustrated and unsatisfied because the policies intimidate a class of people unjustly,” he said. “The conservative wing is frustrated because the policies are inconsistently followed or ignored.”

Despite putting in a year at “the Chapel” as we called it, I remain a squishy fence-straddler on the whole issue. Ironically, I was considerably more pro-Bush then than I am now (this was pre-Iraq), and used to dread the anti-Bush polemics we would occasionally get from the pulpit. Ah, Berkeley…

Has any concept from physics been more abused and imported into more inappropriate settings since, well, Einstein’s idea of relativity?

Granted that picking on Deepak Chopra seems a little like shooting fish in a barrel, but still…

When Heisenberg first presented it to Einstein, he made the famous remark “I don’t believe God would play dice with the Universe.” More recently Stephen Hawking made the statement, “not only does God play dice with the Universe, sometimes throws the dice where you cannot find them.”

In essence, every act of observation transforms the Universe. Since observation cannot happen without interpretation, every interpretation becomes a reality. For us Human Beings, this has enormous implications, because we are linguistically programmed. Language does not describe, it creates. It conceives, governs, constructs, and becomes reality. Many times in many conversations, even with intimate friends, I have found myself in a quandary because we were using the same words but they meant different things to us. On looking up the dictionary, I found we were both right! Freud remarked “neurosis is the inability to tolerae ambiguity and ambivalence.” Our current need for certitude as a society may be an indication of our collective neurosies where we always want to see things as black or white, right and wrong, etc.

Despite being aware of this, I find myself constantly falling into the habit of certitude.

So, becuase subatomic particles defy the simultaneous determination of their position and velocity it therefore follows that the world is constructed by language and therefore…er, Bush is bad? Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Well, within limits…

It is guaranteed to raise a cheer among those who enjoy a tipple: moderate drinkers are better thinkers than teetotallers or those who overindulge.

Research by the Australian National University in Canberra suggests drinking in moderation boost your brainpower. But none at all, or too much, can make you a dullard.

A study of 7,000 people in their early 20s, 40s and 60s found that those who drank within safe limits had better verbal skills, memory and speed of thinking than those at the extremes of the drinking spectrum. The safe consumption level was considered to be 14 to 28 standard drinks a week for a man and seven to 14 for a woman.

Questions ranged from verbal reasoning problems to tests of short-term memory. Surprisingly, perhaps, teetotallers were twice as likely as occasional drinkers to achieve the lowest scores.

Read the rest here.

“To alcohol! the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” – Homer Simpson

Diogenes Allen is professor emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of numerous books on theology, spirituality, and the philosophy of religion. His book The Path of Perfect Love (second ed., 1992) is the first thing I’ve picked up of his, but so far I think he offers a very intriguing approach to the problem of belief in the modern world.

Allen begins with a description of the “panic in theology” – i.e. the idea that theology has lost its ability to make sense to modern people or to offer them anything relevant to their lives. God, if he is thought or spoken about at all, has been pushed to the fringes of out experience. The result is an attenuated and reductionist theology and an impoversihed religious life.

What Allen wants to show is that the presence of God properly resides at the center of our experience rather than the periphery. Rather than assault the reader with a series of deductive arguments intended to compel assent though, Allen begins with what he calls “the experience of perfect love.” Using a passage from Iris Murdoch’s novel The Unicorn as his jumping off point, Allen defines perfect love as an apprehension of things in their particularity as worthy of attention and love in their own right, quite independently of any usefulness they may have for the apprehending self. We might understand this as a version of Augustine’s dictum that “being qua being is good.”

For Murdoch the agnostic, this experience of perfect love is not necessarily a clue to any larger cosmic meaning. But it is a more objective way of viewing reality than our typical way – namely to regard the self as the center of the universe and to apportion value according to how things and people benefit us. The highest goal of the moral life, for Murdoch, involves a certain self-forgetfulness and an apprehension of the goodness of beings that exist for their own sake (she spells this out more prosaically in her essay “The Sovereignty of Good” found in the collection of the same name).

But, Allen asks, what if we did take this experience of perfect love – of love unmixed with self-seeking – as a clue to the meaning of reality itself? And what light might the traditional Christian doctrines of creation, incarnation, and resurrection shed on this experience? The subsequent chapters take up these questions, which I’ll attempt to discuss in upcoming posts.

Paul J. Griffiths reviews David B. Hart’s new book The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (link via Mere Comments)

From a Christian point of view, Mr. Hart notes, such events are quite easy to explain, if difficult to accept. They are dramatic instances of the fact that the world is profoundly out of joint, damaged in deep ways by the fall of Adam and Eve and the rebellion of man. This fall, brought about by the exercise of human freedom, has altered the very physical order of the cosmos so that what God had intended to be a world of harmony and peace, free from suffering and death, is now a world running red with blood.

Much of this blood is shed by human ingenuity, in holocausts and genocides and gulags. But much of it is shed by earthquakes and storms and tidal waves and plagues, catastrophes independent of human will. This was the case for the quarter-million people who died in December but of course it is the case as well every time, for instance, a stray pathogen robs a single child of life.

Indeed, such tragedies are common. For Christians, they are horrors, evils opposed in every way to God’s loving intentions. (Mr. Hart notes, by the way, that the post-tsunami skeptics, in their what-kind-of-God question, posited a Christian and loving god and not a version of the cruel or indifferent gods that are a part of some other religious traditions.) More important, God can achieve victory over such tragedies and in fact has already begun to do so in the victory over death won by Jesus on the cross. There will be a time, too, when comfort is provided to those who have suffered and died, when the world will be irrevocably returned to the harmony intended for it.

But until then the only fully Christian response to events like the tsunami, argues Mr. Hart, is mourning and lament. The effects that natural disasters have on us are privations, absences, negative images of what God’s love intends for us and for the world. There is nothing good to say about them because, precisely, there is nothing good in them. By arguing in such a way, Mr. Hart draws upon and restates, with verve and ornament, the classical Christian view that all evil is an absence, a privation of good.

Thus to the claim that the tsunami provides evidence against the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent God Mr. Hart responds: The disordered world in which we live isn’t as God intended and created it. God did order the world in such a way that natural disasters don’t happen. The only disaster he permitted was the one that we ourselves succeeded in bringing about, the one that disordered the world in the direction of chaos. God will finally overcome even this, Christian faith teaches. But until that victory is complete the damage wrought by chaos provides no evidence against God. Or, as Mr. Hart likes to put it: The God against whom natural disasters might provide evidence isn’t the one in whom Christians believe.

Despite its difficulties, the doctrine of original sin seems to be the perennial way of reconciling the existence of a benevolent God with the manifest disorder of the world. Also see Hart’s article from March’s First Things.

Interesting piece from Radley Balko. As a believer in natural law I’m generally sympathetic.