Category: Uncategorized

I should mention that I commend the Grant McCracken post linked to in the previous post in its own right. He offers a thoughtful critique of “buy local” movements and other attempts to artificially restrict choice for the sake of some kind of aesthetic “purity.”

It really is a vexing question: how much choice is too much? For most of history, perhaps, the problem was scarcity and lack of choice. The fact that we now have an abundance of choice has led in some quarters to a kind of “anti-choice” backlash.

Maybe this really does boil down to the question of identity. As Griffiths points out, forging an identity often means identifying yourself with a certain niche or subculture. The “buy local” people and the purist movie directors Mr. McCracken mentions want to think of themseleve (and want others to think of them) as a certain kind of people. In premodern times your identity was more or less handed to you; now its something you have to strive for.

The biggest challenge to transmitting the faith in the 21st century, according to Paul Griffiths, is that we have been inculcated by the culture of “late capitalism” into thinking of our identities as essentially items of taste. The Church (and he means the Catholic Church, but it could just as well apply to Protestantism) cannot help but appear as just one more “community of taste” appealing to a certain market niche, rather than a truth-bearing community. The problem is especially acute among members of “Generation Y” (b. 1978-1991) who, perhaps more than any preceding generation, have been formed by this kind of culture:

So far, then, we have Generation Y floating in an aural and visual flood, catechized by the late-capitalist market into seeking and finding identity in increasingly segmented communities of taste. Such communities are Lockean churches, in the sense conveyed by John Locke, in his 1685 Letter Concerning Toleration. There Locke defined a church as “a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord, in order to the public worshipping of God, in such a manner as they judge acceptable to him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls.” This is a community of taste and choice, constructed by a particular catechesis of desire. In all important structural respects, it is like the communities of people who mourn the passing of the jam band Phish or who read qvMagazine (a ‘zine for gay Latinos) or who go to monster-truck demolition derbies.

The problem, Griffiths continues, is that:

If membership in a community requires a catechesis of desire; if, too, that catechesis is contingent (it could have been otherwise) and not coerced, then it follows that the community in question is just a community of taste, preference, and predilection. It makes no sense from a late-capitalist, Lockean perspective to identify a community so joined as a community of truth, to say of it that it is the community that preserves and transmits more fully than any other the truth about human beings and the world. The members of Generation Y find it difficult to understand that anyone can seriously make such claims.

Much of Protestantism (especially the “free-church” tradition) has held that joining a church must be a matter of individual choice and conscience (hence “believer’s baptism”). How do these kinds of churches differ from the “communities of taste” that Griffiths bemoans? Well, in classic Protestantism, you joined a church (ideally) because you became convinced that it was indeed a “community of truth” (however we might want to unpack that).

One danger, it seems to me, of the fascination with “postmodernism” (usually used to refer to a grab-bag of cultural, intellectual and political phenomena) among some Protestants is that, in many ways, postmodernism is the ideal complement to a late capitalist economy. The limitless play of differance can quite easily go hand-in-hand with a celebration of “choice” as the highest good, as well as the seemingly inexhaustible plenitude and diversity of the market. The market is our counterpart to the medieval great chain of being – every niche is filled.

Grant McCracken makes a similar point from a more libertarian perspective:

What’s really scary about this “choice against choice” inclination is that it dresses itself up in indignation. It becomes the way sophisticated people show their discernment in matters of food and film, and their disdain for the mainstream. Is this what the avant-garde has come to? It is no longer an experimentation in the very new, an exploration of the far edge of possibility, but a refusal of the full range of choice. Could this be a fit of pique practiced by the Left in protest against the fact that markets did what markets were supposed to stand against: the creation of more and more options and the effortless incorporation of the new. Can we say at least that the most important locus of creativity and innovation has moved away from the artist into the very thing the artist stood against: the marketplace?

The question, it seems to me, is not whether we are going to be “pro-market” or “anti-market;” obviously the market is an indispensable part of human existence. But we can sensibly ask whether the values of the market will be allowed sovereignty over all other aspects of life. Sometimes (and I suspect even libertarians would agree with this) we must indeed refuse the full range of choice. That’s what commitment (to a cause, a family, a church) entails. The question for churches that downplay the question of truth is whether they can resist the hegemony of the market (as many postmodern types bravely claim to be doing), or whether they will become just one more consumer choice.

The January issue of First Things is now online in its entirety. Highlights include “Just War, as It Was and Is” by James Turner Johnson and “The Laughter of the Philosophers” by David B. Hart.

This looks like a promising new blog: Caelum et Terra seems to be the successor to the magazine of the same name (see here). C&T espouses a philosophy of (for lack of a better term) Catholic agrarianism or distributism. Or in their words:

…our vision was (and is) mystical, contemplative, distributist, agrarian, sacramental, ecumenical, aesthetic, traditionalist, and progressive. Note the last two: there are significant political differences among us, but we all believe that the Catholic faith is simultaneously the most conservative and the most revolutionary force on earth. And we agree that there really is a culture of death growing in the world, and that Christianity naturally tends toward the development of a culture of life.

Sounds like a winner!

(link via ACBFP)

Vaughn at ICTHUS asks what use philosophy is for Christians. I started to type a comment, but it got so unwieldy that I thought I’d make a blog post of it instead.

Vaughn says:

…I may say that it is difficult for me to understand how philosophy can be a practice that is prior to one’s Christian convictions. For my part, I will not say with Stanley Fish that “philosophy doesn’t matter” – but rather I will make the affirmation that philosophy is indeed very important for philosophers. …

I want to be clear that I am not saying that the practice of philosophical speculation has no place in the Christian life (I’m not saying this). This would be tantamount to saying that economics has no place in the Christian life – a silly idea to be sure. But simply that philosophy is not a discourse that is prior to theology – that is, it does not set the agenda for theology. …

I for one assume that “Christian” names a people group (like the Jews) who have a particular way of being in the world (disciples of Jesus as recoded in the Gospel narratives). There are certain convictions (beliefs, if you will) that accompany the life of a disciple. For instance, I have a conviction about God’s work in the world – a conviction rooted in my practice of prayer for the world. I have certain convictions about war and abortion rooted in my community’s practice of providing economic assistance to “undesirable” people. But said convictions are not because of a prior theory about metaphysics or ethics. As I said earlier, Christians don’t need a “theory”, they need a Church.

Now, I think this is true as far as it goes, but as Camassia pointed out in a comment to Vaughn’s post:

I don’t quite see how you can have practices without some sort of theory, even if it’s a simple and largely unconscious theory. This is especially true if you’re a Protestant, and you can’t rely on the old Catholic/Orthodox “Jesus and the Church teach this, we’ve always done it, so I do it” approach. The Protestant tradition of applying personal conscience to Scripture and Tradition demands a certain amount of theorizing about it.

I can also testify from personal experience that the Hauerwas approach has limited utility when you’re talking to someone outside the faith. A couple years ago Telford was pushing this on me and I’m like, OK, that’s fine if you start out a Christian, but what about me? What reason do I have to make the leap, not just into Church as a social club, but into faith? I suspect that this problem is a lot of reason why Christian philosophy has developed in the first place.

For me, philosophy contributed to my becoming a Christian, but mostly in a negative or critical sense. That is, I had believed that there were devastating objections to Christianity (problem of evil, critiques of natural theology, Freudianism, Marxism, Nietzscheanism, etc.) and that basically no intelligent person could believe it (an interesting combination of naivete and arrogance when you think about it). But in reading Christian philosophers what I discovered was that there are rejoinders to the stock criticisms of Christianity. Now, all of those rejoinders are not necessarily cogent, but it was very helpful to me to see really smart people addressing them and to realize that these responses could not be dismissed out of hand.

A second, and related, effect was to help me see the weaknesses in a purely materialistic or naturalistic worldview. I would say C.S. Lewis was very helpful to me here – I tend to find his critiques of naturalism much more persuasive than his positive arguments for Christianity (see, e.g. his little book Miracles). I would later encounter more philosophically sophisticated versions of those arguments in the work of people like Alvin Plantinga. But in any event, philosophy helped me to see that naturalism is not obviously right or without problems.

So, I think for some people philosophy can have a preparatory function in that it can remove certain intellectual obstacles to faith. This seems to be what happened to Augustine when he encountered Platonism – it gave him the intellectual tools to shed the Manicheeism that he had adopted (of course, some would accuse Augustine of importing too much Platonism into Christianity, but that’s a separate issue). Beyond this, philosophy can help us articulate the convictions that are presupposed by the practices that Vaughn rightly sees as the heart of the Christian life. It can display their inner logic and coherence and defend them against objections (here the line between philosophy and theology becomes a bit blurry, admittedly).

I think the current emphasis on practices and the life of the church is in many ways a salutary correction to an over-intellectualized faith, but that doesn’t mean we can dispense with intellectual reflection. This has been true from the earliest days of Christianity. Paul and John engage in what looks a lot like philosophical arguments and apologetics, and the Church fathers certainly did. By meeting their interlocutors on their own terms they did, in a sense, let philosophy set their agenda.

This is not to say, of course, that philosophy can create faith. Only God can do that, or so Christians believe. But just as a persistent sin can be an obstacle to faith, a persistent misunderstanding can also keep us on the outside. If I can’t see how, for instance, Christianity can be reconciled with modern science, this may convince me that it is impossible to believe in an intellectually honest way. Philosophy can help show that what we thought was a conflict wasn’t really a conflict, or that we misunderstood what Christian belief entailed, or that we misunderstood what science entailed. That seems to me to be a valuable service.

Word on the street is that Bob Casey Jr. is contemplating a run to replace conservative golden boy Rick Santorum in 2006 (see here – via A Green Conservatism). Casey, the son of late Pa. governor Bob Casey was just elected State Treasurer by an overwhelmeing margin and has long had designs on the Governor’s mansion (he lost in a primary contest with Ed Rendell, the current governor), so it’s not clear if he would agree to run against Santorum. But it seems that if he did, he would stand a very good chance indeed.

Casey, like his father, is a pro-life Democrat (yes, that Bob Casey who was denied a speaking slot at the ’92 Democratic convention because of his pro-life stance or because he refused to back Clinton, depending on who you ask), a rare bird that has garnered increasing interest as the Dems have been casting about for ideas to win back disaffected red-state voters. Pennsylvania is a blue, but just barely, and largely because of Philadelphia and its suburbs (which have been traditionally been Republican but have lately been trending Democratic) and Pittsburgh. The rest of Pa. tends to be socially conservative, and centrist to liberal on economics – these are not generally libertarians, but “Reagan democrats,” farmers, union members, hunters and outdoorsmen.

Thus someone like Casey, who is pro-life, pro-gun rights and moderate to progressive on economics could do quite well in the vast Pennsylvania hinterlands (I say that affectionately – I grew up in those hinterlands!) and hold on to the urban Democrats (if you’re a pro-choice Democrat, you’re still going to prefer Bob Casey Jr. to Rick Santorum).

The question is whether Casey will see a Senate run as an unwanted diversion from his quest for the governor’s mansion in 2008.

A propos of all this, see this from January’s First Things.

Russell Arben Fox has a very interesting post on what it might mean to live the simple life in our technology- and consumption-driven culture. I admit that I’ve been pretty put off by the agrarianism of people like Wendell Berry if, for no other reason, than it seems like they advocate a way of life that most of us couldn’t live even if we wanted to!

As it happens, though, I just finished reading Albert Borgmann’s Power Failure this weekend, and I think Borgmann offers a more constructive approach than the agrarian nostalgia of Berry (or the radical pessimism of someone like Jacques Ellul).

Borgmann says that technology is the characteristic feature of our world. By this he means that the paradigm of the “device” is the predominant way in which we relate to the world. The device has two components, machinery and commodity. Basically this means that the device serves, through an elaborate piece of scientific engineering, to make something (an experience, a product) available for effortless consumption. It is our way of bending reality to our will, and a way that detaches us from a concrete encounter with reality.

For instance, I can pop a frozen dinner in the microwave and virtually instantaneously have a hot meal without understanding what goes into the food, how it was made, or how the microwave cooks it (in any but the most rudimentary terms). The meal is immediately procurable without any significant amount of understanding or engagement on my part.

The technological mode, Borgmann thinks, holds sway over our politics in that effortless consumption is considered the end toward which policy should aim. This outlook is shared by the left and the right; the left is wary of criticizing our choices for fear of violating the value-neutrality of the public square, and the right sees the free market as the instrument which maximizes freedom and prosperity, but which does not discriminate between better and worse choices.

Borgmann is no Luddite; he freely admits that technology has brought us real blessings in extending lifespans, improving health and saving us from hunger and backbreaking labor. What he thinks we need, however, is to recover a space for what he calls “focal things” and “focal practices,” which technology threatens to occlude.

A focal thing is something that calls forth our attention and engagement rather than being immediately available for our use. Focal things are real in their own right, rather than being commodities produced for our effortless consumption. And a focal practice is the activity whereby we engage with this reality. Paradigm instances of focal things for Borgmann are wilderness, musical instruments, the written word and the communal meal. The corresponding focal practices might be hiking, learning to play music, reading to each other and preparing the meal. These all require an active understanding and engagement with the underlying reality and the development of certain skills and virtues.

Technology threatens focal practices because it attempts to make everything available and pliable at the push of a button or flip of a switch. It’s much easier to turn on the CD player and hear a flawless performance than to practice my own halting efforts at learning to play an instrument. But Borgmann thinks that focal practices are precisely what give life its meaning – a life reduced to an endless variety of consumption is unbearably banal.

The connection to theology is obvious – a technological world seeks to reduce everything to an object of control and consumption, leaving no room for contingency and grace. Borgmann highlights the reading of Scripture and the celebration of the Eucharist as the most important focal practices for Christians – they orient us to a transcendent reality that is beyond our methods of technological control. God comes to us on his own terms, not ours.

For Borgmann the recovery of focal practices has a personal and a public dimension. Everytime we pick up a book or a musical instrument instead of turning on the TV, or gather the family around a home-cooked meal instead of stopping by Mickey D’s on the way home from the office, we are enlarging the space where we actively engage with a reality that has its own rules and nature rather than being a sheer commodity. And communally we need to make space for the kinds of public celebrations and non-instrumental activities that go beyond the routine of production and consumption. Everything from public parks, to community symphonies, to street theatre, to athletic events can be occassions for shared focal practices.

Beyond this, though, it would require challenging a politics that takes expansion of the GDP or raising our “standard of living” as its highest end. This is a politics that would be more communitarian than conventionally liberal or conservative. But Borgmann argues, cogently I think, that the liberal claim of a value-neutral public square actually conceals the hegemony of technolgical assumptions.

I think Borgmann’s notion of focal practices provides a useful way of drawing distinctions between empowering and enervating uses of technology. Obviously, no one wants to go back to pre-modern standards of dental care or hygiene. On the other hand, if life is reduced to passive consumption of commodified goods and experiences (represented, in extremis, by a hypothetical virtual reality that we could plug ourselves into to have whatever experience we wanted), then it seems that we will have become Nietzschean “last men” after all.

Some belated MLK-day reading. Here’s Heather Gray on King’s theory of non-violent social change and Greg Moses on “King and the Christian Left” both from Counterpunch.

An interesting post from Get Religion on how various media outlets spun the story.

Of course, it is, as I understand it, still up to the churchwide assembly this summer to accept or reject the recommendations of the task force (though, I would be very surprised if the cwa took a more liberal line than the task force).

By “epistemological imperialism” I mean demanding that a particular subject matter be knowable by means unsuited to it. We don’t expect the same precision from ethics that we expect from mathematics, and to insist upon that would be an instance of epistemological imperialism.

Likewise, the “brights” like Richard Dawkins demand that theology conform to the methods of the empirical sciences in order to be considered intellectually respectable. But what if the subject matter of theology is not amenable to those methods? Why should a single method be allowed to determine our entire ontology (what we think is real)?

There are good reasons, I think, for maintaining that God is not knowable by the methods of science. Science deals with what is observable, measurable and predictable (follows law-like patterns). God is not traditionally thought to be any of those things.

But this might sound like special pleading or begging the question. Alright, consider an analogy: in order to get to know another person, there are limits to what external observation can tell us. To really know someone they must reveal themselves to us. They can hide from us if they choose.

How much more would this be true of God, who exceeds us immeasurably in wisdom, power, knowledge and goodness? God’s utter transcendence virtually guarantees that he won’t be encompassable in our mundane categories of thought, or susceptible to our tools of inquiry. To demand that all that is must be knowable by the scientific method seems to exclude the divine a priori.

Moreover, can this epistemic principle – only science delivers truth – itself be demonstrated by the canons of science? It would seem not; how could such a sweeping principle be justified empirically? (This is really just a form of the traditional refutation of postivism.)

If God reveals himself as a person, then it may be that the disciplines of the self required to know God are different from the disciplines required to measure the distance between two stars. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” may be an epistemic principle. The saints and mystics report that their sense of God’s presence was heightened – a kind of special training analogous to that of the scientist. And maybe most of us occupy a similar position with respect to the saints as we do to the scientists – we take what they report as testimony.

Pascal advocated that we “wager” on God’s existence. I don’t think he meant this as a stopping point, but as a starting point. He suggests that, in the face of uncertainty, we start along the path, trusting that as we proceed things will become clearer. If we put ourselves in the right position, gain the right dispositions and virtues (through prayer, meditation, study, the sacraments, works of charity, etc.) we will come to know God. Is this so different from the disciplines that any honest inquirer has to undertake?