http://churchandpomo.typepad.com/conversation/2010/01/symposium-the-politics-of-discipleship-part-3.html

Of course it should be noted that Berry is quite aware of the fact that his land was once the land of natives, and that it was taken by force. That is, I don’t think Wendell Berry would participated in colonial expansion in the first place. And Berry also cites native Americans in a positive light to illustrate his points.

:)

This writing is great. One of my favorite things is critical writing. It doesn’t have to be airtight…mostly it has to be grumpy and funny.

I’m too dumb to know if McCarraher can hold his own intellectually with Milbank, because I’m too dumb to understand Milbank.

I resonate with his idea that God was still graciously at work through the modern era. Great.

But I also know that RO’s ‘ecclesial fetishism’ saved me from abandoning the church when I was at my most ‘liberal’. So that’s a good thing, right?

Also, for what its worth, having read McCarraher’s essay “The Enchantments of Mammon” I can say without a doubt that he’s no slouch regarding his knowledge of the texts related to RO. And who knows, maybe Mean Gene will pop by at some point and weigh in.

I’m perfectly willing to tolerate criticism — as I did from you in this very thread; I don’t think I was too beligerent about anything.

But Thomas is just asking this document to be something that it isn’t and refusing any sort of hermeneutical fairness. Admittedly, I may have problems with this, too, I don’t deny that. However my last comment is based on a variety of interchanges, not just this one I’m afraid.

Milbank does say that only the church has the fullness of the truth, but this does not logically entail that those who are not Christians cannot get anything right. This sort of lapse in logical reasoning is repeated over and over again. He may be (and in my view is) engaging in hyperbole, but in this context, that’s just another way of saying: “straw man argument”. It’s also a way of avoiding the arguments radical orthodoxy makes.

It may be rhetoric, but it’s rhetoric devoid of substance. This seems to fly with you as being a decent way of doing theology, but it’s this sort of thing that gets theology laughed out of philosophy departments. If it’s just a theologian’s opinion that you happen to concur with, that’s one thing; but if it’s supposed to be taken more seriously, then that’s another.

As for the meta-analysis you’re asking for, all I can say is that I think this interview is a good example of a theologian spiritedly, and with well-crafted rhetoric, voicing an opinion that I take to be well-founded. When it is read with any eye towards its genre and a basic senstitivity to rhetoric, it doesn’t come of nearly as absurd as your woodenly literal interpretation would like.

Obviously this is not a systematic treatise on the works of RO or Milbank. Your faulting it for not being that is like calling a limerick a terrible piece of journalism.

I never argued that this critique is wrong. It may well be right in some aspects. But I’m not one for latching onto things because of their conclusions without looking critically at the reasoning that leads to the conclusion (though, to here some people tell it, that’s a characteristic that belongs to theologians). Since McCarraher is the one making the argument, he has the burden to make a decent argument. Or not, if he’s just giving us sheer opinion, which, as I said, is fine too.

Let me ask it this way: Do you think this is a decent example of how a theologian ought to reason? Do we have an exemplar of theologico-critical method here?

I think this is clarified some a bit later when he says, “…but this sounds like petty bourgeois capitalism decked out in Tolkienesque drag, a Rotary Club of the Shire.”

It used to be that the cultural elite were the ones who drove around in SUV’s and lined their attics with exotic hardwoods. Even though this is still often the case, the cultural elite are now incorporating an ecological “sensitivity” into their elitism, i.e., things like CSA’s and handcrafted furniture are unfortunately now used by some as a sign that they are “in” on what they should be “in on.”

I read McCarraher as issuing a critique similar to that which has often been issued by Berry himself… a critique of surface-level agrarian suggestions that arise almost exclusively from the ivory tower.

He’s not saying that small farms, small workshops etc. are bad, or even that milbank’s attraction to these things is misguided, he’s saying that it’s insufficiently robust, and could benefit from some of the urban design ideas and techonology-criticism, not to mention the realism, of Mumford and Goodman.

Perhaps the catholic workers and the catholic land movement, which McCarraher mentions, are something of what he might envision as an alternative, even if with some qualifications and criticisms? With them you’ve got critics of capitalism with dirt under their fingernails.