“Philosophical language about Sameness and Otherness lacks nuance. It is like using a shovel to turn a screw.”

Socrates and Sven continued to walk.
That morning the way was packed and the air cold. There was not a cloud in the sky; the sun seemed to bounce along the cold air. Day laborers walked by, their tools clinking at their sides in an awake rhythm, and their breath came out in white puffs. Women with head coverings as colorful as the fruit they bore in baskets carried between them, passed by.
Socrates: Look at them go. What do they know of one another?
Sven: Nothing. The laborer doesn’t trade his labor for fruit, instead they all go to a middle-man.
They entered a village. Streams of people surrounded them.
Socrates: Such a rude grown-up you’ve become Sven… What I was going to say is that they know much. They all know one another as beings derived from the same stuff, the same set of urges and emotions—the same blood the same flesh. Because of the big universal “man” that is all of them they are able to relate in amazing ways, in ways that make sense… In each of them lies the capacity of all. That’s why the meat seller there…(Socrates pointed to a skinny man with oriental features.)
Socrates: Can talk with… no… can marry, that woman. (Socrates pointed to a red haired European woman with a bucket of water on her head.
Sven: That’s unimportant. That’s banal stuff. What really matters, what really could make their lives better involves distribution of their products and it involves giving them a voice in city planning. Look at this market (Sven smiled, he felt he was playing Socrates game well) It is disorganized.
And in truth the market was—fruit next to chocolate next to wagon parts next to beer.
Socrates: Ah. You are much wiser than I, with your Empiricism and critique. You do not need a mentor.
And with that Socrates stepped back from the Way. Sven stepped forward. Socrates was gone amongst the crowd of people.

Oedipus in 8 minutes, using vegetables

Veggy Tales this is not--but rather good none the less... warning there is a vegetable "sex scene"

Oedipus ...starring vegetables (2004) short film in HD from jason wishnow on Vimeo.

Born on Nine Eleven (a late thought on Tucson and Egypt)

As has been widely noted Christina Green was born on 9/11, she was featured as a “face of hope.” That her life was bracketed by violence in such a way has some spiritual significance; it also says something to and about our present reality!
I believe it says something about a whole generation born into a world that has been set on edge by violence and threats of violence their entire life. Their lives have been enveloped in the War on Terror—worry about religious radicals and dirty bombs, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, torture at Abu Ghraib, easily accessible videos of Nick Berg’s head being hacked off, the Mumbai attacks—they have never known what it is like for America to be at peace! Having entered into young adulthood when Christina was born I can only feel an echo of what this time we live in does to the impressionable and young by these events certain cynical scaring of my own soul.
Four days before the shooting in Tuscon, Salmaan Taseer, the Governor of Punjab province in Pakistan was assassinated for standing up to extremism. I felt bad for the loss of a good man, yes, but it fit into the larger story of this last decade—the triumph of violence, so I simply shrug and thought, “Violence is essential to being human. Hobbes was wrong, it is not that the state of nature is nasty brutish and short—it is that we are.”
Yet, when I first received a text about the attempted assassination of Representative Giffords I was still shocked and sickened, and I thank God for that! My shock means my heart is not entirely recalcitrant to violence.
And now that we know more fully what happened that day in that parking lot I am impressed by the counterweight that this particular story has to the larger story of violence Christina’s generation has lived with. There were too many instances of people laying down their life for another—spouse shielding spouse—to ignore. I see soul force meeting physical force. I am reminded that self-sacrifice—sacrificial love—too is embedded in our soul.
And this helps me to look at the world around me again. It helps me to shake off the depressing narrative that has built up. It helps me raise my head up and look at those standing against violence and for mutuality and understanding. It helps me to look again at the world around us and find some hope. I draws my attention anew to another international event that happened two days before the Tuscon shooting.
On New Years Eve there was a deadly attack by Muslim extremists against a Coptic Church in Alexandria Egypt. On January 6th, Coptic Christmas Eve, Egyptians from all over the country, anticipating more attacks on Coptic Christians, attended Christmas Eve Mass. This may seem a small thing, but it conveys a collective heroism on the same level as Judge Roll pushing Mr. Barber out of the way of Jared Loughner’s bullets costing him his life. These Egyptians too offered their lives to protect others. They too, in a faithful and courageous way, met physical force with soul force.
Therefore, while I am in full agreement with the President that we should live up to the democratic idealism of Christina Green, I can’t stop there. I believe we have a deep and abiding responsibility to be an anti-violent witness to Christina’s generation. We must speak of historical counter-narratives to the violent story that has plagued her decade. We must point to, and lift up, present instances of ethical behavior and faithful reconciliation. We ourselves must speak, behave, and be, a counterbalance to the ballest and burden of violence that marked Christina’s beginning and her end.

Gender equality and crying

As we all know “Boys don’t cry” yet it would seem there are exceptions… Glenn Beck and John Boehner. Now, I’m not going to suggest these right wing leaders (and make no mistake Glenn Beck is a leader of the Right) are “girlymen” or crybabies. No, I want to know why their tendency to cry in public has not been ran up a flag pole and pointed to as an example of unelectibility, brittleness, a lack of seriousness, inability to be a leader, etc?
Specifically, I wonder this because there was another politician who cried and was darn near crucified for it. Hillary Clinton, now secretary of state, teared up in a coffee shop during her primary campaign. This was front page news, CNN and Fox were fixated on maybe a milliliter of liquid on Hillary’s cheek. By contrast Glenn Beck has cried a river and Rep. Boehner at least a cup. What is the difference? Perhaps it is that Hillary is a Democrat, after all Ed Muskie, another Democrat, was brought down by being caught with moisture on his cheeks while defending his wife from nasty personal attacks. If this is the case donkeys cry because they are overly sensitive and weak on defense, whereas elephants cry because they are passionate.
Yet I would like to suggest another possibility—Hillary was singled out in a way two men involved in politics were not because she is a woman. There is still a assumption that women are more emotional than men, and that emotionalism might cloud a female leader’s judgment. Thus Hillary’s tears validated this stereotype.
This is an additional burden female leaders bear, not only must they be good at what they do, but they need to go out of their way to be the opposite of gender stereotypes. At the same time male leaders can have an out and out cry-fest without fear of electorial repercussions.
Any thoughts?

Luthermatrix in a word cloud

Giffords speaks about violence!

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Rereading books

I have a confession, with the exception of the Bible and a few other books I do not re-read books.
I guess I always felt like I got the basics of what I read the first time so why do it again. I do not want you to think I am ill-educated, I have read from Hitchens to Hesse, Aeschylus to Ellison, Dickenson to Kazantzakis, the Quran to the Bhagavad gita. Yet something is missing.
As I prepare for a life outside the ivory/tagua tower I am beginning to feel a certain poverty of my education, in that the width of my education far outstrips its depth in most areas.
I think of my mother, who can rattle off poetry she memorized in the 3rd grade and has kept close to her heart all these years hence. I hear of people returning to this work or that work (often times Shakespeare) every year to see how it reads after this experience or that experience, and I am jealous.
I think of the conserving and centering force of this task, the digging and redigging of trenches in the mind. Perhaps rereading is like morning suffrages, but for the intellect.
And so, dear readers, I would like to know what book(s) you reread yearly?
For that matter what is the proper nature of re-readable books? Is it just something you like, something that has touched you a certain way, is it edifying, short? What?
As for me I am compiling a list of potential books to reread, here are ten:

Jesus and the Disinherited
Mimensis
The Screwtape Letters
Night
Freedom of a Christian
All the King’s Men
The Sound and the Fury
Invisible Man
Victoria
The Pastor
Peace,
Chris

What if we’ll have the poor with us always because we keep stealing from them?(2)

What if we’ll have the poor with us always because we keep stealing from them?

I was reading John 12:6-8 today and was struck by something. Judas is admonishing Mary for pouring expensive perfume on Jesus because the money could have been given to the poor. Then there is a parenthetical statement that Judas didn’t really care for the poor, but was stealing from the common purse. Then Jesus responds, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
This last verse has been used to justify regressive taxation and to attack the welfare state and attempts to create economic justice and equality. The argument is, at base, “there will always be poor folk, Jesus, who knows all, and is all, says so!” Therefore attempting to tweak economic and social systems to lessen or even end poverty is silly, futile, and maybe even dangerous and demonic.
In response to this, I believe it is Brian McLaren who says, “No! Jesus’ focus in this statement is that the poor will be with you!” That is, you will always be confronted with the needy neighbor on your doorstep—so living in gated communities, or in ways that you are not always struck by poverty, is wrong, unnatural, immoral, and maybe dangerous and demonic.
Today though, I am struck with another possibility. Jesus is saying stealing from the poor, as Judas does, will keep the poor in poverty. Or to state it another way, we will know theft of the inheritance of the poor by wolves in sheep’s clothing has stopped when poverty stops.
Now, this interpretation was hard for me to come to, because when I come to the gospel’s treatment of Judas I do so with a hermeneutic of suspicion. In general, I feel that where the gospels demonize (sometimes literally) Judas they are making rhetorical points, not describing a historical reality. As Christological claims increased in the early Christian community Judas’ betrayal became a greater and greater problem until the only solution available was “he’s a demon.” After all, if we didn’t get that Jesus was the Messiah—the Christ—the Son of God—God enfleshed—perhaps we also did not see Judas for what he was—in it for the money—a betrayer from the beginning—possessed.
All that to say I generally read descriptions such as this one accusing Judas of intending to steal from the poor with some hesitancy. I think it is a bias of the author. For the author Judas could not simply have been disillusioned by Jesus, Judas must have been a demon-possessed thief.
But, because I came with this suspicion I did not, in previous readings, make the connection between theft by Judas and the continued poverty of the poor. We will have the poor with us always because people, in making pious claims about helping the poor, but in fact enriching the rich/themselves, taking wealth from the commonwealth.

An oldie but a goodie: "What kind of Lutheran are you?" quiz

I made this while serving in YAGM over in England. It is kind of fun, as I am in my last year of seminary, to look back and see where I was at theologically then.
Peace,
Chris

Being Bi-vocational

So, one of the things ELCAers going through the candidacy process have been told as of late is that they need to be prepared to be “bi-vocational.”
I would like to stir up the pot a little bit. When we are told that we need to be bi-vocational are we really being told that we need a second job?
If I remember my reformation history accurately part of the revolutionary nature Luther’s teaching was his understanding of vocation. In a sense the medieval church eschewed uni-vocational ministry; or to put it another way bi-vocationality was impossible in that system. By this I mean the only job that was “spiritual” the only job that was actually fulfilling God’s will and calling upon a person’s life was that of the priest.
Luther’s response to this was that a father changing a child’s diaper was as holy as the prayers of a whole monastery of monks. It was a re-capturing of the noble spiritual truth that when we serve our neighbor we also serve God. All of a sudden being a baker, a banker, a mother, a father, a husband, a plumber, or a social worker were all vocations—they were all jobs of spiritual worth, all jobs we are called by God to do because they serve a common good, a communal neighbor, and thus serve Christ and his Gospel.
Thus I have four questions I believe to be worth discussing:
1. So why is it that only now, when there aren’t enough full-time calls for Lutheran pastors, that the ELCA is calling us to discern a second vocation?
2. For that matter what does this “bi-vocational” language say to pastors who are fathers and mothers? GED certifiers? Volunteers of all sorts? What if a pastor has discerned that God has called him to be a pastor, God has called him to volunteer at a homeless shelter, God has called him to be a husband, and God has called him to be a father? That’s four vocations already! Four holy callings upon a man’s life!
3. The lifestyle of a pastor makes maintaining other vocations, such as parent and spouse, hard to do (http://www.pastorburnout.com/pastor-burnout-statistics.html http://www.desperatepreacher.com/pastorcare/intro_clergyfamily.htm) why is the ELCA only concerned with a clergyperson’s other vocations once it involves money? (As a side-note yes I am aware of the wholeness wheel http://www.elca.org/Growing-In-Faith/Vocation/Rostered-Leadership/Leadership-Support/Health/Wholeness-Wheel.aspx)
4. For that matter, when we discuss lay-folk and non-ordination track folk we lessen the use of this language of vocation. Why is it only when the work life of ordained-folk is concerned that we trot out this language of vocation?
I guess it seems that as a church it is important to call things what they are.
Peace,
Chris Halverson

The Sanity/Fear Rally (Part 2)

In a previous post I described the Sanity/Fear rally and Stewart's reason for having it.
What follows are my reasons for going.
I came to the Rally to restore Sanity and/or Fear for civic fellowship, to affirm civility, and to negate the Beck-Tea Party axis’ stranglehold on national discourse.
1.I went to Stewart and Cobert’s rally because friends were going. On one level I mean Onleilove, Samantha and Aaron who I rode down with.
On another level I mean the many friends and friends of friends (for example my Hebrew study partner from undergrad in Oregon and the boss of the woman who convinced me to get Simul in Wisconsin) who also attended, but because of the massive crowd I never saw there.
On still another level I mean all those people who came together who share shades of the same cultural, social, generational, and political views as my own. I’ve heard it said the Sanity/Fear Rally was my generation’s Woodstock. I think that’s a little far-reaching, but the point it well made.
I wanted to participate in a big event in the national-life of our country. There seem to be fewer opportunities for communal and community oriented events in our national life. I think this lack fed into the Beck rally. But it is not only Sarah Palin’s heart that yearns for national purpose, for a public life and the ability to earn some social capital, but my own as well.
2. I also went to the Sanity/Fear rally because I am pro-civility. Much of Stewart’s expressed reason for going to the rally mirrors my own. I think many people are truly fearful. They are acting like chickens with their heads cut off because the media, and, I would add, reactionary people with far more detrimental intentions than simply selling newspapers and gaining high television ratings, are telling us we have everything to fear. These same people also demonize those with whom they disagree, and next thing you know everything becomes a yelling match. I believe healthy discussion and clear discourse can do wonders for understanding what those you disagree with believe.
3. That said, there are people out there with whom I disagree deeply. They are the final reason I went to the Sanity/Fear rally; I went because I am anti-Tea Party and anti-right wing extremist. In fact, because of the way they have handled themselves they deserve to be mocked. Their claims upon the soul of my country (and theirs), their overblown sense of their own strength, and their manufacturing of reality is unacceptable. Thumbing my nose at these tendencies is the third and final reason I went to the Sanity/Fear rally (and yes I am aware there is a disconnect between this and my previous reason for going to the rally).

Simul Justus Et Peccator

As my little sinner-saint kitten, Simul, opens up my kitchen cabnet, climbs in, and goes to sleep, I note two websites that point toward her namesake this day:
Mockingbird points to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and quotes Stevenson thus: "With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two."
And over at LivingLutheran Luther is hailed as our "Patron Saint-Sinner."

Theology of the Cross in Revelation

As I write my paper about what Revelation chapter 5 verse 5 means in light of verse 6-- essentially asking the question what does a slain lamb have to do with a conquering lion--I ran across an interesting sidebar that I do not have time to research in the moment. Here is the summation of my sidebar:
I think it is important to note the parallel between the lamb horned earth beast and the lion mouthed sea beast found in the 13th chapter of Revelation. Both lion roar/fangs and lamb horns hold authority, but of a violent/coercive kind. Perhaps these things could help understand the Lamb/Lion of Revelation 5. Talk about finding God in the form of the opposite!

The Sanity/Fear Rally (Part 1)

I went to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. My girlfriend
, two fellow seminarians, and I

got up early on that chilled Saturday morning and drove from Philadelphia to Pentagon City. There we took out markers and poster board and made a few cool signs!

We made our way to an extremely packed subway car and played the part of sardines all the way to the National Mall.
There we were met with Libertarians passing out signs, venders selling buttons, people giving away free towels, and people wielding homemade signs, lots of people wielding homemade signs!



We waded through the sea of people heading toward the stage in front of the Capital Building, passing Jumbotrons as we went. Along the way we saw met people from all over, from Alaska

to Texas, South Carolina to Wisconsin, Oregon to Maryland.
Eventually we found a place to sit near a Jumbotron, put down tarps, and enjoyed the rally. Stewart’s and Cobert’s show was great. It was filled with camp, satire, and stars (including the hosts of Mythbusters, Sheryl Crow, Kid Rock, and yes, R2-D2). Stewart and Cobert sparred over fear and sanity. Cobert was armed with a giant Cobert puppet and news clips, Stewart with guest appearances by R2D2 and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Stewart ended the show with a speech about his intentions for the rally—about its meaning.
First the rally was a chastisement of the media, which in Stewart’s view, has amplified all problems in America to the point at which it we believe that we live in the end times, a catastrophic apocalypse in which killer bees will destroy us all—as will bullying—as will illegal immigration—as will our the Tea Party. The media has also projected a false image of our fellow Americans. They are “Marxists actively subverting our Constitution.” They are “racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own.”
Secondly, the rally was about affirming that this media echo-chamber is not true. Most Americans live their lives, “as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do—often something that they really do not want to do—but they do it—impossible things every day that are only made possible by the little reasonable compromises that we all make.”
He made this second point clear with a video of people on a multi-lane highway that narrowed down to one lane in order to enter a tunnel. People were willing to take turns—to work together—in order to make it through to the other side.
Finally he concluded with a word of thanks, saying that seeing so many people come out to a rally to restore sanity restored his own.
I must admit, while I think it is important to affirm all of these things, to speak a still small word through the valley in order to point out that it has become an echo-chamber, and while I think it is also important to recognize dignity and humanity of people on both sides of an argument, I felt Stewart may have shot a little too low—maybe even have sided a little too strongly with the status quo. Having strong political views is seen as a vice, just getting along, just making it in a middle-class soccer-mom kind of way is a virtue. Not that there is anything wrong with middle-class soccer-mom’s, but I truly believe there are good strong political views and bad strong political views. I believe there is a whole large swath of America who doesn’t fit into a middle-class “just getting along” so don’t bother me Mr. Tea-Party-Man demographic.
And so, I have reflected upon this rally. Stewart allowed that it held multiple meanings—different people came for different reasons. In my next post I will describe what my reasons for going were.