Category Archives: Culture - Page 2

Bacevich blogs

Posted by Halden on April 14, 2010 Comments Off

Andrew Bacevich is now blogging at World Affairs. His blog, Anti-Imperialist looks to be a consistent source of helpful and insightful commentary on contemporary issues. His latest post is on the Iraq war and its legacy:

The violence unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 persists, but Americans, from Barack Obama on down, are eager to declare the Iraq War at an end. Apart from a few diehard neoconservatives still keen to use Mesopotamia as a springboard for the pursuit of imperial fantasies, Americans can’t wait to shake the dust of Iraq from their feet and be done with the place.

Yet even as we leave, we should not forget. Common decency demands that we honor the service and sacrifice of those who bore the burden of waging that war. No doubt some committee will soon start lobbying for the construction of an Iraq War Memorial to be erected on the Mall in Washington. That effort deserves to succeed.

My own view is that every American war, large or small, ought to be commemorated smack dab in the middle of the nation’s capital. Crowding every inch of the Mall with granite and marble war memorials—the bigger the better—just might help deflate the continuing American illusion that we are a peaceful people desirous of nothing except to be left alone. It might help us see ourselves as we really are.

Yet the commemoration of the Iraq War ought to have a second component: American soldiers and American citizens are owed an accounting of exactly what this war was about. Who devised it? What was its actual purpose? What did it achieve and at what cost? Why did so much go so wrong for so long? Who should be held accountable?

God bless Rowan Williams

Posted by Halden on April 13, 2010 16 comments

Apparently among fringe right-wing Christian groups Rowan Williams is catching some heat, yet again, this time for his comments in his Easter Sermon. Referencing some recent British political happenings about wearing crosses in public, Williams boldly called Christians away from facile claims to being persecuted victims in the big bad secular world, opting instead to inject a little knowledge and reality into the the theatrics that are all too common amongst the power-starved Christian right:

It is not the case that Christians are at risk of their lives or liberties in this country simply for being Christians. Whenever you hear overheated language about this, remember those many, many places where persecution is real and Christians are being killed regularly and mercilessly or imprisoned and harassed for their resistance to injustice. Remember our brothers and sisters in Nigeria and in Iraq, the Christian communities of southern Sudan fearing the outbreak of another civil war, the Christian minorities in the Holy Land facing the extinction of their two-thousand year old presence there; or our own Anglican friends in Zimbabwe, still – as I reminded this Cathedral congregation at Christmas – subject to routine attack from the security forces and locked out of their churches. That’s not our situation, thank God, and we need to keep a sense of perspective, and to redouble our prayers and concrete support.

See what he did here? How he talked about actual persecution? How he called us to stop frenetically chattering about how we are no longer in control of Western civilization and instead simply pray and help those who are actually suffering?

Its truly amazing how conservative Christians are, as whole, more concerned about petty bureaucratic inconveniences to them than about the actual suffering and death of (non-white) Christians throughout the world.

Israel and democracy

Posted by Halden on April 13, 2010 11 comments

Apparently Israeli bookstores are systematically eliminating a book that criticizes the extremely violent and illegal settler movement in Palestine. Not too surprising, I guess. But the authors raise some utterly undeniable points, such as this one:

Israel is a democratic, Jewish state. If we remain in the territories we will have to choose: either Jewish or democratic. It won’t work together, because in a democracy the majority rules and soon [Arabs] will be the majority between the Jordan and the sea. If we want to remain a Jewish state, we will have to deny the rights of the majority and we will turn into an apartheid state. If we insist on remaining democrats, an Arab prime minister will soon be elected by a majority of votes.

I have no idea how anyone can possibly consider this to be false.

Satan and sex scandals

Posted by Halden on March 17, 2010 11 comments

I’m sure we’ve all heard plenty about the recent round of abuse scandals among the Roman Catholic clergy. Of course this isn’t exactly new, but this time around it looks like they’re letting the Vatican’s resident exorcist come up with explanations for the phenomenon:

When you’re one of the most powerful institutions in the world and you’ve got an escalating series of sex abuse scandals erupting in such far-flung locales as Ireland, Germany, Brazil and beyond on a near daily basis, how do you even begin to do damage control? If you’re the Catholic Church, maybe you say you’re going to investigate. You issue a few letters. And then just to cover all your bases, you do a little Satan blaming. In a bold and arguably wack move, the Vatican’s normally press-shy exorcist Don Gabriele Amorth has been granting interviews left and right lately, and they are a treasure trove of WTF moments.

You say you hadn’t been aware the Vatican even had an official exorcist? Thought that stuff was just for Linda Blair movies? That’s likely because, prior to last week, the Vatican had permitted its exorcist to grant one interview in the entire last century. Now, suddenly he’s doing the rounds like he’s got a new rom-com with Gerard Butler opening Friday.

Speaking to La Republica last week, Amorth, who in fact does have a new book, “Memoirs of an Exorcist,” to shill, said, “When one speaks of ‘the smoke of Satan’ in the holy rooms, it is all true – including these latest stories of violence and pedophilia.” A few days later, he told the UK Times, “All evil is due to the intervention of the Devil, including pedophilia.” He also added that contemporary culture has “given in to the Evil One. You see it in the lack of faith, the empty churches, the collapse of the family. Compare the world of today to when I was a boy in Modena: families and parish communities were strong, women did not go out to work.”

I don’t know. If I were part of the Vatican superstructure working to get this matter settled, I don’t think I’d want this guy on my side.

Luther loves music

Posted by Halden on March 8, 2010 9 comments

“Indeed I plainly judge, and do not hesitate to affirm, that except for theology there is no art that could be put on the same level with music, since except for theology, music alone produces what otherwise only theology can do, namely, a calm and joyful soul.”

~ Martin Luther (LW 49, 428.)

J. Kameron Carter on Haiti: From Theodicy to Christ-odicy

Posted by Halden on February 18, 2010 Comments Off

As was mentioned in the comments to my quote from Nate’s article on Haiti, you should also make sure to check out J. Kameron Carter’s excellent reflection on the tragedy. Here’s a quote:

For in Jesus, so we confess, God was manifest, not metaphysically above the fray, but in the flesh, in our condition (1 Tim. 3:16). In him, pain and suffering are taken up into God’s identity. Our economy of pain is received into the divine economy of life. The suffering and pain that marks the humanity of God, thus, includes the realities of physical and social death, as well as the conditions that perpetuate death and suffering. In the person of Jesus, these realities have been decisively dealt with and, indeed, dealt with not by a god who is above the fray but by one who is named Immanuel, God with Us, one who walks in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Jesus’s resurrection from the dead by the Spirit of God points to that form of life within and ultimately beyond the conditions of death.

And yes, we must say both at the same time: within death but ultimately beyond the conditions of death. We must say “within death” to indicate how Jesus has absorbed death and its power within himself. From within his taking up of death and suffering, a social space is constituted beyond death and suffering. Thus, we also say “ultimately beyond the conditions of death.”

From here, we also glean the significance of the resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection, which we live into by the Holy Spirit, empowers us now to work within tight spaces—the tight space confronting the world community now, among other tight spaces, is the trauma of the Haitian earthquake—to bring life from death.

By coming at the issue of God and suffering, which this Haiti crisis compels us to do, from the vantage point of the God not above our pain but the God known in and who is identified from our pain, the classical theodicy question comes to an end. We step beyond theodicy and into a “Christ-odicy.” That is to say, we address suffering from Jesus Christ. And to approach suffering from him is to approach those who suffer, not as those merely needing our charity (which positions us above them), nor as those who trigger our intellectual and aesthetic capacities to glean the beautiful from the tragic (which also positions us as masters, above the fray), but as those who witness God to us, the God who is the Neighbor—the one and only Neighbor—who has come to us (cf. Luke 10:25–37). They are neighbors in whom God is known and is present to us. And thus, Haiti is the witness to our redemption. The script is Christologically flipped: they are the missionaries to us. To neglect them, to position ourselves above the fray and thus above them, to not work to change the social conditions that make natural disaster worse—these are all signs of the refusal of salvation.

Nate Kerr on Haiti: Prayer, Solidarity, and Revolt

Posted by Halden on February 18, 2010 6 comments

Nate Kerr has a new article up at The Other Journal responding to the issue in Haiti, and particularly underscoring the theological importance of prayer and solidarity in relation to such events of radical suffering. Its definitely worth reading. Here’s just one quote:

At the heart of all Christian prayer is the cry “Thy kingdom come!” It is with this cry that we move out into the action that speaks to God by waiting upon the free coming of God. It is with this cry that we speak to and for the coming again of Christ—that decisive action of God by which the powers and principalities of this world are to be subverted and creation is to be opened anew to its revolutionary transformation into new life. In prayer, we come to participate in this revolutionary transformation. Thus, Barth says, the action to which Christians are called by Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit is a specific kind of revolt. Specifically, the Christian prays in “revolt against all the oppression and suppression of humans by the lordship of the lordless powers,” against those powers that have gained their lordship by virtue of their refusal of humanity’s and creation’s relationship to God. At the same time, the Christian prayer of revolt is rooted in an equally specific kind of hope. The Christian acts against the lordship of the lordless powers not so as to win her own freedom from their rule (as if by some equally autonomous power), but rather in the recognition that she has been implicated in a struggle that refuses their rule as false and illusory, in recognition that she has already been liberated from their rule in the original revolution of Christ’s cross and resurrection. For Christians to cry, “Thy kingdom come!” in revolt against the lordless powers is to act “in the sphere of freedom” from the powers which “is already given to them here and now on this side of the fulfillment of the prayer.” Prayer, Barth is saying, should make revolutionaries of us all. Indeed, what kind of an invocation of God’s kingdom would it be if it did not testify through specific ways of working and living and loving to the path through and out from under the lordless powers—cosmic, political, and religious alike—that enslave the powerless poor by presuming to deny the resurrection of the crucified?

How to be a complete moron about Lent

Posted by Halden on February 17, 2010 48 comments

Just follow Jim West’s Nadab’s advice.

No national anthem at Goshen, please

Posted by Halden on February 15, 2010 35 comments

You may have already heard about Goshen College’s recent decision to start playing the national anthem at sporting events. And if you haven’t heard about the backlash against this move — quite understandable and right as Goshen is a premier Mennonite college. Anyways, there’s now a petition being signed regarding this decision, and calling upon the College to reverse it. Please consider signing it, especially if you are a Mennonite. For those of us who care about curtailing the church’s capitulation to American nationalism we really cannot afford to lose the distinctive witness of the Mennonites.

The post explaining the petition is right on:

Acquiescing to a public ritual that glorifies the nation-state is an issue that affects more than the Goshen College community or the Mennonite Church. Indeed, when Christians glorify their nation over another, they chip away at ecumenical fellowship, making this an issue for all Christians seeking to be faithful to the only God worthy of glory and praise.

McCarraher at TOJ, ctd.

Posted by Halden on January 27, 2010 20 comments

The final, and in my opinion the best, part of The Other Journal’s interview with Gene McCarraher is live now. Definitely check it out. The stuff on Herbert McCabe is really worth your time. Especially if you have committed the grave sin of not reading Herbert McCabe.

This section of the interview also includes Gene’s evisceration of the Manhattan Declaration. Here’s just one quote from him on the folks behind this rather lazy and windbaggy document:

If they want to be the intellectual shock troops of a counterrevolution, they’re going to have to amass a better arsenal than what’s on display in the Manhattan Declaration. David Fitzpatrick’s hagiography in the New York Times Magazine made it appear that Robert George is a real intellectual juggernaut, but this document is really lame. (Having met George once, I can attest that he is indeed a learned and gracious man.) The preamble, for instance, is a farrago of half-truth, untruth, and middlebrow history. We’re told in the very first sentence that Christianity has a two-millennium “tradition” of “resisting tyranny” and “reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed, and suffering.” Not a mention of the two-millennium tradition of sanctifying tyranny—imperial conquest from the Romans to the Americans, monarchical rule from the Dark Ages to the twentieth century, dictatorships from Francisco Franco to Ríos Montt. Not a mention of the many blessings showered on feudal and industrial squalor, the oppression of slaves with the authority of the Bible, the infliction of suffering on Indians and other non-Christians. Later, we’re regaled that Christians “challenged the divine claims of kings,” but nothing about how Christians also, and more forcefully, sustained those claims. We’re reminded that Christians liberated “child laborers chained to machines,” but we’re left unenlightened about Rev. Thomas Malthus, Rev. Thomas Chalmers, and later evangelical apologists for laissez-faire and wage labor, often the very same evangelicals who fought for the abolition of slavery. And that’s not to mention the impact evangelical thinking had on exacerbating the Great Famine in Ireland. (Those interested in early 19th-century evangelical social thought must read Boyd Hilton’s The Age of Atonement.) We’re informed that Christian women “marched in the vanguard of the suffrage movement,” but not that Christians of both sexes also barred the door to the franchise for women, bolstered, I might add, by centuries of tradition. The authors think they’ve covered their backsides by writing that they “fully acknowledge the imperfections and shortcomings of Christian institutions and communities in all ages,” but the survey they offer betrays no sign of humility or contrition.

Yeah. Humility and contrition never seem to go with conservative Christian sloganeering, does it?

Dressy fundies

Posted by Halden on January 21, 2010 31 comments

Have you people been checking out this new 9 Marks thing? Wow. That’s really all I can say. I mean, I know that regular displays of fundamentalist-evangelical craziness are constant in the United States. But this little self-styled bunch of prophets really seem to take the cake. Its like they’re fighting the battles of nineteenth-century liberalism in the twenty-first century on purpose.

Now of course the essays reflect a complete lack of scholarly acumen or even biblical literacy in most cases, but what’s amazing is the kind of smarminess that oozes off of every page. I mean, what do you make of quotes like this:

For most of my adult life, I have been a pastor among the highly educated, the materially successful, and the politically powerful. It’s not that I sought these people out as more strategic than others. It’s simply where God’s providence placed me.

Wow, that sure is great for you, isn’t it? Gee wasn’t it nice of God’s providence drop you miraculously among the super rich and the politically powerful? Thanks God!

Yeah, its no accident that the majority of this little movement’s contributors are ruling elites of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, which sits but a couple blocks from the U.S. Capitol building.

And then there’s the “9 marks” themselves which consist of expository preaching and then, well, 8 things that start with the word “biblical” (well I guess one of them is actually “promotion of Christian discipleship and growth”).

Couldn’t they just narrow down the list by just having one mark called “biblicalness in all things” or something? Why try to make up a movement just to display your church’s sense of superiority?

Anyways, if you’re looking for some woefully bad reasoning, odd martyr complexes, and general theological dyslexia, check out the 9 Marks. Its a treasure trove of fundamentalist dumbshittery.

Edited to add: I deeply apologize if my language in the last paragraph offended any people with dyslexia. I by no means meant to compare you to orangutans that run the 9 Marks. Please accept my apologies.

How to dedicate a book

Posted by Halden on January 20, 2010 5 comments

Terry Eagleton doesn’t seem to be losing his flare. In fact, he’s just revolutionized the genre of book dedications. From his forthcoming book, On Evil we read the following on the dedication page:

To Henry Kissinger.

H/T: dotCommonweal

MLK, the tyrannical socialist

Posted by Halden on January 19, 2010 5 comments

An old, but still utterly apt article cuts through the sentimentality we go through every year around MLK day.

By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”

You haven’t heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 — and loudly denounced it. Life magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post patronized that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington — engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be — until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.”

King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America’s cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor” — appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.”

How familiar that sounds today, more than a quarter-century after King’s efforts on behalf of the poor people’s mobilization were cut short by an assassin’s bullet.

If King were alive today the Glenn Beck’s and Sarah Palin’s would be calling him a demonic communist trying to take America away from us. We have no problem fetishizing King as the enlightened proclaimer of racial equality. But can America remember the historical King who condemned the systemic violence of the United States at home and abroad? The King who crusaded on behalf of the poor?

Well, no. Clearly not.

Satan responds to his Sock Puppet

Posted by Halden on January 16, 2010 7 comments

Looks like Satan has given us a helpful response to his loose-lipped sock puppets. Good thing.

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action.

But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished.

Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”?

If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll.

You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just, come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan.

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune