A Sound of Sheer Silence

COVID, and COVID-tide, has been very kind to me as an objective matter.  No one close to me has died of the Coronavirus, only two people I am close to contracted the virus, and both appear to have recovered completely.  I still have my job, and my employer is doing quite well.  COVID, ultimately, has been mostly an inconvenience, at least in terms of the direct impact it has had on me.   And, yet, COVID-tide has coincided with a crisis of faith for me.  Like many things, this has become only apparent to me as I have started to climb out of it in the last few weeks, with the help of a couple of old friends, and one new one.  If I have to describe it, I would call it a spiritual depression, in the sense that I had all of the now-familiar to me symptoms of depression, but only as it related to matters relating to faith.  That strange combination of lassitude and anxiety greeted me every time I tried to watch a service via streaming, or engage with ot...

1. Perhaps you are not familiar with the liturgical clothing item called an amice.  If not, here is a definition, courtesy of Wikipedia: The amice consists of a white cloth connected to two long ribbon-like attachments, by which it is fastened around the shoulders of the priest. Before the liturgical reforms of 1972, its use was mandatory for all Roman Catholic Masses, but it is only required today if the alb does not cover the priest's ordinary clothing. Many priests choose to wear the amice for reasons of tradition or to prevent damage to their other vestments due to perspiration. For the more visually inclined, here is an example: I have never seen a Catholic priest wear an amice.  I had assumed that it was basically a completely archaic item, joining such exotica as the fiddleback chausable . Why am I bringing this up?  Two Sundays ago, the rector at the Episcopal Church I attend began a sermon series on the liturgical vestments and their me...

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...

In his introduction to Christianity series Jesus the Forgiving Victim  (and probably before that, but this was where I first encountered it), James Alison begins with a discussion of what he calls "the Social Other." ( you can see him talk about it in a short video here ).  Alison defines "the Social Other" as "everything that is other than us on the social level--the people, geography, buildings, politics, weather, climate, food--everything that is."  Except, critically, for God--God is the "Other Other," and represents the only outside force that influences us that is not part of the Social Other.  Alison insists that the Social Other is both prior to us (it existed before we existed, and is thus not "created" by us in any sense) and is in every sense constitutive of us.  Our very sense of self is created by the Social Other, as we grow and develop and interact with the outside world.  And yet, we are not merely passive receptors of t...

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...

In the 80s movie War Games , a computer system (called, for reasons I don't remember, WOPR) is installed to take command of the nuclear arsenal of the United States.  A hacker played by a young Matthew Broderick accidentally triggers the "Global Thermonuclear War" scenario, and so WOPR attempts to run the scenario using real nuclear weapons.  In the climatic scene, Broderick "teaches" WOPR that nuclear war is an unwinnable game by causing the computer to replay itself Tic-Tac-Toe on a continuous loop.  Since Tic-Tac-Toe always ends up in a tie if the players understand the game, WOPR "learns" that all nuclear war scenarios, like Tic-Tac-Toe, always end in "ties," in that everyone is destroyed.  Having learned this lesson, WOPR provides the pithy lesson shown above: "A strange game.  The only winning move is not to play." I am becoming increasingly convinced that this sentiment describes the focus on orthodoxy--the idea that the ...

In the previous post , we looked at one part of what comes from having a focus on "believing the right stuff" as the foundation of Christianity.  But there is another dimension to this, one that is on some level on the opposite side of the coin from the Endless Spiral.  The Endless Spiral is, in many ways, the product of taking "believing the right stuff" hyper-seriously--it leads to a kind of neurosis that forces you to keep drilling further and further down to make sure that the "right stuff" that you are believing is indeed right.  But there is a dimension to this that transcends the specifics of any specific theological point, and it has to do with the image of God that lies behind that vision of "believing the right stuff." I am coming around to a basic conviction with regard to any religious discussion or any analysis of a person's religious faith-- the way you see God is the center of everything .  Now, that statement might seem triv...

Here's an idea that has been bouncing around in my head for a while.  It's in its most preliminary phases, so this is more of "getting something down on paper" than any kind of polished product. The Christian church, in many ways, is like a very old house.  For one thing, it is old--2,000 years old.  For another thing, like many old houses, it has a bunch of stuff in it that is not in keeping with modern times, some of which are actually dangerous--old school fireplaces that vent gases into the house, asbestos coverings on pipes, etc.  And, even if you don't have things that are affirmatively dangerous, you still have a number of things that don't make sense in the context of the way we live now. Now, there is a school of thought that says, "why bother with these old houses?  Let's just tear it down and start from scratch."  So, on this plan, you tear down the old house and build something new.  Maybe you build some sort of gigantic "McM...

In the last post , we looked at the idea of the Problem of Orthodoxy.  Let's take a moment to lay out exactly how this plays out. It begins from the premise that what is primarily important to be a Christian is to believe the right stuff.  In the next post, we will tackle some of the problems with the idea of "believing," but for now, let's define "believing" to be "having the right ideas in your head and accepting those ideas as being true."  So, being a Christian under this view is first and foremost about understanding and then accepting a set of propositions about God and about the world. But both the "understanding" and "accepting" prongs of this idea create what you might call "downward pressure."  Take for example the first line of the Apostles Creed--"I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth."  If a core part of my identity as a Christian lies in "believing" thi...

There are many different ways to know whether you have stumbled upon an idea or insight of significance.  Sometimes, the idea itself is so compelling that it just stands out, such that you can't avoid it.  Other times it is precisely the right idea in the right circumstances--it fits like a key in a lock.  But other times, you come across an idea being presented by two or more entirely different people in two or more entirely different circumstances.  These people have little in common, and yet they find their way to the same basic conclusion about something, such that it makes you go "a ha, well, there is something that is really there and these folks have found it on their own." About a week ago, I realized that two people that have almost nothing in common--James Alison and Rob Bell--have the same basic diagnosis of a problem in the way Christianity is thought about and expressed.  They use their own sets of terminology, and talk about their own specific co...

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 ...