For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ. I Corinthians 3:11
It's happening again. An Episcopal diocese has elected a bishop and stormclouds are swirling around the result. Is it a sign of growing maturity that the bishop's sexual orientation isn't the issue? I think not.
For information on the dispute, see Episcopal Cafe's current round-up .
Part of the dispute stems from the organizational framework of the Diocese since the mid 1980s, which emphasizes a concept called "Mutual Ministry." You'll note that I have intentionally linked to the Diocese's description of this framework. In theory, I like the idea of mutual ministry. Recently (while taking a break while writing draft chapters of my thesis...or published articles), I read Three Minute Theologian's online version of his book, Killing George Herbert . It's a tour de force on how defective present models of Anglican ministry are and finds considerable insight in reform from Bonhoeffer, Rowan Williams, and others. But the key problem of the book that most parishes are still somewhere in the leftmost two models of ministry described in the pyramid plots on the Northern Michigan page. Northern Michigan's aging and shrinking population has been forced toward a model of ministry that may have benefits for the wider church. The details can vary, however. Rather than calling this model uncatholic etc., let's use this dispute as an opportunity to learn from N. Michigan. Maybe, some sort of FAQ could be provided to Standing Committees. Does it concern me that the election was non-competitive? Of course. The Holy Spirit should be free to work in such cases, viz Pope Fabian. But the circumstances aren't yet clear.
Part of the dispute involves the Zen Buddhist practice of the Bishop-elect, Kevin Thew Forrester. In light of pagan and Muslim syncretism by Episcopal priests in recent years, we should ask whether the Buddhist principles Forrester embraces contradict Christian principles, as is quite clear in the former two cases, which imply worship of the asheroth /erotoliturgical expression and denial of Jesus' divine equality with the Father in each case respectively. In both of these cases, it's fairly clear that the foundation upon which these priests were building was not Jesus Christ, God of Israel and human being, crucified, died, and risen. I don't have enough the facts of the case to judge.
The final part of the dispute involves accusations of some of the exact liturgical abuses that go on in my parish most of the time, often to my vexation. There is a part of me that would like to Forrester's alleged total disregard for the authorized worship of the Church severely punished, considering he has been elected to an office of oversight in this matter. I feel especially tempted, knowing how these kinds of changes forced down a parish's throat can have serious consequences for the faith of the faithful. But I also know that some of these changes really can be healing for some people. I think it's more important for us to talk about why liturgical abuses go on and what effect they have and what processes liturgical change be implemented than punishing the abusive. Often the problem is one of ignorance rather than malice. Liturgical abusers need counseling, not punishment.
Monday, March 02, 2009
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Keeping Your Lent on the Right Side of the Law
My officemate, a sometime Methodist, asked me what I was doing for Ash Wednesday. I mentioned that I had begun Lent with the Commination this morning, a sixteenth century thing, though I had used the seventeenth century version. I explain that its name derives from the Latin for threatening, so it involves a lot of threatening.
"[Caelius]", she says, "You're going to have to explain that."
"What do you mean?"
"You're not doing anything illegal, are you?"
Having determined what she meant, I responded, "Oh, no, it's entirely legal to threaten yourself."
The Monastery would like to wish you all a Holy Lent.
"[Caelius]", she says, "You're going to have to explain that."
"What do you mean?"
"You're not doing anything illegal, are you?"
Having determined what she meant, I responded, "Oh, no, it's entirely legal to threaten yourself."
The Monastery would like to wish you all a Holy Lent.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Abortion Is a Christological, Not a Patriarchal Issue
Amanda Marcotte briefly troubled my morning with this excerpt from a piece she wrote further quoted on Pandagon this morning.
Could it be this baldly simple? Because if Christian motivation against abortion rests on these grounds, they seem ridiculous. Why deny women credit for the production of children?
In truth, Marcotte's words forced me to look back at Tertullian's De Anima , perhaps the most fundamental inspiration for the Roman Catholic Church's teaching that life begins at conception, where I encountered at Chapter 27:
Thus, while Tertullian maintains through this work as I do that the act of breathing and ensoulment are simultaneous, ensoulment for him derives from the hot flush of our fathers' orgasms in direct line from Adam. Indeed, Tertullian argues with a logic not too dissimilar than that which Marcotte intuits from Christians today.
This is heresy. For what follows such logic but the anathemas of St. Gregory Nazianzen:
But while Tertullian's view is incorrect in this light, since it is necessary that Christ's humanity in both body and soul be contributed by her in unity with the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, the exact mechanisms are not anything that late antiquity really was able to say much about, considering that the standard medical understanding of generation qua Tertullian is Aristotelian or Hippocratic with all sorts of assertions about hot and cold, dry and wet and a fairly male-centered view of the whole business. If Christianity had its first great philosophical stirrings post Watson and Crick, the cooperation (synergy) between the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit might have been easier to deal with or not.
And while I would like to believe that the burden of Anglican moral theology favors implantation in the uterine wall as the point of ensoulment and the convenience of holding also that this is perfectly synergistic in that the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary could breathe as one into the implanted Christ, the Pope is likely never to agree with me.
But from these kinds of issues, we see why abortion was of such great importance to the early Christians. Given the significance of unborn children in the birth narratives and thinking about the mechanics of how a child could grow in the womb as God and man, the eyes of faith only could be enlightened with the need to see a child as human at a very early stage of development beyond all contemporary knowledge and the need that children be preserved at that stage, since they, too, must be in the image of God. But these are the eyes of faith. Those outside the faith really only can see so far as Tertullian writes:
Only so far and after so long of gestation does the law of nature permit a mother really to feel a life within her. But some of us forget this. We forget that pregnancy begins as a biological disturbance more than as a clear interaction, so we can't imagine why a woman
doesn't feel guilty about an early term abortion , because if we took the extreme position that she was a murderer, it would be very strange. She is the embryo's most intimate acquaintance, yet only knows it from chemistry and remote sensing. But she just may not see. It is often a belief in God who made both the visible and invisible things that can make us see the unseen things in the very depths of our nature.
But at the level of quickening, abortion is a human rights issue, for beyond the Bible-beating and the ultrasounds (or if they ever pass away) always will lie a kick, a beating, and a leaping in the womb: a life growing toward the atmosphere. It is impossible for me to contemplate who has the right to terminate an indubitable human life. And, yes, it's so much easier to fight for this life than the life of the addict, the homeless, the stateless, and the criminal. But it is hard to fight for one of these lives without fighting for them all.
The national conversation over abortion feels like war because it isn’t about abortion per se. It’s the most important battle in the struggle over the existence of the patriarchy. The dictionary defines patriarchy as, “a form of social organization in which the father is the supreme authority in the family, clan, or tribe and descent is reckoned in the male line, with the children belonging to the father’s clan or tribe.” This explains why abortion matters more than anything else--if we believe that “life” begins at conception, then the father gets all the credit for making children, and this in turn justifies male authority over women and official “ownership” of children. If we believe that “life” begins at some other point in fetal development, then the credit for new people goes to women, and patriarchal justifications dry up.
Could it be this baldly simple? Because if Christian motivation against abortion rests on these grounds, they seem ridiculous. Why deny women credit for the production of children?
In truth, Marcotte's words forced me to look back at Tertullian's De Anima , perhaps the most fundamental inspiration for the Roman Catholic Church's teaching that life begins at conception, where I encountered at Chapter 27:
Indeed (if I run the risk of offending modesty even, in my desire to prove the truth), I cannot help asking, whether we do not, in that very heat of extreme gratification when the generative fluid is ejected, feel that somewhat of our soul has gone from us? And do we not experience a faintness and prostration along with a dimness of sight? This, then, must be the soul-producing seed, which arises at once from the out-drip of the soul, just as that fluid is the body-producing seed which proceeds from the drainage of the flesh. Most true are the examples of the first creation. Adam's flesh was formed of clay. Now what is clay bug an excellent moisture, whence should spring the generating fluid? From the breath of God first came the soul. But what else is the breath of God than the vapour of the spirit, whence should spring that which we breathe out through the generative fluid? Forasmuch, therefore, as these two different and separate substances, the clay and the breath, combined at the first creation in forming the individual man, they then both amalgamated and mixed their proper seminal rudiments in one, and ever afterwards communicated to the human race the normal mode of its propagation, so that even now the two substances, although diverse from each other, flow forth simultaneously in a united channel; and finding their way together into their appointed seed-plot, they fertilize with their combined vigour the human fruit out of their respective natures. And inherent in this human product is his own seed, according to the process which has been ordained for every creature endowed with the functions of generation. Accordingly from the one (primeval) man comes the entire outflow and redundance of men's souls-nature proving herself true to the commandment of God, "Be fruitful, and multiply."
Thus, while Tertullian maintains through this work as I do that the act of breathing and ensoulment are simultaneous, ensoulment for him derives from the hot flush of our fathers' orgasms in direct line from Adam. Indeed, Tertullian argues with a logic not too dissimilar than that which Marcotte intuits from Christians today.
This is heresy. For what follows such logic but the anathemas of St. Gregory Nazianzen:
If anyone should assert that Christ passed through the Virgin as through a channel but was not fashioned in her, divinely because without the help of man and humanly because by the law of conception--he, too is godless."
But while Tertullian's view is incorrect in this light, since it is necessary that Christ's humanity in both body and soul be contributed by her in unity with the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, the exact mechanisms are not anything that late antiquity really was able to say much about, considering that the standard medical understanding of generation qua Tertullian is Aristotelian or Hippocratic with all sorts of assertions about hot and cold, dry and wet and a fairly male-centered view of the whole business. If Christianity had its first great philosophical stirrings post Watson and Crick, the cooperation (synergy) between the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit might have been easier to deal with or not.
And while I would like to believe that the burden of Anglican moral theology favors implantation in the uterine wall as the point of ensoulment and the convenience of holding also that this is perfectly synergistic in that the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary could breathe as one into the implanted Christ, the Pope is likely never to agree with me.
But from these kinds of issues, we see why abortion was of such great importance to the early Christians. Given the significance of unborn children in the birth narratives and thinking about the mechanics of how a child could grow in the womb as God and man, the eyes of faith only could be enlightened with the need to see a child as human at a very early stage of development beyond all contemporary knowledge and the need that children be preserved at that stage, since they, too, must be in the image of God. But these are the eyes of faith. Those outside the faith really only can see so far as Tertullian writes:
"Now, in such a question as this, no one can be so useful a teacher, judge, or witness, as the sex itself which is so intimately concerned. Give us your testimony, then, ye mothers, whether yet pregnant, or after delivery (let barren women and men keep silence),-the truth of your own nature is in question, the reality of your own suffering is the point to be decided. (Tell us, then, ) whether you feel in the embryo within you any vital force other than your own, with which your bowels tremble, your sides shake, your entire womb throbs, and the burden which oppresses you constantly changes its position? Are these movements a joy to you, and a positive removal of anxiety, as making you confident that your infant both possesses vitality and enjoys it? Or, should his restlessness cease, your first fear would be for him; and he would be aware of it within you, since he is disturbed at the novel sound; and you would crave for injurious diet, or would even loathe your food-all on his account; and then you and he, (in the closeness of your sympathy, ) would share together your common ailments-so far that with your contusions and bruises would he actually become marked,-whilst within you, and even on the selfsame parts of the body, taking to himself thus peremptorily the injuries of his mother!.
Only so far and after so long of gestation does the law of nature permit a mother really to feel a life within her. But some of us forget this. We forget that pregnancy begins as a biological disturbance more than as a clear interaction, so we can't imagine why a woman
doesn't feel guilty about an early term abortion , because if we took the extreme position that she was a murderer, it would be very strange. She is the embryo's most intimate acquaintance, yet only knows it from chemistry and remote sensing. But she just may not see. It is often a belief in God who made both the visible and invisible things that can make us see the unseen things in the very depths of our nature.
But at the level of quickening, abortion is a human rights issue, for beyond the Bible-beating and the ultrasounds (or if they ever pass away) always will lie a kick, a beating, and a leaping in the womb: a life growing toward the atmosphere. It is impossible for me to contemplate who has the right to terminate an indubitable human life. And, yes, it's so much easier to fight for this life than the life of the addict, the homeless, the stateless, and the criminal. But it is hard to fight for one of these lives without fighting for them all.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Envelopes and Offices
1. So last year, the pledge envelopes were being distributed. But apparently, my pledge envelopes vanished down a rabbit hole. Oh well. But I was promised that new ones would be printed and sent to me. Last week, I received notice that I had a new envelope number to write on my checks and thanked me for "Going Green." Well, fine. I love doing things for the environment, even if involuntarily, but couldn't I have kept my beloved envelope number?
2. Derek and Christopher and Chris Tessone and Father John-Julian are discussing Office Reform. Let me add my two cents. I officiate publicly at three liturgies per year:
1. Morning Prayer at the Young Adult Retreat
2. Compline on Good Friday Night
3. Morning Prayer on Holy Saturday
I just received the Young Adult Retreat, informing me that Morning Prayer will be Rite One. Given consultation, I probably would have gone with Rite II, since I do like to use these occasions to popularize the Office. My standard routine is daily Morning Prayer at dear Josh Thomas's place with the General Thanksgiving and the Prayer of St. John Chrysostom added (sometimes with the original closing). This is the kind of Office I would promote to people my age. Sure, Josh's Canticle choices are informed by the 1979 BCP but he almost always keeps the NT Canticle steady as Magna et Mirabilia , which I think is wonderful and he keeps the OT Canticle in a rota (Saturdays are Benedicite Omnia Opera . The key is that Josh recognizes that the parochial office has a limited impact and tries to make prayer as accessible as possible, retaining almost all of the necessary and salutary elements. Look at his traffic feed sometimes. He's reaching the world with the way he presents the 1979 Office.
But if you want Rite One, I'll do it with the Confession, Benedicite Omnia Opera and Te Deum Laudamus , because that's how I roll.
2. Derek and Christopher and Chris Tessone and Father John-Julian are discussing Office Reform. Let me add my two cents. I officiate publicly at three liturgies per year:
1. Morning Prayer at the Young Adult Retreat
2. Compline on Good Friday Night
3. Morning Prayer on Holy Saturday
I just received the Young Adult Retreat, informing me that Morning Prayer will be Rite One. Given consultation, I probably would have gone with Rite II, since I do like to use these occasions to popularize the Office. My standard routine is daily Morning Prayer at dear Josh Thomas's place with the General Thanksgiving and the Prayer of St. John Chrysostom added (sometimes with the original closing). This is the kind of Office I would promote to people my age. Sure, Josh's Canticle choices are informed by the 1979 BCP but he almost always keeps the NT Canticle steady as Magna et Mirabilia , which I think is wonderful and he keeps the OT Canticle in a rota (Saturdays are Benedicite Omnia Opera . The key is that Josh recognizes that the parochial office has a limited impact and tries to make prayer as accessible as possible, retaining almost all of the necessary and salutary elements. Look at his traffic feed sometimes. He's reaching the world with the way he presents the 1979 Office.
But if you want Rite One, I'll do it with the Confession, Benedicite Omnia Opera and Te Deum Laudamus , because that's how I roll.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Media Notes
I just saw the new movie directed by Darren Aronofsky, The Wrestler , starring Mickey Rourke. If I had to summarize the aesthetic of this movie, I would describe Marisa Tomei's character giving Mickey Rourke a lap dance as he documents the wounds of a long and successful career in professional wrestling. Tomei then says, "He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His wounds we are healed." She notes she's quoting Passion of the Christ not Isaiah 53, but she gets the point. Randy "the Ram", nee Robin Ramsinski is a sacrificial victim of a sort, bearing the griefs of a world that can't bear forgiveness and the burden of unconditional love. The movie also has political undertones, pitting the heroic Dodge Ram-driving Ram against an African-American named Bob who wrestles as the Ayatollah, carrying Iranian flag as his cheap prop. In these less immediately Iranophobic times, Bob is a car dealer in Phoenix, but in the ring, the assaults on his body and his expressions of disdain for the American hero still stir up primitive and orgiastic emotions in a crowd whose ancestors loved bull-baiting and public executions. The Wrestler is a reminder that the ritualized violence of the past remains a very present part of modern life, whose only enemy is compassion for the Other and the villain. I also think Aronofsky gets a real kick that his title character's signature move is the Rambam.
NBC is desperately trying to hype its new show, Kings about a "modern monarchy." Here's the web site. Yes, it's true. Hollywood has so run out of ideas that they're updating I Samuel. Who has the rights to that anyway?
NBC is desperately trying to hype its new show, Kings about a "modern monarchy." Here's the web site. Yes, it's true. Hollywood has so run out of ideas that they're updating I Samuel. Who has the rights to that anyway?
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Two Words: Rhinestone Chasuble
And the sermon described forthcoming appearances of the preacher on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
But we sang St. Patrick's Breastplate at the Recessional, so I guess it was a good Sunday.
But we sang St. Patrick's Breastplate at the Recessional, so I guess it was a good Sunday.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
About That Incident in Tess of the D'Urbervilles
bls mentions in her post today the incident in Chapter XIV of Tess of the D'Urbervilles depicted in a BBC adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel being shown on PBS last Sunday and this coming Sunday, in which Tess baptizes her dying baby Sorrow privately according to the form given in the Prayer Book, because her father has locked the house against the parson.
I'm afraid as far as I can tell that even in the era during which the novel is set, the parson was in the wrong to deny Sorrow burial in consecrated ground. Hardy unfortunately glosses over the parson's exact justification for his actions and the BBC production tries to fill in with a little hemming and hawing to imply that Tess could not be a lawful minister of Baptism, perhaps because she is a woman. The early 17th century canons of the Church of England do discourage private baptism, perhaps less for the theological grounds we would cite today (the importance of the local Christian community showing visible support for the incorporation of the child into the Body) than as a form of repression upon non-conformity. However, the ancient Patristic precedents support Tess. Some of these even allow baptism in the proper form of words by pagans and heretics to be valid Reading them more restrictively as the Roman Catholics do to exclude those baptizing in the correct form of words with heterodox beliefs concerning their meaning, Tess still would be empowered to baptize in extremis as was clearly the case. Renton and Robertson's Encyclopedia of the Laws of England quotes Bingham's Scholastical History of Baptism , "[The Church of England] forbids laymen or women by its laws to baptize: but if it be done in due form, she does not wholly disannul or order it to be repeated as entirely null and void." These authors also quote ecclesiastical law reports from as early as 1809 in support of this position, even allowing baptism by Dissenting ministers to be valid.
Hardy's account of the incident doesn't really give much insight into the priest's motivations, noting only that he was new to the parish and so not acquainted with the devout and reasonably well educated Tess (for a rural working class woman) or her unfortunate circumstances. His attitude may be punitive and malicious, treating Tess as a "loose woman" who locked him out of her house in the cold night while he was trying to do his duty and now expects him to believe she baptized the child according to the Prayer Book rite (which Hardy actually says she did). His attitude may stem from simple ignorance and the obligation to enforce his misunderstanding of canon law. After all, Tess does get him to admit "sinner to saint" that Sorrow is properly baptized. This rather misty business suggests that Hardy finds his Anglican clergymen easier to portray one dimensionally, whereby they may be more easily pilloried. But I think it's fair to say that situations like this easily could arise in a world where a poor rural woman could not be expected to have recourse to a canonist or even any kind of second opinion.
It's not a situation that could arise in TEC today, where emergency baptism is a little more clearly explicated in the Prayer Book and the funerary offices of the Church are more freely offered in recognition of the deep theological truth that even non-Christian human souls and bodies have kinship with the Triune God and are worthy of being put to rest with dignity and good order. But I suppose such things still depend on who the priest is.
I'm afraid as far as I can tell that even in the era during which the novel is set, the parson was in the wrong to deny Sorrow burial in consecrated ground. Hardy unfortunately glosses over the parson's exact justification for his actions and the BBC production tries to fill in with a little hemming and hawing to imply that Tess could not be a lawful minister of Baptism, perhaps because she is a woman. The early 17th century canons of the Church of England do discourage private baptism, perhaps less for the theological grounds we would cite today (the importance of the local Christian community showing visible support for the incorporation of the child into the Body) than as a form of repression upon non-conformity. However, the ancient Patristic precedents support Tess. Some of these even allow baptism in the proper form of words by pagans and heretics to be valid Reading them more restrictively as the Roman Catholics do to exclude those baptizing in the correct form of words with heterodox beliefs concerning their meaning, Tess still would be empowered to baptize in extremis as was clearly the case. Renton and Robertson's Encyclopedia of the Laws of England quotes Bingham's Scholastical History of Baptism , "[The Church of England] forbids laymen or women by its laws to baptize: but if it be done in due form, she does not wholly disannul or order it to be repeated as entirely null and void." These authors also quote ecclesiastical law reports from as early as 1809 in support of this position, even allowing baptism by Dissenting ministers to be valid.
Hardy's account of the incident doesn't really give much insight into the priest's motivations, noting only that he was new to the parish and so not acquainted with the devout and reasonably well educated Tess (for a rural working class woman) or her unfortunate circumstances. His attitude may be punitive and malicious, treating Tess as a "loose woman" who locked him out of her house in the cold night while he was trying to do his duty and now expects him to believe she baptized the child according to the Prayer Book rite (which Hardy actually says she did). His attitude may stem from simple ignorance and the obligation to enforce his misunderstanding of canon law. After all, Tess does get him to admit "sinner to saint" that Sorrow is properly baptized. This rather misty business suggests that Hardy finds his Anglican clergymen easier to portray one dimensionally, whereby they may be more easily pilloried. But I think it's fair to say that situations like this easily could arise in a world where a poor rural woman could not be expected to have recourse to a canonist or even any kind of second opinion.
It's not a situation that could arise in TEC today, where emergency baptism is a little more clearly explicated in the Prayer Book and the funerary offices of the Church are more freely offered in recognition of the deep theological truth that even non-Christian human souls and bodies have kinship with the Triune God and are worthy of being put to rest with dignity and good order. But I suppose such things still depend on who the priest is.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
New Year, New Blather
Or the same old...
Item the First: The Postulant designates me a Superior Scribbler. I thank him but realize that all memes of this type generally die here.
Item the Second: I had a month of blog silence there. It's been a rather hectic couple of months, involving three transcontinental round-trips (well, come next week) and one intercity train journey. In that time, I've attended three services of Lessons and Carols, all somewhat different. I've also been to two conferences and presented two talks and two posters. I've seen the Wren Chapel at William and Mary, where services are far more rubrically proper than I've seen in a long time. Reflecting on this busy time, I realize that I must have been having a lot of fun, but it was intensely exhausting.
Item the Third: In the new year, I have a thesis to write. Being single and childless, this is easier for me than others we know. But I'm also going to try to learn to drive and get a job during the same period. So will there be long periods of blog silence in the new year? As events warrant.
Item the Fourth: The anonymized title of my thesis is Flying Particles of Nanophase Iron Oxides and the Boreal Spring and Summer Weather of a Cold, Desert Planet. Take that, Google.
Item the Fifth: James Howard Kunstler's predictions for the new year include multiple families living in suburban housing, farming organic gardens. Some of these families will become a new servant class to replace our broken service economy. In addition, the Federal Government, who is the ultimate source of compensation in my current future, will become gradually insolvent. Living in a state with thousands of vacant units of suburban housing, a potential water shortage that will pit the needs of the nation's fruit basket and my thirsty metropolitan area, bonds that cannot be floated, and a treasury that will be insolvent before the lions of March come calling, I say that Kunstler's future is looking plausible indeed.
Item the Sixth: I am currently reading Don DeLillo's Underworld , which might be called an American Foucault's Pendulum thematically, but proves quite convincingly why Europeans don't respect our authors come Nobel time. I should write about this more later.
Item the Seventh: I disagree somewhat with bls about Slumdog Millionaire but only because I suspect my cinematic standards have been warped by the subpar offerings of the last year. But I disagree with any claims that it is the "best movie ever." It will be Oscar-competitive, but it has its faults, especially in how it presumes knowledge of the complex religious politics of Mumbai and the surrounding state, which is important for understanding the early scenes. In other news, did you know that Sony Pictures is making Bollywood movies now? I hope they show some of them in the United States.
Happy New Year!
Item the First: The Postulant designates me a Superior Scribbler. I thank him but realize that all memes of this type generally die here.
Item the Second: I had a month of blog silence there. It's been a rather hectic couple of months, involving three transcontinental round-trips (well, come next week) and one intercity train journey. In that time, I've attended three services of Lessons and Carols, all somewhat different. I've also been to two conferences and presented two talks and two posters. I've seen the Wren Chapel at William and Mary, where services are far more rubrically proper than I've seen in a long time. Reflecting on this busy time, I realize that I must have been having a lot of fun, but it was intensely exhausting.
Item the Third: In the new year, I have a thesis to write. Being single and childless, this is easier for me than others we know. But I'm also going to try to learn to drive and get a job during the same period. So will there be long periods of blog silence in the new year? As events warrant.
Item the Fourth: The anonymized title of my thesis is Flying Particles of Nanophase Iron Oxides and the Boreal Spring and Summer Weather of a Cold, Desert Planet. Take that, Google.
Item the Fifth: James Howard Kunstler's predictions for the new year include multiple families living in suburban housing, farming organic gardens. Some of these families will become a new servant class to replace our broken service economy. In addition, the Federal Government, who is the ultimate source of compensation in my current future, will become gradually insolvent. Living in a state with thousands of vacant units of suburban housing, a potential water shortage that will pit the needs of the nation's fruit basket and my thirsty metropolitan area, bonds that cannot be floated, and a treasury that will be insolvent before the lions of March come calling, I say that Kunstler's future is looking plausible indeed.
Item the Sixth: I am currently reading Don DeLillo's Underworld , which might be called an American Foucault's Pendulum thematically, but proves quite convincingly why Europeans don't respect our authors come Nobel time. I should write about this more later.
Item the Seventh: I disagree somewhat with bls about Slumdog Millionaire but only because I suspect my cinematic standards have been warped by the subpar offerings of the last year. But I disagree with any claims that it is the "best movie ever." It will be Oscar-competitive, but it has its faults, especially in how it presumes knowledge of the complex religious politics of Mumbai and the surrounding state, which is important for understanding the early scenes. In other news, did you know that Sony Pictures is making Bollywood movies now? I hope they show some of them in the United States.
Happy New Year!
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
This and Every New Year: God Is Our Salvation
My mother often likes to note that the decision to celebrate Christmas in this time of year is really a celebration of the birthday of Mithras or Sol Invictus. Mom is in part right. There's no Biblical warrant for Joseph and a pregnant Mary riding a donkey through a December blizzard to Bethlehem or any other like clue as to the season. For one thing, the Earth's climate was driven by sunnier weather than usual during a period still called by climatologists, the Roman Maximum. And snow is rare enough in the Levant or the similar climate of coastal California, though it does happen as Los Angeles residents learned this year. Sorry, Miss Rosetti, your snow likely was not real but merely a metaphor for our world frozen in sin.
If I had to guess, the Roman census in Judea and Galilee probably was conveniently scheduled between major Jewish holidays and pilgrim feasts and avoided a season of major agricultural activity. So February or early March looks more promising if Hanukkah really was a pilgrim feast. But the Bible does not say, so it really doesn't matter.
What does matter is when we choose to celebrate it. And disagreeing with my mother, I suspect Christmas is celebrated on December 25 to place Jesus' circumcision on the eighth day from this event: 1 January, the beginning of the Roman civil year. In Rome, this day would be filled with omen-casting and inauguration of magistrates in rituals varying from the reasonably ordinary to the very, very strange. (HBO's Rome shows one ritual meant to give a sacrosanct character to a tribune. It's quite bloody.)
The Church originally celebrated 1 January as the Feast of the Circumcision, the first opportunity in Jesus' life to fulfill outward submission to the Law, and in which Joseph redeemed Jesus as his firstborn with a small sum given to charity or the local priests, depending on the exact custom. This act commemorated the redemption of the firstborn Israelites from the Angel of Death in Egypt as the circumcision recalled the circumcision of Israel from Egypt signified by the plagues. But it's all rather funny, because Joseph and Mary know that this child is God's son. That the Son of God is being incorporated into Israel. That Joseph is redeeming God from God on God's behalf. That in the submission of this child to the rituals of the Law, messianic prophecy is coming towards fulfillment and the reason of the Law ("the way of your statutes") is breaking down.
And since this day requires an unusual "redemption," they name the child Yeshua, a common enough name, held first in lore by the most obedient child of the Generation of the Wilderness, who took the mantle of Moses after his death and smote Canaan with the sword, purifying the land from the abominations of the nations. The child'
s parents might have hoped that this child, too, might be Israel's liberation from Roman oppression. But instead this child's name was not Yeshua Yisroel but Yeshua Tebel, God saves the entire world, Jew and Gentile alike. God saves. God redeems. And on New Year's Day, it signifies to us that God redeems all time, all struggle, all challenge, all change, and all things old we would like to bring with us into the new.
Today, I was reading a columnist who noted that the Roman Catholics, like the Episcopalians, no longer call 1 January the Feast of the Circumcision. The Episcopalians call it the Feast of the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which retains some of the original significance of the day. The Roman Catholics now call it the Solemnity of Mary. Charity forbids further comment.
A blessed Christmas and New Year from all of us at the Monastery, knowing that the only certainty of a new year is the continuing gift of God's salvation.
If I had to guess, the Roman census in Judea and Galilee probably was conveniently scheduled between major Jewish holidays and pilgrim feasts and avoided a season of major agricultural activity. So February or early March looks more promising if Hanukkah really was a pilgrim feast. But the Bible does not say, so it really doesn't matter.
What does matter is when we choose to celebrate it. And disagreeing with my mother, I suspect Christmas is celebrated on December 25 to place Jesus' circumcision on the eighth day from this event: 1 January, the beginning of the Roman civil year. In Rome, this day would be filled with omen-casting and inauguration of magistrates in rituals varying from the reasonably ordinary to the very, very strange. (HBO's Rome shows one ritual meant to give a sacrosanct character to a tribune. It's quite bloody.)
The Church originally celebrated 1 January as the Feast of the Circumcision, the first opportunity in Jesus' life to fulfill outward submission to the Law, and in which Joseph redeemed Jesus as his firstborn with a small sum given to charity or the local priests, depending on the exact custom. This act commemorated the redemption of the firstborn Israelites from the Angel of Death in Egypt as the circumcision recalled the circumcision of Israel from Egypt signified by the plagues. But it's all rather funny, because Joseph and Mary know that this child is God's son. That the Son of God is being incorporated into Israel. That Joseph is redeeming God from God on God's behalf. That in the submission of this child to the rituals of the Law, messianic prophecy is coming towards fulfillment and the reason of the Law ("the way of your statutes") is breaking down.
And since this day requires an unusual "redemption," they name the child Yeshua, a common enough name, held first in lore by the most obedient child of the Generation of the Wilderness, who took the mantle of Moses after his death and smote Canaan with the sword, purifying the land from the abominations of the nations. The child'
s parents might have hoped that this child, too, might be Israel's liberation from Roman oppression. But instead this child's name was not Yeshua Yisroel but Yeshua Tebel, God saves the entire world, Jew and Gentile alike. God saves. God redeems. And on New Year's Day, it signifies to us that God redeems all time, all struggle, all challenge, all change, and all things old we would like to bring with us into the new.
Today, I was reading a columnist who noted that the Roman Catholics, like the Episcopalians, no longer call 1 January the Feast of the Circumcision. The Episcopalians call it the Feast of the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which retains some of the original significance of the day. The Roman Catholics now call it the Solemnity of Mary. Charity forbids further comment.
A blessed Christmas and New Year from all of us at the Monastery, knowing that the only certainty of a new year is the continuing gift of God's salvation.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Picking Olives Tomorrow
My great-grandfather Josephus was an Italian peasant. When he came to this country, he spent his leisure time growing grapes, making wine, and then consuming it. Back in Italy, I'm sure he had olive trees because I get this deep atavistic pleasure from harvesting them. For the last couple of years, my institution has decided to harvest as many olives as they can from the trees that grow around the campus and make olive oil. So early tomorrow morning, I will be enjoying myself with a little arboriculture. Unlike the solar plants being installed around campus, the effort seems a bit of a stunt. For one thing, the olive oil made last year tastes horrible, like turpentine, just not as poisonous. It apparently won last place in a taste test competition of forty producers in Ionia. It, however, might be useful for other purposes. But it makes a point. Many of us (not me) spend our days trying to figure out sustainable and less carbon-intensive ways of powering the future. Our now less neglected olive trees are a reminder that there are older, but successful approaches to the problem lying dormant all around us. Like the foods that feed our bodies, our external energy use may be healthiest for us with a little locally adapted diversification.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways
Earlier today, I was electioneering against California's Proposition 8 in these parts. One of the people with whom I was electioneering asked me why I was doing this, so I told her the story of a man I knew in my childhood, a vestryman of my church and an attorney, who had nursed his partner as he died of AIDS while dealing with HIV infection himself. His union taught me that same sex partners could be "married" in the same way that my parents could be and such unions should be entitled to the same or similar rights. Just now, I was curious about where this man was now. After all, I had seen him in a video promoting a fundraiser for AIDS services back in high school. So I googled him and found that he had re-married in this state. And he's still working hard against AIDS both in himself and in the rest of the world.
So thank you, Mr. Milan, for being an inspiration for so many, I hope it brings you joy.
So thank you, Mr. Milan, for being an inspiration for so many, I hope it brings you joy.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Contradictions in the Life of a Climate Scientist
I am a regular reader of Pandagon, mainly in order to remind myself that I am out of place with the American center left as presently constituted. And also because I find many of the opinions expressed there wrong but well-considered. Today, I found myself amused by this blog . Maybe it's just the title, since I generally have dated by bus and train and find it rather romantic, just not practical for ladies' footwear as presently constituted. But also because it really forced some of the commentariat to think about a less mobile world and the potential impact it could have on the general cosmopolitanism of our society.
It also made me think about my own love life, which sometimes involves pining after someone with whom I would have to have a long distance relationship (often abbreviated LDR in the Pandagon piece). The commentariat is right about one thing. LDRs have a definite connection with graduate school. In the sciences, it is especially bad. American anti-intellectualism is particularly pronounced toward the sciences (even among other intellectuals), and so scientists have a great deal of trouble finding someone who understands their passion and depth of purpose and are willing to build a common life with that considerable distraction always fighting toward the center of that relationship. To some extent, the onus falls on the scientist to set limits for themselves in order to care for the needs of their beloved as well as their own. I've heard plenty of divorce stories about older colleagues that make me think that science (and scientific discovery) can become an addiction and a rather obvious threat to relationships. But it's still helpful for a scientist's partner to either be a scientist or be a more flexible person with their own work of deep creativity and passion. And I'm happy to say I've seen some wonderful marriages of this type of long standing.
But often those kind of people find themselves in graduate school or similar situations, and not always in the same place. An LDR is so tempting in that neither of you have much time and so can block out a few phone calls etc. a week and see each other twice a year. On the other hand, many of my graduate school friends are pretty much set against LDRs. I'm not quite sure why, perhaps sex drive issues are involved. But maybe it's more generally incarnational than carnal. That your limited spare time is best spent being with someone than trying to compensate for being apart.
Of course, I also worry about climate/resources implications as in the Slate article referred to in the Pandagon piece. I have a friend at another school who was flying every month cross-country to see his girlfriend. The friend in question probably would have a deeper understanding of the latest IPCC Report than Al Gore, but he recognizes that in a society with distorted priorities and infrastructure, human relationships trump carbon emissions.
I understand the feeling. I try to limit both my business and personal travel. But my extended family on the East Coast likes to see me, and I've been only doing so about once per year. Friends are getting married. The only thing you can do is to try support less carbon-intensive transportation options. This year I will be using Amtrak Ionia to travel to a conference in Byzantion. (I even may get some colleagues to join me.) It doesn't quite make me feel better the three transcontinental round-trips I will be making in the next two months, but I know that those trips are not made frivolously. In all three cases, it is important for me to present for people, both in my family and in my field. If I lived in China, I gladly would ride from Lanzhou to Beijing by rail for the same necessity. If I lived in India, I'd say the same for Delhi to Madras. But I live in America...
There's one particular comment from Alara Rogers on the Pandagon piece that I think is worth reading. Small communities do tend to be insular societies, especially when isolated from cultural cues from the larger society (good or bad, q.v. Rwandan genocide) and there is a potential for excess, resentment of the alien, family rivalries and jealousies, and all manner of other evils. And so in the process of localizing our stuff while keeping our data global (sorry, Derek, I love your phrasing), it will be important to plan for human mobility, not the in and out mobility of the international businessman or global gatherings like Lambeth Conferences but room for mobility that still allows an American priest to spend a year in Southern Africa (and vice versa, especially vice versa). A prioritization of travel for purposes of experience, cultural exchange, and incarnation rather than goods and simple information. The best thing about this is that such travel needs only to be safe and reliable, not fast, permitting travel as a less energy-intensive pleasant experience and time of potential social interaction instead of an energy-intensive unpleasantness necessary to get from point A to point B. But will there be fewer LDRs? You betcha.
It also made me think about my own love life, which sometimes involves pining after someone with whom I would have to have a long distance relationship (often abbreviated LDR in the Pandagon piece). The commentariat is right about one thing. LDRs have a definite connection with graduate school. In the sciences, it is especially bad. American anti-intellectualism is particularly pronounced toward the sciences (even among other intellectuals), and so scientists have a great deal of trouble finding someone who understands their passion and depth of purpose and are willing to build a common life with that considerable distraction always fighting toward the center of that relationship. To some extent, the onus falls on the scientist to set limits for themselves in order to care for the needs of their beloved as well as their own. I've heard plenty of divorce stories about older colleagues that make me think that science (and scientific discovery) can become an addiction and a rather obvious threat to relationships. But it's still helpful for a scientist's partner to either be a scientist or be a more flexible person with their own work of deep creativity and passion. And I'm happy to say I've seen some wonderful marriages of this type of long standing.
But often those kind of people find themselves in graduate school or similar situations, and not always in the same place. An LDR is so tempting in that neither of you have much time and so can block out a few phone calls etc. a week and see each other twice a year. On the other hand, many of my graduate school friends are pretty much set against LDRs. I'm not quite sure why, perhaps sex drive issues are involved. But maybe it's more generally incarnational than carnal. That your limited spare time is best spent being with someone than trying to compensate for being apart.
Of course, I also worry about climate/resources implications as in the Slate article referred to in the Pandagon piece. I have a friend at another school who was flying every month cross-country to see his girlfriend. The friend in question probably would have a deeper understanding of the latest IPCC Report than Al Gore, but he recognizes that in a society with distorted priorities and infrastructure, human relationships trump carbon emissions.
I understand the feeling. I try to limit both my business and personal travel. But my extended family on the East Coast likes to see me, and I've been only doing so about once per year. Friends are getting married. The only thing you can do is to try support less carbon-intensive transportation options. This year I will be using Amtrak Ionia to travel to a conference in Byzantion. (I even may get some colleagues to join me.) It doesn't quite make me feel better the three transcontinental round-trips I will be making in the next two months, but I know that those trips are not made frivolously. In all three cases, it is important for me to present for people, both in my family and in my field. If I lived in China, I gladly would ride from Lanzhou to Beijing by rail for the same necessity. If I lived in India, I'd say the same for Delhi to Madras. But I live in America...
There's one particular comment from Alara Rogers on the Pandagon piece that I think is worth reading. Small communities do tend to be insular societies, especially when isolated from cultural cues from the larger society (good or bad, q.v. Rwandan genocide) and there is a potential for excess, resentment of the alien, family rivalries and jealousies, and all manner of other evils. And so in the process of localizing our stuff while keeping our data global (sorry, Derek, I love your phrasing), it will be important to plan for human mobility, not the in and out mobility of the international businessman or global gatherings like Lambeth Conferences but room for mobility that still allows an American priest to spend a year in Southern Africa (and vice versa, especially vice versa). A prioritization of travel for purposes of experience, cultural exchange, and incarnation rather than goods and simple information. The best thing about this is that such travel needs only to be safe and reliable, not fast, permitting travel as a less energy-intensive pleasant experience and time of potential social interaction instead of an energy-intensive unpleasantness necessary to get from point A to point B. But will there be fewer LDRs? You betcha.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Good Theology Is Simply A Matter of Changing Pronouns When We Have Evolved To Do So
Or at least that's what they believe in Laodicea .
I am sorely tempted to write on a third viewpoint in reply and mail it to the Bishop. The hubris... It burns...
I am sorely tempted to write on a third viewpoint in reply and mail it to the Bishop. The hubris... It burns...
Monday, October 13, 2008
Friday, September 26, 2008
Politics
bls has been concerned lately about what the purpose of blogging could be if one has no opinions. I understand the feeling. And then I thought about it and realized I have a lot of opinions but I'm not sure they matter very much.
In both the earthly and heavenly city, the city has an analogy with a human. In the case of the earthly city, we go round about with who among us is what part. In antiquity, the elite were said to be the head of the society and so consumed by the mouth and let the lower classes be the hands to work to feed them. In modern times, the same analogy holds in practice, but the hands and feet now are permitted to send nerve impulses to the brain on occasion and serious doses of neurotransmitters every six years. In the heavenly city, whose only described building is the sanctuary, the analogy is between the city and the God made man, Jesus Christ, who has resurrected the temple of his Body that the whole creation be at peace therein.
Some concern with the heavenly city has seemed appropriate lately. Recall the Collect for Proper 20:
It helped to think on this this week. The Collect dates from the uneasiness during the era of the barbarian invasions of the 5th century AD. But as Will Durand reminds us, the invasions from without only have the power when we are corrupt within. The good person is neither buoyed up by joy nor brought down by misfortune saith Augustine. But I find it hard to cultivate ataxia, so how can it be for a Wall Street trader?
So given this analogy between the city and the human being, I wonder what is the point of the occasional nerve impulses to our legislators and seratonin shots to them in the voting booth. Why not simply externalize each and every listing of the state to the organs to which our constitution has externalized that function (ignoring our rights of suffrage and petition). If I feel myself as a scientist to be a communal externality of our individual curiosities, why not let the politicians be a similar communal externality of our individual deliberative functions?
The answer, of course, is that this brain is on drugs, in particular Special K (Street). And like a human being, the state has the potential to act extremely stupidly when intoxicated and panicked. Indeed, all of us acting extremely stupidly is infinitely more dangerously than one of us acting extremely stupidly.
I think I might have looked at this bailout plan a bit differently if I hadn't just read North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, a Victorian novel of Non-Conformity, mutiny, romance, early industrial capitalism, and labor agitation. It's amazing how much globalization shapes a novel written in 1855. But that's the idea. England had advantages in the early Industrial Revolution, but now it faces competition from a growing United States with better soil, cheaper food, easier access to raw materials, and more favorable conditions for immigration. In other words, the United States was the developing country capable of undercutting English textile manufacturers in the world market in a world of much more expensive transportation. Gaskell took a lot of flack from her husband's mill owner parishioners, but she portrays mid 19th century capitalists in a sympathetic light. What's interesting is how Gaskell notices how comfortable the industrial working class is relative to the rural working class. They have furniture, reasonably comfortable lodging, and generally are better fed. Many of them even have substantial savings, completely unthinkable from the rural poor, who seem dependent on the trickle down of ecclesiastical charity. But they are more prone to illness, working in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, and often live just as marginally.
The amazing thing about this novel is that it represents a middle period in the relation between the capitalist manager and the working class man and woman of production. In the early stage, industrial capitalism began in the context of the artisanal workshop emerging from the collective and conservative force of the medieval guild. In this middle stage, the worker has been demoted from a potential master but still remains in intimate contact with the manager whose capital is embodied by the factory, who lives next to the factory, and runs the operations of the factory himself. The increasing globalization of capital (as opposed to the globalization of the market, which is distinct) has eliminated these kinds of relations. If someone in some other city or country manages your factory and "funds" own the capital, the social controls that allow labor and management to have a mutual interest fall away. The capitalism seen in Gaskell is attractive because it is mutualistic. Modern capitalism is feared because of the instances in which it is parasitic.
Many would ask why is it important that capitalism be mutualistic. That's often inefficient. Well, capitalism in a democratic world is only justifiable on two grounds: one is in its aesthetic. In its purest form, capitalism is the self-sufficient and self-defensible person using his or her excess to do or make things that others find "useful" and will gladly provide their excess to obtain. Its eventual end, however, lies in the perpetual excrescence of human existence beyond sufficiency. The pure capitalist exchange requires a weighing of desire, not a weighing of need. The choice of sale or starvation makes a transactional party unfree. Most critiques of capitalism are of its impure form. But in a world of self-defensible and self-sufficient people with desires in proportion to their resource base, capitalism is a beautiful thing and fine director of human curiosity and innovation.
The other value of capitalism lies in its purity hopefully being its aim. In a world of uncertainty and scarcity, capitalism brings technology and a global marketplace, allowing a sort of half-sufficiency, in which the market hopefully compensates for the limitations of our individual economic lives.
Unfortunately, since its inception, capitalism has been perverted by force. The earliest industrial workers were those driven off by enclosure, which took land in which the peasantry had interest through the mixture of their labor with the ground and the aristocracy had interest through their defense of that ground and announced that the capital in that ground would belong to the sword alone. So all of this is to say that I understand the beauty and benefits of libertarianism, especially for Christians, in that there are certain aspects of ancient Israel that seem anarchocapitalist. Unfortunately, we are fallen people who pervert all things with force. And so I lean to the social democratic approach of supporting a variety of strategies to use the force of popular sovereignty and scientific curiosity to encourage local sufficiency and various checks on the activity of capital to ensure that property rights not easily apportioned in a flawed capitalist system become reserved to the people.
Mainly, I take the American approach pioneered by Chief Justice Roger Taney, "While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget that the community also have rights, and that the happiness and well-being of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation." In Taney's case, he was merely arguing that the government could modify exclusive monopolies in the public detriment. I feel free to extend this to any government interference with enterprise tending to the good of the public at large, but generally restricted to "public goods." Public health care management, public utilities, and public transit generally work for me. In World War II, the United States Government had nearly communistic control of factories. They ensured they paid well, though, and directed the excess salary into buying into the war debt. Considering the way defense contractors work now, why can't we have wartime control of those industries all the time? Well, maybe not.
The key is that the left generally likes to repeat the mistake of Marx, which insists that capitalism and private property are so deeply flawed as to be worthy of destruction. Yet private property at least is rather basic to humankind. We are social and political animals but do much better than ants on our own. Adam and Eve chose their downfalls on an individual basis after all.
I think it's much better to think of capitalism as something beautiful and flawed, like a lover with a substance abuse problem. If our love is true, we neither enable them, nor cast them away. We try to get them help when they fall down, but we do let them hit bottom. Both the right and the left like drag us toward class warfare. Bernie Sanders of Vermont wants to tax $500,000 income individuals and $1,000,000 income couples with a special surtax for ten years to help pay for the bailout. California has a similar surtax. I find these kinds of measures punitive, because it only measures economic activity in terms of income, and it equally punishes and rewards the best and the worst of a capitalist economy. Unfortunately, it would be nearly impossible to implement my perfect tax system (based on ecological economics). Instead, I favor progressive tax rates similar to the 1960s and spending and debt reservice in fixed proportions of GDP, possibly delineated in broad categories. I wish I could do things to bring back the middle phase of capitalism and the conscientious class unity possible between "master and man." But I think the energy issue will take care of that soon enough.
So in the end, I remain opposed to a bailout of the financial system at this stage. Let the toxic debt crash upon the relevant ears and let those unaffected climb to the top of the financial heap. The government seems like it can find buyers for the distressed. And if not, the government should buy them at lower prices in the coming year. I don't imagine it's going to be easy. Bond issues will slow. Credit will be tighter. 20% down payments generally may be required. But this crisis is a crisis of lust and overreaching. Easier credit and lower taxes encouraged irresponsibility of both government and people. In some, it led to desperation. As credit tightens, certain goods will return to reasonable prices. Other goods will seem necessary. From what I can tell, lending to industrial expansion continues apace. If you are willing to change your ways, a new structure of the American economy is coming. But as this economy develops, we are going need a little bit of cash to pay down government debt and create a less energy-intensive infrastructure. And some of that money should go into restructuring housing. I'd like to see the government offering benefits to mortgaged properties that are insulated, put to agricultural use, or divided into multiple family dwellings.
So I have opinions. And if you read carefully enough, you may realize that I am in favor of one drug addict letting another drug addict potentially overdose in order to allow another drug addict to go into treatment, which is often the consequence of analogies in this vale of tears.
So what about our presidential candidates? I'm at least voting for one of them, though I have to admit they're increasingly ridiculous. Just listening to them talk about Russia tonight made me want to scream. No consideration of Russia's strategic position at all. Instead, anyone who opposes people we support hates freedom. No mention of how we're going to be pointing missiles at them from Poland and want all their neighbors to join their military alliance. And I really want someone to ask why we're defending borders drawn by Joseph Stalin.
In both the earthly and heavenly city, the city has an analogy with a human. In the case of the earthly city, we go round about with who among us is what part. In antiquity, the elite were said to be the head of the society and so consumed by the mouth and let the lower classes be the hands to work to feed them. In modern times, the same analogy holds in practice, but the hands and feet now are permitted to send nerve impulses to the brain on occasion and serious doses of neurotransmitters every six years. In the heavenly city, whose only described building is the sanctuary, the analogy is between the city and the God made man, Jesus Christ, who has resurrected the temple of his Body that the whole creation be at peace therein.
Some concern with the heavenly city has seemed appropriate lately. Recall the Collect for Proper 20:
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things which are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
It helped to think on this this week. The Collect dates from the uneasiness during the era of the barbarian invasions of the 5th century AD. But as Will Durand reminds us, the invasions from without only have the power when we are corrupt within. The good person is neither buoyed up by joy nor brought down by misfortune saith Augustine. But I find it hard to cultivate ataxia, so how can it be for a Wall Street trader?
So given this analogy between the city and the human being, I wonder what is the point of the occasional nerve impulses to our legislators and seratonin shots to them in the voting booth. Why not simply externalize each and every listing of the state to the organs to which our constitution has externalized that function (ignoring our rights of suffrage and petition). If I feel myself as a scientist to be a communal externality of our individual curiosities, why not let the politicians be a similar communal externality of our individual deliberative functions?
The answer, of course, is that this brain is on drugs, in particular Special K (Street). And like a human being, the state has the potential to act extremely stupidly when intoxicated and panicked. Indeed, all of us acting extremely stupidly is infinitely more dangerously than one of us acting extremely stupidly.
I think I might have looked at this bailout plan a bit differently if I hadn't just read North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, a Victorian novel of Non-Conformity, mutiny, romance, early industrial capitalism, and labor agitation. It's amazing how much globalization shapes a novel written in 1855. But that's the idea. England had advantages in the early Industrial Revolution, but now it faces competition from a growing United States with better soil, cheaper food, easier access to raw materials, and more favorable conditions for immigration. In other words, the United States was the developing country capable of undercutting English textile manufacturers in the world market in a world of much more expensive transportation. Gaskell took a lot of flack from her husband's mill owner parishioners, but she portrays mid 19th century capitalists in a sympathetic light. What's interesting is how Gaskell notices how comfortable the industrial working class is relative to the rural working class. They have furniture, reasonably comfortable lodging, and generally are better fed. Many of them even have substantial savings, completely unthinkable from the rural poor, who seem dependent on the trickle down of ecclesiastical charity. But they are more prone to illness, working in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, and often live just as marginally.
The amazing thing about this novel is that it represents a middle period in the relation between the capitalist manager and the working class man and woman of production. In the early stage, industrial capitalism began in the context of the artisanal workshop emerging from the collective and conservative force of the medieval guild. In this middle stage, the worker has been demoted from a potential master but still remains in intimate contact with the manager whose capital is embodied by the factory, who lives next to the factory, and runs the operations of the factory himself. The increasing globalization of capital (as opposed to the globalization of the market, which is distinct) has eliminated these kinds of relations. If someone in some other city or country manages your factory and "funds" own the capital, the social controls that allow labor and management to have a mutual interest fall away. The capitalism seen in Gaskell is attractive because it is mutualistic. Modern capitalism is feared because of the instances in which it is parasitic.
Many would ask why is it important that capitalism be mutualistic. That's often inefficient. Well, capitalism in a democratic world is only justifiable on two grounds: one is in its aesthetic. In its purest form, capitalism is the self-sufficient and self-defensible person using his or her excess to do or make things that others find "useful" and will gladly provide their excess to obtain. Its eventual end, however, lies in the perpetual excrescence of human existence beyond sufficiency. The pure capitalist exchange requires a weighing of desire, not a weighing of need. The choice of sale or starvation makes a transactional party unfree. Most critiques of capitalism are of its impure form. But in a world of self-defensible and self-sufficient people with desires in proportion to their resource base, capitalism is a beautiful thing and fine director of human curiosity and innovation.
The other value of capitalism lies in its purity hopefully being its aim. In a world of uncertainty and scarcity, capitalism brings technology and a global marketplace, allowing a sort of half-sufficiency, in which the market hopefully compensates for the limitations of our individual economic lives.
Unfortunately, since its inception, capitalism has been perverted by force. The earliest industrial workers were those driven off by enclosure, which took land in which the peasantry had interest through the mixture of their labor with the ground and the aristocracy had interest through their defense of that ground and announced that the capital in that ground would belong to the sword alone. So all of this is to say that I understand the beauty and benefits of libertarianism, especially for Christians, in that there are certain aspects of ancient Israel that seem anarchocapitalist. Unfortunately, we are fallen people who pervert all things with force. And so I lean to the social democratic approach of supporting a variety of strategies to use the force of popular sovereignty and scientific curiosity to encourage local sufficiency and various checks on the activity of capital to ensure that property rights not easily apportioned in a flawed capitalist system become reserved to the people.
Mainly, I take the American approach pioneered by Chief Justice Roger Taney, "While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget that the community also have rights, and that the happiness and well-being of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation." In Taney's case, he was merely arguing that the government could modify exclusive monopolies in the public detriment. I feel free to extend this to any government interference with enterprise tending to the good of the public at large, but generally restricted to "public goods." Public health care management, public utilities, and public transit generally work for me. In World War II, the United States Government had nearly communistic control of factories. They ensured they paid well, though, and directed the excess salary into buying into the war debt. Considering the way defense contractors work now, why can't we have wartime control of those industries all the time? Well, maybe not.
The key is that the left generally likes to repeat the mistake of Marx, which insists that capitalism and private property are so deeply flawed as to be worthy of destruction. Yet private property at least is rather basic to humankind. We are social and political animals but do much better than ants on our own. Adam and Eve chose their downfalls on an individual basis after all.
I think it's much better to think of capitalism as something beautiful and flawed, like a lover with a substance abuse problem. If our love is true, we neither enable them, nor cast them away. We try to get them help when they fall down, but we do let them hit bottom. Both the right and the left like drag us toward class warfare. Bernie Sanders of Vermont wants to tax $500,000 income individuals and $1,000,000 income couples with a special surtax for ten years to help pay for the bailout. California has a similar surtax. I find these kinds of measures punitive, because it only measures economic activity in terms of income, and it equally punishes and rewards the best and the worst of a capitalist economy. Unfortunately, it would be nearly impossible to implement my perfect tax system (based on ecological economics). Instead, I favor progressive tax rates similar to the 1960s and spending and debt reservice in fixed proportions of GDP, possibly delineated in broad categories. I wish I could do things to bring back the middle phase of capitalism and the conscientious class unity possible between "master and man." But I think the energy issue will take care of that soon enough.
So in the end, I remain opposed to a bailout of the financial system at this stage. Let the toxic debt crash upon the relevant ears and let those unaffected climb to the top of the financial heap. The government seems like it can find buyers for the distressed. And if not, the government should buy them at lower prices in the coming year. I don't imagine it's going to be easy. Bond issues will slow. Credit will be tighter. 20% down payments generally may be required. But this crisis is a crisis of lust and overreaching. Easier credit and lower taxes encouraged irresponsibility of both government and people. In some, it led to desperation. As credit tightens, certain goods will return to reasonable prices. Other goods will seem necessary. From what I can tell, lending to industrial expansion continues apace. If you are willing to change your ways, a new structure of the American economy is coming. But as this economy develops, we are going need a little bit of cash to pay down government debt and create a less energy-intensive infrastructure. And some of that money should go into restructuring housing. I'd like to see the government offering benefits to mortgaged properties that are insulated, put to agricultural use, or divided into multiple family dwellings.
So I have opinions. And if you read carefully enough, you may realize that I am in favor of one drug addict letting another drug addict potentially overdose in order to allow another drug addict to go into treatment, which is often the consequence of analogies in this vale of tears.
So what about our presidential candidates? I'm at least voting for one of them, though I have to admit they're increasingly ridiculous. Just listening to them talk about Russia tonight made me want to scream. No consideration of Russia's strategic position at all. Instead, anyone who opposes people we support hates freedom. No mention of how we're going to be pointing missiles at them from Poland and want all their neighbors to join their military alliance. And I really want someone to ask why we're defending borders drawn by Joseph Stalin.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Things Anglicans Like: Iberian Fortified Wines
One usually does not associate Episcopalians with temperance. As the old joke goes, "Whenever two or three are gathered together, there is a fifth." And while there is something to be said for the divine favor that smiles on "wine that gladdens the heart of man," our fallen natures and imperfect bodies lead us to excess and genuine illness and addiction. Many of our last generation of priests were alcoholics. Many of our present generation are the children of alcoholics.
But when Anglicans aren't dealing with addiction and broken family systems, they probably need a drink, and not just a beer, despite Mother England's reputation as a land of beers and ciders. If we're talking Anglican booze, we're talking Iberian fortified wines: port, Madeira, and sherry. I don't know who first thought to mix brandy with red wine, but the English clearly loved it. And let's not forget the white version: the sack that Shakespeare writes about. Just the other day, I was buying a bottle of port as a gift for a non-Anglican Kiwi friend when I see my Anglo-Baptist Rector just behind me in line. He asks in his Cotton Kingdom accent, "Have a night of drinking ahead of you?" Not a bad guess, just a wrong one. After all, I'm a cradle Episcopalian. I've been a member of one parish where we'll serve sherry to you after Eucharist every Sunday of the year. And let's not forget how many parishes we'll do so at Eucharist as well. All during college, the Chaplain consecrated tawny port. I was fairly vexed he never mixed it with water, but don't most other catholic churches insist on "pure, fermented juice of the grape—good and wholesome," including the Church of England? Does wine mixed with grape distillate count?
But when Anglicans aren't dealing with addiction and broken family systems, they probably need a drink, and not just a beer, despite Mother England's reputation as a land of beers and ciders. If we're talking Anglican booze, we're talking Iberian fortified wines: port, Madeira, and sherry. I don't know who first thought to mix brandy with red wine, but the English clearly loved it. And let's not forget the white version: the sack that Shakespeare writes about. Just the other day, I was buying a bottle of port as a gift for a non-Anglican Kiwi friend when I see my Anglo-Baptist Rector just behind me in line. He asks in his Cotton Kingdom accent, "Have a night of drinking ahead of you?" Not a bad guess, just a wrong one. After all, I'm a cradle Episcopalian. I've been a member of one parish where we'll serve sherry to you after Eucharist every Sunday of the year. And let's not forget how many parishes we'll do so at Eucharist as well. All during college, the Chaplain consecrated tawny port. I was fairly vexed he never mixed it with water, but don't most other catholic churches insist on "pure, fermented juice of the grape—good and wholesome," including the Church of England? Does wine mixed with grape distillate count?
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Christianity and the Children of Her Handmaid
Derek of Haligweorc just reposted an old essay of his on the intellectual collision of Christianity and the natural sciences with the preface that he tires of the collision being reconciled by two options: either the rejection of doctrinal orthodoxy or the rejection of the most basic and well-tested hypotheses of the natural sciences. Casual readers might think he was arguing for something on the lines of Gould's much vaunted and much critiqued Non-Overlapping Magisteria, but I think it's fairer to say that he expects Christian doctrine to inform how Christians put science and technology to use. As a reading of Job 38-41 might indicate, God syrely considers natural science and technology to constitute a gradual encroachment on his dominion. Christians understandably might think that there are doctrinal limitations on the extent of that dominion, especially with respect to the dominion of action (as opposed to knowledge unless the act of investigation is itself encroachment). For instance, some of my present research is covered by Job 38:35 (and some of it by other verses), but I'm far more interested in lightning telling me about itself rather than putting it to use myself. I'm rather wary of weather modification, both on practical and theological grounds.
Thus, Derek, I think, expects Christian doctrine and the natural sciences to be complementary magisteria and not merely in morals. It is C.S. Lewis' observation that the miracles of Christ involve the slowing and speeding up of the natural order rather than its distortion or destruction. Water under the proper conditions can become wine. Olive oil not so much. Doctrine and science are at least complementary in this sense. Without "the rules that govern the heavens or [those] that determine the laws of nature on the earth" (Job 38:33), which are the same rules, there would be no room for signs and wonders, for we would have no null hypotheses when faced with a personal and self-revelatory God. There would be no distinction between reproducible and irreproducible phenomena nor between falsifiable and unfalsifiable hypotheses. In addition, Christian theology long has recognized analogy or even homology between the Divine Word in Christ, in Scripture, and in Creation. This pseudohypostatic union presupposes a harmony between them. The question of Christian theology at this point in history is not the substance of this proposition but its details.
In some sense, the conflict between Christianity and the natural sciences should not be unexpected. Natural science, as we know it, comes out of two great intellectual stirrings in western Europe: the post-Reformation Enlightenment (Newtonian physics, non-alchemical chemistry, and Linnaean biology) and the post-Revolutionary era (modern physics and evolutionary biology). Newton was one of great early Unitarians and Einstein was a major socialist activist. Their religious and political beliefs integrated well with their physical hypotheses. Newton argued stenuously with Leibniz against the importance of relationship and harmony in physical systems and instead stressed deterministic cause and effect to the extent that the close of Book III of the Principia was one of the great Deist manifestoes. Newton's physics allows a world not continually held in being by "the Love that moves, the sun, the stars" as Dante puts it but one that starts like a pinball machine without any love being required. Einstein's inclination toward socialism familiarized him with egalitarian thinking that suggested there were no privileged reference frames in physics.
Thus, when Christianity subsumed Greco-Roman philosophy by late antiquity, it sowed the seeds of a new philosophy that spurred a great number of viable physical hypotheses and axiomatic principles that shape modern natural science. The so-called central dogma of physics, which my more moderate agnostic and atheist friends will admit is an act of faith, states that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. While generally treated as axiomatic, it is so far a very well-proven hypothesis. Yet its initial success depended on another act of faith: one in a God who guaranteed natural law by His almighty power, who had made both the heavens and the earth. This wasn't exactly the majority report in Christian doctrine before Newton, but when presented with evidence of corruption and change in the deep heavens, adaptation was inevitable. And the central dogma of physics is far more harmonious with Christian doctrine than the Aristotelian gradient theories about natural law. The progressive nature of sacred history surely inspired 19th century thermodynamics with its heat death of the universe and forward arrow of time.
In fact, I have seen arguments against the conclusions of the IPCC Reports on a similar basis, that the notion of humans progressively bringing themselves to apocalyptic catastrophe through sin is a doctrinal one, not justified by scientific evidence, which for the authors in question primarily describes cyclical change. The fact that the first head of the IPCC was Sir John Houghton, one of the UK's leading public Evangelicals (Anglican) (and a fine scientist), lends the necessary credence to this particular conspiracy theory. Global warming thus is a Christian Tory plot, which would be funny except that the editorial pages of Britain's newspapers often contain garbled versions of this particular fairy story.
The point is here not that Jews, Muslims, and Hindus etc. have not or cannot contribute to the natural sciences or their general intellectual direction. They have and will. The natural sciences owes a debt to the mathematics of Baghdad and the mystics of the Kabbalah. And the originally Christian egalitarianism and ontological universality that consumes the West makes it impossible to say that there is a human being who cannot be a natural scientist. Science is as free and intrinsically human as salvation. But Christian doctrine, by positing a God-created reality and a pseudohypostatic union between the process rather than the substance of the real, was well positioned to create the natural science we know today. Indeed, we are obsessed with the physics of our sacred rites (q.v. transubstantiation) and their resultant chemistry (transubstantiation again, ontological change in Baptism, Holy Orders etc.) like no other religion on earth. Though, of course, some of us would prefer we stop obsessing about these subjects.
One intermediate word about quantum physics: the fundamental idea of quantum physics is the reduction of laws to probabilities at small scales. Derek is right that it is going to take some time for this idea to percolate into our general cognition. If it ever does. As I pointed out to two of my colleagues recently, though, quantum inflation satisfies creation ex nihilo , though creation by quantum inflation is highly troublesome to many because it does not imply God's love, omnipotence, intelligence, or coherence, only His randomness. But after all, this why we have Scripture and the Creeds. See what I mean about complimentary magisteria.
Now we come to how the pseudohypostatic union actually might work. The first solutions involve privileging one entity over the other. Most obvious is Fundamentalist Christianity and its backsliding cousins along the spectrum, which support young earth creationism. They are privileging a particular reading of the Book of Genesis over Creation, not only in attempt to maintain the inerrancy of Scripture but a very narrow soteriology (how does the Fall happen???). Neglecting arguments that scientists are godless frauds, their most interesting arguments posit inconsistencies in special relativity and atomic physics that suggest the central dogma of physics is historically invalid. The laws of physics 6,000 years ago were different than than today. Thus, young earth creationism is not merely a conflict between science and religion but really a complex panoply of doctrinal disputes within Christianity itself. And it would really be helpful if this were more public knowledge. Liberal Christianity often becomes the opposite extreme. I wonder what would happen if I told certain preachers, "I'm a very well-educated scientist, who finds the NT miracles quite plausible if and only if Jesus is the Son of God the Father, the creator of heaven and earth. Otherwise, I'm quite skeptical."
In the miscellaneous category, we have some conservative Catholics who think that Aristotle is still right, at least on special occasions. Yes, they exist. Or else this article makes no sense whatsoever .
Today, I mentioned in comments at Haligweorc that there were three Anglican options I knew of: John Donne, Joseph Butler, and Alister McGrath. I'm sure there are hints in other theologians of other or similar options, but these were the three that popped into my head. The key works are Donne's Essay on Divinity (note that this is not poetry but still quite poetic in places), Butler's Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (required reading for many 19th century American college students, which is why I read it as a student of philosophical curricula of that era), and McGrath's A Scientific Theology (whose epitome, The Science of God I have stuck amidst Bible, BCP, Hymnal, and Bede's Homilies on the Gospels). I don't have suitable access to the first two, though Analogy should be online.
Donne's harmony is a difficult one, possibly because the work seems addressed to particular viewpoints in early Jacobean London. On one hand, he quotes a very many chronologies for the world from a variety of sources (and clearly he hadn't heard of the 9 trillion year Hindu chronologies) but asserts that the Holy Scriptures are reliable in saying that the world began with creation by God. We are not in endless recurrence. But later it seems possible that he only can say there is uncertainty in the age of the Earth because there are inherent uncertainties in the interpretation of the Genesis chronology, for he says that if the numbers in the Bible are not right, we have no confidence in God's promises. My guess is that he is poking fun at an extreme Puritan position without directly angering the Puritans in question, whom he considered too obtuse to get the joke. But this passage appears to be an argument for non-literal interpretation. And if I am right, his general position is that apparent Biblical errancy relative to Creation (and history) must be considered to be of mystical significance.
Donne's position is unsatisfactory. Perhaps, AKMA's "Signifying Theology": the epilogue to his recent Faithful Interpretation is most convincing in this respect. AKMA sees harmony between theology and exegesis in Christ, who literally expounds God through every aspect of His life. AKMA has a variety of rather technical and particular things to draw from this insight but what concerns us is this passage:
And indeed AKMA's primary inspirations, Maurice de la Taille and the Gospel of John, are good places to look to understand the deep importance of the pseudohypostatic union I keep positing. But the key point is that Donne's position logically might be taken to the extreme that the Gospels (particularly the miracles and the Great Acts of Resurrection and Ascension) are stories about what Jesus meant rather than stories about things that Jesus did that expound His life in God. But AKMA and de la Taille warn us otherwise. If we expect actual encounter with the Living God in our own lives through the conduit to Christ in the sanctuary not made with human hands, we must expect that Jesus' life was filled with genuine encounter between the world and God through mystery and miracle. This is a sentiment as old as the Apostle who warned us, "If Jesus is not risen, then we are most pitiable." But AKMA speaks even more deeply to me.
Butler, writing a hundred years later than Donne post Newton, argues that there is a religion that may be empirically inferred from nature that becomes corrupted by our fallen human nature to the religions outside of Judaism and Christianity. He even reasons out their basic principles such as the immortality of the soul and a future system of rewards and punishments. He then argues that Christianity is the revealed religion most consistent with these natural principles. Butler's general intellectual orientation may appear familiar. Not only is Butler a key part of the natural theological tradition that influenced Darwin and which he only rejected in part. (I have a lovely essay in college on the subject.), but the eventual goal of the Intelligent Design movement is a Butlerian argument, in which mankind is the culmination of a particular kind of designer, whose characteristics may be derived from biological and physical creation, and who is most likely the Christian God (and not Allah or an extraterrestrial or a Mouse and Disco Ball or an entity with Noodly Appendages). The basic argument itself may not be original to Butler. Alister McGrath cites a slightly earlier work of Thomas Tindal in the same vein. But it had many refiners and imitators, including early scientists of importance such as Joseph Priestley and William Whewell.
Butler's position is problematic in that it insists on an empirically derivable religion consistent with Christian truth. It puts too far to the side questions of why such a religion can be recovered in a fallen world, limited both by our own fallenness and the potential fallenness of nature and why Christianity should be harmonious with a religion meant for man before the Fall when the Fall and the Incarnation is generally assumed to change God's original plans for humanity. So far intelligent design has fallen on the central dogma of physics and an inherent notion of divine economy as William Whewell puts it in his Bridgewater Treatise and Darwin quotes,
Intelligent design still has a theological case to make, not just a scientific one. It must explain why and to what extent the world was punctuated by such insulated interpositions of Divine power before the Fall. It also must explain what role revelation plays in salvation history in this case and how design is maintained in a fallen world, but this juncture brings us to McGrath.
McGrath is a third option and much of the first paragraphs of this essay are shaped by his position, though I held much of it well before I read anything of his. A priest friend of mine in high school was McGrath's student at Wycliffe Hall, but I have had to infer this in later life from an offhand comment that the head of his theological college had two doctorates in theology and (bio)physics. McGrath observes the pseudohypostatic union, "the same divine rationality that that is embedded in creation is embodied in Jesus Christ, as God incarnate [emphasis his]" (q.v. Thomas F. Torrance...or Bonaventure, Augustine, Cappadocian Fathers) and concludes that Christian theology is by first principles required to be in dialogue with the natural sciences. Since he's at Wycliffe Hall, we can assume that the analogy/homology with Scripture is given. (He mentions it every once in a while). And the rest of the work is trying to explain how that dialogue might take place procedurally. Since I am quite exhausted, I'll leave those details to my next entry.
So until next time, the Holy Brothers leave you with U2:
Thus, Derek, I think, expects Christian doctrine and the natural sciences to be complementary magisteria and not merely in morals. It is C.S. Lewis' observation that the miracles of Christ involve the slowing and speeding up of the natural order rather than its distortion or destruction. Water under the proper conditions can become wine. Olive oil not so much. Doctrine and science are at least complementary in this sense. Without "the rules that govern the heavens or [those] that determine the laws of nature on the earth" (Job 38:33), which are the same rules, there would be no room for signs and wonders, for we would have no null hypotheses when faced with a personal and self-revelatory God. There would be no distinction between reproducible and irreproducible phenomena nor between falsifiable and unfalsifiable hypotheses. In addition, Christian theology long has recognized analogy or even homology between the Divine Word in Christ, in Scripture, and in Creation. This pseudohypostatic union presupposes a harmony between them. The question of Christian theology at this point in history is not the substance of this proposition but its details.
In some sense, the conflict between Christianity and the natural sciences should not be unexpected. Natural science, as we know it, comes out of two great intellectual stirrings in western Europe: the post-Reformation Enlightenment (Newtonian physics, non-alchemical chemistry, and Linnaean biology) and the post-Revolutionary era (modern physics and evolutionary biology). Newton was one of great early Unitarians and Einstein was a major socialist activist. Their religious and political beliefs integrated well with their physical hypotheses. Newton argued stenuously with Leibniz against the importance of relationship and harmony in physical systems and instead stressed deterministic cause and effect to the extent that the close of Book III of the Principia was one of the great Deist manifestoes. Newton's physics allows a world not continually held in being by "the Love that moves, the sun, the stars" as Dante puts it but one that starts like a pinball machine without any love being required. Einstein's inclination toward socialism familiarized him with egalitarian thinking that suggested there were no privileged reference frames in physics.
Thus, when Christianity subsumed Greco-Roman philosophy by late antiquity, it sowed the seeds of a new philosophy that spurred a great number of viable physical hypotheses and axiomatic principles that shape modern natural science. The so-called central dogma of physics, which my more moderate agnostic and atheist friends will admit is an act of faith, states that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. While generally treated as axiomatic, it is so far a very well-proven hypothesis. Yet its initial success depended on another act of faith: one in a God who guaranteed natural law by His almighty power, who had made both the heavens and the earth. This wasn't exactly the majority report in Christian doctrine before Newton, but when presented with evidence of corruption and change in the deep heavens, adaptation was inevitable. And the central dogma of physics is far more harmonious with Christian doctrine than the Aristotelian gradient theories about natural law. The progressive nature of sacred history surely inspired 19th century thermodynamics with its heat death of the universe and forward arrow of time.
In fact, I have seen arguments against the conclusions of the IPCC Reports on a similar basis, that the notion of humans progressively bringing themselves to apocalyptic catastrophe through sin is a doctrinal one, not justified by scientific evidence, which for the authors in question primarily describes cyclical change. The fact that the first head of the IPCC was Sir John Houghton, one of the UK's leading public Evangelicals (Anglican) (and a fine scientist), lends the necessary credence to this particular conspiracy theory. Global warming thus is a Christian Tory plot, which would be funny except that the editorial pages of Britain's newspapers often contain garbled versions of this particular fairy story.
The point is here not that Jews, Muslims, and Hindus etc. have not or cannot contribute to the natural sciences or their general intellectual direction. They have and will. The natural sciences owes a debt to the mathematics of Baghdad and the mystics of the Kabbalah. And the originally Christian egalitarianism and ontological universality that consumes the West makes it impossible to say that there is a human being who cannot be a natural scientist. Science is as free and intrinsically human as salvation. But Christian doctrine, by positing a God-created reality and a pseudohypostatic union between the process rather than the substance of the real, was well positioned to create the natural science we know today. Indeed, we are obsessed with the physics of our sacred rites (q.v. transubstantiation) and their resultant chemistry (transubstantiation again, ontological change in Baptism, Holy Orders etc.) like no other religion on earth. Though, of course, some of us would prefer we stop obsessing about these subjects.
One intermediate word about quantum physics: the fundamental idea of quantum physics is the reduction of laws to probabilities at small scales. Derek is right that it is going to take some time for this idea to percolate into our general cognition. If it ever does. As I pointed out to two of my colleagues recently, though, quantum inflation satisfies creation ex nihilo , though creation by quantum inflation is highly troublesome to many because it does not imply God's love, omnipotence, intelligence, or coherence, only His randomness. But after all, this why we have Scripture and the Creeds. See what I mean about complimentary magisteria.
Now we come to how the pseudohypostatic union actually might work. The first solutions involve privileging one entity over the other. Most obvious is Fundamentalist Christianity and its backsliding cousins along the spectrum, which support young earth creationism. They are privileging a particular reading of the Book of Genesis over Creation, not only in attempt to maintain the inerrancy of Scripture but a very narrow soteriology (how does the Fall happen???). Neglecting arguments that scientists are godless frauds, their most interesting arguments posit inconsistencies in special relativity and atomic physics that suggest the central dogma of physics is historically invalid. The laws of physics 6,000 years ago were different than than today. Thus, young earth creationism is not merely a conflict between science and religion but really a complex panoply of doctrinal disputes within Christianity itself. And it would really be helpful if this were more public knowledge. Liberal Christianity often becomes the opposite extreme. I wonder what would happen if I told certain preachers, "I'm a very well-educated scientist, who finds the NT miracles quite plausible if and only if Jesus is the Son of God the Father, the creator of heaven and earth. Otherwise, I'm quite skeptical."
In the miscellaneous category, we have some conservative Catholics who think that Aristotle is still right, at least on special occasions. Yes, they exist. Or else this article makes no sense whatsoever .
Today, I mentioned in comments at Haligweorc that there were three Anglican options I knew of: John Donne, Joseph Butler, and Alister McGrath. I'm sure there are hints in other theologians of other or similar options, but these were the three that popped into my head. The key works are Donne's Essay on Divinity (note that this is not poetry but still quite poetic in places), Butler's Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (required reading for many 19th century American college students, which is why I read it as a student of philosophical curricula of that era), and McGrath's A Scientific Theology (whose epitome, The Science of God I have stuck amidst Bible, BCP, Hymnal, and Bede's Homilies on the Gospels). I don't have suitable access to the first two, though Analogy should be online.
Donne's harmony is a difficult one, possibly because the work seems addressed to particular viewpoints in early Jacobean London. On one hand, he quotes a very many chronologies for the world from a variety of sources (and clearly he hadn't heard of the 9 trillion year Hindu chronologies) but asserts that the Holy Scriptures are reliable in saying that the world began with creation by God. We are not in endless recurrence. But later it seems possible that he only can say there is uncertainty in the age of the Earth because there are inherent uncertainties in the interpretation of the Genesis chronology, for he says that if the numbers in the Bible are not right, we have no confidence in God's promises. My guess is that he is poking fun at an extreme Puritan position without directly angering the Puritans in question, whom he considered too obtuse to get the joke. But this passage appears to be an argument for non-literal interpretation. And if I am right, his general position is that apparent Biblical errancy relative to Creation (and history) must be considered to be of mystical significance.
Donne's position is unsatisfactory. Perhaps, AKMA's "Signifying Theology": the epilogue to his recent Faithful Interpretation is most convincing in this respect. AKMA sees harmony between theology and exegesis in Christ, who literally expounds God through every aspect of His life. AKMA has a variety of rather technical and particular things to draw from this insight but what concerns us is this passage:
...but it is the recollection of the unanimous teaching of Scripture, the saints, and reason itself that the Truth transforms lives that acknowledge its truth.
Finally, the signifying practices to which exegesis and theology lend complementary energies may arguably point to a consummation in the church's signifying practice par excellence: the Eucharist, which is 'an essential action,' not 'an isolated presence or merely illustrative symbol.'"
And indeed AKMA's primary inspirations, Maurice de la Taille and the Gospel of John, are good places to look to understand the deep importance of the pseudohypostatic union I keep positing. But the key point is that Donne's position logically might be taken to the extreme that the Gospels (particularly the miracles and the Great Acts of Resurrection and Ascension) are stories about what Jesus meant rather than stories about things that Jesus did that expound His life in God. But AKMA and de la Taille warn us otherwise. If we expect actual encounter with the Living God in our own lives through the conduit to Christ in the sanctuary not made with human hands, we must expect that Jesus' life was filled with genuine encounter between the world and God through mystery and miracle. This is a sentiment as old as the Apostle who warned us, "If Jesus is not risen, then we are most pitiable." But AKMA speaks even more deeply to me.
Butler, writing a hundred years later than Donne post Newton, argues that there is a religion that may be empirically inferred from nature that becomes corrupted by our fallen human nature to the religions outside of Judaism and Christianity. He even reasons out their basic principles such as the immortality of the soul and a future system of rewards and punishments. He then argues that Christianity is the revealed religion most consistent with these natural principles. Butler's general intellectual orientation may appear familiar. Not only is Butler a key part of the natural theological tradition that influenced Darwin and which he only rejected in part. (I have a lovely essay in college on the subject.), but the eventual goal of the Intelligent Design movement is a Butlerian argument, in which mankind is the culmination of a particular kind of designer, whose characteristics may be derived from biological and physical creation, and who is most likely the Christian God (and not Allah or an extraterrestrial or a Mouse and Disco Ball or an entity with Noodly Appendages). The basic argument itself may not be original to Butler. Alister McGrath cites a slightly earlier work of Thomas Tindal in the same vein. But it had many refiners and imitators, including early scientists of importance such as Joseph Priestley and William Whewell.
Butler's position is problematic in that it insists on an empirically derivable religion consistent with Christian truth. It puts too far to the side questions of why such a religion can be recovered in a fallen world, limited both by our own fallenness and the potential fallenness of nature and why Christianity should be harmonious with a religion meant for man before the Fall when the Fall and the Incarnation is generally assumed to change God's original plans for humanity. So far intelligent design has fallen on the central dogma of physics and an inherent notion of divine economy as William Whewell puts it in his Bridgewater Treatise and Darwin quotes,
"But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this-we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws."
Intelligent design still has a theological case to make, not just a scientific one. It must explain why and to what extent the world was punctuated by such insulated interpositions of Divine power before the Fall. It also must explain what role revelation plays in salvation history in this case and how design is maintained in a fallen world, but this juncture brings us to McGrath.
McGrath is a third option and much of the first paragraphs of this essay are shaped by his position, though I held much of it well before I read anything of his. A priest friend of mine in high school was McGrath's student at Wycliffe Hall, but I have had to infer this in later life from an offhand comment that the head of his theological college had two doctorates in theology and (bio)physics. McGrath observes the pseudohypostatic union, "the same divine rationality that that is embedded in creation is embodied in Jesus Christ, as God incarnate [emphasis his]" (q.v. Thomas F. Torrance...or Bonaventure, Augustine, Cappadocian Fathers) and concludes that Christian theology is by first principles required to be in dialogue with the natural sciences. Since he's at Wycliffe Hall, we can assume that the analogy/homology with Scripture is given. (He mentions it every once in a while). And the rest of the work is trying to explain how that dialogue might take place procedurally. Since I am quite exhausted, I'll leave those details to my next entry.
So until next time, the Holy Brothers leave you with U2:
You speak of signs and wonders
But I need something other
I would believe if I was able
But I'm waiting on the crumbs from your table
Monday, August 25, 2008
Scattered Thoughts from A Quiet Summer
I started reviewing the events planned for the next few months in my head this afternoon.
There's the big meeting of my current project in mid-September followed by the day dedicated to planning for the future of a certain program of planetary exploration.
There's another meeting about atmospheric modeling of that certain planet up in the Silicon Valley at the end of September.
I have to give a talk in these parts at the end of October.
And it's a good thing I'm in town, because I agreed to help with baptismal preparation that month, too, and there's a very nice young adult Bible study planned during the same time. One thing has changed at ILEOS during my time: the membership between 18-39 has grown by leaps and bounds to at least 1200!
Then I have a big sub-sub-field conference in November and the big field conference in December before I head home for Christmas.
And since a presidential election will intervene (and Kunstler is claiming the second Great Depression will start about Halloween), my life may just hit the mean for excitement.
And September draws near and with it, the start of yet another academic year, the first year in which I will not be a student in the same way I've been one for twenty years. There'll be papers and oral presentations and hours and days spent in computer programming and library research. But no homework, tests, exams, and grades. The first day of classes will not be a day of new beginnings, but merely another day at work and its own occasional excitements, those days in which as Susan Stewart writes in "The Owl" in her new collection, Red Rover , "...the circuit of the world/ belies the chaos of its forms--(the kind/of thing astronomers/look down to write/in books)." (Stewart is an acquaintance...and possibly her editor, too, but it's a good collection...about how children's games presage adult foolishness).
I wish I had something edifying to say, but the common company I share with many of you is the rhythm of the Office: a daily look at a quirky book. What are we to make of Israel's obsession with worshipping ephods? Could early Israelite religion have considered the ephod to be the manifestation of the Divine Presence? And what are we to make of the priest-stealing Danites? Whatever the significance of these incidents, I am looking forward to Job: the book that more than any other in the Old Testament takes us outside the particular obsessions of Israel to the general condition of both Jew and Gentile. Indeed, it is the book Tom Paine attributed to some unknown goy. But I think it's instead a work of the Diaspora, a meditation on the exilic misfortune as part of general misfortune: a minority report on both the uniqueness of Israel and the significance of her sin and a reproach to the reforms of Ezra. And when God and Job's author finished the work surely He said, "soon comes the time for me to be incarnate within the circles of the world. Now is the time for the Messiah." Oh, and I always do appreciate Saul living the death and resurrection of Jesus in his blindness. Thomas just had to see, but Saul was so pig-headed, he had to experience.
There's the big meeting of my current project in mid-September followed by the day dedicated to planning for the future of a certain program of planetary exploration.
There's another meeting about atmospheric modeling of that certain planet up in the Silicon Valley at the end of September.
I have to give a talk in these parts at the end of October.
And it's a good thing I'm in town, because I agreed to help with baptismal preparation that month, too, and there's a very nice young adult Bible study planned during the same time. One thing has changed at ILEOS during my time: the membership between 18-39 has grown by leaps and bounds to at least 1200!
Then I have a big sub-sub-field conference in November and the big field conference in December before I head home for Christmas.
And since a presidential election will intervene (and Kunstler is claiming the second Great Depression will start about Halloween), my life may just hit the mean for excitement.
And September draws near and with it, the start of yet another academic year, the first year in which I will not be a student in the same way I've been one for twenty years. There'll be papers and oral presentations and hours and days spent in computer programming and library research. But no homework, tests, exams, and grades. The first day of classes will not be a day of new beginnings, but merely another day at work and its own occasional excitements, those days in which as Susan Stewart writes in "The Owl" in her new collection, Red Rover , "...the circuit of the world/ belies the chaos of its forms--(the kind/of thing astronomers/look down to write/in books)." (Stewart is an acquaintance...and possibly her editor, too, but it's a good collection...about how children's games presage adult foolishness).
I wish I had something edifying to say, but the common company I share with many of you is the rhythm of the Office: a daily look at a quirky book. What are we to make of Israel's obsession with worshipping ephods? Could early Israelite religion have considered the ephod to be the manifestation of the Divine Presence? And what are we to make of the priest-stealing Danites? Whatever the significance of these incidents, I am looking forward to Job: the book that more than any other in the Old Testament takes us outside the particular obsessions of Israel to the general condition of both Jew and Gentile. Indeed, it is the book Tom Paine attributed to some unknown goy. But I think it's instead a work of the Diaspora, a meditation on the exilic misfortune as part of general misfortune: a minority report on both the uniqueness of Israel and the significance of her sin and a reproach to the reforms of Ezra. And when God and Job's author finished the work surely He said, "soon comes the time for me to be incarnate within the circles of the world. Now is the time for the Messiah." Oh, and I always do appreciate Saul living the death and resurrection of Jesus in his blindness. Thomas just had to see, but Saul was so pig-headed, he had to experience.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
At A Party
CS: So you're an actor?
NA: Well, I majored in religious studies.
CS: Oh, I know a lot of religious studies majors from my time at [alma mater].
NA: Yeah, alma mater has a good divinity program. But I'm trying acting out, but I could do religious studies again, probably teach.
CS: Really? What are your research interests?
NA: Well, my thesis was about reconciliation and the Anglican Communion...
CS: Um, I'm going to have to keep myself from talking to you for the rest of the night.
Anyway, NA may show up at ILEOS. We ended up talking Christology and Job for a while. And he's read Countryman's Dirt, Greed, and Sex . But I tuckered myself out dancing. It was a party, after all.
NA: Well, I majored in religious studies.
CS: Oh, I know a lot of religious studies majors from my time at [alma mater].
NA: Yeah, alma mater has a good divinity program. But I'm trying acting out, but I could do religious studies again, probably teach.
CS: Really? What are your research interests?
NA: Well, my thesis was about reconciliation and the Anglican Communion...
CS: Um, I'm going to have to keep myself from talking to you for the rest of the night.
Anyway, NA may show up at ILEOS. We ended up talking Christology and Job for a while. And he's read Countryman's Dirt, Greed, and Sex . But I tuckered myself out dancing. It was a party, after all.
Saturday, August 02, 2008
The Local Big City Police Chief
So I saw this story today . The last graph made me think of a story in the LA Times mentioned by Getreligion.
The most interesting part is that Bratton clearly thinks that Lohan's relationship with Ronson is a stabilizing influence, which is entirely consistent with his support for gay marriage. Imagine that.
In other news, the only moratorium I want to see from Lambeth is a moratorium on reports and covenants and agreements, unless the agreement requires bishops who want to intervene in other dioceses to have a meal with the diocesan bishop in question.
The most interesting part is that Bratton clearly thinks that Lohan's relationship with Ronson is a stabilizing influence, which is entirely consistent with his support for gay marriage. Imagine that.
In other news, the only moratorium I want to see from Lambeth is a moratorium on reports and covenants and agreements, unless the agreement requires bishops who want to intervene in other dioceses to have a meal with the diocesan bishop in question.
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