A Sound of Sheer Silence

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...

One of the true joys that has come from writing this blog is that it has given me the chance to make what I call "Internet friends."  These are people that I have not met in person, but people who I have interacted with via Twitter or email as a result of something I written, or something they have written, or both.  Frank Strong of Letters to the Catholic Right   is one such person (by the way, you should absolutely check out his recent post on the goings on in the Episcopal Church , of which he is a member), as is Bill Lindsey of Bilgrimage .  Another one of my Internet friends is Maureen Clarke, a woman who lives in Manchester, England, and maintains an active Twitter feed involving the Catholic Church, UK politics, and healthcare issues in her neck of the woods. On Saturday, Maureen tweeted the following: The debate on LGBT dominated the Synod on the family yet nothing changes.  Why is sin always synonymous with sex?  What about greed power, etc W...

The previous posts in this scattershot series have been looking at various issues that come up from James Alison's book The Joy of Being Wrong.   Before diving ahead with that, I figured it made sense to circle back and ask a more foundational question--why bother with any of this Girard stuff in the first place?  Why do we need some outside source to further complicate an already complicated religion that is Christianity? The simplest answer to that question is that Girardian ideas have provided the best and most comprehensive set of answers to my questions regarding how to be a Christian in our time.  And because it seems that my questions are not particularly unique to me, but questions that lots of people seem to be asking, that means that Girard is providing answers to questions that people are asking. What are those questions?  I think there are four basic questions. 1.  What Should We Do About the Violence Around Us?   2015 was a year of violen...

In retrospect, I was primed to go Full Girardian long before I actually encountered Girard's work.  Back during my time with the Dominicans, I read the book that I believe is the greatest novel ever written-- The Brothers Karamazov  by Feodor Dostoevsky.  Dostoevsky is one of the handful of authors (alongside Shakespeare, Cervantes, Proust, and Steindahl) that Girard used as the basis for developing his initial theories on memetic desire, back when it was basically a literary construct.  Loving Dostoevsky put me halfway home to appreciating Girard. Reading Dostoevsky is always, for me, an interesting experience--it's not enjoyable in the normal sense (though, it's not un-enjoyable, either) so much as it is revealing.  The sense I get when reading Dostoevsky is that he is telling you the truth about the way things are, even when you can't exactly isolate the precise content of the truth he is communicating.  The first time I read the novel, my basic reacti...

[Note:  Since it has been a while, the first post on forgiveness is here ] I will state up front that I have always struggled with the Sacrament of Confession (or Reconciliation, to give it the more modern label).  I have always found the experience both unpleasant and spiritually unsatisfying.  More specifically, I have never gotten a handle on what I am supposed to do with the Sacrament.  Either it turns into me reciting a laundry list of faults and failings, the recitation of which feeds into a tendency to view myself entirely through the lens of my failures and deficiencies.  Candidly, this state of mind sets me on the path to the dark home of my depression, a home from which the grant of absolution provides no escape.  Or, it turns into an unfocused counseling session, which the poor priest is not really expecting or prepared to engage in, leading to a frustrating and unproductive experience.  For this reason, it has been several years since I...

[ Note:  The piece on Confession is in progress, but needs more work, so a detour for now.] When we worship an idol, our love, which is in principle a good thing, is trapped into grasping onto something made in our own image. This “something”, which we of course do not perceive as an idol, then becomes the repository for all the security and certainty which we idolaters need in order to survive in the world. We are unaware that the tighter we grasp it, the more insecure and uncertain we in fact become, and the more we empty the object which we idolize of any potential for truth and meaning. And of course because love is in principle a good thing, for us to get untangled from its distorted form is very painful. Nevertheless, against any tendency we might have to blame the idol for being an idol, it is really the pattern of desire in us, the grasping, that is the problem, not the object. For just as the Bible is not an act of communication that we can lay hold of, but the written m...

One of the subtle, but powerful, dimensions of James Alison's The Joy of Being Wrong is the way in which it asks pointed questions about the notion of God's forgiveness.  The message of God's forgiveness, delivered through Jesus, is a key component of what makes the "euangelion" the Good News.  And yet, this message of forgiveness is often not experienced by the recipients as a good news, but as a kind of burden.  What's going on here?  Alison suggests that our problems with God's forgiveness have to do with the way it is framed and presented.  In particular, Alison argues that God's forgiveness is not in fact a kind of emotional blackmail, notwithstanding the fact that it is often presented in "emotional blackmail-ish" terms. Consider this scene, one that I suspect that vast majority of you have been on both sides of at one point or another.  It's the evening, and your husband/wife/spouse/significant other/roommate/family member comes ...

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...

In the last part, we talked about the idea of why it is important to accept that all of us are wrong, and all of us are always capable of being wrong.  So, let us begin with where I know I have been wrong. I may well be wrong on the gay issue. That is to say, wrong in my belief that the discovery that there is just such a thing as being gay, is part of how the Gospel has worked in our midst, teaching us to discover what God’s creation really is by teaching us how to detect our lies and violence in ganging up on scapegoats. I may well be wrong about this. But I do not think I am wrong to trust that God wants to make it easier for me to discover how wrong I am, not more difficult; and he longs for me not to head up paths that do me no good, rather than capriciously leading me into them. But this means that there is a very serious obligation on me to make it easier for those I consider to have got it wrong, not more difficult. To reach them, not to provoke them. It means, for ins...

In the last few posts, we have discussed the idea that we don't know how to talk in Catholicism anymore, and out failure to talk makes many of our problems difficult, contentious, and insoluble.   So, what language should we use?  How can we talk to each other? We can start by paying attention to how we talk about this thing that we are all involved in together--the Church.  An almost endless series of metaphors for the Church have been employed throughout the centuries.  I tried my hand at the plow with the "train to the Land of Hope and Dreams" (borrowing from the Boss).  Alison has a similar, if perhaps more festive, suggestion: I’d like to say that for me being Catholic is being at a huge and very spacious party at which there are an awful lot of people, most of whom are not at all like me and with whom I don’t have much in common. Furthermore this is a party to which I have been invited not because I’m special, or any of the other people are special, b...