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?

Pope Francis and the End of the Theologian-King

Running around circles that includes systematic theologians I know a fair few converts to Catholicism. Systematic theologian often means a late convert, usually white and usually male, who got really into Communio (the link is for those who have no idea what I’m talking about). And many of these converts fervor for Catholicism either began or was deepened because of the Papacy of Pope Benedict XVI. These converts told themselves a story where the modern world was descending into chaos and despair because of the failures of the modern project and in this story it was only the Roman Catholic Church that could resist this descent. Pope Benedict XVI stood as the symbol of that resistance, a “real theologian” that would reinstate a radically orthodox, third way between laissez-faire capitalism and the welfare state. And I say radically orthodox not to overstate the power of those who align themselves with John Milbank and a book series (as he does like to overstate that power), but to say that the reactionary logic of those who write under the banner of Radical Orthodoxy is part of a more general reactionary idealist move in theology we also saw in Pope Benedict XVI.

Neoliberal Church?

I’ve followed Peter Rollins’ work for a couple years now and this weekend I had an epiphany: Are “transformance art collectives,” as he calls his communities (read: churches in a pub), really just a new kind of church for a new kind of capitalism?

Let me preface by saying that I’ve met Pete and his stated goals are admirable, but whether these communities, or other similar “emerging churches” (both of which mostly seem to be a white, middle-class phenomenon), are actually different from traditional church is questionable.

David Harvey continually emphasizes that changes in the deployment of political economy result in changes to the way that subjects experience space and time. Individual behaviors must be brought into a semblance of uniformity in order for particular regimes of capitalism to function. These social rules are internalized by the subjects of that regime, and therefore similarities can be found among the various institutions that thrive in a particular place and time. Simply put, under industrial capitalism, subjects are disciplined to remain passive in school, army, factory, prison, and church. The individual is not required to know how the assembly line works, never questions their superiors, can sit in church and think about where they will go to lunch afterwards, etc etc.

However, under the regime that we have entered and are currently living in, which, following Mauricio Lazzarato, I will call a debt economy, we now embody a new form of subjectivity.

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

Red Shoes or Black Shoes? Does It Matter?: On the Symbolism of Pope Francis

One thing that Benedict XVI understood was the power of a good symbol. Take the famous red shoes that Benedict was often seen wearing. What seemed to many non-Catholics to be a bizarrely fashionable choice for someone supposed to represent a poor carpenter put to death by the Roman state in some global backwater was actually a symbol for many conservative Roman Catholics and to the Eastern Orthodox Church. The red shoes was a sign of rank in imperial Rome and when the old imperial roles began to be taken up by the new Christian rulers after the legalization and institutionalization this sign of rank transferred from imperial Roman senators to the Pope. As a matter of tradition only the Pope could wear these shoes, not the Patriarch of Constantinople, symbolizing the position of the Vicar of Rome being above that of any other leader in the Christian church, Roman Catholic or otherwise. This decision to reinstate this symbolic use of shoes is completely in line with Benedict’s ecclesiology, a message that the other branches of Christianity were welcome to come back under the control of Rome but that Rome would not be changing in response in the light of any future reconciliation.

Secular Inquiry into Catholicism: A Series of Reflections on the Election of Pope Francis

It has been a little over a week now since Pope Francis* was elected. Working as I do in the Department of Religion at a Catholic university and as my research is in religion and philosophy I followed the news as one does. A bit of interest, a lot of resignation, and some trepidation since these elections can have real impacts on educators working in the Catholic system. I think my own views on Roman Catholicism are well known. Unlike many of my staunchly secular friends I am less likely to simply consign the whole of the Catholic world to the flames of history, but I am also not at all an apologist for the institution, the people that make it up, or the ideas that it propagates. I’ve touched on this in many of my posts here (here and here I discuss my decision, around age 19 or 20, not to convert to Roman Catholicism, though it was the religion of my childhood but I was never baptized or confirmed into it), but it bears pointing out a few reasons why Catholicism is still worth thinking about and engaging from the perspective of a left-wing, philosophical position.

Hobbes and “at least it’s an ethos” arguments

One frequently hears arguments from conservative Christians that extol the virtues of authority and strongly held beliefs simply as such. (For instance, see this old response to a post where Kim Fabricus makes the typical move of preferring conservative over liberal Christians because at least the former really believe, etc.) The arguments can be baffling, as they seem to boil down to “our communities might be dysfunctional, but at least they’re authoritarian!” or “our beliefs may be retrograde, but at least we won’t change them!” All that confusion dissolves, however, when we reveal the Hobbesian presupposition behind them: namely, that liberal individualism is the equivalent of the Hobbesian state of nature, compared to which any authority, even the most oppressive and ignorant, is preferable.

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.)

More Evidence Points to the Total Devaluation of Thinking

This article was popping up on my Facebook feed this morning. Academics that I know are sharing it with one another. What the author of the piece (a retired high school teacher) tells us isn’t news, per se. He’s simply tracing the damage that a generation of No Child Left Behind policies have done to learning in American public schools. There were a few things I didn’t really know: he gave me some insight into how the writing sections of assessments are scored, for instance. If I had questions about whether high school students today had fewer opportunities to learn how to struggle with ideas, or develop their inspired analytic faculties, by using the written word—to think—I feel like I now have answers. But in the end this is what the author calls a “plea” for some kind of help:

If you, as a higher education professional, are concerned about the quality of students arriving at your institution, you have a responsibility to step up and speak out. You need to inform those creating the policies about the damage they are doing to our young people, and how they are undermining those institutions in which you labor to make a difference in the minds and the lives of the young people you teach as well as in the fields in which you do your research.

I’m picking up what he’s putting down: stop complaining about the high school teachers and start calling for policy change. Amen. Lamentably, he’s speaking to a class of professionals who (increasingly) are being forced to face the harsh reality that academic labor becomes more and more contingent: brilliant thinkers are unable to secure full-time positions, tenured faculty lose their jobs when their institutions declare “financial exigency.” Granted, there are still a few superstars who moonlight in the New York Times. And, surely, as long as they continue to celebrate the beautiful world of technological, non-institutional possibility that awaits us—as we stumble out of the wreckage of an educational system that never managed to work as well as it should have—there will be a platform for them. There will alway be a platform for the people who believe in the power of new techno-commercial enterprises. The rest of us will vent to one another, in forums like this, simmering in the safe shadows of our relative obscurity.

Peterson and contemporary ecclesiology

In the epilogue to his exchange of letters with Adolf von Harnack published in Theological Tractates, Peterson writes that the conversation with Harnack foundered due to “the character of Protestantism itself, whose presuppositions make it possible for ecclesiastical life to exist without serious relation to dogma and theology, and which can, on the other hand, evolve a theology that ignores the concrete dogmatic problem of a ‘state church’” (23).

While he takes this observation in a direction many of us would find difficult to accept — namely, he believes that only a return to official state sponsorship would make Protestant churches into proper “Churches” again in the sense of being public entities (which the Catholic Church automatically is due to its direct claim of dogmatic authority in continuity with Christ and the apostles) — I do think it raises an interesting problem for Protestant theology that continues to this day. Namely, does Protestant ecclesiology really ever reflect on the actual-existing church? In the context of modern liberal Protestant theology, it seems that the existing state-church arrangements were always treated as a temporary condition, perhaps even a necessary evil — and the task of ecclesiology was to provide a vision for what the church should be.