nevermind the bricolage

zizek first as tragedy

 

I love the format of these animations--they help me process the ideas contained in the talks.

millenials, church and other generalizations

The incomparable Homebrewed theologian Tripp Fuller, tweeted this this little back and forth earlier in the week and for some reason I havent been able to completely shake it off. It's from Andrew Tatum, whom I confess I don't know. This is his post...

Earlier this week, Respected Philosophy professor (and one of my favorite authors), James K.A. Smith blogged the following:

It seems like every other day I'm told another reason why young people are leaving the church: because Christians fight too much, or because Christians are too political or anti-gay or don't care about social justice.  Millennials, we're told, are leaving the church because the church won't bless their cohabitation or provide them with contraception for pre-marital sex. They're leaving because they don't care about fights over creation/evolution or abortion or worship style or what have you.  In sum, it seems we're regularly informed that if the church doesn't change, young people are going to leave. 

And what exactly are we supposed to do with these claims?  I think the upshot is pretty clear.  Indeed, am I the only one who feels like they're a sort of bargaining chip--a kind of emotional blackmail meant to get the church to relax its commitments in order to make the church more acceptable? 

Could we entertain the possibility that millennials might be wrong?

I would agree entirely that millennials are, in fact, wrong on many issues. But I would argue that the reasons listed by Smith above are by no means the most prominent of reasons why young people are leaving the church. It isn't that the church simply needs to "get with the times" or accommodate moral ambiguity. The fact is that young many young people are leaving church because they have come looking for "church" and have found many things -- but authentic church is not among them.

What I mean is that young people are leaving because they have been in attendance at church services, Sunday schools, and other church events and instead of finding a community of spiritual depth and Christ-like love that truly cares about its community, they have found too many people over-concerned with gimmickry, social status, self-interest, and self-preservation. Instead of finding a community of authentic worship of God and sacrificial love for neighbor, they have found a community of fear, anxiety, and tepid pseudo-spirituality.

I believe millenials are searching for authenticity and community and that the church today has, indeed, lost its way. But the problem is not just that the church has refused to accommodate millennials' moral shortcomings by "relaxing its commitments to make church more acceptable" -- it's that the millennials have come looking for a community passionately following Christ in all areas of life and - far too often - we (i.e. Christians) haven't given them what they're searching for. I am not surprised that millennials are leaving church because as I survey the landscape of American Christianity today I don't see that it has much to recommend itself to the next generation -- or any generation, for that matter.

In order to regain the trust of future generations, the church needs to regain its own spiritual vitality, but this will not come through gimmicks, ad campaigns, moral laxity, or any of the other "desperate measures" currently being pursued to stave off the church's decline. If there is to be any hope that the church will regain the next generation, what is really needed is steadfast obedience to Christ's call to sacrificial love and a commitment to be "good news" to our communities born out in concrete acts of service and radical hospitality. We need to be less committed to the "institution" -- our buildings, bulletins, budgets, and social status -- and more committed to Christ and the pursuit of the koinonia that Christ lived, died, and rose again to create.

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I don't particulalry like to wade into these conversations, but sometimes it seems there are such glaringly obvious things to address. For instance, Smith speaks of millenials perhaps emotionally blackmailing the church to change its commitments. I think blackmail implies an on-going threat i.e. "something will happen if you don't do such and such," this doesn't seem to be the case here--rather, people are simply walking away and in effect saying "keep your commitments" I dont want them--thats very different from blackmail. I think this is what churches often miss, they think they are more important than they are--people don't want to debate these issues, they aren't interested in them. So by all means, keep your 'commitments'--which in this particular case seem to be little more than particular theological and culturally contextual reads anyway, but for many people they aren't sticking around to listen.

In saying that, I am not necessarily agreeing with the 'millenials.' In fact, another point I'd like to make here is the danger of generational theory--which is rooted in marketing and advertising--generations may exhibit certain trends in terms of views and behaviours--but the reality is more complex than that and should not be trusted--we speak way too much in these broad and unreliable terms--and to be honest, the claims made of millenials about the church are not exclusive to them--I hear those comments on multi-generational levels. Yes, younger people are less inclined to favour institutional forms of anything, and to challenge certain views or positions related to cultural issues, but that is a dynamic that has long been at work in western cultures, and for some millenials christianity may work fine, so to write off or speak broadly of any 'generation' is silly--we have to get away from this if there is to be any cogent and worthwhile conversation--it's not just young people who find difficulty with aspects of Christianity.

But back to the millenials (whoever they are)--so are they right? Yes and No. I applaud the search for 'authenticity and community'-but they are far from the first crowd to want that--can it be found in church? Sometimes, but we have to get over generalizations about all this. I also think it is a littler naive to dismiss church experiences as inauthentic or lacking communal aspects--it can just be particular forms and expressions of both those things and they may or may not work for people--but they can't just be written off on the basis of some generalized and idealized sense of what authenticity and community mean--those words have many interpretations and iterations, What is needed here is an expansion of the moral imagination on both sides. Times are changing, that much is sure. Different values, ideas and views are re-shaping the world. The church holds onto to history as it's determinant way too much--history cannot be ignored, but the future isn't embraced or necessarily engaged by a commitment to the past as if the past had it all together--the shifting sands of church views on creation, sexuality, marriage, worship etc, should be guide enough for any of us to realize the need to recognize temporality in what we hold all too tightly sometimes. I'm a bit tired of people linking their present state to the 'historic' faith--they tend to become guardians of a certain history and proponents of a sort pseudo-orthodoxy rather than a radical one.

In fact, I'm a bit tired of most of the debates around religion. It's filled my life for the past thirty years and I am getting very close to be done with it all. I could walk away from 'the church' (again, what the fuck does that mean when we speak in such generalizations?!--there is no 'the church' it's just like politicians who speak of the 'american people'--it's a fiction, and not a very helpful one anymore) just as some millenials do, over exactly the same issues, and more. Actually, thats probably not true, I wouldn't leave over these issues or the postitions certain people hold about them, it's bigger than that for me---I just think that church has become about little more than niche iterations of certain interpretations of what christian faith means and most of them don't strike me as particularly interesting anymore--that certain people think this or that or adopt this or that form of expression? who cares? I don't anymore.

So why did I respnd to this little back and forth then? Well, in between my feelings and my actions exists a little disconnect that I am actively working on and this stuff falls into that space for right now.

Lightbulbs

I don't know how much attention has been paid to the 'lightbulb wars' but in the past few months there have been a number of debates surrounding a 2007 law that essentially brings an end to old lightbulb technology and replaces it with newer, more energy efficent, longer lasting and slightly more expensive incandescent lightbulbs. This has touched a nerve, bringing up issues of government control and the like. Michele Bachmann for instance said, "The American people want less government intrusion into their lives, not more, and that includes staying out of their personal light-bulb choices"(there we go with the mythic 'american people' that politicians of all stripes claim to speak for!).

I don't really want to wade into that debate as much as use it as an access point for thinking about some shifting cultural moments. I was reading an interview with media ecologist Douglas Rushkoff on the always enlightening TNI, in which he used lightbulbs as a way of understanding how media functions,

"So it’s like the lightbulb is a media environment, right? You turn on the lightbulb, and you have a different environment because of that medium. But print is a media environment that encourages certain ways of looking at the world. Television changes us. Internet is a media environment. Somehow our media environment, combined with our economic environment, can really amplify one another’s effects in dangerous ways."

He also spoke about the important shift of the past few years which in his mind is a shift from futurism to what he terms presentism, that essentially we aren't a forward-looking society anymore (this could be a sign of the final end of modernity or not, but it would seem to signal a significant shift in the cultural psyche away from a dominant perspective rooted in the Enlightenment project). Elsewhere, Rushkoff has defined presentism as this,

"We shifted to this leaning forward futurist viewpoint to a “woah we’re here” presentism, it’s the shock of “Oh my gosh, we’re alive right now, but I’m not living for the now.”Nothing changes where you are right now, but we don’t think that way. The new thing that’s supposed to change our lives, when it doesn’t, we don’t know what to do."

Now, I think of two competing, or at least parallel, ideas about the present here. The one is the 'spiritual' discipline of being present in the world, and the idea that it is an important thing to be alive to the present moment, and we use any number of techniques, meditation, prayer and the like to condition ourselves to being 'in' the present moment. It's interesting to me that Rushkoff finds that living in the present, in the now, seems to eradicate the potential for change, and perhaps more importantly, challenges the idea that we are supposed to be changing. Presentism seems to be about media demands for us to paying more attention, and this partly seems to be a bit of a negative for Rushkoff and he goes on to posit that things like Asperger's and ADD are perhaps resistant mechanisms to the demand from media to be more attentive? The Sex Pistols line, 'no future' was going through my head whilst I was reading the article.

Again, I don't want to debate that as much as point out, that however we parse it, something is changing in the cultural psyche and that this is important. There are going to be any number of ideas about the present moment, but I do think Rushkoff is pointing out something important here--the path he takes with it has appeal and non-appeal for me--but nonetheless, there seems to be a tangible shift in the way we are processing the world around us and a certain inertia accompanies that--noone seems to know what to do, or is perhaps afraid to make a move. I can only apply this anecdotally to my own small worlds, that of a certain acedemia and the diverse church environs and economies that I inhabit--all of them characterized by inertia as the future-lean gives ways to presentism.

 

technology repeats theology

We had a very interesting class Monday. We were joined by some professors from Beijing--who are visiting the school. How they wound up in my class I dont know but they were a delight--there were some language issues, but thankfully one of them was able to translate for the others. They were from the religious studies department of Beijing University--the Dean, who teaches philosophy, a taoist philosopher, a marxist studies prof. and a professor of Christian studies, who recently translated some of Graham Ward's stuff into Chinese. The class topic was theology and the body and we began with a reflection on Catherine of Siena and then moved backwards and forwards considering the various ways in which the idea of 'body' has been understood throughout Christian history, and how we might think about it today. There was an interesting roadblock of sorts when it came down to the idea of the 'soul' between those who were very clear in their belief i its existence, but less clear in their ability to explain it in any meaningful way. I'm not a big 'soul' man, unless it's Marvin Gaye--I believe its simply language trying to get at something beyond words. 

I did raise a point made by John Caputo that "technology repeats theology," meaning that miracles in the Bible become medical and technological miracles today--opening up new space to think about the relation between the material and immaterial worlds.

I have been thinking through a book idea around this--techno-theology, exploring the relationship between technology and flesh-the organic and the mechanical, the material and the immaterial, stuff like that.

on premature death and pregnant vacuums

I have read a couple of things of late that seem to have some resonance with other conversations I hear in the various realms I inhabit connected to church futures etc. The ongoing debate over emerging church and the like, and particularly the continuing, although admittedly more muted lately, discussion over the demise of the emerging church. I tend to refrain form the immediacy of these flurries because I think they require a bit more reflection, at least they do for me personally in order to get to the heart of my thinking. But I wanted to wade in on that conversation a little bit because I think it points to an important point about how we deal with historicity. In Networks Without A Cause, which I am enjoying immensely, Lovink quotes McKenzie Wark, in connection with the future of media studies, but the comment seems to have some ramifications beyond that realm in my mind. Wark says,

"Having to always declare something over is connected to refusing to historicize. There are two ways of situating (media studies) historically. One way is to see new media as add-ons or extensions of old media. Start with cinema for example, and position the new as same-but-different within this space of thought and disciplinary organization. The other way starts with the phenomena before us - games, mobiles, internet - how do they call into being entirely new (long range) genealogies? How do they call us to reject or revise exisiting histories? It needs to be allied with three methodologies: the conceptual, the ethnographic and the experimental. The mere reading of "texts" does not serve us well at the moment."

Now, as I have already noted, there is a very specific context at work here, namely media studies, but nonetheless there are similarties at work within the church horizon in my mind. Not the least of which is to declare something over or dead, in order to get around dealing with the implications. I am not so much pitching in support of emerging church as I am seeking to address a tendency which I have noticed quite a lot in my few decade relation and involvement with church stuff. Wark offers two ways of dealing with an issue--and in my mind when it comes to new church paradigms, the former has governed the conversation but what if the second approach is taken. What if different questions are asked of the issue? What if the questions related to things like alternative/emerging whatever-the-fuck-name-they-pick-church are more probing of both the new arena and the old?

We have lived through the death of so many things--god, modernity, secualrism, sprituality, rock, hip-hop, on and on, but in virtually every case, those death-clarations are--well, wrong, especially if death is viewed as some kind of finality! None of those things has really 'died'--it's just laziness I think, and perhaps fear, fear of being eclipsed.

The second component is from an article by Slavoj Zizek in the Guardian about the next steps for the Occupy movement. Again, a couple of comments that seem to have resonance beyond their context. He speaks of the Occupy protesters as having created a vacuum in what he calls, the hegemonist ideology, but more importantly that "time is needed to fill this vacuum in in a proper way, since it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly New." The movement isn't new, it opens up space for the New and at present we are in a pregnant vacuum. I think the same may be true of the newer Christian movements like emerging/emergent/alternative etc.--they are not the new movement--they just made the space, the pregnant vacuum.

Something is waiting to be born. Now we can debate whether anything in this world can truly be New (guess it might depend on how one interprets Solomon and how we interpret what 'new' means), but something needs to change, that is the message of those rag-tag groups--change, not for changes sake, but because it is needed, desparately needed within religion in my mind. So let's not rush too quickly to declare things over--let's wait and be around to give birth to something.

no news is good news?

According to a little blurb on Mental Floss, on Good Friday in 1930, the BBC announced that there was "no news" and proceeded instead to play some piano music. In our age of information glut, where 'news' is so diluted that it seems to mean 'information of any kind however banal, that somehow we think we all need to know this' the idea that there would be 'no news' is incomprehensible. What a relief on some levels. It gets more and more difficult to imagine a time when information was in short, or shorter, supply. Now it's been said that the amount of information in the New York Times alone exceeds the amount of information a person in the 17th century would have received in their entire life--I don't know if that is even a valid reference point, a  more telling one might be the difference between the amount of information one received or was exposed to in 1930 versus today, which I am sure could be determined if one were to just 'google' it!!

Of course, in the 1930s information came to us in a smaller number of ways, and at an entirely different speed. it was the age of radio, so things could be relayed quickly, but what was deemed worthy of relay was significantly different I would imagine-information,I mean there is always something happening, but whether or not we 'need' to know about it is another question. And, like many other things, 'news' was in the hands of a different kind of control mechanism, much more centralized, probably government run etc, this was way before the democratization of many of the things-and it was also defined differently.

I am deep into Geert Lovink's Networks Without A Cause and one of the things he briefly touches upon is the idea of the 'politics of traffic.' He applies that term to the link culture in web 2.0 environments but it seems to me that there is resonance here--a different kind of traffic politics was in play on good friday 1930--one that perhaps should occasionally make an appearance in our world, but what would we all do with that silent time and how would we cope with the anxiety of not-knowing??--but piano music as a substitute? I'm thinking OK Computer might be a better musical choice for a no news moment in 2012.

Unplug from the god of religion?

Before I get into this particular post, it seems that a couple of posts I wrote went astray, not sure what happened, they seem to have disappeared completely, so my lack of posting this past week was not intentional--and they were really, really good posts, haha!!!

Anyway, back to this post, which I will post immediately after writing it to avoid whatever issue took the last one. I teach at a fairly conservative evangelical theological seminary, and I don't think I would be too far off base to suggest that my particular theological positions, such as they are, are not the norm by any stretch of the imagination, but there are perhaps a surprising number of students who do not fit the imagined student constituency, and I manage, by nature of the kinds of classes I teach, to interact with many of them. I have been engaged in a long-term book reading group with a number of students over the years whose progressive and imaginative theologizing has surprised and informed my own again and again. That said, there are any number of students who are way more conservative and rigid than I and I get to interact with them as well. All of that means that my classes can be quite wild journeys--lots of back and forth, lots of provocations and occasional upsets.

My latest class is Theology and Culture, a broad syllabus looking at the relationship between theology and culture, followed by some cultural engagements, designed to introduce ideas about enagaging theologically with the world around us---something that comes as revelatory to some, but more often than not, is something that many of the students simply haven't been equipped for thus far.

I am interested in intersections, the places where any number of things meet, connect and diffuse, and the past couple of weeks we have been exploring the intersections of four things: theology, church, religion and christianity. Part of the process is examining where we are and what might have brought us to this place. With these four topics there is a lot of overlap which is why I clumped them together. yesterday we had a pretty lengthy conversation about religion versus spirituality (cue eye-rolling? yes, but I actually think it is an under-evaluated continuum in terms of exegeting where people are at and going--lots of simplistic interpretations--like most things today it is complex), and we wound up discussing that viral video of the spoken word about hating religion and loving Jesus. There were any number of reactions in the room, ranging from non-plussed to excited. I have to admit that it was my responses that elicited the most reaction. I said that while I could acknowledge the frustratons and legitimate concerns voiced in the video, my real issue was that he had not broken free of his own conceptual horizons and the latter part of the video collapsed for me into a typical understanding of the cross/jesus/sin/god/etc. and that it wasn't religion per se that was his problem, it was his theological grid. This of course, led to discussions about the work of Jesus on the cross--the place of sin/forgiveness etc.

As you may know, I'm a bit of a death-of-god type, so for me the cross means something other than what it might mean for someone else. The conversation didnt get heated at all--it was just surprising to me, no it wasn't, it was affirming once again, that the real work that needs to be done is on the theological--we spend an inordinate amount of time examining forms--what works what doesn't--but theology? It's secondary, even tertiary at times it seems, when it comes to really thinking through that state of things.

It seems to me that we are witnessing the disintegration of the concept of religion in the West, and it is morphing and transforming beneath our feet. The response I think is stronger theological self-definition, a rigorous examination of all aspects of our 'believing' and the avoidance of what Graham Ward names as fetishization--which can only be accomplished by some serious theological reflection and reaction I think. The problem for me with that viral video is that he is unplugging from the wrong thing, or maybe only unplugging from half of the story--it's not just the structures of religion in and of themselves, its the god of those structures-what Bonhoeffer called deus ex machina. Our viral poet still seems lowering that god down into world and until that changes...

plenty

"Do not ask yourself if you can or cannot cope. It is not about adaptation or choice. The Greek god of hunting and rustic music, pan, is a symbol of plenty and abundance and has never been stigmatized as a problem. Humankind was always impressed by the billions of stars shining in the clear night sky-and never was in a panic about its plentitude." Franco Berardi

I was impressed by the ideas drawn from Italian philosopher Franco Berardi, in one of the books I am presently reading--Geert Lovink's, Networks Without A Cause--which I am finding very stimulating. The book is a critique of social media, but it is also a critique of theories around social media and the way ideas or opinions get traded with little critical reflection on their holistic engagement with issues at hand. Berardi's quote at the top of this post comes in a chapter on the Psychopathology of Information Overload and I really appreciate the way Lovink tackles it--mainly by challenging the idea that too much information is the problem--again, quoting Berardi, "the problem is not in the technology. We have to come to terms with it. The killing element is the combination of info stress and competition. We have to win, and to be the first. The real pathogenic effect is the neo-liberal pressure that makes the network condition so unlivable-not the abundance of information itself."

This book is one of the first social media critiques that actually stimulates my own thinking about it. I have found many of the books on this subject just a little too confident of their own veracity and I haven't fully bought the arguments put forth. This one, however, is really working for me--I find myself generating a new resource pool in terms of thinkers, books and concepts---semio-capitialism/personal information autonomy/hedonic lassitude/soft narcosis/depressive hedonia--(just in one chapter).

It's a good read and may challenge some ideas already firmly ensconsed in your own reasoned reflections on this topic, but one of those books that should be included in any comprehensive reflections on this topic.

radio radio

 

At the end of the 70s, while Elvis Costello was at his most bile-spilling, vitriolic, lyrical brilliance, he released a little gem, Radio, Radio--a rant against corporate control in the radio and music industries--censorship, and the power of those who were able to determine what got played on the radio and what did not. For much of the rest of the 20th century radio seemed to slip farther and farther down the scale of media-interest as television and particularly the visualization of music via MTV etc. reduced radio to a product of a bygone era. Actually, radio has remained a constant and viable source of communication, it seems to have a long and productive lifespan, it just slipped out of view a little. It used to be the communication centrepiece, but was eclipsed by tv, video and all the other visual media that emerged in the 20th century. But...radio has returned, risen from the ashes, but also, like the 'return of God' it is not a return to the same radio as the return to the sacred can hardly be characterized as a recovery of old forms. In fact, radio, probably isn't radio in the strictest definition of the word anymore--it's quite often digital and it's new nexus point is the Internet. Digital technologies and environments seem to have re-vitalized radio and once again it is finding its way back into peoples living rooms--not as the centrepiece perhaps, but as a component of a multi-mediated, multi-technological communication frame that people create to meet their particular needs and fancies. Internet radio, podcasts and iPad apps have allowed radio stations large and small to find new audiences--global audiences in some cases. Shows like Radiolab and apps such as KCRW's Music Mine are helping to bring the idea of radio back on our horizons. Of course it could be argued that radio has remained constant and viable during the entire late 20th century communications revolution--it just had to find new ways to insert itself into the cultural psyche...there might be a lesson there for religious practitioners, or not.

on reading

I have noticed a bit of a shift in the way people seem to be reading books. What I have to say is both anecdotal and not even fully thought-through, but I wanted to get some thoughts out as this is something I have been coming into contact with lately.

There is, of course, much debate about books--whether they are dead(like rock music,cds, cassettes, vinyl etc.), because new technologies are offering other ways of accessing information. There are those who bemoan the shift to digital and e-books of various incarnations--the debate is essentially not much different from the vinly versus mp3 conversation--each side arguing the benefit of their preference. personally I am an equal opportunity consumer--I enjoy the various mediums for different reasons and purchase books accordingly.

The conversation that interests me more, is the 'how we are reading' because I think that has changed quite dramatically. In my various professions I spend quite a lot of time in environments where books and their content are often a principle focus--classrooms, discussion groups etc. What I have noticed is a subtle shift in attitude towards books. I find many people, including lots of grad students, incapable of actually reading a book by its own limits--most academic books of any worth state the intentions up front and usuaslly sketch out the landscape and the criteria by which a particualr subject will be addressed. But is is amazing how little effect that seems to have on the interaction readers have with it. They apply their own criteria to it--and maybe that is the point I am trying to make--we read our own views onto the text and judge it based on our own preferecnes rather than engaging with its content and coming to conclusions afterwards--we like or dislike--based on our apriori views. It's another example of the judgment culture we live in (see Lauren Zalaznick's Ted Talk), and it doesn't promote learning in my opinion.

Perhaps it is just me, but I find it increasingly difficult to have a book discussion about a book and not have everything surrounding the book--the information not included in its pages, dominating and shaping the conversation. on one level i dont think this is completely new--but what is new I think is the way books and authors are approached now. We come at books aware that they are incomplete tomes--the wealth of information we can access about a particualr topic is so great that we know a book will only scratch at certain pieces of an issue or topic, but even though we know the limitations, there seems to be an unforgiveness, or perhaps an expectancy, that everything will be included anyway.

I may not be making sense or I might be saying something others have known for years. I can only say that in the past couple of years of teaching I am seeing this more and more. It seems to reflects a certain polarizing within the culture--we read what we want to read and avoid the contrary or converse opinion, or if we read it, we cannot get beyond what 'we think' to let the author present his or her argument before. I find it a frustrating exercise these days. It's not first a question of whether or not we 'like' a book, it is about whether or not there are ideas and things to interact with, whether the author has delivered on a particular promise, whether they actually wrote about what they said they were going to write about--there is too much preferential judgment and not enough engagement with a text if you ask me--whether it is in print or digital.