A Sound of Sheer Silence

Doubt takes different forms.  When people think about doubt in terms of religion, people tend to think about big-picture structural doubts.  Does God exist?  Did Jesus rise from the dead?  Things like that.  But there are other, more subtle forms of doubt. Last night at Maundy Thursday service, I heard a stem-winder of a sermon.  The topic of the sermon was how Jesus's death and resurrection defeats the Empire of Death, which is powered by fear, scarcity, and division.  It was a fantastic sermon, and it presented the Christian message in its most vital and relevant possible form. And yet, as I was sitting there, the doubts came.  Did it really?  Did this story that we remember every year really defeat fear, scarcity, and division?  Or, even, did it provide the possibility of overcoming those forces?  Fear, scarcity, and division seem more powerful and more omnipresent then ever.  It doesn't feel like those forces are being ...

Twitter is mostly terrible, but there are a few bright spots, and one of them is Nicole Cliffe.  Moreso than anyone else I have found, she is able to tell consistently compelling stories in the weird and artificial format that Twitter provides.  She also has this incredibly ability to build community around her writing on Twitter, which sounds strange when you say it but is 100% true. Yesterday, Cliffe dropped a particularly amazing story, the beginning of which is: OKAY: I am going to tell the story of my bigamous grandmother at the current time. Please mute me if you heard it two years ago. Please do not steal it for an Elite Daily story (happened last time.) — Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) March 25, 2018 Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.  Beyond being a cracker of a tale, her story got me thinking about a question that I think is at the heart of so much what is going on in America right now.  Everyone, I think, recognizes that things have chan...

In case you think the Bible is irrelevant: The Book of Esther features a rich, bumbling, & misogynistic king with a fragile ego who relies his racist advisors to tell him what to do. He is ultimately bested by an orphan girl & some eunuchs. #HappyPurim ! — Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) March 1, 2018 Not sure what you mean by "literal," but I never said it was. It's a satirical diaspora story of resistance & Jewish survival, a sort of Persian "dark comedy," likely based on history but not a straightforward recitation of fact. LOTS more options than "literal" vs. "fairy tale." — Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) March 2, 2018 What struck me about this exchange is how it reveals a way of thinking about stories and how they work.  Rachel Held Evans asserts that the story of Esther is relevant and important to our current situation.  Based on that assertion, her conversation partner immediately jumped to the concl...

{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...

There is a dimension to the mass shootings in the United States,  most recently the horror yesterday in Florida , that cannot be reduced simply to the lack of meaningful gun control.  It is certainly the case that, absent access to the guns, the destruction caused by incidents such as this would be dramatically reduced.  To be clear, this is absolutely reason enough to justify such moves--I am in favor of the complete ban and confiscation of all firearms in private hands in the United States, along the lines accomplished in Australia and the UK .  If accomplishing this goal is in conflict with the Second Amendment, then I am in favor of repealing the Second Amendment.  I am a gun control absolutist, and I believe that any and all efforts toward that end are good and salutary.  If such measures were in place yesterday, these kids would be alive today. But. There is something going on that causes all of these people to take advantage of the opportuni...

Two stories came through the pipeline in the last couple of days that caught my attention.  The first was a piece by Ross Douthat arguing for some sort of extensive ban on pornography .  The other had to do with Shane Claiborne, one of the organizers of an anti-Trump revival in Lynchburg, Virginia , who received very strong push back due to his non-affirming stance on LGBT questions ( example here , see also Bill Lindsey here ), as well as the corresponding backlash to the backlash.  The backlash to the backlash primarily took the form of "how can you shun or criticize Claiborne and claim to be a classical liberal?," an example of which can be found here .  The link between these two stories is a discussion of classical liberalism, and so it is worthwhile talking about that for a bit. We can think about classical liberalism as having two dimensions.  The first is political--a particular area of human life will not be regulated or otherwise coerced by the stat...

Last night I listened to a discussion/debate between Ross Douthat and Dr. Massimo Faggioli, staged under the auspices of the Canadian Catholic media outlet Salt and Light Media, regarding the first five years of Pope Francis's pontificate ( video replay can be found here ).  Douthat has a book coming out about how Pope Francis is ruining everything (though, his posture at the debate was more like "he might ruin everything"), and Faggioli is and was one of Pope Francis's most articulate defenders.  While much of the ground covered was rather predictable, there were a couple things that cropped up that were interesting and clarifying for my own thought. I found myself listening to the debate while also following it on Twitter, especially following the excellent Twitter account of Dr. Natalia Imperatori.  To me, she got to the heart of the matter with this exchange: Changes in sexual ethics are a big thing, don't you think? asks Ross. "No" responds Mas...