‘His Dark Materials’ and Radical Theology

The A. V. Club‘s Noah Cruickshank responded to their “AVQ&A” feature, this week asking what popular culture artifacts pull a bait-and-switch on their audiences, answering with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.  I’ve been meaning to go back and re-read these books this summer, so I’ve been thinking a little bit about the books’ connections to Milton and others.  Here’s what Cruickshank wrote:

I don’t think anyone who finished The Golden Compass thought that the next two books in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy were going to lead to the death of God (or The Authority, as he’s called in the series). The first book is a beautifully written, classic piece of fantasy, with witches, talking polar bears, and a hefty dose of world-building. But what began as a story about a young girl in a single magical world became an epic story about destroying the corrupt power of a single deity over all worlds (including our own). It’s heavy stuff, but Pullman wasn’t interested in just telling a story for young readers; he had a theological point to make. Pullman is a noted atheist, and His Dark Materials isn’t a religious work, but a humanist one. Plenty of fantasy series have religious overtones (The Chronicles Of Narnia is my favorite example, but Twilight is chock full of allusions to Mormonism), but usually they’re pretty obvious from the get-go, not themes that dawn on the reader halfway through. The three books work beautifully in tandem, and His Dark Materials is one of my favorite series in any genre. But I do feel like I got hoodwinked. I don’t mind that the books are a kind of counter-allegory to Paradise Lost, but it seems to me Pullman was a little coy about his intentions.

One of the things I really appreciated about His Dark Materials is its quite the opposite, that it was pretty clear that the book was moving in somewhat Nietzschean directions from the outset with its critique of the church, and that these directions made the meshing together of Milton, with elements of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Everlasting Gospel in the final book even more stunning. 

RIP: Otto Maduro (1945-2013)

Word has been moving around the interwebs this morning about the passing of Otto Maduro, and Drew University’s Facebook page just announced his death.  Although I did not have him as a professor at Drew University, I did meet him and sat in some of his lectures and he worked with me as a mentor when I was selected as the speaker at my commencement. I particularly have a deep resepct for the way he connected his scholarly work to the world of lived faith.  He was very active in the AAR and his work with hispanic seminarians and pastors has , and will continue to have, a major impact on their church communities.

Call for Proposals: “Living Theology: Reclaiming the Pastor as Theologian”

I am hosting a conference at my church in Dallastown, Pennsylvania, for UCC clergy, sponsored by the UCC’s 2030 Clergy Network and the UCC’s Local Church Ministries.  Jeff Robbins will be our guest facilitator.  The idea will be to have a new writer’s group emerge from this confernece for future gatherings and publications.  Please distribute to those that you know who might be interested?  (The Altizer quote with which I open is from the afterword for my forthcoming book, Too Good to Be True, more information on that will come soon…)

Description / Rationale:  Theologian Thomas Altizer asks the progressive church, “Is a Jonathan Edwards possible in the church today?” This question is especially stunning, provocative, and condemning for mainline churches, especially the United Church of Christ, who claims Edwards as one of our own.  In the UCC, we may ask:  Where are our theological voices today?  Who validates or invalidates them?  Who promotes them?  Who is their audience?  Do they reflect the “ground” of the church?

Ironically, The UCC @ 50, the official publication of denomination’s golden anniversary, while proclaiming that “theology is alive” in the United Church of Christ, omits our most enduring and broadly influential theologian, Paul Tillich, from its overview of our theological history—is the absence of Tillich indicative of a lack of focus or lack of knowledge of our own recent history and traditions?  Is theology or theological practice possible today in the United Church of Christ?  Do we think of ourselves as too diverse to have a unified theology that theology has now become marginalized or even forbidden? If “theology is alive” in the UCC, who are our theologians? Who publishes them? Who is their audience?

What’s your favorite logic textbook?

I have always wanted to challenge myself to teach logic or symbolic logic.  Every opportunity I have had to teach logic never really came to be, lack of enrollment, registrar forgetting to put the course on the schedule, but I am now in a situation that I might be teaching it in the coming year where I will likely have enrollment and the course will actually happen.  I know this will take some disciplined preparation on my part, and I am up for the task, but I am struggling at this point to arrive at a compelling text.

Do any of you have experience teaching logic, and what text or texts do you use?

Open thread: Subverting the Norm II reactions

I just got home from Subverting the Norm II in Springfield, MO.  I had to leave a little early to be back in time to preach on Sunday morning, so I missed the later sessions.  Jeff Robbins said this morning, and I agree, that the big shift that we have seen between the first Subverting the Norm conference and this one is that there seems to be a whole lot more people talking about radical theology, folks are more comfortable with the vocabulary, and there didn’t seem to be as big of a rift between the academics and the pastors present.  To the last point, I think there were fewer pastors in the audience, but more clergy involved in presentations and breakout sessions.  I really enjoyed the Homebrewed Christianity event with Tripp Fuller and others; the Caputo and Cobb beers were very good.  The whole conference was a lot to take in, compressed in a very short time and it seemed like there were really interesting things going on against each other all day–I heard that the schedule got modified a bit at the end to accomodate this.

I finished reading Brewin’s Mutiny on the flight to the conference, and then heard him speak about this and his new book, After Magic.  AUFS commenter Robert Saler asked an excellent question regarding the violence of piracy which exposes Brewin’s Mutiny book a little bit

Lent 5 sermon: “The Resurrectionist”

I struggled with this week’s Revised Common Lectionary this week, and decided to expand it to be on the raising of Lazarus, which is actually a subject I have never preached on before.  The lections are Isaiah 43:16-21; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 11:1-27, 38-44, 54-57; and 12:1-11.

I’ve been reading a book titled The Italian Boy by Sarah Wise, which is a book about the public exposure of the dark side of urban expansion in London in the early 1830s, namely, the business that emerged for body snatching.  Body snatchers were thieves who stole corpses from graves.  The population of London exploded in the first three decades of the 19^th century, and these years also saw an expansion of interest in the medical sciences and a new demand for medical workers.

To go back in time a little, fifty years prior, the English Parliament declared in the Murder Act of 1751 that the practice of “gibbeting” was expanded to allow judges to not only order an execution as punishment for murder, but that the executed corpse would be placed on display in a very public place, usually along a highway or at a busy crossroads.  The idea was to deter the growing problem of murders in London by treating the bodies of murderers in the same way the royalty would treat the bodies of those who commit treason against the King—traitors—and pirates.

The very next year, another Murder Act was passed by Parliament, the Murder Act of 1752.  The Murder Act of 1752 was designed again to further deter murder crimes by making clear that those who commit murder will not be buried after execution, and that their remains must be either displayed by gibbeting, with the body publicly hanging in chains, or—and this is the innovation—the body will be turned over to scientists for “public dissection.”  As a result, murder convicts’ bodies could be turned over to medical colleges for use in teaching.

With the expansion of medical education and research, however, there were not enough felons whose bodies ended up on the dissection tables.  As a result, a somewhat lucrative black market emerged for fresh bodies to be sold in secret to medical colleges.  Body snatchers or corpse thieves became known as “resurrectionists,” who would dig out fresh graves from the ground. 

Lent 4 sermon: “Smelling Like Pig Slop…”

This Sunday’s lectionary passages are Psalm 32 and Luke 15:1-3, 11-32; the following is my working draft (and draft title) for my sermon this coming Sunday at Saint Paul’s United Church of Christ in Dallastown, PA.  Commentaries used include the UCC’s SAMUEL resource, the Girardian Commentary on the Lectionary, and Anne Howard’s blog post (cited below).

Most of us know this story of the lost Son or the prodigal Son.  In fact, I was just thinking about this story as I was watching the Disney movie Pinocchio a week or two ago with my kids.  The scene in the movie where the boys, including Pinocchio, are taken away to Pleasure Island before they are kidnapped is especially disturbing to me, partially because it seems to have an undertone of how child molesters groom children they are about to abuse—to the point that it really made me cringe watching this film.  Consequently the children are all turned into donkeys, which I think is symbol of the child abuse, after they are given a taste of alcohol and tobacco, representing in the story addictions that adults have, offering them to children as a kind of forbidden fruit.

The other thing that Pinocchio reminds me of in this story is what Pinocchio is most famous for, which is the lying.  In our Bible story, the youngest son exploits the father’s money, comes back home and is extravagantly welcomed back.  In fact, the Father sees the son coming home in a distance, and the son begins telling him the speech that he has been rehearsing.  The Son had rehearsed this whole speech about how the father’s servants were eating better and so on, but the Father was so happy that he didn’t even let him get to that point.  All the Son said was “Father, I’ve sinned against God, I sinned before you, I don’t deserve to be called your son ever again.”

Of course, the father welcomes him home, puts good clothes on his son, places a ring on his finger, and calls a banquet.  This part of the story is important, because the ring is a symbol of the inheritance, the banquet here is a symbol of heaven, of the banquet that has no end.

The way I have always heard this story and the way I have always been taught to interpret this story places emphasis on the banquet, that the prodigal son is an analogy or allegory about how God welcomes home sinners.  I’ve actually heard this story preached at funerals for people who were pretty clearly not Christians as a mean to comfort the grieving, that God welcomes home everyone who returns.  To be honest, I really like this interpretation of the story, that no matter how far away we’ve gone from God, when we come back we are welcomed home.  (In fact, to follow my connection to Pinocchio earlier, this theme is a lot like another Disney movie that some of you have surely seen, Finding Nemo, where the Father does everything he can to get his lost son back.)

Lent 1 Sermon: “Why I Should Be Pope!”

The following is my draft of this Sunday’s sermon, which is using the lectionary readings of Romans 10:8b-13 and Luke 4:1-13.  I will preach it this coming Sunday at St. Paul’s United Church of Christ, Dallastown, PA.  Thanks as always to the Girardian Commentary on the Lectionary for some helpful starting points and ideas, and I was also led to this sermon by a chapter in Altizer’s new book, The Apocalyptic Trinity, on the nature of tragedy and trinitarian thought.

In our scripture reading, Jesus heads out into the wilderness, and there is tempted by the devil, who tempts him to perform a magic trick of turning a rock into bread.  When Jesus refuses, the devil, the scripture says, “led him up” (it doesn’t say, up where, but the devil leads him up, I assume to a high point on a mountain, or high in the sky) and offers him all of the kingdoms of the world, if he is to simply worship the devil, and Jesus again refuses.

Then the devil tempts Jesus again, taking him to the pinnacle of the temple and again demands a miracle, that he throw himself from the top and command the angels to save him from death.  The devil famously quotes scripture here, and after Jesus resists the temptations of the devil, the devil departs from him until a more “opportune time.”

Among the things very interesting about this story is that there is an assumption that the devil owns all of the kingdoms, and Jesus does not say to the devil, “these are not your kingdoms to give.”  There is no indication that the devil is lying to Jesus.  And it is not just that some of the kingdoms are his to give, or only those within immediate view, the Bible instructs that it is “all of the kingdoms.”  None of the kingdoms or governments escape control of the devil, none of them are holy.

CFP: Subverting the Norm II

Phil Snider is hosting a second Subverting the Norm conference at Drury University.  Confirmed speakers so far include Peter Rollins, John Caputo, Namsoon Kang, Katharine Moody, Christena Cleveland, Barry Taylor, Kester Brewin, Micki Pulleyking, Clayton Crockett, Jeffrey Robbins, Phil, and myself.

And you, too, if you respond to the following call for papers… Deadline is the end of the month…

Advent 4 Sermon: “Palm Sunday in December”

The following is the draft for my upcoming sermon at St. Paul’s UCC, Dallastown, PA, this Sunday.  The lection is Luke 2:1-7.

A reading from the holy book of Islam, the Quran, Sura 19, verses 16-36: 

Mention in the scripture Mary. She isolated herself from her family, into an eastern location. While a barrier separated her from them, we sent to her our Spirit. He went to her in the form of a human being. Mary said, “I seek refuge in the Most Gracious, that you may be righteous.”