An Orwellian moment
My first venture into public WiFi (at Panera), and I find that a "SonicWall Content Filter Service" has blocked access to my very own blog.The reason? "Forbidden Category: Cult/Occult"
This isn't nearly as scary as AKMA's encounter with the law and WiFi back in August [who knew that accessing the Internet could be a felony], but it's disturbing nonetheless.
I guess it's something else to add to my c.v., along with the neurosurgeon's pronouncement that I'm "naturally degenerate."
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Thursday, October 21, 2004
And let all God's people say . . .
There was a telling moment in the last presidential debate, when Bob Schieffer asked the candidates about their faith and its influence on policy decisions.President Bush answered with a statement of personal belief, emphasizing prayer.
Senator Kerry answered with a statement of public theology, quoting scripture (more precisely, Jesus' summary of the law) to identify a key criterion for his own ethical and political decisions.
[Thanks to Fritz for pointing this out to me.]
These answers say a lot, I think, about where each man turns for religious authority. They say a lot about the primary sphere--public or private--in which each man locates faith.
They might even say a lot about the regard each man has for community, understood as the role of Christian traditions in interpreting and living out faith.
With that in mind, it is interesting to read Bill Clinton's reflections on faith, politics, and the Republican agenda prior to the GOP convention in New York City.
Here's a taste:
I was raised a Southern Baptist. I used to wonder why the Republicans hated a fellow like me so much, I'm kinda nice and accommodating, you know? I even go duck-hunting once a year. I think it's because I’m supposed to be some sort of apostate… I mean a white, southern Protestant, why am I not a Republican? Especially now that I'm getting all of those tax cuts. . . .
I believe President Bush is a committed Christian. I believe that his faith in Jesus saved him. I believe it gave him new purpose and direction to his life. But that doesn't mean that he doesn't see through a glass darkly and know in part, just like all the rest of us. It doesn't mean that their positions are not subject to evidence and argument. . . .
So, I say again, don't let somebody tell you you're weak because you don't agree with everything somebody else does. And don't let somebody tell you you're not a good Christian because your views on certain issues don’t fit the party line of the "Values Voter" crowd. And remind them that all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory, and all of us see through a glass darkly, and all of us know only in part.
If only we had a political party that made such "epistemological humility" a part of its platform . . . . [Page down here for a nice summary of what such humility may be.]
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Thursday, October 21, 2004
Do less
To continue the theme of the last post, see Seth Godin's ChangeThis manifesto "Do Less.".: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Wednesday, October 20, 2004
(Im)balanced
Life is a series of chapters, Keith H. Hammonds writes in Fast Company, not a fully realized plot.And that's why it's time to give up the misguided notion of a "balanced life."
The truth is, balance is bunk. It is an unattainable pipe dream, a vain artifice that offers mostly rhetorical solutions to problems of logistics and economics. The quest for balance between work and life, as we've come to think of it, isn't just a losing proposition; it's a hurtful, destructive one.
Contentedness outside of work, he writes, "is less a matter of doing more than of cutting back."
Obvious enough, isn't it? Life is about setting priorities and making trade-offs; that's what grown-ups do. But in our all-or-nothing culture, resorting to those sorts of decisions is too often seen as a kind of failure. Seeking balance, we strive for achievement everywhere, all the time--and we feel guilty and stressed out when, inevitably, we fall short.
It's good to see business turning toward a truth long-acknowledged by pop music and the Wisdom tradition of Judeo-Christian literature ("To everything there is a purpose, and a time for every matter under heaven," to quote Ecclesiastes.)
But how do pastoral caregivers, whose lives more often than not model a culture of overwork and overcommitment, provide authentic and faithful care to church members struggling with the guilt and stress that result from "falling short" of the cultural ideal?
(Note that "falling short" or "missing the mark" has long been one understanding of sin, albeit when sin is involved, the target we fail to hit is our sacred purpose, not a cultural ideal.)
It remains for pastoral theology to address the question above. Meanwhile, Hammonds offers his own guides to living and loving an unbalanced life and accommodating workaholic ways.
[And even here, Hammonds borrows from theology--pastoral theologian Wayne E. Oates was the first to coin the term "workaholic."]
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Pray the news
News of a mass grave in Iraq containing the bodies of hundreds of Kurdish men, women, and children reminded me of a group of cloistered Carmelite nuns who "pray the news" each day.As they state on their website:
We look . . . and all too often, it seems, there is no one to help. No one, it seems, to free the oppressed, uphold the fallen, or shelter the homeless.
We may view these events through a television screen, the front page of a newspaper--or even the eyes of someone who has seen. However they come to us, these painful reminders of the incompleteness of the world are everywhere.
It is in this context, then, that we pray the news. By continuously making ourselves aware of the present moment of the universe, we awaken ourselves to our presence to God--and in our own way, participate in the healing, loving, and creative energy this process can spark.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Dumbing down . . .
. . . or "21st-century philistinism":Cultural institutions like universities and galleries no longer challenge us or encourage us to question what we know. Instead they flatter us. But flattery will get us nowhere.
Frank Furedi asks, "Where have all the intellectuals gone?"
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Monday, October 11, 2004
"Utter caprice, extreme subjectivity, and hence the destruction of the very concepts of knowledge and truth"
Listen to what else they're saying about Jacques Derrida:
- "a rite of passage into the world of rebellious intellect"
- "nihilistic"
- "writings are 'absurd,' but his mark on modern thinking is undisputed"
- "loathed, adored and seldom fully comprehended"
Derrida has certainly shaped my own intellectual dwelling, and "deconstruction" of a sort is stock-in-trade for my therapeutic work. A memory emerged upon hearing of his death:
In February 1996, I was stranded on a Utah ski lift with a ski instructor who had been a student of Derrida's at UCal-Irvine (see where a Master's in English can get you?).
In the snowy silence, hundreds of feet above a mountain as wrinkled as a Sharpei pup, we proceeded to deconstruct the meaning of ski slopes, ski lifts, and the inability to control one's descent from the top.
Derrida's influence had truly reached everywhere, I think.
[I later emasculated the ski instructor at the bottom of the slope by running into him in order to stop myself, but that's a different story.]
Here's how the Guardian summed up Derrida's work:
He argued that understanding something requires a grasp of the ways in which it relates to other things, and a capacity to recognise it on other occasions and in different contexts--which can never be exhaustively predicted. He coined the term "differance" (differance in French, combining the meanings of difference and deferral) to characterise these aspects of understanding, and proposed that differance is the ur-phenomenon lying at the heart of language and thought, at work in all meaningful activities in a necessarily elusive and provisional way.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Monday, October 11, 2004
Understanding violence
Violence creates stress, and the body's response to stress seems to provoke more violence.So says a new study that identifies an ever-looping cycle of stress and aggression as one reason violence tends to escalate--at least among rats.
Learning to control neurobiological responses to stress, the researchers argue, may be one way to cut down on violence.
So: is the potential for violence a part of our created nature, that which G-d called "good," or is it the result of biology gone haywire?
And how much human violence relates to hermeneutics--that is, the ways in which our perhaps subconscious interpretation of a particular event pumps a certain chemical into our brains and thus increases the likelihood of physical violence?
While I value this sort of study, the more I read about neurobiological research into human behavior, the more clearly I see that someone could make a good living translating the stuff into sensational stories for supermarket tabloids.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Monday, October 11, 2004
Why are we here?
Many school reform efforts in America, according to my friend John, have a common end: "To give everybody an equal shot at the dough."That's not a bad benchmark, I suppose. But it assumes a pretty stunted vision of what it means to be human.
Call it the consumerist-consumptionist theory of human nature.
Whatever we call it, it's a view that infects much of American politics, social critique, and Christian ministry. It certainly underlies the therapeutic model of pastoral care that has dominated American ministry for the past half century.
During a conversation with John last week, I started to wonder if an insufficient theological anthropology is one reason that our educational reforms, political platforms, outreach ministries, and faith practices continue to fail?
In my own field, the communal-contextual model of pastoral theology seeks to move away from individual well-being as the primary goal of Christian pastoral care. That's an important, emergent reform. But I'm not sure the communal-contextual model reaches beyond a consumerist-consumptionist definition of the "good life."
Theology has sought for a long time to establish an adequate understanding of what it means to be human. I tend to embrace the Shorter Catechism's perspective, when amended for inclusive language, which affirms that humanity's "chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy God forever."
What would pastoral care, spiritual direction, and pastoral counseling look like if we accepted the Shorter Catechism's perspective as a foundational understanding of why human beings exist and what it means to be human?
It might mean we'd be less focused on who has access to money and power--and that might not be a helpful move at all.
But it could move us closer to the development of sapiential wisdom [not phronesis, but something closer to what Edward Farley would call the habitus of theologia] as the underlying purpose of humanity.
That would seem both a noble endeavor and a radically different foundation for pastoral theology.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Sunday, October 10, 2004
When blogging goes bad
At first, he thought it was funny. A day later, the amusement waned.By the end of the week, this tenured academic cried when university officials expressed their support despite e-mails demanding his dismissal.
Wired reports on how a blog mobbing can stain or ruin a researcher's reputation.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Friday, October 08, 2004
Lousy
A new study of human head and body lice suggests Homo sapiens once made direct physical contact with Homo erectus.Lousy parasites . . . now they're even contaminating our stories about ourselves.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Education as entertainment
Here's a course evaluation format I can get behind:Part one: What book in the course did you most dislike; part two: What flaws of intellect or character does that dislike point up in you?See Mark Edmunson's reflection on contemporary higher education: "All Entertainment All the Time."
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Monday, October 04, 2004
"Spiritual Direction and Pastoral Care"
If you're a Brite student who plans to enroll in my spring 2005 course "Spiritual Direction and Pastoral Care," drop me a note and tell me what you hope to learn--how you hope you'll be different as a result of the class.I'm working on syllabus, assignments, texts, etc., and your reflections are most welcome--either as e-mail or as comments in the blog.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Sunday, October 03, 2004
The "Religious Right" . . .
. . . an "American anomoly"? Tom Sine thinks so..: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Sunday, October 03, 2004
God gene?
From Science and Technology:By page 77 of The God Gene, Dean H. Hamer has already disowned the title of his own book. He recalls describing to a colleague his discovery of a link between spirituality and a specific gene he calls "the God gene." His colleague raised her eyebrows. "Do you mean there's just one?" she asked.
"I deserved her skepticism," Hamer writes. "What I meant to say, of course, was 'a' God gene, not 'the' God gene."
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Sunday, October 03, 2004