Breathing (out, in, out, in)

Big week.  Tuesday is my “oral defense” of a set of three exams I’ve written this year.  I’m terrified, and yet so tired of being anxious about it that I’d do it tomorrow if I had the option.  If I pass, I will tackle my dissertation proposal.  If I fail, I’m going to be quite bitter about the student loans I’ve taken out. :-\  In any event, I am trying – with spotty success – to visualize positive outcomes, stay calm, etc.  When I saw this image in a recent Stylus article about the calligraphy of “Ian K.,” I printed it out and posted it above my desk, where I occasionally look up and think, “oh, yeah…”

(And yes, I justed outed myself as a penophile.)

 

Not dead, yet

Three years ago I mulled over the state of the religious left – as seen by media figures who were just beginning to notice there WAS such a thing, political observers who doubted its viability, and conservative figures eager to demean and undermine it.   Two recent studies show that the religious left is very much alive and kicking.  A study from the University of Florida reports that the religious left “is closing the so-called ‘god gap” (the theory that white religious Christians are inevitably conservative and Republican) and is likely to have increasing electoral visibility and influence during the Obama administration.  The 2009 Religious Activist Surveys (by the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics) finds “strikingly different religious profiles” (in terms of issue positions and priorities… would it be impolite to say “duh”?) between the religious left and right, but finds that at the same time activists in both camps are “deeply religious,” cite faith as a factor in their voting, and are equally engaged (albeit in slightly different ways) in political activism.

Charlotte Allen wrote her LA Times rant about the impending death of liberal Christianity in 2006.  (The direct link to her article seems to be broken, but my old blog entry has some excerpts, as does this link.)  ‘Course she didn’t say exactly when we’d meet our demise, and as we approach the end of 2009, Kenneth Wald, one of the authors of the University of Florida study, is declaring “we’re in an age where we’re likely to see a flowering of the religious left.”  But other observers think the religious left will lose relevance by being too quick to compromise on core positions, in order to curry favor with a religious right that never gives an inch.  Here’s Peter Laarman:

Health care reform provides a good case in point. A significant part of the conservative community is determined to insert a hard prohibition on federal abortion funding into the final reform legislation—a provision that will remove existing access to abortion services from the insurance plans of millions of women. Conservatives unhesitatingly frame this as an issue of fundamental conscience. In response, many good liberals bite their tongues and go along for the sake of the supposed greater good of achieving universal coverage.

The silencing of a progressive religious voice for the sake of creating an imaginary common ground is also evident in the informal agreement to remove entire issues—marriage equality, for example—from the table. Whereas abortion can be admitted to the conversation on the right’s terms, equal rights for sexual minorities cannot be admitted at all. The religious right’s position, “we’re not even going to discuss this,” becomes tacitly accepted by everyone else.

When the left compromises, the “goalpost” moves rightward:

…some notably sex-phobic evangelical and Roman Catholic individuals and entities have been rebranded as the progressive forces watch, while actual progressives (solidly feminist and pro-LGBTQ religious leaders) have disappeared from view.

Interesting point.  Are religious lefties more open to compromise?  (Is it that difference in neural wiring, again?)  Are we fatally attracted to it?  Will it be our undoing?

Just thought I’d toss this stuff in the mix, while co-blogger abc41 has us thinking about what religious progressives believe.

(Updated to fix my co-blogger’s tag.)

Progressive Christianity, first in a series

A while back, co-blogger abc41 mentioned she was reading “What Does a Progressive Christian Believe?,” a recent book by the late Delwin Brown.  I gently encouraged her to contribute her impressions here, and the result is posted below.  Your comments are desired!

What Does a Progressive Christian Believe?  On seeing this title, and from the perspective of a fairly new member of a so-called progressive Christian congregation, my initial response was something like, “not much.”  But that would be giving in to my inner smart-alec.  In fact, the more I read, the greater was my appreciation for what Delwin Brown has attempted to accomplish in this slender volume:  the rudiments of a progressive Christian theology, as he says, “for ordinary people, not specialists.”  As an unusually ordinary person, I will share my responses to his efforts in this and succeeding posts.  Here I consider the preface and opening chapter.

 For readers who might not know, Brown, a layperson, was dean of the Pacific School of Religion and taught Christian theology for many years at Iliff School of Theology, a United Methodist-related seminary in Denver.  He died this past September.  By all accounts, he was well regarded for his clarity of thought and irenic disposition, both of which are reflected in this particular writing.  I didn’t know him, but I wish I had.

In the book’s preface, Brown properly decries the silence of the progressive Christian voice in the U.S. public square.  “For the sake of our nation as well as the Church, we must be able to say what we believe, and why, and to say so effectively.” (p. xii)  So far, so good.  I’ve believed forever, from the earliest of the denominational squabbles over human sexuality beginning in the 1970s, that we liberals/progressives/lefties/whatever-label-you-want-to-use have allowed others to define the field and set the rules of the discourse.  So I dig the idea that we actually have to do our own constructive theological work, rather than deconstructing (or just dissing) what we don’t like or don’t agree with.

 BUT:  The first chapter, entitled “What Progressive Christianity is Not,” seems to me to be indicative of the dilemma that Brown so ably articulates.  If the aim is to say what we believe, etc., why spend more than 10% of the space, right off the bat, on “what we’re not”?  I confess to a lot of impatience with the negative approach.  For one thing, as George Lakoff has shown us, it concedes the frame to that which is being opposed.  We all remember the example, “Don’t think of an elephant.”  So, section headings like, we’re not the religious right, we’re not liberal Christianity, etc. just evoke those frames.  For another, it’s a defensive posture that is unappealing and unattractive. Tell me who you are, not who you’re not.   If I’d been Brown’s editor, that first chapter would have been taken up in each of the succeeding essays as examples of differentiation rather than simply negation.

Nevertheless, some gems are to be found within the negations, and in particular I found the following (p. 9) to be absolutely compelling:

 “The mind is not all of human nature by any means, but it is part of and essential to a healthy humanity.  Similarly, a full and credible theology is essential to a healthy Christianity.  Hence a progressive Christian movement, if it is to be more than a fad, must be resolutely theological as well as active in the pursuit of justice.”

Interestingly this passage was embedded in a discussion of the history of the Princeton fundamentalists.  Brown is asking progressive Christians to emulate, at least in some respects, the approach of these 19th-century evangelicals.  Oh, the shock!  Might Gandhi have been correct in his assertion that everyone (even an evangelical or a fundamentalist) has a piece of the truth?

In my admittedly brief experience in a “progressive Christian” congregation, I’ve observed a reluctance to engage in any sustained theological reflection.  Indeed, I’ve been told, “We don’t do theology here,” a statement I find quite astounding.  Elsewhere (p. xii) Brown stresses the urgent need for progressive Christians to “become articulate about the transforming faith that is within them.”  Do we fear that in the process, if we look too closely at ourselves, we won’t find that transforming faith?  So I applaud Brown’s commitment to the theological task, even if it took a while to get there. 

 Future posts will take up the subjects of the remaining chapters:  Bible, Christ, God, Humanity, Sin, Salvation, Church.  Hmm:  sounds like systematic theology to me.  Maybe there’s even (yikes) a creed in there somewhere.  Stay tuned.

The “affair” is back on

Credit where credit is due, and I suspect it’s not due to my break-up letter.   But the good news from Shakespeare’s Sister is that Emma Thompson has reconsidered her position re: Polanski and is asking that her name be removed from the petition protesting his arrest!

Bad to the bone?

The Better Half and I failed miserably at our plan to eat two vegan meals a day last week, World Go Vegan Week.  We’ve been “talking about” going vegan for two years, now, and just keep backing away from taking the plunge.  World Go Vegan Week seemed like a good time to transition.  We decided on two meals/day because we had some open dairy products in the ‘fridge – eggs and yogurt, primarily.  So we figured we’d make smoothies or scrambled eggs in the morning, and then have vegan lunches and dinners.

But I was frantically trying to finish a paper, and she was working some odd shifts, and we simply got lazy.  It was so much easier to reach for dairy protein than to plan balanced vegan meals.  So I’ve been trying to think about veganism differently – as a “practice” to adopt.  Perhaps that will sharpen my resolve and intentionality: make me plan ahead, put some care and time into meal-planning and meal-preparation.  We’ve gotten into some terrible habits in this hectic household: we eat primarily to keep from fainting, often standing up, and doing so many other things at the same time it’s a wonder we even taste the food.  Maybe we don’t?

One evening I read the October issue of Harvard’s Women’s Health Watch as I ate.  It includes a feature on “becoming vegetarian,” and summarizes some studies about the health effects of vegetarianism and veganism.  Here’s what froze my fork in mid-air: “In the EPIC-Oxford study, 75% of vegans got less than the recommended daily amount of calcium, and vegans in general had a relatively high rate of fractures.  But vegans who consumed at least 525 milligrams of calcium per day were not especially vulnerable to fractures.”   I’ve read up on the importance of getting alternative sources of calcium in a vegan diet, but that study has pretty solid evidence that not enough vegans do.  And the Women’s Health Watch article has another fun fact about dietary calcium: “Spinach and Swiss chard, which also contain calcium, are not such good choices, because along with the calcium they have oxalates, which make it harder for the body to absorb calcium.”   Bone health being an issue for women “of a certain age” (an age I’m getting closer to) in any event, this points to an even greater need for care and intentionality in a vegan diet – for gratitude AND fortitude!  I’ve been relying on Brenda Davis and Vesanto Melina’s Becoming Vegan.  Vegan Action is a great web resource.  If any you have good tips/recipes/etc. for making a healthy vegan transition, I’d sure love to hear them.  (And if you need some good health reasons to buttress the good environmental and compassion-reasons for going vegan, here’s a list.)

(Dang it.  I saved the first draft of this at 12:00 a.m. and missed the Nov. 3 dateline, so I’ve already broken my NaBloPoMo “streak.”)

No pain, no problem

A Thinking Reed links to a Mother Jones article on the livestock industry’s plan to pre-empt humane farming regulations in Ohio.  That article is disturbing enough, but an item on the MoJo sidebar also caught my eye.  “Guilt-free meat?” is about the prospect of genetically engineering cows and pigs, e.g., so that they will not experience pain, thus reducing the overall amount of suffering caused by factory farming.  It cites an article by Adam Shriver, “Knocking out pain in livestock: can technology succeed where morality has stalled?” which you can download from the journal Neuroethics (click on the PDF icon; as of now, the full-text article is free).  Shriver seems to think that factory farms are the only way to keep up with increasing per capita meat consumption, and that one way to address the primary ethical complaint against factory farms – that they inflict unnecessary suffering on animals – is to “replace current livestock with genetically engineered animals who lack the affective dimension of pain” (the dimension we experience as “suffering”), thus reducing overall suffering.  Problem solved!  And as an added bonus to meat eaters, “creating animals who do not suffer as much would result in higher quality meat” (because stress decreases meat quality, and reducing suffering will reduce stress).  Well, this is just a win-win, isn’t it?  Unless you get all hung up in that stuff about animals having inherent value, being subjects-of-a-life, each having its own dignity, etc.

I have to keep this short tonight, but you can bet I’ll come back to it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Gotta love Google Images; what a find, huh?)

My break-up letter to Emma Thompson

Dear Emma,

I hate to do this in such an impersonal way, but let’s face it: breaking up by text message, voicemail and fax is no longer considered as crass as it once was.  It’s just a small step to breaking up by blog.

Yes, I said “breaking up.”  It’s over between us, Emma.  My long imaginary affair with you has withstood many obstacles: my preference for staying with my partner of 15 years, your preference for being heterosexual and marrying Greg Wise, the impossible geographic distance between us, the fact that we’ve never met…  It even withstood “Junior.”

But now your name appears on a petition signed by luminaries who think it’s unfair to extradite Roman Polanski to stand trial for the rape of a 13-year old girl, and that is more than I can take.

Chores

I’ve wasted a lot of time today fussing around with the blog’s future home.  But I pushed my luck and tried to export the posts from here and import them to the new site.  The import got fouled up somehow, and nothing more recent than 2005 made it in.  And that’s after I got the maximum import file size increased by the new host!  And now I can’t get into the site at all.  I should’ve quit while I was ahead — at just about the point where I said to myself, “I really should stop doing this and get back to studying.”  Yep.

I’m not sure when I’ll make the move official, so keep checking here – if you’re still checking at all.  I’m taking the NaBloPoMo challenge: I’m going to try to post every day in November!  Just like the old days.  Which, as it happens, are the only days showing up on the new blog site.

(Update: Defeated, I decided to delete the partial-import and just start from scratch at the new site.  I’ll maintain a link to this site for older archives.)

Guest Post: Thoughts on Worship

My good friend and former co-blogger abc recently shared with me some thoughts she wrote for a church discussion on worship.  I thought they made good material for reflection, and asked her if she would share them on the blog.  To my delight, she agreed!  Feel free to comment.  If one or the other of us fails to respond to comments, it will be because I’ve forgotten to give the far-more-reliable  Ms. abc administrative access to the blog.  Let’s hope I remember to do that.  Thanks again, abc!

This reflection came about during a process of communal self-examination in the small “progressive Christian” congregation to which I belong.  In one of the all-congregation gatherings to share the findings of an outside consultant on the state of the congregation, I expressed concern about what seemed to me to be a lack of focus in the worship services.  Subsequently I was asked by two members what changes I would like to see in worship.  The following is my response, edited slightly to remove specific identifiers of the congregation.

I would be grateful to readers of “Left at the Altar” for feedback.  All theology is a work in progress!

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Thank you for the questions, and for the opportunity to try to clarify my comments regarding worship here .

First, let me be very clear that what I am saying in this message is to be construed as only my own views and reflections.  I do my best to respect others who may hold different views and to avoid being judgmental about the differences.  (I am not always successful in these efforts.)  I do not expect agreement; I am not trying to convince anyone of anything.  I am only speaking of and about my way of seeing things.

As I see it, what is at issue is the nature and purpose of what we are doing when we gather at 10:00 on Sunday morning.  We call it “worship.”  The word implies an entity to which the action of worshiping is directed.  My understanding of that entity is that for Christians it is God as revealed through Jesus who is for us the Christ, an embodiment of the divine and the one I want to follow.  (Notice that I have not said the sole embodiment of the divine, nor have I said that he – Jesus – is the Christ for everyone.)  In worship we receive and celebrate God through scripture, song, prayer, sermon, the Eucharist.  It’s fundamentally about God, then about our relationship with God, and then about us.  It’s certainly not just about us.

What I have just done is to propound a theology of worship.  It’s rudimentary, it’s inadequate and partial (as are all theologies), and it could stand for a lot of unpacking.  It could be greatly improved by dialogue.  In a congregation that wants to claim the identity of “Christian,” I believe there has to be agreement that Jesus is at the very least a distinctive revelation of God.  (As my divinity school teacher often said, “We look Godward through Christ.”)  I am a Christian; that is my religious identity and my religious commitment.  So for me, worship that focuses elsewhere does not offer the opportunity to do that looking Godward.

I believe it’s desirable and necessary to build one’s faith in many ways, through conversation and dialogue, reading, times of silence, personal devotions, works of service, and acts of justice.  I don’t believe that any of these is worship.  The time set apart for what we call worship not a time for education or socializing or focusing on programs; that’s what a Sunday School class or an adult learning forum does.  Worship is an end, not a means.

You have noticed that I am not answering your questions directly.  That is because I think they address second-order issues.  I believe that our congregation needs to recover and articulate a consensus on its identity, and to do the same regarding its theology of worship.   I have been told that this congregation doesn’t do theology.  Maybe so (although I would find that odd for a thinking Christian community, but maybe my assumptions are incorrect).  For me, there is in our worship a lack of sustained attention to God, or a kind of blurriness about God and an avoidance of Jesus that confuses me.  I miss a sense of awe and transcendence that for me is constitutive (not solely, but certainly in part) of authentic worship.  It has led to my finding alternative locations for Sunday worship that I experience as authentic.  So I don’t think that tweaking the service in its present form, or offering a variety of forms, is going to address my concern.

I want to be clear that I am not talking about adopting some creed, or installing some legalistic requirement of belief, doctrine, or dogma.  I am also not talking about robes and crosses, “smells and bells,” or any of those externals.   If the worshiping community (which includes pastoral leadership) is clear on its own self-understanding, the nature and purpose of worship will flow from that self-understanding, the content of worship will follow from that understanding of intention, and matters of the specific forms will follow accordingly.

I’ve tried to be as clear as I can be with the above, and I hope it’s helpful.  Please ask me about anything that doesn’t make sense to you.

I can explain…

I know I’ve neglected you, dearest blog, but I can explain.  I had two comprehensive exams this summer, and am staring down my orals, now.  November 10.  After that, I’ll take you somewhere nice, I promise.  Just us.  I’ve already got reservations: see?  No, there’s nothing there, yet.  (Well, at the moment it’s got some ancient entries that I half-successfully imported, but I’ll clean that up.)  And we’ll probably have to do some redecorating.  But it will be OURS.  Just stick with me through November 10, OK, blogheart?

Actually, I might even challenge myself to take part in National Blog Posting Month, just to get back in the posting habit.  Wouldn’t that be something?  Daily entries, just like when we first got together.  Give me another chance, bloggums.  I’ll do right by you.