A Sound of Sheer Silence

Rachel Held Evans passed away yesterday, as a result of a cascading series of complications stemming from the flu.  She was 37 years old, and leaves behind a husband and two very small children. Social media was awash in tributes to Evans yesterday, and she had an obituary in the New York Times  and other general-interest fora.  Many of the personal tributes were from folks with a similar background as Evans--raised evangelical (perhaps fundamentalist) Christian, once committed to this model but in time came to have grave doubts, struggling to rebuild some notion of the faith.  The tributes were particularly poignant from women, for whom she provided a voice in a place that does not often take women's voices seriously, and/or LGBT folks, for whom she was one of the earliest and most uncompromising advocates for their full inclusion in the evangelical space.  I was also struck by the praises from writers and theologians of color regarding Evans's commitment to...

I wish more people understood and made space for the very real grief that accompanies a crisis of faith/belief/trust. Perhaps we might give one other more grace. (Telling Catholics to “just leave already” probably isn’t the right thing to say at this moment.) https://t.co/Sk1fDjtkB6 — Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) August 27, 2018 Do I think people should leave the Roman Catholic Church?  On one level, yes, I do.  I left, and I do not regret my decision on any level.  The events of the last month or so have been public confirmation of the things that I came to believe about the structural brokenness of the Roman Catholic Church--things I have written about here , and here , and here .  I don't say this with schadenfreude, but simply a recognition that my concerns weren't simply in my own head or the product of some sort of anger or hostility.  And I am very happy and energized as a member of the Episcopal Church, optimistic about its future and its po...

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...

All of these stories point to why I'm sadly pessimistic about a #metoo -style cultural shift in evangelical Christianity (and, to an extent, the broader Church). I'm pessimistic because of the deadly combination of patriarchy & (as discussed recently) evangelical exceptionalism... — Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) January 10, 2018 As I've stated before, evangelical exceptionalism understands "the world" or "the culture" to be filled with darkness & sin, teeming with people who are "lost," and evangelicalism & evangelicals to be the sole bearers of light, the counter-cultural path to salvation... — Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) January 10, 2018 ...White evangelicals perceive "the world" to struggle with racism & sexual immorality, but not themselves. Because of this, it's rare to see serious efforts made at examining the ways racism & toxic masculinity/patriarchy are embedded in evangel...

1. Early on in his journey toward God, St. Francis found himself near the small chapel of San Damiano (St. Damian), about a half mile south of Assisi.  St. Bonaventure's Life of Francis  says that San Damiano was in disrepair, "on account of its great age."  First off, we should probably put "great age" in perspective.  The original San Damiano probably dates to the end of the 11th or beginning of the 12th Century, so by the time Francis comes upon it in 1205, it is 100, maybe 150, years old.  That's certainly not nothing, but from the perspective of the history of the Christian church--even from the perspective of Francis's time--it is relatively recent. Nevertheless, San Damiano was in disrepair by the time Francis arrives.  We are conditioned, or at least I was conditioned, to think of our time as some sort of uniquely problematic period in the history of Christianity.  Christianity is in decline, Millennials are leaving in droves, nothing is a...

Over the course of the last week, the Take-O-Sphere has been awash with reactions to Rod Dreher's long promised book on the Benedict Option, titled, well, The Benedict Option.   Elizabeth Bruenig had a good review , that I talked about briefly here .  Rachel Held Evans had some reasonable reactions on Twitter, provoking Dreher's now reflexive response of accusing her of preparing to become informant for some hypothetical anti-Christian Gestapo , a charge we recall he leveled on David Gushee some time ago .   Damon Linker and the New York Times's David Brooks  also wrote thoughtful responses, and it is those two pieces that I want to talk about for a bit. I have stated my objections to the entire enterprise of the Benedict Option in the past , and I stand by those objections .  But what I think gets the least amount of attention in thinking about Dreher's project is how monomanically focused his vision of Christianity is.  Linker's piece hits on the key fa...

In the previous post , we looked at two basic ideas.  First, there is a moral intuition that many of us have with regard to the beginning of life--a child who is born is fully human, zygote is not fully human, and the stages in between are something of a disputed grey area.  Second, drawing on Girard, there is the notion of defining humanity in terms of its participation in human society, the "Social Other" as James Alison puts it, that forms us and is formed by our presence and action. Let's, then, try to put these ideas together.  By defining humanity in terms of the interaction with and participation in the "Social Other," the most critical event in the life of any human being is the moment of birth.  At the moment of birth, a human being is "installed" in human society in a way that is categorically different from what comes before, in at least two ways.  First, at the moment of birth a baby is able to interact with and be influenced by the entir...

The law school I attended had (as still has) a professor of criminal law named Paul Robinson.  I didn't have him for first year criminal law, but a number of my close friends did.  One of his big areas of research in criminal law involved the idea of moral intuitions.  Criminal law, and other areas of law for that matter, have often taken on a rationalistic and technical character, in which you attempted to come to the "correct" legal regime through the application of pure reason.  Professor Robinson believed that this approach tends to de-emphasize and de-legitimize our basic moral sense of what is just--a basic intuition that is often a more reliable vehicle to achieving justice than our hyper-rational structures, especially when that intuition is "crowd sourced" and incorporates our collective wisdom. I was thinking about Professor Robinson's ideas while reading this essay by Rachel Held Evans .  Evans writes about the dilemma that pro-life Christians f...

The bombshell on the "religious Internet" this week was a new study from the Pew Forum, looking at trends in religious identification ("The Religious Landscape Study").   You can dig through the data to your heart's content here. In short, the two big takeaways are that lots of people are leaving Christianity for no religion, and that Catholicism is not doing appreciably better than the Mainline (and even the Evangelicals are showing cracks).  Lots and lots of people have expounded on these topics and broken them down in various ways, so much so that I don't really have much to add.  Instead, I want to talk a little bit about the notion of leaving and staying in a religion. It is true that I will attend religious services on Sunday in the same religious tradition that I was raised in.  But to say that I have "remained" a Catholic implies a straight line from being baptized to the present day, and that is simply not true.  My arc is something li...

A couple of days ago, Rachel Held Evans posted a beautiful reflection on her experience of being a "post-evangelical."   As she points out, the term is inherently negative, insofar as it defines you in reference to this thing that you were, but no longer are.  At the same time, for the reasons she lays out, some of that negative space is always with you whenever you leave something, especially something so significant as a religious tradition.  Your view of the world is defined by the place from which you start.  Even if you move on from that place--and all of us do, to one extent or another--that move will always be in reference to the starting point.  You can't avoid it. As Rachel's husband Dan so perceptively observed, "we are always post something." In reading her piece, I wondered whether I was willing to consider myself "post-Catholic."  Simply vocalizing the question provided the answer--I wasn't as far down the "post" path...

St. Gregory of Nyssa is one of the true heavy-weights of early Christian theology.  He, along with the other Cappadocian fathers (St. Basil of Caesaria and St. Gregory of Nazianzus), defined theology, and particularly the theology of the Trinity, in the period immediately after the Council of Nicaea in the early 4th Century.  It doesn't get any more rock solid than St. Gregory. St. Gregory wrote a book called The Life of Moses , in which he reflects on the stories of Exodus and the rest of the Torah.  In doing so, he deals with the climax of the plagues that God has sent to Egypt--the killing of the first-born sons.  Here's what he says: It does not seem good to me to pass this interpretation by without further contemplation. How would a concept worthy of God be preserved in the description of what happened if one looked only to the history? The Egyptian acts unjustly, and in his place is punished his newborn child, who in his infancy cannot discern what is good ...

In my previous post, I listed as #9 of my ten beliefs the idea that there is something fundamentally broken about the way that Christianity has approached questions of sex and gender.  In the next couple of posts, I want to unpack that idea a bit and work through some of my thoughts and reflections on this topic. Rachel Held Evans is hosting on her blog an extended conversation about Matthew Vines's book God and the Gay Christian.   This book has been more or less the book of the year in Christian circles, both progressive and conservative.  As a quick summary, Vines was raised in a conservative Evangelical household, and during the course of his time at Harvard he realized and came to accept the idea that he was gay.  The book is in many ways a journal of his personal journey to reconcile his faith and his orientation--there are extended reflections on Biblical verses dealing with (or, purported to deal with) homosexuality, but also a discussion of his relationshi...

This is an opportunity to do something I've been thinking about doing for a while.  Rachel Held Evans has announced a "Blogging the Lectionary" program , where she will post a reflection on the Sunday readings assigned for the week in the Lectionary.  She's also invited others to join in, and so I will. She's using the Revised Common Lectionary, which is used by Mainline Protestant churches.  The Catholic Lectionary is basically the same with a few slight differences (the RCL was derived from the Catholic Lectionary).  I'll probably use the Catholic one--we'll see. She will be posting on Thursdays.  I am going to try to keep the same schedule.

I am the oldest of four--a brother and two sisters.  I will get to see all of them this weekend, when my youngest sister graduates from college.  Each one of them is a wonderful, interesting person.  I love them with all my heart. We are alike in many, many ways, but there is one way in which I am very different from my brothers and sisters.  None of them practice Catholicism, or any other religion for that matter.  They are not angry at Catholicism, not really (well, maybe one of my sisters is, but in general not).  They just don't care.  I think, on many levels, they don't think religion is worth being angry about.   As anyone who has read this blog will probably gather, I do care.  You have to care to take the time to follow what is going on in Christianity and Catholicism.  You have to care to dive deep into theological issues, about God, about Jesus.  You have to care in order to advocate for change.  You have to ca...

I stumbled upon a old post by Rachel Held Evans entitled "13 Things that Make Me a Lousy Evangelical."   It is a nice mix of theological and cultural issues where she departs from standard conservative Christian talking points.  Along the same lines, here are my 13 things that make me a bad Catholic, at least for certain values of "Catholic." 1.  I find saying the Rosary to be extremely tedious, so I almost never do it. 2.  I've read all of Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body lectures.  I think there are mostly incomprehensible, and the parts that are understandable are cartoonishly misogynistic. 3.  I think priests and bishops who wear the old-fashioned clerical garb, like Cardinal Burke in this picture, look ridiculous.  Plus, and I want to say this delicately, I think Liberace would find an outfit like this to be somewhat over the top. 4.  I think Medjugorje is basically a scam.  I have serious doubts about Fatima and maybe...