Posts for category ‘Sightings’

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Persecuted
by Martin Marty
Jeff | January 14, 2010 | 9:58 am

Christians, who through the centuries have often been persecutors, in our time often are persecutees.  Those of us who try to keep an eye on and have a heart for suffering Christians have to log horror stories weekly.  In just a few January days we were made mindful of three Christian churches bombed in Malaysia; eight Coptic Christians shot dead in Egypt; persecution of house-church Christians in China; and Christians suffering even unto death in some Indian provinces.  What, then, do we make of commentator Brit Hume, journalist Andree Seu, and columnist Cal Thomas complaining of persecutions inflicted on them and fellow Christians in the United States?

Criticize the latter three, and one of them, Mr. Thomas, will label you a member of “the secular left” or a “self-described Christian.”  I am a self-described Bible-believing, born again (daily) Christian, so Thomas’s deliberate mischaracterization amounts to persecution of me.  (“Me” and “I,” here, are stand-ins for millions.)  Thomas complains that Hume is criticized for his “hubris” on television for “presuming the Christian faith is superior to other faiths.”  Andree Seu assumes that Hume’s critics “sound like they would prefer his beheading,” and that his “e-mail is dripping with venom” but, adds Seu, he will find that “there is life after persecution.”  Here come the personal pronouns by Seu:  Thanks to Hume’s witness, “the rest of us are made braver.  We see that persecution is survivable.  We find ourselves envying…a man who has done the thing, and is free.”

“The Jeremiah Project” website also logs persecutions, and decrees that “the most sinister battlefield in the war on Christianity take place in the classroom.”  Take that, persecuted Christians in Myanmar!  From Jeremiah: “The City council in Oceanside, CA banned public prayers that begin or end with the phrase ‘in the name of Christ,’” thus the Christians there are being persecuted by “the secular left” and “self-described Christians” in their town.

Time to sum up:  1) There really is persecution of Christians, and it has to be reported on and faced.  2) There really are legitimate issues to be faced by both or all sides in the matter of public (governmental, as in schools) or non-governmental (as in media) preachments.  3) The issues won’t be well faced if all sides bring out the worst in each other, as the American contenders so regularly do.  And I must add number four:  My implicit – or maybe explicit – whining about whiners, griping about gripers, and moaning about moaning, self-described persecuted Christians will not help the cause.  So: “No whining,” from any of us!

What we need are better forums for interpreting how particular faiths should relate in a crowded and tense world; Christians like Mr. Hume are not the only full citizens who believe that their faith is superior; non-Christians, whose faiths are not held by as many, may believe it too.  One hopes that more Christians, in an empathy exercise, will picture themselves as devotees of minority faiths, having to listen to people like Hume downgrade and demean them.  What is striking is that the American Christians who most readily criticize Muslims or Hindus for using the “superiority” of their faith as a basis for penalizing Christians, often do the best job of imitating these others.

The hundred million and more strong who pray “in the name of Jesus Christ” have plenty of opportunities to do so in private, semi-public, and, with thoughtful formulas, in public; and they include millions who do not believe that doing so means forcing second-class citizenship, insult, or stigma on others.

References:

www.jeremiahproject.com/prophecy/warxian/html

www.persecution.org/suffering/index.php

http://online.worldmag.com/2010/01/07/a-personal-thanks-to-mr-hume/

http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/wo/story/1773377.html

Martin E. Marty’s biography, current projects, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.

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In 2010’s first edition of the Religion and Culture Web Forum (“The Uses and Misuses of Polytheism and Monotheism in Hinduism”), Wendy Doniger explores the complex nature of Hindu theology and its relationship to historical and political
issues by focusing on a simple question: “Is Hinduism monotheistic or polytheistic?”  Her answer offers intriguing implications for the distinction between theological identities of “one” and “many” in Hinduism and–as respondents with expertise in
other theological traditions reflect–beyond.  With invited responses from Martin Marty, Willemien Otten, Katherine E. Ulrich, and Ananya Vajpeyi.  http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/index.shtml
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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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Crush Videos
the Human Sacrifice Channel
& Other Religious Horribles
by Jeremy Biles
Jeff | October 19, 2009 | 5:44 pm

A previously obscure sect of sexual fetishism with enigmatic religious dimensions was exposed to the full light of the media last week, as the Supreme Court began deliberations on U.S. vs. Stevens.  The case centers on a 1999 statute making it illegal to “create, sell, or possess ‘any visual or auditory depiction’ of ‘animal cruelty’ if the act of cruelty is itself illegal under either federal law or the law of the state in which the depiction occurred” (Lithwick). The Supreme Court is determining whether prohibiting such depictions would constitute an infringement on free speech rights.

The law was specifically designed to limit the production and distribution of crush videos, which depict the death-by-squashing of insects, arachnids, crustaceans, and other creatures, typically beneath a woman’s toe or high-heeled shoe.  “Crush freaks,” as the enthusiasts refer to themselves, are sexually aroused by the sight of the explosion of the insect or other hapless beast.

Thanks, no doubt, to the ethically troubling nature of videos depicting animal execution, as well as the frisson afforded by a strong dose of erotic otherness, major news outlets as well as the blogosphere have been buzzing with reportage, commentary, and speculation about the case.  The Supreme Court justices themselves provided much fodder for the media.  Their discussion gave rise to a phantasmagoria of hypotheticals, or “First Amendment horribles,” as Justice Scalia dubbed them, referring to improbable scenarios posed by his colleagues – for example, Justice Alito: “What about people who…like to see human sacrifices? Suppose that is legally taking place someplace in the world. I mean, people here would probably love to see it. Live, pay per view, you know, on the Human Sacrifice Channel.”

The evocation of a “human sacrifice channel” elicited laughter in the court – but it should also call up the question of the possible use of videos of rituals as extensions of religious piety.  While videos depicting animal cruelty or human sacrifice may be lawfully produced if they exhibit “bona fide artistic, educational, religious, governmental, judicial, or other purpose,” the justices have not yet considered the crush freaks’ practices or the videos depicting them as religious phenomena. With all due trepidation, and in the speculative spirit of our most eminent jurors, I want to propose that scholars of religion should do just that.

The data I’m using here may be exemplary or, on the other hand, exceptional.  With that caveat in mind, consider Jeff “The Bug” Vilencia.  Publisher of The American Journal of the Crush-Freaks and producer of such crush video classics as Smush, Vilencia characterizes his fetish in religious terms: He imagines being “flattened out of existence by my Goddess,” a woman in high heels.  Within his erotic mise-en-scènes, he fantasizes identification with the crushed insect, becoming one with the minuscule victim in a “perturbing reconfiguration of ritual animal sacrifice” (Gates).

“All eroticism,” according to theorist of religion Georges Bataille, “has a sacramental character.” Eroticism is akin to religious sacrifice insofar as it effects a rupture in one’s sense of closed individuality.  And eroticism, like sacrifice, calls forth a kind of violence – an experience of a little death that “jerks us out of a tenacious obsession with the lastingness of our…separate individuality,” thrusting us into an experience of sacred communication with the Other.

In the case of the crush freaks, this mystico-erotic communication brings to mind Rudolf Otto’s claim that “creature feeling” is a definitive characteristic of religious experience.  Otto speaks of the “emotion of a creature, submerged and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures.”  The self-depleting rupture achieved by Vilencia in sacred communication with his goddess dramatically evinces what Otto thought to be a quintessential religious sensation.

Might such sacred communication also be facilitated by the crush videos themselves?  While the debate around the videos is currently being considered primarily in relation to the free-speech clause of the First Amendment, perhaps it should be reframed as a debate around the free exercise of religion.  In the scenario I’m sketching here, crush videos might be interpreted as a form of what David Morgan terms visual piety, “the visual formation and practice of religious belief.”

All of this may sound as preposterous as it is disturbing – but religion abounds with the preposterous and the disturbing.  And if historians of religion like Mircea Eliade and contemporary scholars like David Chidester are right, we would do well to pay attention to the ways in which religion erupts within ostensibly secular culture, often in disguised or even monstrous forms – for only by reconceiving the forms religion might take in light of such disturbances may we come to terms with what some would deem horrible.

–
Jeremy Biles holds a PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School and is author of the book Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form (Fordham, 2007).

Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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Controlling the Words
by James L. Evans
Jeff | October 19, 2009 | 5:37 pm

One of the most popular biblical translations among evangelical conservatives is the New International Version.  Introduced in 1978, and immediately endorsed by Billy Graham, the NIV has sold over 300 million copies.  As of 2011 the NIV is scheduled for an update.  Editors argue that as language changes, biblical translations need to change in order to reflect current usage.  Some of the proposed changes, however, are creating a controversy among the conservative faithful.

For instance, instead of referring to God as Father, there is some consideration to using the more generic “parent.”  And instead of the male weighted “brethren” as a reference for the gathered church, there is a preference for the more inclusive “family members” or “brothers and sisters.”  Critics are accusing editors of bowing to political correctness.  In 2002 messengers at the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution contending that the British version of the NIV had “gone beyond acceptable translation standards.”  Their particular concern was the rendering of God as “Parent.”

Throughout the history of Christianity, the practice of translating Scripture from one language to another has been controversial.  Even in the third century before the birth of Jesus, some among the Hebrew faithful were disputing the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek.  Incidentally, it was this Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that was favored by the early church.  In time Christians would argue over the translation of the Greek Bible into Latin, and the Latin Bible into German, Slavonic, French and ultimately English.  In fact, there were many who lost their lives or spent time in prison for trying to translate the Bible from a preferred language to another.

Translation battles continued even after English was established as the primary language of Christianity.  The King James Version, produced in 1611, dominated for several centuries.  The King James Bible was not just a book of faith; it was also the lexicon of Western literature and culture.  Consequently, we should not be surprised to learn that in 1810, an effort to update the King James translation was met with strong resistance.  And in 1901, when the American Standard Version was introduced, it was demonized by devotees of the King James as a work of the devil.  That same sort of reaction greeted the Revised Standard Version in 1949 and the New Revised Standard Version in 1989.  Most of this resistance was not from mainline Christian churches or from biblical scholars, but from segments of evangelical Christianity.

It’s amazing to notice how many of the translation disputes of the past have centered on issues of gender equality.  For instance, the King James Version identifies a woman named Phoebe as a “servant.”  The same Greek word is translated elsewhere as “deacon.”  But since women were not allowed to be deacons in King James’ church, the more generic translation was adopted.  The Greek word can certainly mean servant, but in the context of the New Testament it was also used to designate a particular office.  In the current NIV translation, Phoebe is a servant, not a deacon.

And at the end of the day that is what it is all about – controlling the words.  Whoever controls the words that are used in translation ultimately controls how we are able to think about theological issues.  The words open or close doors for our understanding of God.  And ultimately, the words determine who has status in the church, and who does not.  Just ask Phoebe.

James L. Evans is pastor of Auburn First Baptist Church in Auburn, Alabama.

Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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Unnatural Acts
by Melissa Conroy
Jeff | May 8, 2009 | 5:17 pm

On May 4, 2009 the BBC’s top stories included the headline “‘Gay man’ disinterred in Senegal.”  The article told how a gay man died and was buried in a Muslim cemetery, only to be disinterred twice.  In the first instance his body was left outside the grave, and in the second, his body was dumped outside his family’s house.  The man has now been buried away from the cemetery.  The article explains how homosexuality has been outlawed in Senegal, a nation that has had a long tradition of “Goor-jiggen” (men-women) who “dress up as women, socialize with females and have long been tolerated in Senegal.”  However, local imams, media outlets, and the courts have worked to change that attitude, denouncing this behavior as homosexuality – and homosexuality as criminal.  The courts have recently gone so far as to sentence nine homosexual people to eight years in jail for “indecent conduct and unnatural acts.”

A seemingly disparate article, also one of the BBC’s top stories this May, dealt with another act deemed “unnatural” by religious authorities.  Titled “Court grants teen breast removal,” this article describes a situation in Australia, where a biologically female teenager, known as Alex, has won the right to have his breasts removed in order to fully transition to a male identity.  Alex has been diagnosed with “gender identity dysphoria,” “a psychological condition where a person believes they are the opposite sex.”  Family Court chief justice Diana Bryant stated that having breasts was “quite an impediment to his social development, which everyone thought was very important.”  Since the age of thirteen, Alex has been on hormone treatment to prevent the onset of menstruation.  Criticism has come from Catholic groups.  Pointing to the American medical definition of gender dysphoria as psychosis, Nicholas Tonti-Filippini of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family has stated that treating gender dysphoria with an operation is inappropriate:  In an online Catholic news source, he is reported as saying, “What you are trying to do is make a biological reality correspond to that false belief.

These two cases raise interesting questions for the scholar of religion, gender, and sexuality.  In the case of Senegal, one sees how the regulation of sexuality by religion has influenced not only funerary and sexuality practices, but also how gender has become conflated with sexuality.  “Goor-jiggen,” who are cited as men who “dress” and “socialize with women” are clearly labeled as homosexuals in the Senegalese Muslim mindset.  In the case of Australia, one sees how the physical body, one’s sex, interferes with one’s desired gender expression.  The term, “gender identity dysphoria” – however controversial – points to an anxiety in many places in the world.  One expects that a body will be the same as its expression.  When these do not match, Western medicine considers it psychosis and its remedy, as Tonti-Filippini points out, is to use surgery to make them match.

While many cultures have what anthropologist Serena Nanda has called “gender variants,” that is, a range of sex/gender positions that lie between purely male/masculine and purely female/feminine people, we have become accustomed to thinking that two sexes are natural.  In popular, medical, and some forms of religious discourse, sex and gender appear to be “naturally” aligned.  Anne Bolin has noted that “in the Western paradigm women are people with vaginas; therefore, if a man believes himself to be a woman, he must look the part, down to the genitals.  This paradigm has no room for the social woman with male genitals as is found elsewhere in the world.”  Sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender role are understood to relate in a “natural” way that forms bipolar states with little room for anyone who mixes the categories or stands between them.

It is clear that Christian and Muslim discourse define a dimorphic sense of the body, envisioned in the creation story of Adam and Eve.  While many cultures create categories like “men-women,” Western religious thought deems this hybrid state as unnatural.  Yet many religious traditions from cultures as diverse as India, Thailand, and native North America, have myths that suggest that humanity was never meant to be understood as a binary system.

Perhaps what is “unnatural” in both of these stories is the presumption that a particular religious discourse can fully regulate an unruly body and its practices into a religious system.  “Men-women” have become the criminalized “homosexuals” of Senegal, a “gay” man is left unburied, and the transsexual teenager lives with the medical diagnosis of “psychosis”:  These are the realities of religious intolerance.  I am left wondering what, in fact, is “natural.”

Melissa Conroy is Assistant Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Muskingum College, New Concord, Ohio.

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
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Decline of the Culture Wars
by Martin E. Marty
Jeff | March 24, 2009 | 1:43 pm

Eight days ago columnist Frank Rich in the New York Times joined the company of those who note, as his headline says, that “The Culture Warriors Get Laid Off.”  He wrote of the “upside to the economic meltdown,” one which allows citizens to get serious now about drastic issues and render secondary the no-win/no-lose fights over what get called “cultural” as opposed to “political” or “economic” conflicts.  Rich reported on the strangely muted response by legislators to news that seasons ago would have led them to, yes, outrage:  Rich pictured that when the Administration shelves the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about gays in the military, it “will be greeted with more yawns than yowls.”  

In his view, the old New Right has lost credibility, as when “the two top candidates for leader of the post-Bush G.O.P., Rush and Newt, have six marriages between them,” and a roll call including Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Vitter, and “the irrepressible Palins” render talk of “family values” idle.  “The religious right is even more in denial than the Republicans,” Rich adds, reacting as it does with non-apoplectic responses to the appointment of Kathleen Sebelius, who supports abortion rights, to the Health and Human Services post.  Similarly, Congressional Republicans made tepid response or ignored it.  Reaction to new action on governmental support for stem cell research lacked its old fire.  “The family-values dinosaurs that once stalked the earth—Falwell, Robertson, Dodson and Reed—are now either dead, retired or disgraced.”  Et cetera.

Rich went on with a chancier comment on how seriously to take the polls, which show that “nones”—people with no religious attachment or interest—is a fast-growing camp in America.  That’s a different topic for a different day.  For now, it’s advisable to keep fingers crossed.  Culture wars, like other wars, can get heated up after cooling, but they are not likely to take the forms they did, nor keep media over-awed again.

Similarly, non-culture-warring phenomena tabbed ‘Evangelical” are also meeting changed fates, as a spate of books proclaims the decline, if not the fall, of the churchly evangelical empire in America.  Those within the evangelical camp do show some signs of worry, but those outside it are grossly inaccurate in their visions of drastic decline.

The one issue in the culture wars that still has energy is “gay marriage”—“same-sex unions,” and the like.  While most public attention goes to its political and judicial fronts, as with Proposition 8 in California, less notice is given, except to members of some church bodies, to the battlefields in the churches.  Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists and other Protestants of many sorts seem bent on policies of self-destruction at their assemblies and conventions; so say those who anticipate with dread their denominational conventions this summer.  We recall “good old days,” when church leaders debated doctrines of the Trinity, Christology, and not just sex-sex-sex.

Listen to those close to the scene and you will hear of ironies.  Thus, the power people and convention voters tend to be older people, and they will decide on issues that—ask any campus pastor, for example—are seen as only old peoples’ issues, not part of the world younger generations inhabit.  Another irony:  Most of those caught in the middle of these battles know that there will not be any winners—just wearied conventioners who trudge home, confident that they have served God, ready to take up more important church work with those who are left, and necessarily girding up for battle on the same issues in 2010.  Maybe the economic crisis will distract them.

Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
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Mainline Clergy
by Martin E. Marty
Jeff | March 11, 2009 | 11:23 am

While the number of Americans coded as “Mainline Protestant” has gone down (almost) twenty percent in (almost) fifty years, still (almost) one in five Americans and (almost) one in four voters are part of this often (almost) invisible cohort which receives (almost) no prime time or front page media and even (almost) no slot when pollsters interview and rank voters.  You will see and hear more than usual about them, thanks to a Public Religion Research survey released Friday, entitled Clergy Voices: Findings from the 2008 Mainline Protestant Clergy Voices Survey.  Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox present their findings, which are active enough, but in their own way.

Until around 1960 this cluster dominated much public discourse, as it does not today.  Happily, Jones and Cox don’t waste any of their thirty-five pages revisiting the overdone analysis of reasons for their relative decline in size, status, and noise.  Old stuff.  The new stuff here is their set of findings about clergy voices and actions today (as of last August, that is).  While the mainliners have enemies, mainly among conservative Protestants and think-tanks on the right, they go about their work in thousands of vital congregations and more struggling ones.  Those enemies like to portray them as ideological leftists; Clergy Voices does not find them so.  The word “diffuse” shows up in the reports.  They have voices in public affairs, but rarely and mildly try to project or enforce social justice “dogma.”  Some see their limits as a result of lay reaction to leftism, but current members are not massively assaulted with radical preachments and policies.

Politicians who would organize and exploit them, as they do some other religious groups, would have difficulty doing so; constituencies vary too much by denomination, region, social class, and height of  boundaries that might be used to keep members in and others out.  Their members may have strong social justice commitments, but they blend them with those in other religions or in the secular order.  Yes, half call themselves “liberal,” because they are not afraid of the label, but a third are “conservative.”  Over half are Democrat-“leaning” and one-third “claim a Republican affiliation.”  No surprise here:  More than three-quarters want the federal government to do more on the social problems front, especially in respect to environmental and health care issues.  They fall into the “church-state separation” camp, and far more are worried about public officials who are too close to religious leaders than about those who are too far.           

Four out of five speak up on hunger and poverty issues but—and this fits the stereotype—only one-fourth “often discussed the issues of abortion and capital punishment.”  They are friendlier than not to gay and lesbian people, and a majority supports their rights.  Clergy?  Ninety-three percent are still white, eighty percent male, only twenty-nine percent believe in biblical inerrancy, almost eighty-percent say they are strongly interested in politics, but most don’t preach on specific legislative or candidacy themes.  They and their members pitch in on other than directly political causes and prefer broad-based works of mercy through voluntary associations in church and beyond it.  On the large screen, most “are firmly opposed to the war in Iraq and most think Israel has to make greater concessions to achieve Middle East peace.  That, in our reading, is the solitary issue that prompts editorial and talk-show talk.  They are generally for control of guns.  Maybe that’s a clue to the reasoning of those who attack them:  Taking on guns, they attack what may be America’s real religion.

References:

Find information on the sponsoring agency of the survey at www.publicreligion.org; the survey itself is available at http://www.publicreligion.org/research/?id=167.    
 
Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.  

 

 

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Interreligion
by Martin Marty
Jeff | February 16, 2009 | 11:17 am

“Brotherhood Week”: Is there still such an observance? I Googled, and came up with scores of versions, sung and printed, of Tom Lehrer’s delightfully cynical or cynically delightful song of satire about the prejudices and hatreds that were disguised and covered that one week of the year. While Lehrer’s song is a chastening dose of realism, one has to observe that some good things are going on; serious people are working away at improving inter-religious relations; and many more are acting in programs and in ways that advance the minimize the potential of lethal actions, group against group.

Someone who tackles the religion beat has plenty of choices on what to cover, as I did last week. The Pope and the Jews. How the religious line up pro- and con- on Charles Darwin. Whether Abraham Lincoln, our most religiously profound president, has anything to say to us today. New Catholic and Evangelical resolves to fight on the anti-abortion front. But few of these stories do justice to the way religious forces and energies are put to work close to the ground. I look at my logbook and find numbers of these in a week not named “Brotherhood.” Some examples:

First, an afternoon with a religion reporter who is helping her profession make its way in, between, and among print and electronic media. There is no way she can keep up with religion stories, so abundant are they. Yet she reports that recent college graduates, now in journalism schools, tend to have little interest (yet!) in religion, and don’t foresee how they are going to have to make sense of it in the years ahead. Why the generation gap in understanding of the role of religion, with its healing and killing power?

Some younger people do have an understanding and are doing something about it. As this Sightings column is making its way to screens like yours this morning, I am breakfasting and chatting with leadership of the Interfaith Youth Core. Founder and leader Eboo Patel looked around at lectures, forums, and action groups dealing with religion(s) in public life and saw mainly gray-haired seniors. Older people know how important their topics are. Patel reasoned that it is the young who have longest to live with interfaith conflict, and who most need hope of reconciliations. He founded this group, now national and more, to attract the under-thirty set, and attract them it has. There is nothing wishy or washy about the conversations or activities among these young people of all faiths who are changing their part of the world.

At dinner this weekend with friends, my wife and I enjoyed the company of people, most of whom we had never met, who deal with what gets called “faith-based” on every level, from the global to the ghetto-school. Entrepreneurial, full of spirit and Spirit, tireless, they put faith to work. How much does the world we call “secular” know of the buzz of activities, the energies, the thinking of such, when “The New Atheism” more readily attracts attention?

Then there is an e-mail from Rabbi Michael Lerner, announcing his lung cancer, praying for prayers, and pitching for so many causes associated with Tikkun magazine and his Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP). The NSP is not everyone’s cup of tea, but Lerner has added the voice and action of “spiritual progressives” to the media mix long dominated by “spiritual regressives”. Here’s to his health and to faith-based life of many sorts where the promotion of health in public life gets fostered. Tom Lehrer had his place and time, but now a dispirited culture needs new songs. We’ll listen.

References:

Listen to a sound file of Tom Lehrer’s “National Brotherhood Week” at http://www.getalyric.com/mp3/lyrics/songs/tom_lehrer-4565/that_was_the_year_that_was-14721/national_brotherhood_week-78507/.

Learn more about Interfaith Youth Core at http://www.ifyc.org/.

Learn more about Tikkun, the magazine and the movement, at http://www.tikkun.org/.

Martin E. Marty’s biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.

Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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Inaugural Jesus
by Martin Marty
Jeff | January 26, 2009 | 11:09 am

The apostle Paul claimed that Jesus, in the form of “Christ crucified,” was “a stumbling block [skandalon=scandal=offence] to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” (I Corinthians 1:23) Jews+Gentiles=pretty much everybody. You may ask, “What is Jesus doing in Sightings,” given this column’s assignment to deal with religion in public life? Try this: Saturday my internet search engine turned up 484,000 references to “Jesus” or “Christ” linked with “inauguration,” and yours will find even more by today. That’s “public.”

So Jesus is my topic, as we leave the inaugural events behind but still have controversies ahead. Many citizens are at ease with prayers in pluralistic America when they are generic, civil, God-ly. Invoke Jesus, however, and not a few are scandalized by the reference, while others are scandalized by the scandalized. I propose a thesis; correct me if I have it wrong, lest I keep spreading wrongness. Thesis: Jesus is not the scandal. The use of Jesus in public at “we the people of the United States” occasions is usually the offence. Jesus gets from one- to four-star ratings in the following publics:

First the company of non-believers, secular humanists, atheists, deists, et cetera, who often admire teachings of Jesus. Their American patriarch Thomas Jefferson even published his annotated anthology of The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.

Jews have suffered at the hands of millions of followers of Jesus, but some very fine books on Jesus as rabbi get published – by rabbis – without scandalizing. My wife and I attend the “Music of the Baroque” series with many Jews in the audience and some in the chorus and orchestra, as they perform music with Jesus-words, some of them not kind toward Jews. “No problem.” Yet many are uneasy with the invocation of Jesus in general-public and often official events.

Muslims revere Jesus the prophet. Of course, with the other groups just mentioned, they do not accept his divinity, but he is in the Qur’an, and they are respectful, except, again, in certain public settings. Jesus is not in Hindu scriptures, but most Hindus say “no problem” about many of his teachings and about him – in context.

No matter what is said in public, what do the inhabitants of the previous three paragraphs hear? First, they hear: “We belong, and you don’t.” They hear assertions of majority privilege in the religious realm, where such privilege often has taken form in power against others. Second, they hear: “We have things figured out, and you don’t,” and find such claims insulting, since issues of truth based in scriptural revelations cannot be settled in civil discourse and civic debate.

Christians are taught to pray in the name of Jesus, and I join the two billion Christians around the world in doing so. It is theologically correct, liturgically appropriate, and personally, as in matters of piety, clarifying and warm. But such beliefs and practices do not license privilege, assertions of power, or exclusivity in public settings. Because of our confusion on this, we Americans spend more energy debating inaugural and other prayers than praying them, to the point that their point is obscured.

We should devise some signal by which those who pray particular prayers (as I believe all are) let everyone know that while praying in their own integral style and form, they are aware and will at least implicitly assure their audiences that they are not speaking for everyone. They can then encourage others to translate what is being said into contexts they find congenial, and still share a communal experience.

Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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An Inner Life with New Meaning
by Krista Tippet
Jeff | January 22, 2009 | 9:04 pm
As the indicators by which we’ve measured our collective well-being in recent years continue to plummet, I found a conversation with Parker Palmer echoing in my head.  He and I spoke years ago on the radio program Speaking of Faith about his mid-life experience of clinical depression, about which he has written searchingly and made rich sense in later life.  He told me about a psychiatrist who helped him move to a new level of healing by asking him, “Could you begin to imagine your depression not as an enemy that is crushing you — but as a friend pressing you down to ground on which it is safe to stand?”  His description of the unrealistically elevated heights of ego and freneticism that preceded his psychological depression — an unsustainable, inflated sense of what is normal — was startlingly analogous with our economic present. 

And of the “economic terrors that now engulf us,” Parker Palmer makes this plain but startling observation: “At some level most of us knew they were coming.”  We know that we can’t live forever beyond our means, that unregulated greed cannot end well, that a cycle of prosperity that brings unparalleled wealth while simultaneously impoverishing an ever wider population will eventually yield to that imbalance.  In recent years many of us have suspended this knowledge in favor of optimism and opportunities based on facts and figures — “the numbers,” as my colleagues at Marketplace say — that we began to collectively accept as a surer reality.

The knowledge we need to reckon morally and spiritually with the place we’re in now — the commonplace knowledge that might have shielded us from some of the human wreckage that is being wrought — comes, Parker Palmer says, “from a place deeper than our intellects.” During a bull market, such talk might sound sentimental, fanciful, and irrelevant. Yet as the numbers betrayed us, the ubiquitous talk even among economists has been of a loss of “faith” in the market.  We are given to realize anew that, even in the realm of commerce and finance, human emotion and desire shape our most concrete endeavors.  Fear and greed, for example, helped create the illusions behind hedge funds, subprime mortgages, and derivatives that we accepted, for a time, as the contours of solid economic reality.

This kind of truth telling — this correction, if you will — is sobering, but it is also good news.  The numbers don’t become irrelevant now, but we can see their limits more clearly, and give due attention to other modes of analysis that complete and anchor our humanity.  We can tap more seriously into the practical resources that religious and spiritual traditions have mined for centuries.  They offer wisdom that can invigorate and refresh our common reflection.  They speak about abundance and scarcity in non-material terms, about violence and nonviolence in everyday life, and about acknowledging fear without being consumed and guided by it.
 
Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, a pioneer in exploring the overlap between spiritual and physical health, points out that the questions we’re pondering in our financial and family lives now are essentially spiritual questions.  What does it mean to live a worthy, if not wealthy, life?  What is genuinely important, and what can I genuinely live without?  What are my children learning from this moment?  Who and what do I trust in, and why?  And how, in my immediate world, will I respond and take responsibility for the consequences of human and societal wreckage that we are about to experience?

I’m well aware of the ease — the danger — of making lofty observations on the virtue that might emerge from economic crisis, when human beings are falling through the cracks all around us.  I believe that as we learn to speak about the important questions in our lives in new, fresh, and vivid ways, we can also live them differently together.  In the new conversations that this moment makes possible, we must summon practical wisdom and collective courage.

For further information:  My recent conversations with Parker Palmer and Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen are part of a wider project at Speaking of Faith (http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/) called “Repossessing Virtue,” in which we hope you and many others will be involved. We’ve been inviting reflections from listeners and readers on the moral, spiritual, and human aspects of economic crisis. We’re also calling up a range of wise former guests on Speaking of Faith and gathering their ruminations. You can listen to those briefer conversations with the wonderful Martin Marty, stress researcher Esther Sternberg, Swiss banker Prabhu Guptara, “new monastic” Shane Claiborne, and Benedictine author and activist Sr. Joan Chittister. Visit http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/first-person/repossessing-virtue/.

Krista Tippett is the host of American Public Media’s Speaking of Faith.  Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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Farewell, Mr. President
by Martin E. Marty
Jeff | January 19, 2009 | 12:25 pm

Tomorrow, they tell us, is an epochal day in America and on the world-scene, so we’ll choose to be reflective about some of its meanings. The dictionary says that sighting is “the act of catching sight of something, especially something unusual or searched.” The original charter of Sightings was to “search” for sights of religion in public life and public issues in religion, back when it was rarer to “catch” sight of such. A canvass of press and media coverage during the weeks up to and including the weekend just past suggests we do not have to “search” or “catch sight of.” Rather, so massive is the coverage that we have to squint and blink to protect the searching eye. To the point of it all:

The text for our meditation is something the late columnist Mike Royko wrote when he bade good-bye to the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. My Royko books are in storage and what he said was not lifted up by Google and other search engines, but it was etched in my mind, and I hope that my reproduction is faithful. It went something like this: “Farewell, President Johnson. You weren’t the best president a people ever had, but we were not the best people a president ever had.”

This season people are still debating whether President Bush, who, I think, is being mentioned in this column for the first time on his last day in office, is “the worst president a people ever had,” and I don’t think we are “the worst people a president ever had.” But Inauguration Day is a good time to reflect on “what kind of people we have been” and “what kind of people might we wish to be and might become.”

Presidents of both parties from Eisenhower to Clinton have cited Alexis de Tocqueville, the great commentator on American life: “America is great because America is good.” Two problems: Tocqueville never wrote that – look it up! And “good” is too hard to define, is too much in the eye of the beholders, and is far too crisp and clean for any nation to advertise, since the record of each is mixed, and more mixed each year.

What kind of people do we want to be with a new president who has such lofty ideas about what he wants to be? A sermon: We might do better if we aspire to be good rather than claim to be good; if we become a self-claimed godly people who serve God more than we boast about our goodness; if we spend less time fighting over who prays when and where and how, and let the intrinsic value of praying speak for itself.

What kind of people do we want to be? It would be good to see us as a people weary of “culture wars” in which God gets used, and ready for armistice and truces so we can fight the political battles that must be fought in pursuit of justice; a self-claimed godly people that stops legitimating torture of humans; a less litigious people who concerns itself with building trust; a people that will turn down the shouting on talk-radio, cable television, and the internet, so that we can hear each other.

What kind of people do we want to be? A people not paralyzed by fear and insecurity in the face of fearful threats; a people more dedicated than before to the education of all and health care for all; a people concerned with the environment given – many of us say – by a generous Creator; a people concerned for the rights of others. In four or eight years we hope to bid our now-new president farewell upon his retirement: “Farewell. Your and our record is mixed, but there is good in it. And you and we and the people we affect can live with that.”

Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Martin E. Marty’s biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at <www.illuminos.com>.

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