Pentecostalism and Persecution

In my research for the Global Christianity course, one pattern that started to emerge is that Pentecostalism seems to require an environment similar to the free-wheeling religious freedom of the United States to really thrive — in countries where they are kept from starting new churches basically at will (examples include Mexico or Cameroon), they have difficulty spreading, and they certainly don’t experience the “explosive growth” that scholars of Global Christianity are so excited over.

So here’s a thought: Pentecostalism arose in the US, which was a remarkably hospitable region for new religious movements, particularly by the 20th Century. It’s arguably one of the only major Christian movements to arise without significant conflict or persecution—could this have something to do with the optimistic outlook, the lack of emphasis on suffering or injustice, the indulgence in things like prosperity gospel, the failure to gain ground when they face anything but a totally open field for expansion?

How different would Pentecostalism be now if it had initially faced persecution on the scale of that experienced by Liberation Theology, for example? Would it still be enjoying “explosive growth”?

Roundtable on The Monstrosity of Christ

The Villanova University online journal Expositions has a new issue out, including a “roundtable discussion” of Zizek and Milbank’s Monstrosity of Christ. Surprisingly, I have a contribution (PDF), and since I’ve already written so much on the book, I used this as an opportunity to reflect on its overall structure and impact. Ultimately, as my title indicates, I regard the volume as a missed encounter and a missed opportunity. Other roundtable participants include Clayton Crockett, Jeff Robbins, and Frederiek Depoortere.

The ritual satisfaction of stating the Grim Facts about the job market

As a recent Twitter exchange between Bryan Klaus and Zunguzungu has highlighted, a significant part of demonstrating that you’ve been properly socialized as an academic is being able to recite Grim Facts about how terrible the job market is. We’re all familiar with this: “It’ll take me ten years to finish this degree because I’m being exploited for cheap teaching labor, and once I’m done, I’ll be on food stamps teaching in a community college located deep within a coal mine,” etc., etc.

I’ve indulged in such grim speculation myself. What I always question, though, is what function it really serves. Why this rush to make sure everyone knows you’re as jaded and cynical as possible?

Roland Boer’s struggle against censorship

Recently, Roland Boer has been engaged in an experiment, submitting very explicitly sexual papers to various venues for biblical studies. A recent example is his SBL paper entitled “Too Many Dicks at the Writing Desk, or How to Organise a Prophetic Sausage-Fest.” Much to his delight, he’s been asked to change the title — and bizarrely, the request is only to change the term “sausage-fest,” while leaving “dicks” unmolested. This has led to a series of posts over the controversy, culminating in a post in which Roland copies over a letter from the executive director of the SBL chastising him for making this private and courteous discussion public — and above all, for violating SBL culture, which apparently consists in “discussion not argumentation.”

Now on the one hand, Roland’s project here is almost tautological — he knows that the biblical studies establishment is prudish in certain ways and he’s intentionally submitting papers that trigger that prudishness, so that they can be rejected, thereby demonstrating the prudishness we all knew was there to begin with. What’s startling to me, though, is that the paper was initially accepted at all — if there was a time to quash it, it was surely at the stage where there was the plausible deniability of “a high volume of submissions.”

Once it was accepted, though, it’s hard to believe that anyone seriously thought that a person who would submit a paper with the term “sausage-fest” in the first place would respond to a request to change it with something like “Oh, wow — I had no idea people would react negatively to my title! Of course I’ll change it!” Now it appears that the only play left is to represent Roland as a terribly rude person who blew this all out of proportion, such that it’s best for the SBL if he’s not allowed to present and further disrupt the warm collegiality that we’ve all come to expect, etc., thereby making the classic move of pretending a substantive disagreement is really a procedural issue and giving people who were uncomfortable with the term “sausage-fest” (and yet, I repeat, apparently fine with the term “dicks” — who exactly are these people with these super-precise sensitivities?!) a seemingly more principled ground for objection.

The joy of teaching Anselm

This time around I gave myself two weeks of hardcore Anselm in the medieval class, and it’s going really well. I always enjoy teaching Anselm because he’s so thoroughly “discussable” — he has relatively clear argumentative steps, uncluttered by scriptural citations or other appeals to authority (which many students view as prima facie evidence that an author is a fundamentalist or something, so that they don’t really view a text with a lot of citations as an actual argument), and yet he comes to really strange conclusions. Simply walking them through the argument in a Socratic way usually works fine to make sure we’re all on the same page, and along the way there’s always plenty of oddball claims that they want me to follow up on.

The ontological argument, for instance, is basically custom-built for interesting discussion, because of the sensation that (a) it can’t be right and yet (b) you can’t figure out where exactly it went wrong. It’s not as easily dismissable as the various arguments based on using God to plug the hole of infinite regress, and it manages to smuggle more “content” into the idea of God than those ones tend to. And Why God Became Man is a perfect prism for the distinctive concerns of medieval culture and how they present an inflection point between the patristic age and modern times — while at the same time providing the idiosyncratic weirdness we expect from Anselm (for instance, the whole notion of the “heavenly city,” the emphasis on God saving face, the fact that Christ’s death isn’t a vicarious punishment but a massive influx of “extra credit,” the total lack of discussion of God’s love, etc.).

Basically, I find that Anselm is perfect for convincing students of two non-negotiable baseline points that are essential for understanding theology:

1. Theology at its best is about actual arguments that you can analyze, not simply about arguments from authority.
2. Theology at its best is way weirder than you would expect — not always in a good way, but usually at least in an interesting way.

Belated Link Post: Fringe Interests

A few items I’ve been meaning to bring to people’s attention. First, François Laruelle’s latest book, Philosophie non-standard. Générique, Quantique, Philo-fiction, has just been released (Amazon.fr). Laruelle presented on ideas from this book at the conferences in the UK last March and the book promises to be the fullest expression on non-philosophy yet. You can see the table of contents and watch some interviews about the book at a website set up for its release (which includes information about the Philo-fictions journal). Also Laruelle related, John Caputo’s lectures on Laruelle (as well as Meillassoux and Brassier) are now online. I have not listened to them yet, in part out of trepidation since I feel a little too close to the material. Hopefully I can steel myself to do so soon.

Scu has two posts up [1, 2] commenting on a recent “debate” between Jonathan Safran Foer and Anthony Bourdain concerning eating animals, ethics, and the community of meat-eaters.

And, finally, an announcement of a conference investigating the relationship between Religion & Liberation at the University of Durham. Keynote speakers are AUFS favorites Roland Boer and Philip Goodchild.

On How To be Dogmatic

This week, for the first time in, let’s say, a “long” time, I attended a mid-week bible study. I’m now an official Reader/Lector at the church I’ve been attending, so I thought I might actually reflect on the stuff I’m supposed to read. The study itself was fine enough. We talked about the parable of the tax collector’s prayer, which is, if you recall, compared to that of the Pharisee. Humility vs. pride. The error of hypocrisy. Obligatory liberal note that we shouldn’t conflate the Pharisees with all Jews, and that the Gospel ware written during a particularly ticklish period, so emotions were a little heightened. Etc. My favorite part of the conversation was when the group began comparing the hypocritical Pharisee to conservative talking-heads on tv. I did not find this so much as curious as silly, and ended up confessing that I’d never watched Bill O’Reilly, and continued with the suggestion that perhaps their moral indignation might be better directed if they stopped watching 24/7 news channels.

Now, I have not done any solid research to substantiate the claim that the following is any more true now than anytime before, but it seems to me that Americans are far more eager these days to rush headlong into the living embodiment of a caricature. You have these people on tv–Rachel Maddow as the representative caricature of a do-good liberal, and Bill O’Reilly as the representative caricature of a dog-eat-dog-world conservative–and for all our so-called cultural sophistication w/ respect to media, the political discourse of the masses (such as it is) seems modeled on these personalities/caricatures. This is not a novel observation, I know. But what’s interesting to me is that this kind of behavior is supposed to be the very thing a super media-savvy culture has moved beyond, what with our much-ballyhooed sophistication and post-ironic investment in what happens behind the camera, in the editing room, in the marketing meeting, etc. (I observed a similar thing when my niece visited me last summer: it felt like I was watching the tv-version of what a teenager is supposed to do & say, as though she wasn’t even there. Just a slightly less sexed-up Glee cast-member.) We are today, we’ve been told repeatedly, the smartest consumers of culture ever.  On some level, I’ve no doubt this is probably true; and yet, perhaps we’re damned all the more for it being so. I say this because media infiltrates nearly every facet of contemporary culture–including even our reflections about how media infiltrates contemporary culture. Waxing theoretical about irony on this point seems profoundly unhelpful. To my mind, it’s not that everything today (particularly as it relates to our political discourse) is fake: it’s that sincerity itself has been distorted by the untold layers of glass piled all around it. (Note A: No, this doesn’t speak to an inherent problem with “progress” that can be resisted by picking up Milton every now and then.) (Note B: You’ll just have to trust me when I say that I don’t necessarily believe there is a Zero-Ground of “Sincere Human” that has been sullied. This point of perfection, and indeed the entire conversation about it, i.e., whether there is one or not, is a nuisance of ontological proportion. On this point, I diverge mightily from my many of my most philosophical friends, including myself not too long ago.)

AAR Round-up: An Open Thread

AAR is next weekend, and I thought it might be helpful to have an open thread where we could gather together panels featuring blog regulars or else topics of particular interest.

I’ll start: I’m going to be part of a panel on the Body of Christ on Monday from 1:00 to 3:30, where I’ll be presenting on Zizek’s use of that concept.

Politics of Redemption available in the US

At least it is from Amazon, well ahead of the stated December 30 release date. Copies will also be available at Continuum’s booth at the AAR meeting next weekend.

This page describes the argument, and Dominic Fox has written a very generous review. Catherine Keller and Ted Jennings have also provided blurbs.

Pastured!

I’ve been broadcasting this short quote throughout my various social-media manifestations, but I keep returning to it, aghast (in a good way) and aglow (in an even better way) by the use of the word “pastured” in this bit of physical description from William Gass’ novel The Tunnel. I simply had to share it with you, the AUFS reader, as well:

“Work had pastured his face the way weather wears a field. Past burning, beyond tanning, not even any longer leathered, it seemed the sorrowful smoothing out of some angrily wadded paper, his bones like the shadows of bones behind his skin, a gift from the butcher for the dog.”

That is all.