Book Notes: Feminism Without Illusions


Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

This book by the late lamented historian would have saved me from becoming a Republican had I discovered it when I was in college (1989-93, so it could have happened). Fox-Genovese rejected the entire way that the “canon wars” were framed at that time, and argued that “potential lies not in the repudiation of [gender] difference but in a new understanding of its equitable social consequences.” (p.256) 

Conservatives in the 1990s defended the universality of Western Civilization, and its democratic-individualist ideal of knowledge that could be approached on equal terms by everyone, regardless of “race, class and gender” (the Holy Trinity of political correctness in my youth). The liberals at that time often sounded like determinists, reading texts only through the lens of the author’s, or their own, biological and economic classifications. This paradigm foreclosed communication between groups, and diversity of opinion within them.

However, individualism also has an ironically homogenizing effect when pushed to its limits. It’s liberating to be told that you can be a person first and a woman second. But if I don’t in some sense read this text as a woman, am I reading it as me? Or am I aspiring to become a disembodied intellect — the bargain that male-dominated civilization has typically demanded of women in exchange for access to the republic of letters?

Fox-Genovese saw excesses of individualism on both sides of the canon wars. Conservatives plucked writer and reader out of their personal histories and communities, disguising the power imbalances that affected interpretation. Liberals overshot in the other direction, breaking down the very idea of a common culture into a subjective chaos of individual voices, and ignoring the liberating potential of women’s identification with something beyond their gender. 

In Fox-Genovese’s view, feminism needs to honor women’s experience of two-ness, instead of forcing women to choose between gender and other aspects of their identity:



The principal feminist responses [to gender inequality] have consisted in a celebration of difference and in a denial or repudiation of it. Feminist consciousness, confronting the massive legacy and present power of male culture, has tended either toward female separatism, with an emphasis on essentialism, or toward integration, with an emphasis on androgyny….

Sooner or later all feminists are compelled to face the inescapable, gut-wrenching angers that inform the aspirations of women, too long cast as impure, inferior and inadequate and cast out from the sanctuaries of truth, knowledge, and the Word. This current in any feminism fuels female resentment of male prerogative and encourages women to accept one another’s (and their own) pain. But when this anger crystallizes in separatist tendencies, it easily slips into indiscriminate attacks on “male knowledge” and “male values.” It seeks beginnings in imagined pre-patriarchal utopias, histories in heresy, and futures in gynocentrism….


Another feminist current, seeking to escape the anguish of anger, aspires to the “purer” spheres of androgyny: the true word knows neither male nor female, nor does the rational polity, the equitable task, or the order of the just….Indeed, any vigorous individualism carries androgynous overtones….


The categories of individual, citizen, and artist refer to the self-conscious being, the political being, and the creative being in such a way that the attributive takes priority over the substantive — becomes the substantive. And once being is identified with its attribute and becomes in some sense categorical, being comes to be understood primarily as the unit of a system. Any variety of physical being (male, female, tall, short, black, white) may, theoretically speaking, occupy the category, for individuals become interchangeable. Or so traditional conservatives have always insisted in reproaching radical egalitarians….


[Androgyny feminism] too closely resembles the model of the angels, or of rational politics, or of the occupational possibilities of multinational capitalism. It abstracts too much from the varieties of life in different human bodies, proposing homogenization of the ways of being — of male and female — rather than advocating free access to social and cultural categories for very different beings. (pp.226-28)

I chose conservative individualism over collectivist feminism in college because the intellect seemed like a much more level playing field than the vagaries of the body, popular sentiment or sisterly goodwill. I was smart and therefore unpopular, and whatever feminine wiles I might have had, I was afraid to use, because the callous sexual precociousness of my peers seemed light-years away from my private dreams of romance. The touchy-feely educational environment of the 1970s allowed for a lot of arbitrary favoritism by teachers and cliquish bullying by students, factors that turned me off to emotion-based, particularist philosophies. Impersonality was my friend. I wanted a system where I would get an honest wage for honest work even if nobody liked me.

 

Even now, when I have the power to choose which collectives I belong to, and therefore the privilege to sentimentalize connectedness and particularism, I am conflicted about how much my gender matters to my identity. The traditionally “feminine” aspects of myself are the ones I feel most self-conscious about, because I see them as signs of weakness: my preference for the domestic over the corporate realm, my love of luxury, my emotional sensitivity and volatility, and what we will tactfully call avoirdupois. The traits I am most proud of are “masculine”: my analytical mind, my independence, my outspokenness, my aggression in debate, my impatience with “relationship drama”.

One reason I support gay rights so passionately, in fact, is that my attraction to men feels more essential to my personality than the shape of the body I happen to be in. It’s only the luck of the draw that I’m a straight woman and not a gay man! Many women would say that their identity-formation was very much a gendered experience. That wasn’t true for me, and so for a long time feminism turned me off, because it seemed to invalidate a childhood and adolescence in which I was pretty much a floating brain in a jar. Pleasurable experiences of being female were largely unavailable to me then (except for clothes-shopping!). Being told to have warm fuzzy feelings about the Goddess only increases my anxiety that there is a template for female normalcy that I will never fit. I guess I am still an individualist after all — more comfortable expressing my physical side than before, but unwilling to let anyone turn my body into a symbol of values I didn’t choose. 

Support Mthatha Mission in South Africa


Jesse Zink, a young man who grew up in our Episcopal parish, preached an amazing sermon today about his upcoming stint as a missionary in South Africa. Jesse will be working at the Itipini medical clinic in a shantytown outside Mthatha, which was the capital of the largest apartheid-era black “homeland” and is still one of the poorest parts of the country with one of the highest rates of HIV and tuberculosis. You can follow his progress (and make donations) at his blog Mthatha Mission.

In his sermon, he reflected on the mixed history of Christian missions and how the word “missionary” can be reclaimed for a less colonialist, more service-oriented way of living out the gospel in a foreign culture:


I read the Bible as a whole, a complete piece of divinely-inspired literature that – while contradictory and confusing in many places – tells a couple consistent messages throughout. The message I hear most frequently is evident in this morning’s Gospel. Jesus says, “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of one’s possessions” and warns those who “store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” We can summarize this message by paraphrasing what is often associated with a president: “Ask not what you can do for yourself; ask what you can do for God and God’s people.” God has created us, knows each one of us, and has blessed each of us with a unique set of gifts, not to enrich ourselves and store up treasures on earth but to enrich God’s fallen world and make it more like God’s perfect creation. That is no small task and not one that we accomplish in a day, a week, a month, a year, or even a lifetime. It is a task we shall never see the conclusion of. But it is a task to which we must devote our lives all the same.

Since we each have different gifts, we fulfill this godly duty in different ways, in a way that fully expresses the diversity of the Body of Christ metaphor Paul uses in his epistles. But we are united by one theme: service. I define service as the act of putting the needs of others ahead of the needs of oneself. We have our own desires and wishes, of course, and we shouldn’t deny them, but our orientation needs to be primarily outwards, towards our brothers and sisters in Christ, and not inwards, enriching only ourselves.

It is this attitude that has drawn me first to Nome, Alaska where for the past two years I have worked as a news reporter at a public-service radio station there, broadcasting to Alaska Natives in Western Alaska, who live in what are frequently termed “third-world conditions.” And it is an attitude that made me search for something like YASC. But when I found out that I would be a missionary of the church if I joined YASC, I paused. Why not stay in Nome or anywhere on this continent and continue to be a contributing member of society? Why not join some other secular service program, like the Peace Corps, which I seriously considered after college before opting for grad school? Why not run as far away from the dreaded m-word as possible? What theology of mission could I arrive at that would allow me to reconcile my belief in service with my hesitation at, say, the Great Commission?

…When Christian fervour for overseas mission work began to reach a critical mass in the early 19th century, the focus was on the “missions of the church,” that is, the hospitals, schools, and churches around the world that various parts of the church in the rich world supported. “Mission” is rooted in the Latin word that means “sent” so it made sense to focus on these discrete outposts of people who had been sent from their homes. While this is likely where the negative view of missionaries began, we should also recognize there were as many kinds of missionaries as there are kinds of Christians and many were kind and loving types who prayfully served their new communities.

Over time, however, this focus changed and people began speaking about the “Church’s mission.” The question became, What is the church doing all over the world and how can we all participate in that one mission? The Episcopal Church, for once in its life, was ahead of the game and in 1830 declared that every member of the church was a member of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America, which remains our official title today and which means all of you are missionaries as well. Everyone participates in mission.

But focusing on the “Church’s mission” forgot an important element: God. So the focus in the last few decades has been on “God’s mission” and the question that is central to this is, What is the mission of God that the church and its members can participate in? The church is not the same all over the world, which is what the “Church’s mission” idea seemed to imply, but God’s mission is.

God’s mission is, and always has been, one of reconciliation, that is, bringing people to each other and bringing people to God. At Creation, God created Adam and Eve to be in relationship with each other and in relationship with their Creator. They, of course, fell away from that relationship, setting the model we continue to follow today. The reading for Hosea this morning is a reminder of the numerous times Israel fell away from God but also the equally numerous times God called those same sinful people into closer relationship with God, in the spirit of what Hosea calls God’s “warm and tender” compassion.

But God decided the work of reconciliation needed a human face and so took human form as Jesus Christ, who reached out to everyone but particularly the down-trodden, the outcast, and the forgotten and sought to bring them into loving relationship with their world and God. In the remainder of the New Testament, God’s message spreads beyond Israel as people are sent into the world to seek to reconcile our fallen world to God’s creation.

It is a testament to the challenge of this reconciling task that our mission is the same now as it was then: to do that work of reconciliation with the power of the Holy Spirit and the knowledge of Revelation and the Resurrection, that what is old can be made new again and that what is dead can be re-born. I’ll save my exegesis of the Great Commission for another time but it is this theology and this history that has made me comfortable with the idea that I am now a missionary. The point of performing this service mission in a religious context as opposed to a secular one is that it is rooted in and affirming of the faith that is the fundamental driving force behind the desire to serve….

Jesse’s sermon filled me with hope as an example of the Episcopal Church via media at its best: Public service not as a substitute for faith in Jesus, but as the natural and beautiful expression of that faith. Confession of Christ as Lord as the foundation for all we do, but not as a substitute for actually feeding his sheep. My prayers are with him.

A Saint of Emotional Intelligence


Today is the feast day of John-Baptist Vianney, about whom James Kiefer at The Daily Office writes:


Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney (better known as the Cure’ d’Ars, or curate of Ars — now Villars-les-Dombes) was the son of a peasant farmer, born in France in 1786, three years before the beginning of the French Revolution. He wished to become a priest, but his studies were hindered, first by the poverty of his family, next by the anti-religious policies of the Revolutionary government, and finally by the wars of Napoleon. He was not a particularly bright student, and struggled hopelessly with Latin. He was 29 when he was finally ordained, his superiors having decided that his zeal and devotion compensated for his “academic underqualification.”

He was sent as curate to the small and obscure village of Ars-en-Dombes (now called Villars-les-Dombes (46:00 N 4:50 E),about 30 kilometers northeast of Lyon (formerly Lyons, 45:46 N 4:50 E), where he proved an unexpectedly brilliant preacher. He campaigned vigorously against drinking, dancing, and immodest dress, but became chiefly known for his skill in individual counselling. He was blessed with extraordinary psychological insight, and knew when to tell someone, “You are worrying too much about your sins and failing to trust in the mercy of God,” and when to say, “You are not worrying enough about your sins and are treating the mercy of God as a moral blank check.” He would often tell people, “Your spiritual problems do not lie in the matters you have mentioned, but in another area entirely.”

Many people came away convinced that he must be a mind-reader. As his fame spread, people came for hundreds of miles to hear him preach (close to 100,000 in the last year of his life) and to receive his private counsel (he ended up spending eighteen hours a day hearing confessions). The work was exhausting, and three times he undertook to resign and retire to a monastery, but each time he felt bound to return to deal with the needs of his congregation. He died “in harness” at the age of 73, 4 August 1859.

I’m tempted to wonder whether Father Vianney’s lack of aptitude for academic theology blessed him with extraordinary fluidity in tailoring his message to the individual’s spiritual imbalances. The Bible contains apparent contradictions or inconsistencies of emphasis (e.g. Paul’s “by grace alone” versus James’ “faith without works is dead”) that cannot be crammed into a perfectly neat theological system, but that widen the Scriptures’ applicability to every type of audience.

Similarly, in the gospels, Jesus himself is perpetually surprising, at one point proclaiming even stricter moral laws than the Pharisees, at another point forgiving and touching the outcast sinners. So is this religion about moral perfection or moral anarchy? When we abstract out the dynamic initiative of God and His personal relationship with each of us, we have no way to balance these competing principles, and we develop a heartless or mindless theology that overcompensates in a particular direction.

My friend the writer Elise Chase expressed this insight well in an as-yet-unpublished essay about John 14:6 and the possibility of salvation for non-Christians (boldface emphasis mine):


Jesus tells us that belief is crucial [to salvation], but it is often unclear from his words which is more important–theological understanding, or inarticulate trust. What is clear is that his call to commitment is so radical, even outlandish, that it runs counter to our deepest autonomous instincts, and nothing short of God’s own intervention in our hearts can make such commitment possible. This alone should make us hesitate to spell out too precisely just what we must do from our human end to be “saved”. Yet if we throw up our hands and say we have no role in the matter, there are all those other passages in scripture that seem to suggest our human failure to recognize who Jesus is, and to follow him, has enough impact on the heart of God that he suffers genuine pain.

There is so much paradox, even ambiguity, when we set text against text! If each word in scripture is the way God intends it to be, then I can’t help thinking this paradox is there for a reason. Perhaps God doesn’t want us to be too rigid in our understanding of exactly how the salvation provided by Jesus “works”, in an operational sense; maybe the Bible’s very mystery has a pastoral function. We have enough passages promising God will be faithful to his “chosen” ones that, as believers, we are given assurance about our eternal security in him. When it comes to where others may stand with him, though, tension between the themes of God’s sovereignty, on the one hand, and his desire that everyone might come to salvation, on the other, cautions us not to set categorical boundaries around God’s grace….

In the end, I can’t help believing, agape love, which is always rooted in Jesus, inevitably trumps doctrine. “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:15). Yes, doctrine is necessary as a pastoral tool: to ground us in clear thinking, to anchor us in commitment to Jesus as Savior and Lord, to give us assurance that he has already accomplished everything necessary for our salvation, and it is not up to us. But when obsession with doctrine snarls and entangles us, making us regress spiritually and inhibiting us from loving God and those around us, surely it is better to loosen our grip, at least for the moment, on the propositional tenets that are doing this damage.

Desktop Inspirations


Glimmer Train, a leading magazine of literary fiction, asked in a recent survey for the inspirational quotes that their readers have tacked up on their desk to motivate them to write. The full list is here (PDF file). Some of my favorites:


“If you can’t piss people off, why write at all.” (anonymous)
“I write to discover what I know.” (Flannery O’Connor)
“The hard is what makes it great.” (Tom Hanks in the movie “A League of Their Own”)
“One reason for writing, of course, is that no one’s written what you want to read.” (Philip Larkin)
“Have the courage to follow your talent to the dark place.” (anonymous)
“A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.” (G.K. Chesterton)
“Start writing — the answer will come to you.” (fortune cookie; I have this one taped to my computer too)


Quotes from my desktop:


“Concentrate not on protection, but on reducing your vulnerabilities.” (another fortune cookie)

“He who waits to do a great deal of good at once, will never do anything.” (Samuel Johnson)

“Live in joy — even with all the facts.” (source unclear; I’ve seen a version of it attributed to Wendell Berry)

What’s on your list, readers?

God’s Honor and the Atonement


From the April 2007 archives at The Thinking Reed comes this insightful post on how we misread the Atonement as a legal formality demanded by a proud, wrathful God. Actually, one could interpret it as God subverting the human zero-sum model of authority that must be shored up by another’s punishment, by collapsing all distinctions among the offender, the judge and the victim into the Person of Christ. Lee writes:


Anselm’s account of the atonement is rooted from first to last in his understanding of the divine nature, and he reworks the notions of honor and satisfaction accordingly. [John] McIntyre argues that a, if not the, key to understanding [Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo] is the concept of God’s aseity. This is theological jargon referring to the idea that God exists in and through himself, utterly independent of anything else. There is nothing “external” to God which constrains him to act in certain ways.

Thus, there isn’t an order of justice that has to be satisfied by God before he can be merciful to us, as though God were caught in some web of rules. And God’s “honor” for Anselm doesn’t refer to his wounded pride. God’s justice and purpose in creating the world are entirely internal to his nature, and his justice isn’t separate from his love. I think Anselm would agree with N.T. Wright’s point that “wrath,” understood as God’s hatred of sin, is inseparable from his love. How can God not hate that which destroys and corrupts his good creation?

That’s why, for Anselm, the atonement is entirely a provision of God’s love, and not something “imposed” on God from without. Such an idea is absurd in the strongest possible sense. In the Incarnation of the Son God provides for the satisfaction of justice by restoring the harmony and beauty of his creation which has been defaced by sin. But this is rooted in God’s love – love for his creation and inexorable desire that it be brought to fulfillment. Where Anselm differs from Wright and other proponents of a “penal” substitution is that Anselm sees satisfaction as the alternative to punishment. Christ isn’t punished in our place; the self-offering of the God-man provides for a gift so beautiful and good that it effaces or “outweighs” the disorder created by sin. Therefore anyone who “pleads the sacrifice of Christ” is brought into reconciliation with God.

Indeed, the concepts of honor and satisfaction are stretched beyond anything that would really make sense in a human social or legal relationship. God’s honor can’t be damaged, as Anselm points out, because God is unlimited bliss. The best we can say is that his “honor” refers to his unchangeable will to bring creation to its intended consummation. And “satisfaction” is no longer a kind of tit-for-tat proportionate recompense for discrete offenses. The gift of the God-man posesses infinite worth, completely outstripping the evil of human sin. Interesting, McIntyre argues that Anselm in fact subverts the medieval penitential system which prescribed specific penances for particular sins and lays the groundwork for justification by faith: the sacrifice of Christ truly is a once and for all response to human sin.

Browse more of Lee’s blog for posts on such diverse topics as coffee, the liturgy, heavy metal music, Christian peace bloggers, and our old friend N.T. Wright.

Proud Anglicans of the Week

Here’s a roundup of some great Anglican “via media” blogs I’ve discovered this month. All of these folks are thoughtful Christians determined to hold together the compassionate, progressive, dynamic spirit of the church’s liberals and the respect for tradition, truth and theological sophistication of the conservatives. They give me hope that the current fundamentalist-secularist impasse won’t last forever.

Christopher at Betwixt and Between offers a spirited and GLBT-friendly exposition of the Incarnation in his wonderfully titled post A Shitting God. (Hint: If this offends you, you’re exactly the person who needs to read it.)


We don’t want our God to come to us as flesh and blood, bone and sinew. But he did, not deeming equality with God something to be grasped at as did our first parents, but rather relishing simply to be an earthen one–“a shitting god” as one rabbi put it, became truly one of us in all of our comical glory, with our orifices and pleasurable bits, going out of himself to be with us as one of us. To become human is learning to be comfortable in our own skin, the very place God chooses to work, rather than think to escape into the ethosphere and shed off this mutable, vulnerable, carcass, as if we could so easily divide our body and soul leaping from distinction to separation.

The danger to Christianity isn’t homosexuality. The danger lies in certain tendencies in “orthodox” defenses against homosexuality that end with corruptions of our core doctrines or dogma as the case may be. In the end, we near a docetic Christ or a hieros gamos deity, and no more so than the god presented to gay people by the defenders. The fire for another is not our great error, nor harnessing and bridling that fire that love might deepen and move outward; our error is to stamp out that fire and somehow think we can find it all in ourselves without another or others. To do so is to negate the hook in us, as Gregory of Nyssa put it, which is God’s very gift to us for connectivity and intimacy, that lets us be pulled outward toward others, toward God. Another might enter us, and we would rather be self-contained–this is the deepest reality to which an imposition of celibacy for gay people leads. A Manichaean outlook cannot help but attain. That so many would reject such a god is to their credit. God would ravish us, and we would rather bliss out in perfect composure. Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, once quipped that “Christianity is the most materialistic of religions.” But only when we take the Incarnation seriously enough that our God took a shit, could see the potential for love in a hard on.

Now that I’ve got your attention…Huw at +Z’ev: Lectionary Midrash posts about how gay people of faith often find themselves doubly shunned by conservative churches and by other gays who are bitter about religious homophobia. This post both comforted me and challenged my impulse to retreat into an enclave of like-minded people (most of whom are my imaginary friends) instead of withstanding the shame of being the token holy-roller in the Episcopal parish and the token P-Flag Girl in the evangelical one. If God is for us, who can be against us? But Lord, it’s so much work…poor little me…waah…

MadPriest at Of Course, I Could Be Wrong is an unrepentantly snarky extreme liberal, but his visual gags are to die for. I especially liked this one. Hat tip to MadPriest also for the link to this video from Episcopalooza.

Finally, Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton at the group blog The Episcopal Majority takes a swat at the misuse of 1 Corinthians 8:9 (“take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak”) to silence gays in the church.

Nannette Croce: “The Box of Cereal”

 

It’s turning into The Rose & Thorn appreciation week here at Reiter’s Block. R&T editor Nannette Croce’s story about a man facing the brokenness of his relationships is well-paced, heartbreaking, and worth your attention. Here’s the beginning:


Hi, this is Richard Drake. I’m either not home, or I’m busy creating some ingenious piece of software. So leave a message at the tone, and I’ll get back to you – honest.

“Richard, are you there? Are you there?” I thought it might be my boss, but it’s Gwen. Ever since the suicide, she has this new voice, high-pitched and loud, even more of a teeth-grinder than her old one. “I need to talk to you. It’s important.” At the word “important,” I reach for the phone. Then I remember that there is nothing important left to tell me, and I relax back into my chair. “Richard. If you’re there and you’re not picking up….” There is some dead air. The machine clicks off. Maybe I’ll call her later. It doesn’t really matter. She’ll call back if I don’t.

She’s probably calling to ask me one more time what I remember about that weekend…that last one. She has to have asked the same questions a hundred times by now. What did he do? What did he say? Did he act depressed? Where could he have gotten the gun? And I answer her the same way every time. “I don’t remember.” “I don’t know.”

Read the rest here.

An Anglican Hero: William Reed Huntington


In the Anglican church calendar, today is the feast day of Episcopal theologian William Reed Huntington (1838-1909), whose achievements include spearheading the 1892 revision of the Book of Common Prayer, and formulating what became known as the “Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral,” the four-point statement of Anglican/Episcopal identity that is still used today.

Huntington cared deeply about Christian unity. His intent was to articulate a few core beliefs that made the church distinctively Christian and Episcopal; beyond those, the church should make room for a wide diversity of views. Those four points were the Holy Scriptures as the word of God; the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds as the rule of faith; the sacraments of baptism and communion, as ordained by Christ; and the historic episcopate (bishops who traced their lineage back to the apostles). Bryan at Creedal Christian provides a nice overview of those principles and their implications in today’s post.

James Kiefer, who writes the saints’-day bios at The Daily Office, observes:


The reader will notice that the four points of the Lambeth Quadrilateral: Scriptures, Creeds, Sacraments, and Ministry, correspond roughly to the points listed in Acts 2:41f, where Luke speaks of those who received the Gospel as it was preached on Pentecost.

So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. And they continued steadfast in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.

These early Christians were in the apostles’ doctrine. That is, they believed what the apostles taught about the Resurrection of Jesus, and about His victory on our behalf over the power of sin and death. That is to say, they believed the doctrine summarized in the Creeds.

They were in the apostles’ fellowship. That is, they did not seek to serve God as unattached individuals, nor did they form groups of persons of like minds with their own in whose company they might worship. They joined themselves to the existing band of believers, whose nucleus was the apostles. That is, they were united by participation in the ministry of the apostles and those whom the apostles deputized to carry on their work.

They participated in the breaking of bread. That is, they were regular participants in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. (That they had received the Sacrament of Holy Baptism has already been specified.)

They participated in the prayers. As far back as our records go, Christian services of worship have consisted principally of two things: (1) the reading of the Holy Scriptures and preaching based on them, accompanied by prayer, and (2) the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. The pattern was set by Our risen Lord at Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35), when He first opened the Scriptures to His companions, and then “was known to them in the breaking of bread.” The former part, the prayers and readings and sermons, would often be referred to simply as “the prayers.”

Huntington’s classic The Church-Idea: An Essay Towards Unity is available used at Amazon.com.

Anne Caston: “A Man, Returning, Will Not Be The Man Who Left”


A world view: for months and months before he left
for war, he’d spoken of it as if to be without one
was to be godless. And then the planes. Four.

Forget a world view. What she wants
today is a table solid enough to set things on:
a lamp, a pitcher, a bowl of lemons.

She wants a dress the color of brandy.
She wants a black lace shawl.
A silk slip. A locket.

But Love, that tenderest tyrant of all,
fastens its necklace of flame
at her throat and she gives herself

over again to the lesser glory of who she is
with him: the glory of a bent spoke
and the rut it fell into.

She imagines him sometimes now
as he must have been then
in that other kingdom of men:

his doll-like face in its little uniform
of death; his shuttered eyes,
opening, closing;

and, underneath the ribs,
in place of an actual heart, the far-off
knocking of the guns that opened him.


Reprinted by permission from the website Why Are We In Iraq?


 

Why Not Church?

 

Yesterday I wrote to a friend who heads my women’s Bible study group:

 

It has become quite clear to me that fear of sin is one of the things keeping me from church. The current cultural landscape is such that I will eventually end up offended by something I hear either in the conservative or the liberal church, and I am afraid of being unlikable and conflict-causing when I offer a different viewpoint.

Since the whole point of being a Christian is the grace not to be driven by fear of sin any longer, this is obviously a problem. She wrote back:

I too feel if I went back to [the evangelical church], I would be screaming
You people are crazy don’t you see that I am right and you are wrong

and if I went back to [the liberal church] I would be screaming
You people are crazy don’t you see that I am right and you are wrong

Once I put that down in writing, it gives [the liberal church] a less compelling pull on me. If I’m likely to be a screeching lunatic wherever I go, might as well go somewhere where Jesus is Lord.

Or to put it another way:
Girl…It’s not about you!!