A Sound of Sheer Silence

1. In 2004, M. Night Shyamalan released a movie called The Village .  Critical reception was not great, but I enjoyed it a great deal when I saw it in the theatre.  I have thought about this movie a number of times since then, and it I think it fundamentally a fable about a certain kind of attitude that we see commonly, especially in religious circles.  To explain this, I need to spoil the movie, and in particular the twist that is the key to the whole thing, so if you want to watch the movie stop reading now. At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to the 19th Century Pennsylvania village of Covington.  We are told two things--that "the towns," from which the elders of the village come, is full of wickedness, and that the forest is inhabited by monsters.  We get a scene early on where the monster stalks through the village at night while the villagers hide in their homes.  Eventually, Ivy (the blind daughter of the head of the village, pl...

Christianity came into existence in a very specific historical context--in the midst of a people who were part of the Roman Empire.  Rome in the early 30s A.D. was not at the absolute peak of its power (that would come about one hundred years later), but Rome was certainly in its ascendancy, and it was the most powerful empire in the history of the Mediterranean region up to that point.  Like all empires before and since, Roman power ultimately was grounded in overwhelming military might--its legions were everywhere, its naval power made the Mediterranean a "Roman lake."  But it wasn't just military power--Rome was also the masters of what we would now call "soft power," in the form of political power and influence, cultural power, economic power.  These forms of power were interrelated and mutually reinforcing--economic power facilitated and funded military power, while military power kept the peace that prevented economic disruptions; the power of Rome made it...

The Rule and life of these brothers is this: namely, to live in obedience and chastity, and without property, and to follow the doctrine and footsteps of our Lord Jesus Christ, who says: "If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come, follow Me." And: "If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me;" in like manner: "If any man come to Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple."  "And everyone that hath left father or mother, brothers or sisters, or wife, or children or lands, for My sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall possess life everlasting." --First Rule of the Friars Minor, Paragraph 1 (~1212 A.D.) To outside observers, the notion that Christianity should have a focus on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ would...

I've been thinking about the last post  discussing Tim Keller and the importance of progressive Christian theology ( thanks to Bill for his kind words about the post ).  One of the biggest problems, I think, is that many people don't really believe there is such a thing as progressive Christian theology.  Certainly, conservatives take it as an article of faith that there is no such thing as a rigorous progressive Christian theology.  But as I pointed out in the last post, I think many people who consider themselves progressive Christians don't really believe that there is a progressive theology--they are progressive in spite of theology, not because of it. What is ironic and unfortunate about that is how untrue it is.  One of the things that has really shocked me in my faith journey over the course of the last six or seven years or so is how many people are working on these questions, doing work that is really grappling with the issues of the modern world in a...

Lots of people have lots of different diagnoses of the state of religion in general in the West and the Catholic Church in particular.  Some will say that the forces of secularism are to blame,  necessitating that we retreat into protected, sectarian enclaves.   Some will say that the failures are mostly personal--if we only had better priests or better bishops (however one defines "better"), then things would be swell.  Some say it is simply a lack of faith. I would like to offer an alternative theory.  I believe the biggest problem in the Catholic Church in 2016 is that our discourse--the way we talk to each other and to the outside world--is fundamentally dishonest.  When we talk about the issues that are affecting us or are at the front of our collective consciousness, far too often we don't talk about what the  actual  issues are and what we  actually  think about them, but instead we have this constructed, artificial discussion t...

A week or so ago, I got a message on Twitter from my Twitter friend "Egregious Philbin," asking me for my thoughts on an pair of articles from J. R. Daniel Kirk, entitled "Colonizing Biblical Interpretation" and "Oedipus Text: Canon, Creed, and Post-Colonized Interpretation."   They are both interesting articles, and I have wanted to write about them for a while, but I wanted to finish the post on the Cult of Victimhood before turning to these articles (for reasons that will become clear in a moment). I should say that I have enjoy listening to and reading Kirk, especially during his appearances on the Homebrewed Christianity  podcast.  I have also said how I often feel like I have more in common with progressive Evangelicals than I do with conservative Catholics .  Reading these posts, however, was a reminder that this is not always the case, as it immediately brought out the "high church" part of my Christian DNA.  To me, these posts show t...