A Sound of Sheer Silence

{I wrote this about a month ago, when the Bruenig piece was current, and then decided not to post it.  After thinking about what I wrote today , I changed my mind.  This is basically unedited from that original draft, except for a few typo fixes.} Friend-of-the-blog Elizabeth Bruenig, who is now a columnist for the Washington Post (yay!), wrote an excellent and thoughtful piece about the recent Aziz Ansari  incident/revelations.  Bruenig's position, if I might summarize it, is that the Sexual Revolution brought with it the notion that sexual interactions should be treated in essentially the same way as any other sort of social interaction.  And, in the context of other, normal social interactions, it is considered to be appropriate and praiseworthy to try to meet the needs and wants of other people.  So, as an example, if I am in a group that wants to go out and eat sushi, but I don't really care for sushi all that much, I might keep my objections to myse...

I've taken a while to get out this post, the final one in a series talking about Rev. Shroyer's book Original Blessing  (first two posts here and here ), because I've changed my mind about the book in the interim.  Well, that's not quite right.  It's less that I no longer have the concerns about some parts of the book that I had when I first read it and more that I increasingly think that those concerns are not all that important to the overall narrative of the book and the questions it is trying to answer.  The more I think about and reflect on the book and what it is trying to do, the more I think the places where I agree with it are far, far more significant than the ways that I would frame some things differently. In that light, let me (finally) cut the chase and talk about the part of the book that gave me pause.  In the book, Rev. Shroyer calls us to make a decisive move away from the Augustine formulation sketched out in the first post and to replace i...

I have spent the last two weeks working on this post, in which I hope to say something about Rev. Danielle Shroyer's book Original Blessing .  I say "hope," because this post has gone through a series of drafts, none of which I have liked very much.  I know, in a big picture sense, what I think of the book--it is an easy, enjoyable read, well worth your time, that shows all of the promise and problems of a certain kind of progressive Christian theology and the way it avoids (or tries to avoid) the problems of classical theology.  But I never quite could get that into a written form that worked--it either came across as more negative about the book than I actually felt, or never really explained the places where I had problems with the book, or just otherwise never really fit together. So, I am going to approach this from another direction, and talk about Augustine.  This direction was spurred by an article I was linked to today in Elizabeth Bruenig's twitter timeli...

Over the course of the last week, the Take-O-Sphere has been awash with reactions to Rod Dreher's long promised book on the Benedict Option, titled, well, The Benedict Option.   Elizabeth Bruenig had a good review , that I talked about briefly here .  Rachel Held Evans had some reasonable reactions on Twitter, provoking Dreher's now reflexive response of accusing her of preparing to become informant for some hypothetical anti-Christian Gestapo , a charge we recall he leveled on David Gushee some time ago .   Damon Linker and the New York Times's David Brooks  also wrote thoughtful responses, and it is those two pieces that I want to talk about for a bit. I have stated my objections to the entire enterprise of the Benedict Option in the past , and I stand by those objections .  But what I think gets the least amount of attention in thinking about Dreher's project is how monomanically focused his vision of Christianity is.  Linker's piece hits on the key fa...

So, Rod Dreher's long promised tome on the Benedict Option--entitled The Benedict Option --has been released, and the great Elizabeth Brueing has a review/reflection that is (not surprisingly) very much worth reading.  Bruenig hits on one of the core problems with Dreher's thesis, which is whether it is truly possible, desirable, or authentically Christian to withdraw from political life in the way Dreher suggests.  That critique is an important one, and I think Bruenig is 100% correct. But as I was reading Bruenig's review, I was struck again by how much I don't buy the basic conceptual premise that underlines all of this Benedict Option talk.  The master narrative here goes, as Bruenig well sets it out, something like this: [T]he Christian West began to lose its way in the fourteenth century, when the English Franciscan friar William of Ockham pioneered the theory of nominalism, which held there is no inherent order or purpose encoded into the material world. Thi...

As I write this post, Pope Francis is here in these United States, tooling around in a Fiat .  Commentators have offered a number of angles to explain his choice of vehicle, such as the Italian connection, its fuel efficient characteristics, its small size, etc.  All of those likely have something to do with it, but I think one dimension is that Pope Francis, in a gentle way, is trolling his critics.  "Oh yeah?  You don't like the fact that I don't fit into your preferred image of the Pope as the Great and Powerful Oz?  Well, here's some more of what you don't like, courtesy of a cute Italian compact car and my smiling face inside." If Francis is trolling his critics, it appears to be working.  About six months ago, Ross Douthat predicted in the New York Times that Pope Francis's embrace of distributive justice-oriented positions and environmental concern would be taken in stride by the economic conservatives among the Catholic commentariat.  "[T...

Well, we can stop trying now.  We have officially taken the concept of the "non-story" to a new, and in my view untouchable, high.  Don't let anyone tell you that we cannot achieve wonders in our time, because the last few days have proven that we can.  As Pope Francis would certainly be comfortable saying, " Si se puede ." I am speaking of course about the guest list of people who will be present with President Obama to greet Pope Francis when he arrives in Washington .  Did you know that Bishop Gene Robinson, a known homosexual, will be there?  Did you know that Sister Simone Campbell, who is openly a member of a Catholic religious order, we be there?  Did you know that no less than two transgendered people will be present?   Well, you do if you have been reading the Catholic Right  and its various publications and organs. What you wouldn't necessarily know, because many of the articles fail to tell you, is that Bishop Gene and Sister Si...

This last part of Father Alison's talk (the other four can be found  here here here and here ) is, in my view, the most thought-provoking and challenging.  In the last two posts, Alison touched on how individuals need to seek out and foster a kind of sacred space for people to come together and be wrong together.  That space, in principle, is the Church.  But, as seen in the first two parts, there are problems with the way the Church approaches that task, problems that stem in large part from the language with which it understands itself.  Bringing these two ideas together, Alison provides a sketch of how we should think about the Church and how the Church should talk about itself. But, first, some starting principles. If it is true that what Jesus did was to knock out the centrepiece of the mechanism by which humans make anything sacred, that is, by offering himself up to death in a typical sacralised lynching so as to show that the victim is innocent, and...