The story of Mende Nazer begins with a young girl growing up in a harsh environment in the mountain region of the Sudan. She is playful, witty, too smart for her own good, somewhat at odds with her mother, and completely enamored by her father. She is loved by her family and culture, and loved back in spite of some harsh rituals (female circumcision) and a harsh environment (dangerous wildlife and at the mercy of the land).

When raiders attack her peaceful village it all changes. She is raped on the way to the slave traders who then shove her off to an absolutely evil woman in Khartoum where she is unknowingly sold as a slave. No choices, no friends, no comforts, no real safety. She is a body of labor. Flesh that can work as a substitute for others who practice the art of leisure. Beaten and dehumanized to the point of absolute affliction.

She is then traded off from Khartoum to London where she manages to escape the home of a diplomat. She is now free. But she has still not seen her family in over a decade. She is in complete fear of her own country and those in power. And she is a devout Muslim all the while.

This tale shows us that violence towards darker skinned people is alive and well in the world. The violence in Sudan is not religious as much as it is racist and classist. Mende was an unclean barbarian who did not deserve to be treated as a human by her Arab captors.

Slavery is alive in the world and while much of the world decides to look away at such atrocities, there are undoubtedly thousands like Mende when she was just a little girl who are being beaten and abused in every way possible as I write this. Beaten for not washing dishes the correct way, for talking to others, for laughing, for smiling, for an unnoticed wrinkle left in a shirt, a counter left undusted, for not calling their owner “master”. It is a reminder to those in the West that there are parts of the world where basic survival and the freedoms that we have are not taken for granted. A healthy reminder.

The book itself is wonderfully crafted, hard to put down even though you want to avert your gaze often.

I have begun to participate as a “select blogger” for The Ooze which has started sending me books, often review copies before the books hit the stores. So I will be periodically writing reviews of these books. Thanks to the good folks at The Ooze!

My Beautiful Idol is an autobiographical tale in which Pete Gall takes us through his rather flawed, or at least self-delusional journey from advertizing whiz, to “poor fat white guy” in the inner city, to the unresolved questions of the misdirected journey of a failed “hero for Christ”. The metaphor for Pete is a collector crab. This is a shellfish that, like other crabs, lives off of the dregs and excrement of the glorious creatures’ that grace the currents above. But it also has one talent: “The collector crab, or decorator crab, as it’s also called, attaches to his shell bits of what it finds on the sea floor…(T)he idea is to protect itself by becoming invisible to its natural enemy, the squid” (p. 18).

Pete starts off in a cab in Chicago talking about his profession with the cabbie, revealing that the entire job of advertising is to sell people back their beliefs and translate those beliefs into needs that people can no longer do without. It is the grand feedback loop of plucking people of their whims and even latent desires and packaging them into something that dazzles and amuses long enough to make desire conform to the shape of an object that will earn a company profit.

Pete wants more than this in his life. He wants a deeper connection with people and with God that goes beyond the normative structures of the church or the casual relationships he encounters along the way. So he leaves everything behind to pursue this depth. Whether it is working with people down on their luck at an organization called Turnaround, the mentally challenged, or with convicts at a housewares startup business, we learn that Pete himself is the embodiment of all those with whom he finds himself in the role of the minister. You see, Pete does not just grab those things of his environment to conceal or protect him, he holds onto an idealistic image of God and what his relationship with God should be rather than what it actually is.

What we learn with Pete is that all of those tactics he would use to convince people that they need something that they really do not have imploded on his very sense of self in a feedback loop that does everything but rest in God even though he tries so hard to find that rest. But the rest he seeks is on his own terms and rooted in the stuff of not only his environments, but in his very image of who God is, and the person he believes he should be before God. Clinging so desperately to the idol of this version of Pete and this version of God, leads Pete into despair - over and over again.

So what’s Pete’s problem? I share his wife’s sentiment who “said, ‘You know, you were kind of a butt’” (p. 9). Pete frustrates me because he is so irreducibly wrapped in his own self-created and self-delusional tension of masochistic victimization and the audacity of self-importance. I want to slap Pete around a bit, tell him to get over himself, and stop creating the idol that is this ideation of Pete Gall. He has constructed this image of himself and has convinced himself that this is who he ought to be. As he tells us, the reason why he left Five Points Christian Church was, “because it was too hard being there, too unimportant, too low-profile, and playing the role of outsider was wearing thin. It made me a poor fit for the simple work the church needed me to do” (p. 172). And that’s the rub.

The tale somewhat concludes with an interesting dialogue that can perhaps be better summed up with a line from Kierkegaard at the opening of The Sickness Unto Death which in large part gives us a framework for why Pete is often so miserable in this fraction of his life:

The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.

Pete can’t find St. Augustine’s “rest in God” because the only source he truly has to rest in is this image - this idol - of himself. This is like “Diary of a Seducer”, only Pete seduces himself.  He is not Hamlet pondering his existential crisis in the eclipse of his father’s legacy. He is not the prodigal son who wishes his father dead in order to carouse only to come back. True his father offers a moment similar to the father in this parable in Luke. But Pete is really none of these. His character is Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman who said, “The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.” Pete and Willy suffer from the same problem - they want to be well-liked and they want the world to find favor with them. For Pete, God is one more part of that world. For Willy Loman there was no resurrection and no great legacy. But it seems that from Pete’s point of view now, that killing off this idol of himself is the only way that he can truly rest in the grace of God.

These stories are not ones that I tend to read looking to find someone like me in them. But stories of failures and loves lost remind us at how fragile we are and how culpable before God we are of committing the same transgressions that killed Christ. And this is something we do over and over again. What Pete shows us is how we take this one step further by deluding ourselves into believing that we do not behave or believe this way. And sometimes we can only see that we all do these things by resonating with the travail of someone else. Then we have a choice to be hypocrites, or penitents. Our tendency is to be the former. The purpose of our created existence is to be the latter. And that is why you should read Pete’s book.

In God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America Hanna Rosin, Washington Post correspondent, was embedded in the environment of the Patrick Henry College student for a year and reports what she witnessed and learned.

Patrick Henry College is a very small institution, but also newly founded under the clear authority of its president Michael Farris, a Christian homeschool advocate and clear supporter of the link between political conservativism and orthodox evangelical Christianity. The story she tells shows us remarkable resilience and fortitude of the students of this institution Farris can coined “God’s Harvard”. Indeed it’s students will be among the elite of all secondary school graduates much less the creme of the crop among homeschooled teens. The student body which boasts a rather generous helping of homeschooled undergraduates alone supports any assertion that homseschooled teens can compete with the best and brightest of all high school graduates.

Rosin tells tales of highly competitive students who are in the throes of political training at Patrick Henry. these students have unprecedented access to Washington with a clear sense of mission and pride about their task to reform American government to be something in which God can exercise domain and rule. That God is not currently doing so is at the very heart of the curriculum. In any college, one would be thrilled to have such a critical mass of bright and passionate students and this is part of the picture that Rosin paints for us.

There is, of course, another side to the story. This side is the authoritarian nature of the administration with a special emphases on Michael Farris and Dean of Students Bob Wilson. There are very clear limitations on behavior and dress along with unwritten expectations of the role of women along the lines of clear complementarianism. Infallibilism of Scripture is not only preached from the pulpit at mandatory chapel services, but it is a clear expectation to be integrated into all facets of the curriculum. And more than just integrated, but this view of Scripture should hold all other forms of knowledge as a contingency upon its truth. To wit, the biology program focuses on a rather odd anomaly in biology called baraminology, which is a taxonomic system that re-casts speciation in terms of what was likely to have been the case in the literal six day creation of Genesis (see Ch. 8, 183 ff.). History and politics are taught with the indubitable assumption that the founders intended to favor evangelical Christianity as the structure in which government and civility would be administered. So this is not just about abortion and gay rights. These are only symptomatic issues of a wider evangelical worldview that hold the structure of quite literally everything in different terms and under different standards of truth compared to even other evangelical colleges (Rosin points out differences with Wheaton College in a few key places such as science).

Finally, the ethical administration of the behavioral code is brought out in Rosin’s stories of a few students that she followed intently. Chapter 7 “Den of Sin” (p. 167 ff.) recounts one such conflict in which one student informed the administration of behavior infractions of other students whom he had befriended.

Someone was getting expelled. No, five people were getting expelled, or maybe three. A couple of them were Farahn’s friends. Rumor was that the boys had been caught drinking, smoking, abusing prescription painkillers, and possibly cheating on exams. No wait, they had not been caught. They had been turned in by one of their roommates. He had written a long letter to the dean of students (p. 168).

The problem here is not so much that students get caught and punished for such behaviors. The problem is that the institution made as part of its rules that students should hold each other accountable if they catch another breaking any rule to any degree. Rosin’s tale shows that this has created among many of the students a culture of distrust and paranoia rather than one of moral fortitude.

Indeed, Rosin points out such details with the tone of a mother who feels bad for these children; that in spite of their brightness and passion in what they do, there is a stir of conflict that rages beneath the surface. The college’s position is to use biblical infallibilism to hammer any such conflict into submission with perhaps a follow-through of a hug and even an “I love you” from the Dean. But with he influence of Tim LaHaye and other Christian Right conservatives who support Farris unflinchingly there is a clear pejorative tone to Rosin’s narrative even in terms of the homseschooling environments from which many of these students came.

Experimental communities almost always implode. One faction wants to hold on to the purest version of the mission while another begs for a little fresh air. The men fight for power, while trying to protect an image of unified authority. But eventually, their adoring subjects catch on (p. 257).

For PHC, such an implosion was the resignation of four professors who did not support the same premises of Farris in their classrooms. Indeed, it is clear that for Farris, this version of “God’s Harvard” hearkens back to the ante-bellum Harvard itself, perhaps more so of Yale. But this is even more radical in its understanding of the evangelical nature of government and the role of the student. This is an interesting and thought-provoking engagement of a new kind of evangelical college that seeks to dissociate itself from the controversies of Falwell and Robertson, but maintains a clear kinship in its very mission.

Read an excerpt here.

Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion is a seminal work in sociological theory. Berger’s argument that the process of being religious comes from a deep seated biological need for humans to structure their environments is both empirically demonstrable as it is important for theologians in order to understand the assumptions that govern doctrine.

The process is a dialectic from externalizing structures of understanding reality that create order. These are then apprehended as objects by others and internalized. From this internalization new structures will then emerge as the process continues. Epistemologically, this process is then regulated in terms of plausibility and legitimation. As structures of order are created, different ways of knowing and understanding the world are made plausible and thus different forms of knowledge are seen as legitimate ways of understanding and maintaining order in the world. The end of this process is to make the world a habitable place by mitigating the effects of disorder or “anomy”.

The last piece on secularization traces the division of the numinous reality of God and the spiritual things of God and the physical structures of experience. This begins in the radical division between Yahweh and Israel, is re-united in medieval Catholicism, and then re-divided in Protestantism. Rationalism in the Nineteenth century then creates a challenge where theology is forced to define itself against a more plural environment where the plausibility of religious dogma is challenged by other equally plausible structures of reality. Maintaining these religious plausibility structures is legitimated in terms of marketing their respective value rather than assuming that one’s dogma must be true in itself.

Berger closes with the state of this process in the late 1960’s where theology was in the process of coming out of the neo-orthodox reassertion of the otherness of God and primacy of Scripture and investing itself with psychological and existential legitimation. He uses Tillich as an example of this.

It is important for theologians to understand that in the process of doctrinal analysis and synthesis, that theology is relative to social constructions that shape doctrine by virtue of being human. The tendency is to mask theology as some discipline which is beyond the reproach of answering the challenge of what we can observe empirically. This is not the case is theology is a discipline that can develop and progress as do other disciplines in the field of what humans can know and understand about the world and themselves. It seems that understanding how and why people behave religiously ought to always go hand in hand with how we parse theological belief and doctrine. It is not all that clear how well the discipline of theology maintains this pragmatic sensibility and that seems to be a shortcoming.

Julie Reuben’s The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual transformation and the Marginalization of Morality is as important a volume in the history of higher education as you will likely find.  The central thesis is the movement in higher education that, largely due to the imposing force of scientific rationalism, pushed the moral component of the curriculum from a central place in the classroom, to the margins of the institution in student affairs.  Reuben traces this development in undoubtedly the greatest period of higher education transformation between 1880 and 1920.

This marginalization of morality also encompasses the fracture between fact and value.  This results in the division of faculty into specialized departments where research aims take the key position.  In response to this, she traces developments in humanities and other administrative options to re-integrate value into the curriculum through extra-curricular activities, student groups, and the goal of the humanities to establish itself as the seat of value and moral education.

It is fascinating to read how moral training began to be a nuisance to most people at the institutions even though it remained a central component to institutional mission.  As she concludes, “But universities no longer have a basis from which to judge moral claims.  The Protestant synthesis that provided moral guidance up until the late nineteenth century did not survive the adoption of modern standards of scholarship or increased cultural diversity” (p. 269).  Also of note is the interesting view of the sciences which focused squarely on method to the degree that the method alone was sufficient enough to inculcate moral training.  This proved to be a failure.

What makes this of particular interest is that this is precisely the same argument that the new atheist crowd is making - exactly.  If we can only push out the constraints of religion, then scientific morality can reign supreme.  Dogmatism became the four letter word in the academy of scientific rational discourse.  To be sure it can take this role.  However, the notion that morality can be aught through method did not work then.  Why should we believe in the new atheist argument that the same thing can work now?  They have literally made nothing new of the argument - nothing at all - if we take Reuben’s analysis of the same set of claims made in the birth of the research institution in her time frame of inquiry.  Thus, by association, her argument places the current debates regarding the public intellectualism of new atheism and its penchant for value statements regarding the secular methodology of scientific rationalism as a vehicle for rationally based ethics in proper context.

I recommend reading Marsden’s The Soul of the American University and Ringenberg’s The Christian College in conjunction with this volume.  A logical follow through is Sloan’s book Faith and Knowledge where he continues to plot the trajectory of fact and value in higher education through Christian neo-Orthodox theology.  Finally, a recent musing on the topic of how morality is at the margins of higher education hearkening to the university reform movement in the early 19th century is C. John Sommerville’s short book The Decline of the Secular University.  This is how I would design a graduate seminar in the place of religion and morality in the history of higher education since Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

Johnson, William S. (2006). A time to embrace: Same-gender relationships in religion, law, and politics. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

ISBN-10: 080282966X ISBN-13: 978-0802829665

William Stacy Johnson has been a lawyer, a Presbyterian (USA) pastor, and now a professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He was also a key member in the Presbyterian Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity – a group formed in 2004 which discussed the issue of marriage as well as same sex relationships and how the Presbyterian Church (USA) has been responding to them and how they ought to respond to them. The first half of the book is largely a recapitulation and refinement of the product of those discussions from the Task Force, but clearly more representative of Johnson’s own argument. What I want to do here is briefly discuss the argument he makes from the case of religion. In a later post I will discuss one or two shortcomings that ought to be further addressed for a more complete account to be rendered. There is also a website for the publication that can be found here.

One of the more helpful pieces of the book is that Johnson discusses the different kinds of responses to same sex relationships and orientations one can have from a religious, biblical, and theological account. He lays them all out in a clear typology from the outright prohibition of homosexuality as a source and sign of human sin and depravity, to full inclusion of homosexuality and the cultural manifestations of it for various individuals and groups. His own view takes seriously the various kinds of positions that do not affirm homosexual lifestyle and claims made that are fully accepting of it. Further, he puts each of these responses within a distinctly Christian framework in terms of Creation, Reconciliation, and Redemption arguing that each comes from one of these perspectives more so than the other two.

Continue Reading “A Time to Embrace - Part 1″ »