A Libertarian(ish) solution to gun violence

I grew up in Wyoming, my dad owned the kinds of guns that could, in about 3 seconds, shred a herd of Antelope or ATF agents hopping out of black helicopters.

I (sort of) get both hunting and non-hunting gun culture.

I get the 2^nd Amendment being ingrained into America’s basic understanding of Freedom, and intrinsic to the covenant between We the People and the State.

At the same time, lessening or even ending gun violence is a truly worthy goal.

So, here is my proposal for gun ownership accountability:

1. All gun owners must be members of a well-regulated militia.

2. Militias are liable in civil court for all damages done by guns and bullets connected to members.

3. Militias may not declare bankruptcy.

            Essentially Militias would become insurance pools. It would be in their best interest to encourage safe choices, regulate member’s gun purchases and sales, and reject folk who pose a danger to our society.

            Some Militias would probably have a pretty low bar for membership and fees—for example the “Revolutionary Era Musket Collectors and Skeet Shooting” Militia. The “Hey, Bob, look what I can do with a modified Bazooka and a Watermelon!” Militia would probably have a much higher bar for entry and fees.

            Think about it, even the NRA, generally not amenable to regulation of guns, could make a killing! They have a mailing list, a reputation, and would have the greatest membership pool from which to draw.

            One of the things many gun-folk aren’t fond of is the idea of a centralized organization forcing people to make particular choices. This scheme would be decentralized, voluntary, and rely on the free market for regulation.

            And, I would hope, make gun deaths less likely.

The Central Things

As some of you know I’ve been creating a prayer book—the intention of which is to move the 7 central things of worship out into the rest of the world, stretching Sunday out into the rest of the week.

Imagine a group of people who focus their lives on being community, fostering forgiveness, reflecting on their vocations in light of God’s love for us, rooting themselves in God’s Word, cultivating a thankful heart, sharing Christ’s grace at table, and being people in the world that are salt and light for the sake of the world.

Here are a few brief maxims to reflect on:

To Gather in community requires being self-outside-of-self.

To Confess and Forgive one another requires humility.

To remember our Baptism is to both forget and re-member our other callings.

To engage with the Word is to make relative the world for its own sake.

To give Thanks is to be aware of the source of all that is good.

To Eat together the body of Christ is to become what we are.

To be Sent is to be in the world as it is and as it shall be.

On Specialization

I ended up reading a small portion of a tentative English translation of a Coptic document by Hibat Ibn al-‘Assal, the translator of the Bible from Coptic into Arabic, and I got to a place where Hibat was describing the books of the Bible he affirmed as canon.
The author translated most of the books correctly, but when it came to the books of Wisdom there was one book that the translator did not know how to translate “’Quhalet.”
This is of course a hare’s breath away from the Hebrew title for the book we call Ecclesiastes. Now, I would have assumed the author knew this and was simply leaving things in a purer form of translation—transliteration, except that “’Quhalet” was accompanied by one little added mark, a question mark. I genuinely believe the translator of this document did not know that Ecclesiastes is a Latin rendering of the Hebrew title Qohheleth.
And this was one of the reasons I didn’t stay in England to do the Ph.D. at Cambridge but instead came back to the United States to do an M.Div. at Philly. I kind of like being a generalist, poking my nose in multiple steaming and smelly mounds of knowledge. I am not ready to become so specialized that I can’t see the forest because I’m caressing one specific portion of a specific leaf on one specific type of tree.
That said, before I kick Specialization to the curb, I do have to affirm that the skills fostered by a Ph.D. are formidable and transferable to other subjects. Additionally, in digging down through the layers of time and interpretation to get to your specific subject you end up bumping into a lot of interesting things—so in a sense you become a generalist by osmosis instead of by intent.

What if Luke chapter 12:13-21, the man Jesus called a fool, is about the father of the two brothers?

So, I’ve spent the day looking at the final 8 sermons I’ll be preaching… because if I’ve learned nothing else on internship it is to be intentional and to prepare things in advance.
I was reading the gospel readings for August 1st and hit upon an imaginative question: What if the man Jesus calls a fool is in fact the “father” of the two men squabbling about inheritance rights?
Let me set the scene, Jesus is chilling out telling a crowd about faithful fearlessness and a dude in the crowd switches up the conversation, asking Jesus to intervene and get his brother to split his inheritance.
Jesus responds, “that’s not on me… but be careful about this possessions thing—that’s not what life’s about. It can lead to greed… in fact, let me tell you about a man, who was very rich. He decided to build bigger warehouses because he had a LOT of stuff.
In fact he saw having all that stuff secure in an even bigger building to be a sign to his soul that he would be protected for years to come.
And then he died. He was a fool.”
So, what if the man Jesus calls a fool is, either spiritually, or even physically, the father of this man who is after his inheritance. That, to me, would add an even deeper barb to this story. The ending becomes, “he died. He was a fool. Look now, those mighty barns he built up are being torn into two by you! That foolishness is being spread even as it is being torn up! You too are a fool!”

The authority is gone!

This morning, before listening to MLK’s speech on my I-pod, I was woken to further news about the sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. There is a chance it goes all the way up to the top, to the “Vicar of Christ.”
Well, this “Vicar of St. John’s” was none too impressed by the Pope’s response. Essentially, “aren’t those Bishops of mine naughty”… and, “man, there are a lot of rumors out there.”
I mean we’re talking about rape, rape of children!
It feels like people in authority just don’t care. It’s like this “too big to fail” mentality has been taken up by people we genuinely trust. It’s like authority means never having to say you’re sorry. I mean I don’t like “the Pope’s bulldog” turned Pope, but I figure if you’ve got a bulldog the least you can do with it is use it to protect children!
I know half a generation turned counter-culture after Nixon’s breach of trust was revealed, and the war in Vietnam was called into question. I wonder if we’re at another such moment.
My generation has seen some pretty big shifts in the world, and they definitely don’t make those in charge, or those institutions that put them there, look very good.
There was the dot-com bust and the impeachment of President Clinton. Then we had democracy called into question with a close election in 2000 that some claimed was rigged. Then the myth of America being a safe place was stripped from us on 9/11. Then there was the half-truths that got us into Iraq. Then there was the abuses of Abu Ghraib. Then there was a more popularized understanding of how our actions affect the environment. Then there was the giant economic downturn. Then there has been the response to the 2008 election of America’s first African American president—people have been throwing more and more partisan, and sometimes racist, vitriol out there and people are actually turning violent!
And now the most recognized figure of global Christianity may be directly involved in a cover up of child rape in his home country and indirectly involved in such actions throughout Europe, and perhaps the world.
I mean… I mean… I mean, I was raised by fairly non-conformist parents—I affectionately refer to them as a biker and a hippie—I listen to Alice’s Restaurant every Thanksgiving—because I wanted to end the war and stuff… but you know!
You know! I kinda held out hope that those people and systems that had been given authority would at least use them wisely. In fact, I would go so far as to say I had some affection for authority figures—my way of rebelling against the morals and norms of my parents I suppose—but I think its getting pretty hard to do…
…You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
Excepting Alice
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant

Da da da da da da da dum
At Alice's Restaurant

The Meta-narrative is broken?

This morning, as I exercised, I listened to Martin Luther King’s sermon “Paul's Letter to American Christians.” In it he goes off on the following trope:
“For many years I have longed to be able to come to see you. I have heard so much of you and of what you are doing. I have heard of the fascinating and astounding advances that you have made in the scientific realm. I have heard of your dashing subways and flashing airplanes. Through your scientific genius you have been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. You have been able to carve highways through the stratosphere. So in your world you have made it possible to eat breakfast in New York City and dinner in Paris, France. I have also heard of your skyscraping buildings with their prodigious towers steeping heavenward. I have heard of your great medical advances, which have resulted in the curing of many dread plagues and diseases, and thereby prolonged your lives and made for greater security and physical well-being. All of that is marvelous. You can do so many things in your day that I could not do in the Greco-Roman world of my day. In your age you can travel distances in one day that took me three months to travel. That is wonderful. You have made tremendous strides in the area of scientific and technological development.
But America, as I look at you from afar, I wonder whether your moral and spiritual progress has been commensurate with your scientific progress. It seems to me that your moral progress lags behind your scientific progress. Your poet Thoreau used to talk about "improved means to an unimproved end." How often this is true. You have allowed the material means by which you live to outdistance the spiritual ends for which you live. You have allowed your mentality to outrun your morality. You have allowed your civilization to outdistance your culture. Through your scientific genius you have made of the world a neighborhood, but through your moral and spiritual genius you have failed to make of it a brotherhood. So America, I would urge you to keep your moral advances abreast with your scientific advances.”-- http://www.mlkonline.net/christians.html
Now, this isn’t the only sermon in which he wonders at the scientific advances of his age (and how much more our own?). He is consistently impressed by skyscraping buildings.
As a caveat he calls on his listeners to move forward in thinking, in morality, in matters of the heart, to a point at which we truly match our physical sciences with the science of the spirit.
But, being influenced in my thinking by Paul, Augustine, and Luther I know humans are both dust and spirit. Even at the heights of our powers and even our morality there is a propensity to do evil.
And then I remember my own vision for the world. The closest thing I’ve ever written to a dream for the time I reside in. I re-write Genesis chapter 22 to speak to a time in which religion and violence have become, for some, synonyms:

“And Abraham weeps, and puts down his knife, and comes to his children and hugs them tightly. And he suggests that they bind themselves to an oath, saying, “Yours is a generation unlike mine. In my day only God could knock down the tower of Babel,” and he picks up the sacrificial knife off the ground, “now 19 men armed only with these can do similar. Sectarians have been unbound throughout Babylon, and it is in flames. Man’s consumption can cause a new flood and his bombs can bring Armageddon. Cuneiform tablets and riders on horses have been replaced with the keyboard and instant communication and so being respectful to one’s neighbor is now a global affair.” With that he throws the knife onto the altar, “Yours is a generation where individuals can impact the whole world as never before. You carry a responsibility that previously was the burden and pleasure of only the elites and the statesmen of the world. We have become god-like and never even noticed. The myth of redemptive violence, a myth I unwittingly have given to each of you, must be extinguished. So bind upon your hearts a promise to shake off the nihilism of violence.”—“Religiously Motivated Violence and the Akedah,” in An Uncomfortable Bit of Rope” page 92.
And I wonder if I am simply diagnosing, in more mythical terms, the same malaises of our age—simply pointing to the shadowy cloud that billowed from those sky-scrapping buildings instead of the fact that they scrape the sky. King, in the 50’s looked at technology with wonder and hoped for a morality to match. We, in this millennium, look with horror at our morality and don’t even realize “we have become god-like.”
The world King read he read in a prophetic way—projecting forward that which was to come, a mix of hope for what is and anguish for what will be. We, on the other hand, are living amongst the rubble and in the midst of the anguish, with only a peep of hope, like that faint feather resting in Pandora’s box.
So, the questions are: Is this continuity or discontinuity? Is the myth of progress, either moral or material, still something that is worth talking about? Or have we reached an age at which we may no longer reach for the heights of beauty, truth, honor, pity and compassion? Is the only question remaining the very question William Faulkner spoke against in his Nobel prize speech, “When am I going to be blown up?”

Suicide and Country Music... they had to do a scientific study!?!

Entertainment then and now

The Doc has a post up about how entertainment used to contain virtuous tales, and now it is nitty-gritty and real.
This made me stop, pause, and reflect. Is it simply that our current entertainers are trying to express the ambiguity of our so called post-modern world, or could it in fact be that both of these forms of story telling are escapism. Back in the nasty, brutish, and short days happy edifying stories where evil looses and good triumphs was the norm, now in this modern world in which the "good" of materialist capitalism has triumphed, and esentially freedom and democracy reign we now want stories where the moral cleanliness of the present system is gutted?
I'm just throwing an idea out there.
Peace,
Chris