Category Archives: Commentary on Religion

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, US History

Orthodoxy become Orthopraxy: A Political Sinkhole

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Samain                              Moon of the Winter Solstice

An interesting article in this morning’s Star-Tribune about the conflation of economics and religion, in particular laissez-faire economics (individualism) and Christianity as defined in William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale.  The author of a biography of Buckley, Carl T. Bogus, also the writer of this column, identifies this conviction as a sentiment rather than an argument, that is, the United States must be as radically laissez-faire in its economics as it is pure in its Christianity, so orthodoxy conflates into orthopraxy, a recipe for political disaster.

Bogus sees these two sentences as central to GAMAY (as Buckley’s book is called by movement conservatives):

“I myself believe,” he declared, “that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.”

The effect of this framing is to create either/or, black and white analysis.  Either you are Christian or you are not.  Either you are a laissez-faire economics individualist or you are a communist/socialist collectivist.  Either you are a Christian or you are an atheist.  One side is good, the other bad.

Buckley was an Episcopalian and had definite opinions about the correct, or orthodox line of thought within Christendom, a bright line that defined his Episcopalianism over against diluted or deluded others.  In the same way either you were a free-trader, a hands-off the individual para-libertarian or you were a collectivist, crushing the individual and the marvel of the free-market.

This splits the world, shattering the notion of a dialectic where individualism and collectivism, for example, exist as poles on a continuum, in dialogue with each other and informing each other.  In dialectical thinking the world is more complex, more given to nuance, there may be times where collectivism makes more sense and others where individualism does.  They are not, in dialectical thought, opposites, rather they represent dynamic forces always at work.  In other words you can’t have one without the other.

Bogus helped me follow the trail from Buckley, who was well-known for his warm personal relationships with liberals, to Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Dick Cheney, evolution and climate-change deniers.  This underlying either/or analysis of Buckley’s has devolved into a crusade the evils of secular humanism and government action in general, though especially government action designed to show our collective responsibility as citizens of one nation.

I’m not sure what trail we follow to get back from this place where heaven is Milton Friedman and hell is John Maynard Keynes, where heaven is right-wing Christian evangelicalisim and hell is any other way of understanding the world.

Orthodoxy helps clarify and simplify the world, leading to clear lines of ethical and moral thought.  When orthodoxy makes the concomitant leap to orthopraxy, that is, practice must always be in line with orthodox belief, we find ourselves in the same spot as those with conservative Islam looming over them.  Mullah Limbaugh and his fellow clerics, Ann Coulter and others of the shock jock circuit lash waverers back into line.

 

 

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Holidays, Retirement

Socialized Medicine, Here I Come

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Samain                      Moon of the Winter Solstice

The end of the day.  Sunday.  Used to go to sleep on Sunday night with Monday whirring away, chattering and buzzing, cutting a channel through my attempts to sleep.  Now I go to sleep on Sunday night.  That’s all.

Granddaughter Ruth has the makings of a cook.  Maybe.  Her recipe for cooking a turkey:  put it in the oven at 10 degrees, cook it for half an hour.  Put it on a big plate and put green beans and potatoes beside it.  Sounds like my first attempts at cooking a turkey.

Speaking of retirement.  Didn’t somebody bring that up?  I go to sign up for Medicare tomorrow.  I have my Medicare card already and now have to choose a plan.  Kathryn Giegler will help me as she did Kate.  This is a rite of passage, analogous to getting a driver’s license or that first Social Security check.

When I went on a quest tonight to solve a computer problem, I ended up in Best Buy where Christmas music played over the loudspeakers.  I found myself cheered by it, rather than annoyed.  It felt familiar, comfortable, mine.  This surprised me.  A Grinch I’m not, but I’ve often found the commercial side of the holiday season a large, unwelcome mosquito that won’t quit buzzing into my awareness no matter how often I try to swat it away.

Instead I found myself thinking of roasting chestnuts, singing carols, making a roaring fire and having hot chocolate.  Geez.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story

Humanism

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Fall                                                      Waxing Autumn Moon

Spiritual Resources for Humanists.  Been thinking about this from an odd perspective.  Humanism is often characterized as anti- or post-Christian.  It is, of course, easy to see why this should be so in such Christian marinated cultures as those of the United States and Europe.  Easy, yes.  But accurate?

Think about it this way.  If there were no monotheism, no polytheism, no reaching out beyond the natural world to a supernatural (anti-natural?) realm, then raising a Christian theology would be seen as anti-Humanist or, maybe, post-Humanist.

If you, like me, find the idea of a God out there, beyond us and our world, no longer viable, then we have to consider that there has not been a God out there right along.  That means, further, that Christianity, Islam and Judaism, among many others, have never had their metaphysics right.  In other worlds there was no God in Israel, Ephesus, Corinth or Rome.

In that case, humanism is counterpoised not to a deity, but to a story, rather stories, about deities; narratives that, like kudzu in the south, overgrew everything, changing their shapes and appearance until all that could be seen was a green, viny realm.

These are narratives with a great deal of power, narratives that inspire devotion, sacrifice, even war, yet, for all that, narratives not substantially different from the very best fiction.  The difficult part to keep in focus here is the difference between the narrative as fiction and the history of the narrative’s power.

In other words, even though the Biblical material, from this perspective, has the same metaphysical punch as Hesiod and Ovid, compilations of Greek myth and legend, the historical actions of those who imbibed this narrative from their birth and acted on it in complete confidence of its veracity is nonetheless real, just as are the actions of Periclean Athens, Sparta and Corinth.

The historical depth and reach of Christians cannot be dismissed as fiction and reveals, in it all its vitality, the true force of myth and legend.  A story like the passion of Jesus, because it includes compassion, sacrifice, redemption and the defeat of death, resonates energetically with daily life, in particular the daily life of those on the wrong side of history.

Nietzsche recognized this and called Christian morality slave morality, a morality meant to bring down the strong and the good, a morality meant to turn on its head the way to power. ***

We do not have to give up the mythic power of the Christian story as humanists.  No, we can reach into the Biblical material and read these narratives with the same keen eye and open heart that Christians do.  We don’t have to buy the notion of Olympus to be inspired by the story of Hercules, saddened by the story of Orpheus and add depth to our understanding of  fall and spring through the story of Persephone.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work, Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story

Breaching the Walled Garden of the Self

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Fall                                               Waning Harvest Moon

Prepping for a presentation on Spiritual Resources for Humanists.  Reading books, articles, letting ideas slip past as I get ready to sleep, keeping my antennae out for what feeds me now.

The book I mentioned before, All Things Shining, has convinced me of one thing.  It’s important to know why we need resourcing in the first place.

The title offers a rationale, unpacked.  Humanism embraces a world shorn of its medieval metaphysics; the Great Chain of Being has met Nietzsche’s Bolt Cutter, God is dead. God is dead, of course, was not an argument, but an observation, a sensitive man’s awareness that the God drenched era of the ancien regime had been drained by the empirical method, reason and the strangely acidic effect of the Protestant Reformation.

This world, a world with a strangled sense of the sacred, gave birth to the angst and anomie of the existentialist 20th century, a world with no center, or rather, a world with millions of centers, each person a godhead struggling with their own creation.

What can buttress the Self that must navigate these empty places?  Does our supernatural vacuum hold enough air to nourish the isolated self?

We stumble toward wonder, toward joy, hope for a glimpse of the sacred, of the moment that can lift us out of our isolation and put us in communion with others, with the natural world, with the stars which birthed the very atoms which constitute us.

These things we seek not out of some vestigial institutional memory, an anachronistic impulse to live again in a God drenched world.  No, we seek these things because the essential paradox at the heart of our lives is this:  we live alone, the only one with our world; yet we live together, up against galaxies of other worlds, sometimes with other worlds so close that they seem to intersect with ours.  We seek the venn diagram, a mandorla labeled self and other, where the other is another person, a flower, a sky, a lightning bolt.

So, spiritual resources in this context, then, would be those fragments of culture that can weaken or penetrate the walled gardens of our Selves, not in order to breach the walls, but to let in companion armies, allies in our quest.

The quest seems to similar to the one Sir Gawain faced when he beheaded the Green Knight and, in a year and a day, had to bend his own neck before the Green Knight’s sword.  That is, we somehow must will ourselves into a vulnerable, ultimately vulnerable position, to those we have beheaded.  Interestingly, as the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight proposes, this vulnerability is not only, perhaps not even mostly, a human to human one, rather, it is human to the whole Green world.

So we seek allies who will keep us strong in our vulnerability, mighty in our humility.  We seek at least love.

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

How Are We?

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Lughnasa                                     Waning Harvest Moon

In preparation for my presentation, Spiritual Resources for Humanists, I have come across two mentions of a critique of Enlightenment thought’s emphasis on individualism.  In one instance the critique compares Western individualism with the more integrated person of Taoist thought, one with the Tao, or with the more communal sensibility of the East in general.  In another instance individualism lies at the root of contemporary nihilistic ideas.  Life’s a bitch, then you die.

These two critiques I know now only in their casual clothes, not in their full dress argument though I intend to hunt them down as I work.  My first instinct is to bristle, to lean into the obvious benefits of individualism:  creativity, activist politics, a chance to flourish as an individuals gifts and dreams suggest, personal liberty.  My second instinct is to note that even the most individualistic of philosophical stances cannot extricate a person from family, from socialization, from nation, from history.

Then, once my bristles lie back down and I quit pawing the earth, I move to a possibility that neither the more communal and integrated inflection nor the individually inflected position has it right, that the reality is more dynamic, at some times we Westerners are as communal and familial as the East while at other time the individuality of an Easterner comes to the fore, both depending on the particular situation, era, motivation.

This is all before I sit down to think about it.  At first I defend my intuitive position, then I ameliorate and finally I move to the dialectic.  All without benefit of much reflection or introspection.

That comes next.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Humanities, Writing

Getting Ready for the Dark Time

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Lughnasa                                         Waning Harvest Moon

The museum (MIA) has us check out when we’re going to be gone over our tour days, so I’ve checked out from mid-October through early December.  I’ve not had many tours in August and none in September, just one in October.

That, plus the relatively light schedule for the Sierra Club–the legislature doesn’t convene until February, so no weekly meetings–has given me plenty of time for the late garden work with time left over rearranging the downstairs and reconfiguring my study.

Yesterday I finished swapping out books from the bookcase nearest to my desk.  The desk and the bookcase form the sides of a U, with the bottom of the U created by the computer workstation.  On this bookcase I had collected various art and art history texts as the docent years had gone on, but they were works I did not reference frequently.

What I need near the desk are books I pull off for work.  It’s a working bookcase, not a storage unit.  Now I have near me all my Latin dictionaries, commentaries, grammars and readers; various style manuals like The Chicago, a thesaurus and english grammars plus books on writing.   The works I use most after the latin texts are the oxford dictionary of art, the oxford dictionary of philosophy and the oxford english dictionary.

On the bottom most shelf I have notebooks from docent training and several comprehensive art history texts.

I do have a shelf devoted to a long term project which I’ve shorthanded Ge-ology.  This project has its own page on this website, but I’ve let it dangle, as I have the ecological history of Lake Superior.  Here’s the summary:  This work will gather various strands from ecology, environmental movements, pagan and neo-pagan faiths, literature, art and philosophy.  It will weave those strands into a faith indigenous to the Midwest (and most other places) and universal to Ge.

Having at least some key texts near to hand may spur down time work on Ge-ology.  Oh, hell, why not go for it?  It will produce work.

There are still a few book stacks on the floor and this and that to find new places for, but I’ll finish that today.  Ready for winter.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Politics, Writing

Exegesis and Hermeneutics

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Lughnasa                                              Waning Harvest Moon

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle

While the empirical method, the theory of falsifiability and scientific rigor make it an article of faith that scientists will entertain thoughts with which they may not agree, it is even more important that in the world outside the realm of science:  politics, art, sports, religion, literature, psychological therapies and commerce for example, that we insist on considering the opinions and beliefs of others without subordinating ourselves to them.

Why more important?  Because these are the realms in which we live our lives.  The realms of home, work, play, faith, leisure and citizenship.  The crucial realms.  Science is but a helpmate, a maidservant to these much more central human activities.  Science gives us tools to use, like this computer on which I work and the communication network on which you read this, but the tool does not write the words, think the thoughts, feel the feelings.

Science gives us a clearer and clearer picture of our world, the fundamental physical and biological components of it, but science fails when it steps into such everyday, yet critical arenas like defining life, the meaning of life, the decision between a good use of nuclear power and a dangerous one, identifying the beautiful or the just, embracing love.

It is in these fuzzier areas, the areas marked by complexity and uncertainty, that the humanities come into focus.  The humanities allow us, demand really, to search the experience of humans who have lived before us or who live now.  We search their experiences and their thoughts and dreams through books, movies, paintings, sculpture, music, political structures, even through the medium of a blog such as this one.

We then face the always daunting task of exegesis, that is, making sense of the thought or experience in its original context, and after this challenge, we face the even more critical task of hermeneutics, applying the wisdom of the past or of others in other places, to our own situations.

Only when we can entertain the thoughts of others, often alien others, alien due to era or geography or culture, can we examine our own lives and situations in a broader context.  In that broader context we can see new or different ways to handle the problems we face today.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

This Light of Mine

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Lughnasa                                                  Full Harvest Moon

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman

Howard Thurman was a theologian who studied with the Quaker mystic, Rufus Jones.  His work, which I had forgotten until I read this quote yesterday, reaches deep into the human heart.

The Quaker concept of the light that leads from within influenced many theologians, including Thurman who, in turn, influenced Martin Luther King.

In Scientific American Mind a recent article referred to the human “self-schema.”  Created due to our ability to see into our past and project ourselves into the future, this organization of thoughts, experiences and natural gifts produces the Self, that ever elusive entity at the heart of our life.  Self-schema strikes me as a scientific description of the Self I refer to here from time to time, that Self that pulls us into the future, that can challenge us to live a deeper, richer, fuller life.

This Self is the light that leads us, a light whose brilliance and warmth comes not from a supernatural realm, but from a super natural one.  When Thurman challenges us to find what makes us come alive, he asks us to dig deep into our Self, to use our imagination and our deep heart to find vitality within it.

When we can locate a path, our own ancientrail, that knits together the genetic gifts, the particular experiences and the most exciting prospects we can imagine for our future, then we can come alive to the personhood for which we each yearn.  We can become alive in every fiber of our being. Such persons live.  They burn with an incandescence available only to those who feed all of themselves into the furnace of their Self.

You know such people.  Martin Luther King was a such a person. Perhaps you are.  I know for sure you can become one.

This is a spirituality that holds nothing back, that demands it all, all you have and all you will have.  This is a humanist spirituality, a call to kindle the light of your true Self, the one light only you can bring into this world.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Humanities, Letters, Myth and Story

Looking Backwards

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Lughnasa                                                                        Full Honey Extraction Moon

Over the last week plus I’ve watched the Starz Network version of the King Arthur legends, Camelot.  I get it streaming from Netflix.  Each time I watch this program I get a shot of creative juices, similar to the ones I got when I first read the Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley.  Those didn’t inspire me to write about the King Arthur material, an area that gets reworked a lot, but it did cause me to think about my own heritage, my ethnic heritage and what might be there as a resource for writing.

At the time I chose to emphasize the Celtic aspects of my bloodline, Welsh in the instance of the Ellis line and Irish through the Correll’s, my father’s father’s mother’s family.  The Celts have a rich pool of legends, religious ideas and quasi-historical accounts.  Most have heard at least something about druids and faeries, both part of the Celtic past.  There are, too, holy wells, a Celtic pantheon and the series of holidays known as the Great Wheel which I celebrate.

I’ve not done much with the German side of my heritage though it is, arguably, more substantial since the Zikes and the Spitlers, my mother’s and father’s mother’s families respectively are both German.  The Keatons, my mother’s father’s family, we think have an English connection though it’s proven difficult to track down.

The legendary and religious aspects of the ancient Celts and Germans are what interest me, the more recent history not so much and by recent I mean from the Renaissance forward.

Roman and Greek mythology and legend has also fascinated me since I was young and my Aunt Barbara gave me a copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology.  Through out my life at various points I’ve read such works as the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, amazed at the richness of these stories.

As you know, if you read this blog with any regularity, that lead me to learn Latin, which I am doing, so I could translate Ovid’s great work, the Metamorphoses, for myself.  The distance between a translated text and its English version has interested me especially since seminary.  In seminary I studied both the Old and New Testaments extensively, learning in the process many techniques for analyzing ancient texts.  It was my favorite part of the seminary curriculum.

When I observed yesterday to Greg, my Latin tutor, that the commentaries I’d found for the Metamorphose lacked a lot compared to commentaries for the Biblical material, he challenged me.  “Well,” he said, “You could write a commentary to it.”  I might just be able to do that.

When I mentioned it to Kate, she said, “Oh, and finish your novels, too?”  And she’s right of course.  I have more than one creative iron in the fire, plus other matters related to art and the environment.

Even so, the idea intrigues me.  A lot.  Now all I have to do is get very facile at translating.

 

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Humanities, Politics

Repeal the Renaissance

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Lughnasa                                                                            Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

I’ve found major points of agreement between myself and my congresswoman, she-who-would-be-president Michelle Bachmann.  She considers the Renaissance a major problem for Christianity.  The Enlightenment, too.  I see it that way myself.  Of course, we do disagree on the significance of these facts.

Yep.  Michelle and the Calvinist theologian Franklin Schaeffer along with a Schaefer acolyte “Nancy Pearcey, a prominent creationist whose recent book is “Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning” have found each other and God is good.”  But the rest of the modern era, unfortunately, isn’t.

Having attended a liberal Protestant seminary and worked as an ordained Presbyterian for 15 years (a church founded by the Calvin, John), these are waters with which I am very familiar.  Schaeffer and Pearcey (maybe the problem is in the way they spell their last names?) have discovered a dark secret in Western history.  The Renaissance, taking its cue in part from the Copernican revolution which put paid to the Ptolemaic universe with the earth–and therefore man (no gender weasling allowed here) and therefore God–at its center, went on to place increasing emphasis on humans, hence humanists and humanism, and on this world not the next.

This showed up in art which began to veer away from the medieval dominance of the church as patron and in so doing began to look backwards to the ancient Greeks and Romans, too, focusing on the human body and the natural world.  These evangelical fundamentalists are not wrong in their history of ideas.  This was the point where Western culture began to turn away from medieval scholasticism.  It is, too, the field from which the Enlightenment grew, perhaps, from Bachmann’s point of view, much like the Thebans, a warrior line of thought sprung from the dragon’s teeth of Renaissance humanists.

The Enlightenment in its turn closed the door for good on the ancien regime, that hold over of papal theocracy, divine right of kings and the Great Chain of Being.  Or at least I hope it did.

The rise and rise of those who would return us to the dark days of Scholastic reasoning (an oxymoron in some ways) and a theocratic view of government with the Bible as the basis for our very own version of the Sharia portends a possible governmental assault on the last 500 years.  This is, in its own way, the Christian version of the return to the Caliphate so dear to the hearts of Islamic extremists like Bin Laden.