A Sound of Sheer Silence

μόνος, or "monos," means "single" or "only."  θεός, or "theos," means god, originally in the sense of entities like Zeus or Athena.  Together, it is pretty straight-forward--monotheism is a assertion that there is "a single god."  Fair enough. But, within this framework, there are actually a number of permutations.  Rather than spell them all out in the beginning, I'll cut to the case--I believe in and interpret monotheism in the maximum possible way.  I believe there is one and only one divine, transcendent principle, period.  And that singular divine principle, as Aquinas would say, "everyone calls God."  Now, I understand that singular divine principle to be compatible with the assertion that the Son of God came to earth and lived among us, but for the purposes of this reflection that thorny issue is not really relevant, so let's set it to the side. So, only one divine, transcendent principle.  This means, by defini...

Lots of people have said lots of better and smarter things about #metoo, particularly in light of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings ( most recent update here , though this story is evolving at warp speed), than I can.  I have never been assaulted, so I cannot speak to the experience.  I have, however, noticed a couple of things out there in the discussion that I think are worth commenting on. 1. "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" and "Innocent Until Proven Guilty."   Lawyers, and people who like to sound like lawyers, often try to gaslight people who are concerned about an accusation against someone by saying things like "people are innocent until proven guilty!" and "where is your proof beyond a reasonable doubt?"  The idea here, of course, is that you are a bad person for "immediately assuming" that a person is guilty of whatever they are accused of, whereas the speaker is a reasoned and broad-minded and fair person.  This is nonse...

A term that has recently entered The Discourse, or at least I have recently become aware of it, is "emotional labor."  Emotional labor is the work of regulating one's own feelings and emotional state in such a way as to maintain some sort of social environment.  More specifically, it is controlling or restraining one's own natural or reflexive emotional state in order to prevent someone else's emotional state from spiraling out of control.  So, if you are in a situation where you are scared of something, but you have to suppress or hide that because you know that if you show fear you will cause the person you are with to completely freak out, you are undertaking emotional labor. Emotional labor is usually brought up in the context of male/female relations, tied to the claim that women are expected to perform an undue amount of emotional labor insofar as they are presumed to have responsibility for the emotional state of their male partner.  Here we might think o...

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...

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...

I had a long drive this weekend to and from Chicago.  Worth it, without question--I got to see some friends that I haven't seen since about a year ago at this time at Neil and Mike's wedding .  But, long nevertheless, and so by the end of the trip back, I found myself flipping through the satellite radio channels.  In the end, I found myself of EWTN, the conservative Catholic channel.  Usually their material is awful, and this was sort of awful as well, but in the course of listening to what the speaker had to say, something clicked into place in a way it hadn't really clicked into place before. The interviewee was giving a run-down of why Catholics are right about contraception and gay issues.  The core of his argument was that all Catholic positions flow from "reason," and that "reason" establishes that there is certain content to "human nature."  If that is true, then to act in a manner inconsistent with human nature is per se unreasonabl...

After going through five previous ideas ( "Experiental Priority, " "Contextual Theology," "Rejecting the Salvation Industrial Complex," "Franciscan Hermaneutics," and "Christ versus Empire" ) we come to the last one, "Christian Realism."  "Christian Realism" is, to the best of my knowledge, a term that I made up.  But it reflects an idea that is fundamental, if often unspoken, to the way you approach everything you might encounter when talking about religion, and in particular the way that theology interacts with the rest of the world (which, basically, is everything).  In its simplest terms, makes the claim that the physical world is (1) intelligible; (2) real [as opposed to the product of our imaginations]; and (3) ultimately the creation of God.  The theological touchstone for Christian Realism is a well-known quote by the great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas--"all that is true, by whomsoever it has be...