What is going on?

I am an admittedly bad blogger. When I used to work for the man and he used to keep me down I had so many thoughts all day long that blogging became a way for me to 'discuss' them in a corporate world void of meaningful talk. But now that I'm in grad school studying something I love with other people who love it, all I do all day is talk about the stuff I would have blogged back in the day. So I get home and I don't have the energy to write out my rants or ideas because I've already bounced them off my friends here who think relatively similar to me. So the blog has become something else, but I'm not sure what. I am not a journaler and I never have been. I hate that I feel like a bad Christian for not journaling. But I just never had it in me. I'm an extremely introspective person - for better or worse - but I find that writing my thoughts out doesn't really help much. I prefer writing poetry or painting, neither of which I'm very good at. But you can't blog that stuff.

So what should I do? Maybe I could try to be more disciplined and write about what I'm studying. Or perhaps I could talk about the books that I read or see in the library and want to read. I realize that I'm a novice at theology. I just don't know what I'm doing. So when I read blogs like America's Young Theologian, Faith & Theology, or Chrisendom I just feel like an idiot. Trying to blog like those guys would be like trying out for the Astros - I would just look like a fool.

So what is my role in the blogosphere? I guess that question will slowly become more clear as I get closer to figuring out my role in the world. Oh well...

The Gathered Community

My vision of the gathered church that had come to me after I became the janitor had been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on…It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw then all as some how perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.

Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry, pg. 205

I'm writing a paper on Wendell Berry's vision of the gathered community. My argument is that it is a challenge to the church's embodiment of the Gospel, but also that it is insufficient in and of itself. Berry needs the Church in order to have a people capable of performing this vision.

"Without a church capable of demythologizing false idealism that possess our imaginations, there is no possibility..." that a community can exist capable of loving its neighbors or its enemies to the extent Berry envisions. Essentially, it is an argument that sides with Hauerwas and stands against those who think Hauerwas and Berry are 'idealists'.

Rethinking Christ and Culture

Liberal Protestantism has accommodated itself to culture at the point of the sexual revolution. The fruites of the sexual revolution are easy divorce, shallow interpersonal relationships and promiscuity, sexually transmitted disease and sterility, homosexual activity, routine abortion, contraceptvies and antibiotics as substitutes for sexual responsibility, increased poverty among women and children, and children growing up without secure relationships with both parents. All this is tragic--yet liberal Protestantism does little to stand against it.

On the other hand, conservative Protestantism has accommodated itself to culture by blessing the commercialization of all of life and the exploitation of the poor through global capitalism. The fruits of the worship of the market are the commercialization of nearly all public space, the constant preaching of materialism through advertising, the destruction of the environment, the mad scramble for money, and the trampling of the poor by faceless corporations that view people as nothing but units of labor and consumers. All this is tragic too--yet conserviative Protestantism does little to stand against it.

Ironically, having set out to transform culture, both liberal and conservative forms of Christianity in North America today find themselves greatly transformed by late-capitalist, liberal-individualist culture during the last century. It is little more that empty rhetoric, then, for liberals and conservatives to claim to be transforming culture and to accuse those who reject the Christ transformting culture model (of Niebuhr's Christ and Culture) as irresponsible and irrelevant. What could be more irrelevant than Christian leaders who beg the government to pass laws to coerce their own church members into caring for the poor or refusing the abortion temptation, when those Christian leaders cannot convince their own flocks to do these things on the basis of the Bible? There is a glaring parallel between liberal Christians lobbying the government to tax the capitalists in their own flocks and redistribute the money to the poor, on the one hand, and conservative Christians lobbying the government to outlaw abortion, so members of their own flock will not have it as an option. No wonder politicians often have so little respect for religious lobbyists.

--Craig Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006) 20-21.

Eyes wide open...

In prayer we wake up to the world as it is spread out before God in all its heights and depths. We perceive the sighing of creation, and hear the cries of the created victims that have fallen dumb. We also hear the song of praise of the blossoming spring, and feel the divine love for everything that lives. The person who prays, lives more attentively. Pray wakefully – that is only possible if we don’t pray mystically with closed eyes, but messianically, with eyes wide open for God’s future in the world. - Jurgen Moltmann

life...

The older you get, the more you need those who knew you when you were young.

Math Atheism

4 things

1) As long as we think that 'success' is the same as 'popularity', we will fail.
2) As soon as we forget the cross and what it means, we will make Jesus (and Christianity, for that matter) a means to our own ends.
3) We will think that 'being in positions of influence' will be the only way for real change when we forget who Jesus was.
4) Most of us read the Bible thinly and without a proper understanding of the context from which Jesus comes from and into which Jesus speaks. Therefore we fail to see the counter-cultural (read: subversive) nature of the Gospel, of Jesus, and of Paul (and the whole Bible, really). If this is the case, we will always be 'chaplains to power' and affirm the status quo.

To be an artist in world of dirt...

Thanks to AYT for this post:

Gandhi, Graffiti, and Christian Ethics

Rugged Individualism

"Every man for himself" is a doctrine for a feeding frenzy or for a panic in a burning nightclub, appropriate for sharks or hogs or perhaps a cascade of lemmings. A society wishing to endure must speak the language of caretaking, faith-keeping, kindness, neighborliness, and peace. That language is another precious resource that cannot be "privatized."

A quote from "Rugged Individualism," in The Way of Ignorance, by Wendell Berry.

John Yates & The Falls Church in the NY Times

Episcopalians Reach Point of Revolt
by Laurie Goodstein

"For about 30 years, the Episcopal Church has been one big unhappy family. Under one roof there were female bishops and male bishops who would not ordain women. There were parishes that celebrated gay weddings and parishes that denounced them; theologians sure that Jesus was the only route to salvation, and theologians who disagreed.

Now, after years of threats, the family is breaking up.

As many as eight conservative Episcopal churches in Virginia are expected to announce today that their parishioners have voted to cut their ties with the Episcopal Church. Two are large, historic congregations that minister to the Washington elite and occupy real estate worth a combined $27 million, which could result in a legal battle over who keeps the property.

In a twist, these wealthy American congregations are essentially putting themselves up for adoption by Anglican archbishops in poorer dioceses in Africa, Asia and Latin America who share conservative theological views about homosexuality and the interpretation of Scripture with the breakaway Americans."

Read the rest of the article here.