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.

-------------------

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.

corpus mysticum: performing the body of christ

Today (Thursday) is the celebration of the Feast of the Ascension, acknowledgement of the final phase in the physicality of Jesus, from birth, growth, tranfiguration, breaking, crucifying, death, resurrecting, and finally, ascending. I have been thinking a lot about bodies lately-(I have been working on a book idea about technology and bodies)-I think many people in church life have been--not just around issues of gender and sexuality, but beyond that towards new thinking about things like materiality and subjectivity, make-up--body/soul/spirit etc, consciousness--you name it, it all seems up for grabs. So I have been giving particular thought to the body, both of Christ and 'us' in this post-Resurrection period.

The transformation or phases of Jesus' physicality are of interest. I mean, sure all God, all man--but his physicality always seems to be the site of fairly unusual activity and possibility throughout the gospels--walking on water, healing by word or touch, multiplication of resource--the list goes on, but once you get to the Tranfiguration things take an even deeper path-from that point, his walk towards death, and then life again, puts Jesus' body in the centre of the action--his body, his flesh, becomes the sight of some interesting exchanges which culminate in this final exchange--he ascends and then re-emerges, in us as the body of Christ. This is paul isn't it? We perform the body of Christ. I think what is coming to fruition in my thinking is a new valuation of the body--I think it has been generally undervalued in my particular church and theology experiences--it's a dangerous thing, the human body---it's subject to 'vile passions' and in a culture where the immaterial, subjective part of humans (spirit/soul) have dominated theological thinking and process, the body is all too easily dismissed, discounted etc. I realize that we hear lots of talk about the 'body of Christ'--the church, the community of faith, but I am scratching at something more than that--human physicality--the value of flesh--what are we doing with our bodies and why? The actions of our bodies connect us to the meaning of our bodies I think--sex, illness even, somehow these things point to the worth, the value, the beauty of embodiment, of physicality.

Graham Ward wrote about the gendered body of Christ overcoming and transcending its gendered and ethnic limitations, and posited this as a pathway to understading human sexuality or gender issues in a new light or way. I think there is a lot there, and I have spent a long time reflecting on that idea, but that kernel of an idea has morphed into wider areas and possibilities for me--anyway, its Ascension Day and I'm thinking about that in different ways today than I used to.

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.

 

one nation under socialism

Artist Jon McNaughton, has quite a career going. His work is decidedly right of centre. One of his recent works is entitled, One Nation Under Socialism, and as you can see above, features Obama holding a burning copy of the Constitution. There has been a bit of a ruckus over this particular piece, which is not unusual with this artists's work. On his web site he is somewhat coy about what he is really trying to say, but he did say this,

"“This is my pledge. I pledge allegiance to the United States of America and not to an ideology that could never stand: one nation — under socialism — divisive with no liberty or justice for anyone.”

Here's another one, it's called, One Nation Under God.

By the way--the one nation under socialism this week is France. Come back Kinkade all is forgiven.

the friends and friends of friends on facebook

I just disconnected from Facebook. I did in a moment, at a traffic light, but it was a long time coming. For a while now, I have been thinking quite deeply about my relationship and feelings about this particular expression of social media. I have always been a little ambivalent. I first joined to communicate with friends in the UK who told me they always responded to messages there quicker than e-mail. So at first, it was simply a long-distance communication tool but then Friend Requests started to come--confirm, confirm. Then people I didn't remember or didn't know and then that moment--do I 'confirm' or 'not now,' well, they are friends of friends of mine so...why not? Then the numbers grow, 'find me on Facebook' became part of my vernacular and friends brought friends, nothing particularly serious, essentially innocuous. I have not been very active apart from messaging people occasionally and confirming people. But for some time I have been a little conflicted about confirming people I dont really know--but I dont interact much, I never 'like' anything and most of the time I pay little attention to what's in the news feed. But today for some reason I took an extended look and didn't like what I saw. My feed was full of negative comments about Obama's comments in support of the rights of same-sex couples to marry. What I found most troubling was that I didn't actually know many of these people--I had friended on the basis of other friends or on some kind of tenuous connection--church, seminary--mostly, I must admit around the issues of religion and culture.

Now, if you don't like the idea of same-sex marriage thats up to you, but I don't want to be connected to the ridiculous comments about how America is anti-Christian, how Obama is the devil, how he has rejected God's clearly defined Truth...blah blah blah. Because my opinion is different, doesn't mean I assume some moral superiority or don't want to engage in meaningful dialogue, but I am not going to sit around and see a whole bunch of mad shit in the feed of a social media tool that I have opted to use. 

My initial reaction was to go through and edit out, you know 'unfriend,' but then I thought that perhaps I would just give it all a miss and liberate my self from it. In Geert Lovink's marvellous book he writes,

"By questioning the self-evidence of Facebook and its befriending algorithm, we already make a first step toward refusing corporate-controlled social media platforms."I prefer not to." The next step could be to actively shape new manifestations of collective anonymous action: "I need to become anonymous in order to be present."

 I'd like to think that my decision to deactivate was a step toward refusing corporate-control, but  I was just pissed off with people on my page saying stuff that I thought was offensive and naive(it wasn't the postioning so much as the justifications that upset me), and I didn't want to have it in front of my face. I don't always react to dissenting opinions in this way, I try to remain open to any and every view--I think it's important to do so in the long run--but not on a social media platform that is so intimately connected with me.

Friendships come in all shapes and sizes--it was Nietzsche I think who nurtured the idea of 'star friendships' and of course, there are 'fair-weather' friends--we have many ways of speaking about friendship and facebook has undoubtedly brought new understandings to the concept--for good and bad I think. But what it comes down to for me is that some friendships are easily left behind, others, for a host of complex reasons, we stick with, even when they are difficult. I don't pick friends based on their opinions about particular issues (well, maybe music and dress haha!), I have been fortunate to have immense diversity in my friendships, and I accept them regardless of their opinions, but what I realized is that I need a more stringent process for accepting friends on social media platforms. There are some people who I only contact via Facebook, I'll have to do a little work to make sure I re-connect via other means. In the meantime, I am going to enjoy the freedom. One of my favourite quotes about friends comes from the movie Love is the Devil, in the mouth of Derek Jacobi playing the painter Francis Bacon,

"Real pain for my sham friends and champagne for my real friends." 

sex with nietzsche

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.

pOLITICS AND POWER

 

I am in a couple of reading groups. one of the book's we are taking up is Simon Critchley's Faith of the Faithless. Someone from the group forwarded a link to an essay by Critchley in Adbusters about the current state of politics and power. Much of it rang true to me. I was particularly struck by a short comment in response to an engagement with is son in which Critchley addressed his son's disillusionment with these words,

"...I had a conversation with my 19-year-old-son in a favorite London pub last Saturday – the Lamb on Lamb’s Conduit Street. He cares about the state we’re in and is really worried and really fears and to some extent hopes that something big might happen. He sees what is happening across the world and doesn’t know what to do. He is part of a huge culture of disillusionment and disappointment among youth. (And if there is one central issue that the last year of global uprisings has raised, then it is that of youth. The question of youth is the question of the future, and that future has disappeared. We who are no longer young have to try and understand this and not simply adopt a patronizing attitude toward youth). My son is disillusioned and doesn’t see what good it would serve if he got involved. He feels powerless. I think this is a general feeling of his generation."

Worth a read, and an opportunity to feature the vocal stylings of Peter Tosh, founding member of the The Wailers, "You can't blame the youth," but we do.

(ignore the bob marley and the wailers tag--they were the wailers until peter and bunny left)

holy anorexic

The Episcopal Church acknowledges Catherine of Siena on this day. April 29th 1380 is when she died at 33 years of age. She is an interesting figure to say the least. Ac ouple of summers ago I was with a bunch of students in Italy for some summer classes and part of my task was to speak about Catherine of Siena in advance of our visit to her hometown. She, along with St. Francis, are the two patron saints of Italy and their birthplaces draw thousands of pilgrims every year.

I found her very complicated, and I found talking about her even more so. One the one hand, her contribution to the church would seem to be important and effective. She managed to become an influential figure in the church when it was more than difficult for a woman to do so, her piety and charity drew male and female followers, she attempted to reform the clergy in profound ways. But she also campaigned for a crusade and had some quite troubling/startling dynamics in her personal life--not th eleast of which was a tendency to starve herself and deprive herself of any comfort during her life. This is what I found and continue to find very disturbing. Beginning at a very young age she seemed to use aversion tactics when her behaviour was challenged--she claimed that Christ himself appeared and gave her communion and she advocated mystical marriage, believing that people could liberate themsleves from what ailed them by complete and total abandonment to God's love--again, on the one hand, it seems quite benign, but on the other, when combined with extreme ascetic behaviours and practices of extreme deprivation, it gets a little worrying for me.

I am troubled by the way we move quickly past self-denial into self-negation, denigration even, and then seem in awe of people who do this. the way the body figures into religous behaviour and pratcie is interesting to me.

Teresa of Avila, another mystic and reformer, was said to have used olive twigs to make herself vomit, so that she could only receive nutrition from the communion host. In his book, Holy Anorexia, Rudolph Bell estimates that almost half of 170 medieval Italian saints exhibited signs of anorexia.

The role and view of the female body in medieval Europe is also a factor. Part of the view was that the male body was shaped and fashioned by God but the female form with its curve and obvious sexuality was shaped by women themselves. It is also said that the female body was more prone to visions, trances and even levitation, as well as stigmata and many of these factors seem to have also resulted in examples of forms of ascetism and often what today would probably be termed anorexic behaviours.

 "Anorexia and other manifestations of the body provided the medieval woman a unique opportunity to affirm the true power of mystico-religious rules. A woman was destined to get married with whomever was designated according to family origin; otherwise, she entered a convent closed to the outside. In the latter case, however, the medieval woman was not allowed to study or acquire clerical power nor to speak in public or to preach. However, the complete renunciation of the body made it possible for a woman to foster, express, and experience her sensations and desires as manifestations of faith and religious expression. "Holy anorexia" was a confirmation of the role of mystical power, providing the woman with a way to convincingly affirm her sanctity to her confessors in whom she placed her trust and gave her charge. In fact, she placed her trust in her confessors in the same way that trust was placed in the family, which guaranteed in return to nurture her. Anorexia, together with flagellation and other bodily suffering, became the way for a woman to achieve holiness."

This 'empowering dynamic' is an interesting take on things. I don't doubt that it is true, whether it is necessary today, or would raise different issues about female empowerment and the like is another conversation--not that I am saying that everything is peachy for women today, just that we do live with different views of gender, sexuality and identity, and that ought to have an impact.

The other component that comes into play is the role that ascetism plays in our world today. For much of human history, Western history anyway, our view of the self was much more dualistic--soul/body etc. and it seems that for many the important part of the human was the subjective self-the soul or whatever one chooses to call it-therefore denial of the physical body seems to have been linked with ideas about refining the pathway between the soul and god--hence fasting, self-denial, and the litany of practices we adopt to get connected to the divine.

Today we use those practices still, sometimes attached to religion, sometimes just to life. One of the things that strikes me is the way we often use food medicinally--there is a lot of that here in LA--people with such particualr food habits and needs, they might even show up for dinner with their own food(I doubt that it is exclusive to this city, but its rampant). The tyranny of certain physiques or body-shapes is still governed by strict practices of diet and exercise--we put ourselves to extremes for the sake of body and self. I was watching one of the recent editions of A Day in the Life, Morgan Spurlock's weekly documentary on Hulu, and it featured Tim Ferris, author of the Four-Hour series of books, who uses food as a means to an end, way beyond simple nutrition.