Daily Archives: April 23, 2009

Compassion, Homosexuality, and Platitudes

Posted by on April 23, 2009 12 comments

A USA Today opinion piece on Christianity and homosexuality strikes me as rather boring–and a little annoying. The author is a young Southern Baptist who writes about faith and culture and appears to be into Christian environmental advocacy. What we have here is a plea for evangelical Christians to stop being ridiculously homophobic and love gay people even if they don’t agree with their lifestyle. Well that’s just dandy and I’m sure there are plenty of neanderthal evangelicals out there who have a visceral hatred of all things gay who need to hear it.

But. Is anyone else getting tired of this kind of semi-progressive evangelical way of talking about this stuff? Why on earth is it so earth-shattering for Christians to be saying that we need to be loving towards people, irrespective of their sexual exploits and identities? All too often these sorts of “pleas” come off as far too self-congratulatory and confident. They assume that the issue is closed, settled, and certain and all we need to do now is be nice and loving about how we deploy our settled correctness. What looks like sensitivity and opposition to bigotry is, in fact false humility.

At least the crazy fundamentalist bigots that the author derides are quite obviously unsettled by homosexuality. The author is placidly unaffected by it. He is secure in his belief that its wrong to have gay sex, but the presence of gay people doesn’t bother him. He is enlightened, patient, and loving, undisturbed by the presence of the otherness of gays. This posture makes alarmingly clear that the problem of homosexuality–or the issue of Christian sexual ethics more generally–is just not a problem for him. Its all something that he can easily handle, processing it in a paternalistically compassionate and calmly measured manner.

But shouldn’t we disturbed by issues like this? Isn’t a total lack of conceptual unsettledness a glaring sign of ideology? This is why mainline liberalism and mature compassionate evangelicalism are two sides of the same coin when it comes to the issue of homosexuality. For both the actual presence and issues of gay Christians are an afterthought. What counts is ideological advocacy for the correct, settled, true position. This is precisely why, to my mind, Rowan Williams is taking precisely the right course in regard to these issues. He is refusing to allow ideological advocacy, in either direction, to determine how the church faces these issues. Only by starting there, and by taking seriously the challenge of actual gay people in the particular reality of their lives can we begin to address this issue in a way that doesn’t fall into ideological platitudes that do little more than validate us in our sense of self-certainty and correctness.

What Gives with Milbank?

Posted by on April 23, 2009 31 comments

Ok, Milbank obviously rejoices in being esoteric. Like all the time. But, there seems to be a serious about-face that has taken place in his thought regarding sexuality. Consider this recent article on Milbank’s current theological-political work:

He urged the movement’s followers to “grasp the hands of labour unions, feminists, gay and lesbian activists”, and warned that “if they remain content, as I fear some of them do, to carp and posture before gatherings of the anointed, then the movement will become at best a beloved clique and at worst another academic vaudeville show”.

The groups mentioned may not want to shake Milbank’s hand: he opposes gay marriage (“I don’t want to get into the situation where we deny there is something special about being attracted to the opposite sex”).

He says he is concerned about working-class women being left to raise children alone, “in part – alongside economic factors – because of the collapse of the male ethos of supporting the woman”, and has written most stridently in opposition to in vitro fertilisation treatment for single women.

Or again, the somewhat older piece from The Other Journal:

So by supporting the total disjuncture of sex and procreation, the left is really supporting a new mode of fascism. ‘Women’ are lined up with science and choice in order to produce a new kind of ideal human subjectivity—male and autonomous and yet pliant in ‘female’ manner. The newly envisaged female body is the final site of the coming together of scientific objectivity and absolute freedom of choice. Perhaps one could even speak here of a new racism of the human race as such—it’s to be made the object of an endless ‘objective’ improvement and expression of a will to freedom/will to power. Of course this also means that the specific phenomenology of the female body is destroyed. It’s denied that this body is inherently linked both to the male body (as also vice-versa) and to another body that is itself and yet becomes not itself—the baby. Having denied the link of babies to men and also to women save as objects of their (‘male’) choice, babies thereby become pure consumer objects and all human personhood is abandoned.

Now, this is a pretty conservative framing of Christian sexual ethics coming from Milbank. Žižek, in a brief conversation mentioned to me that he believes that the reason for Milbank’s current trend against gay marriage and toward a broadly Roman Catholic theology of the family stems from recently falling under the influence of Pope Benedict. Perhaps so.

However, no matter what the reason, the anti-liberal Red Tory Milbank is a far cry from the Milbank of Being Reconciled with its talk of the “trancendental homosexuality” of angels. Its not every day you see high-profile theologians getting more conservative on sexual issues these days. Any idea why Milbank is swinging that way?

Three Arguments against the Kindle

Posted by on April 23, 2009 18 comments

From Micah White at Adbusters:

Argument one: The Kindle destroys the trace of the author. After the death of the individual author, books continue to live. They carry the trace of the authors life and thoughts on the page and show this trace through the physical existence of the book. If you hunt for books in bookstores instead of libraries, you may not realize that every age has bound its books differently, used different papers and inks and decorated the page in various ways. The materiality of the book gives us a taste of the author and the time when the book was made. Each book is different and an avid reader can often remember the color of their favorite book or the feel of its pages. The Kindle destroys this because it divorces the text from the book. It displays every book the same. While the text on the screen may changes the physical object in one’s hands stays the same. This has some troubling consequences for our relationship to the author’s words because what the Kindle really displays is one long book — simply a long stream of endless, digitized words.

Argument two: the Kindle destroys the community of readers which books engender. The Kindle has been devised by a society that wants to make profit each time a text is read rather than each time a book is purchased. In the old system, once I bought a book I owned it as an object. I could read it as many times as I liked and give it to friends who may give it to their friends. That is the basis behind public libraries, we all share books because we understand that there are more books we’d like to read than we’d ever be able to afford to read. This creates a community of readers who circulate books amongst themselves for the benefit of all. The Kindle is the end of that, no more sharing books, no more public libraries, no more sitting in a bookstore and reading a book without buying it. The Kindle is a prison for words.

Argument three: the Kindle denies the call to deep, meditative reflection. Books have a magic power in that they can draw us into the world of the author and make time pass quickly while we are immersed in the text. The book is the ideal format for presenting complicated, philosophical arguments that require the reader to pause between paragraphs and reflect. The Kindle is the opposite — it is merely a television for reading text, a computer that will distract us. Furthermore, the adoption of the Kindle will destroy the culture of reading that sets aside sacred places for study: libraries. The Kindle makes these special places unnecessary because it argues that the library will be carried in our pocket. But with the loss of quiet study places for the public will come the loss of the public’s capacity for quiet study. This is why some commentators have already reflected that the Kindle is best for trashy novels. But if the Kindle becomes widespread, all we will have is trashy novels.

The Kindle is the devil.

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