posted by chancehunter
This is a self-referencing blog. Center for Spiritual Procrastination
1/28/2001 10:17:16 PM
posted by chancehunterPlease read this article, called "The Divine Right of Capital."
It is perhaps the most inspiring article in social ethics I have read for quite some time. Put differently, it's the article I've been hoping, longing to read for three or four years.
What Marjorie Kelly does so well in this article is expose the root of the evil that I call global corporate feudalism: the supposed divine right of shareholders to profit. It's the myth that keeps an aristrocatic capitalism humming along when we could be in a democratic capitalism--one that rewards the people who earn the money.
I'll say more later, I'm sure (I can't sleep tonight). But in the meantime, read it yourself!
8/15/2000 01:34:11 AM
posted by chancehunter
Brittish humorist Will Self has this take on the Book of Revelation. He wrote it for Pocket Canon series, a kitchy-hip packaging of key books of the Bible, with celebrity introductions by the likes of Doris Lessing and Bono. Apparently the buck-a-book jobbies have been all the rage with hip London twenty-somethings, either in spite of or because of the original King James.It seems that Self thinks that the Twentieth Century was the apocalypse now. What frightens him is the way that the admittedly strange book (that even clergy were not allowed to read for centuries, without the oversight of a partner) has become the centering point for a neurotic movement within fundamentalism, a disease that in my view has symptoms like the Waco burning and the resulting Oklahoma City bombing. Thank you Hal Lindsey! Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, eh?
6/14/2000 02:24:46 PM
posted by chancehunter
I got my tonsils, adenoids, and my uvula taken out late last week. This is what I've been up to. Deep. . .
6/12/2000 07:00:30 PM
posted by Mark Crenshaw
Did this really work? If it did you are really going to regret this chance.
6/6/2000 03:17:16 PM
posted by chancehunter
Okay, so Richard Mouw doesn't like labels. And I have to agree with him. The terms "liberal" and "conservative" have very little content left--if they ever had any--whether in religion OR politics.Still, I like labels. They're easy. They're quick. They give you an instant handle on things. As I read through JRR Tolkein's Lord of the Rings series this summer, I'm reminded of the ancient understanding that knowing something's true name gives you a power over it.
But perhaps that's just the problem. All these labels don't really get to the point, don't get the the quick. They aren't true names.
So here's a few labels I'm experimenting with as I try to find my one true name:
- Post-evangelical. Explored in his book of the same name, Dave Tomlinson tries to find a Christianity that still has some meat to it, without being too close-minded. Written from a Brittish context, the book is a good, quick read even if it focuses too much on what to make of the Bible (at the expense of other important questions).
- Post-liberal. George Lindbeck, William Placher, and generally the Yale and Princeton crowds to some extent. The idea here is to get beyond the tendency of liberal theology to dacay into a cheap relativism, for instance "the resurrection means whatever you feel like it means to you." But they still don't want to come out and say that doctrines "mean what they mean," in the simplistic sort of way that evangelicals do. The solution? Christianity is a language, a way of speaking and being in the world, with its own dialects. Christianity can be "spoken" in infinite creative ways. But what about doctrine? For the post-liberals, doctrine is Christianity's grammar, sort of the ground rules for how to use the language properly (and so that other people will be able to understand you). A fine idea in theory, but does it preach?
- Feminist Wesleyan. Part of what I don't like about postliberalism is that it focuses too much on the tradition of Christian doctrine. Wesley taught that you also need to give equal weight to the Bible, reason, and experience. For Wesley, the Bible was the final arbiter between the four key parts. For me, as a feminist, it's experience (I don't know how else you can look at tradition, reason, and the Bible, except through your own experience). Welsey also thought that God's grace was ever-present, an idea I like to take a little further to explain how I can see God's grace in nature and even in other religions.
- High church charismatic. My perfect church would have a high church liturgy centering around the Eucharist, with a feminist theology (especially hymns and art) and a charismatic spirituality. Yeah, I know. Keep dreaming.
- Recovering fundamentalist. Probably the most accurate of all of them, even if I'd rather it not be. One friend calls me "Captain Bible Study" when he wants to remind me what a shmuck I was in high school. Too bad there aren't 12-step groups for this. But then I'd have to go to all those meetings, and I really don't want to take up smoking anyhow.
6/6/2000 01:13:05 PM
posted by chancehunter
Are happy endings always sentimental? Chris Fujiwara seems to think so. In his recent review of Magnolia, he kvetches about "fantasies of redemption and reconciliation," which he equates with ahistoricism or some magical undoing of the past.Has this man never been forgiven? Never been reconciled? To anyone? Or perhaps he is the reincarnation of Albert Camus, raging against the plague of meaninglessness in some Twilight Zone version of the Boston Pheonix (where he writes). Isn't playing existentialist just a late adolescent way of being a poser? Not that I haven't played dress-up with the same costume myself, but I was nineteen. And I say this as a still (I think) loyal Nietzschean. Seems like a fake authenticity to me.
5/24/2000 11:45:25 AM
posted by chancehunter
I got some spam this morning urging that I vote for Ralph Nader. So I posted it to an egroup ran by a "restorative justice" group I work with from time to time to see what they think.I'm quite sure that a political party--even one like the Greens that I'm sympathetic towards--can't solve society's problems. I'm also reluctantly convinced that there must be some sort of utopian vision, balanced by a dystopian critique of the status quo. Ralph Nader seems to have the dystopian critique down, but the utopian bit seems a little hazy.
5/23/2000 08:49:40 AM
posted by chancehunter
With some notable exceptions, most all of the supposed "GenXers" I know (and respect) who've planned to enter the ordained ministry have left that track entirely.Along that line, a friend of mine recently had a conversation with several up-and-ups in the foreign policy establishment, who were lamenting my generation's lack of idealism. My friend (a Boomer) countered that he thought we were just as idealistic--if not more--but that we have channelled our idealism into less than official channels, i.e. not the State Department or the Peace Corps.
A case in point is my friend Laurie, a twentysomething post-evangelical Catholic (my description), who organized a conference for seminarians of all flavors from all over the Balkans. The goal of this conference was to teach them to "play well with others," in the hopes that years down the road this new generation of religious leadership won't allow their religions to excuse another series of bloodbaths. So far so good. The young seminarians plan to get together again, keep in regular contact, and above all remain friends. Not very official, but could it have worked otherwise?
As I've been reading Simone Weil the last week or two (thanks to Hermenaut for the recommendation), I've been struck by her converting to Christianity, yet refusing baptism or church membership. It seems that Simone refused to be a part of what Kierkegaard called the "Christianity game." Interestingly, she wrote at the same time as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who envisioned a "church-less Christianity" just before he was executed after a failed attempt to assasinate Hitler. (Simone died of starvation-related illness after refusing to eat more than her compatriots in occupied France.) I remember hearing occasional rumors about John Paul II wanting to name her a saint, which only makers her refusal to get baptised the more interesting.
Is there a connection here? Is there some "saintliness" in the GenX refusal to play the "Christianity game?" It seems a little much to equate my friends' (and my own) refusal to enter the ranks of the clergy with, say, Francis of Assisi's stripping himself of his inherited privilege in order to identify with the Christ of the poor.
Still, there is some virtue in it. At the least, it represents an indigenization of religion, of its being pushed out to the periphery where it take root in fresh ground. It's the birth of a new tradition of Christianity--a clergy-less Christianity. Who knows? It could end up being a lot closer to two other religions with no clergy: Wicca and Bahai.
5/22/2000 01:00:29 PM
posted by chancehunterOkay, so I've started this thing.
5/18/2000 11:52:30 AM