Category Archives: Faith and Doubt

Who Cares for the Reader’s Soul?


Among the many reasons I have found to avoid writing, or at least to avoid writing with any conviction, is the fear that my work would lead the reader astray. All truth comes from God, it is said, and therefore if I tell the truth as I see it, the end product will lead back to Him, without my needing to impose a Christian allegorical framework or engage my characters in theological conflicts.

The killer words there are as I see it. My vision is clouded by sin, so it is possible that if I write from the heart, what I’m really offering my readers is a glimpse into how far I am from God–or worse, persuading them to adopt my own faithless worldview.

It is no wonder that so much evangelical art is banal, since the stronger one’s belief in total depravity, the greater the resistance to departing from tried-and-true Biblical imagery. Of course, Catholics are no strangers to kitsch, but it’s always seemed to me that they had more of a campy sense of humor about it, connected to their refusal to let the sentimental entirely eclipse the grotesque.

Speaking of Catholics…I would like to believe what Flannery O’Connor says in this passage from “The Church and the Fiction Writer”, in Mystery and Manners, but I’m not sure if I should let myself off the hook that easily. On the other hand, what’s the alternative? I’m sure most people would rather read a good story than another hand-wringing post about why I don’t deserve to write one.

In this essay, O’Connor is disputing the conventional wisdom that religious truth and imaginative freedom are at odds. This view is shared by secular intellectuals and, ironically, by their Christian antagonists, who demand sanitized language and subject matter in their fiction. Both parties, she says, misunderstand the writer’s responsibility. Truth is embedded in the fallen reality of this world, not floating above it. The writer’s job is to describe this world, not to direct her readers’ spiritual lives.

Interestingly, O’Connor does not base this assurance on the “all truths lead to God” concept, which she might consider too akin to liberal optimism about personal authenticity and perspective-free knowledge. She would be more likely to cite St. Paul’s “many members, one body”: God wants us to know our role and develop the excellences appropriate to it, neither lording it over others nor taking on responsibilities outside our competence.  O’Connor writes:


When fiction is made according to its nature, it should reinforce our sense of the supernatural by grounding it in concrete, observable reality. If the writer uses his eyes in the real security of his Faith, he will be obliged to use them honestly, and his sense of mystery, and acceptance of it, will be increased. To look at the worst will be for him no more than an act of trust in God; but what is one thing for the writer may be another for the reader. What leads the writer to his salvation may lead the reader into sin, and the Catholic writer who looks at this possibility directly looks the Medusa in the face and is turned to stone.

By now, anyone who has had the problem is equipped with Mauriac’s advice: “Purify the source.” And, along with it, he has become aware that while he is attempting to do that, he has to keep on writing. He becomes aware too of sources that, relatively speaking, seem amply pure, but from which come works that scandalize. He may feel that it is as sinful to scandalize the learned as the ignorant. In the end, he will either have to stop writing or limit himself to the concerns proper to what he is creating. It is the person who can follow neither of these courses who becomes the victim, not of the Church, but of a false conception of her demands.

The business of protecting souls from dangerous literature belongs properly to the Church. All fiction, even when it satisfies the requirements of art, will not turn out to be suitable for everyone’s consumption, and if in some instance the Church sees fit to forbid the faithful to read a work without permission, the author, if he is a Catholic, will be thankful that the Church is willing to perform this service for him. It means that he can limit himself to the demands of art.

The fact would seem to be that for many writers it is easier to assume a universal responsibility for souls than it is to produce a work of art…. (pp.148-49)

Ouch. That hits me right in my codependent little tush.

The fact is, dear readers, I don’t actually care about your souls as much as we all thought I did. What I really care about is not letting you see what a bad person I am, which might happen if I wrote honestly. Not even bad so much as foolish, self-indulgent, affected, unlikeable and gloomy. Honest badness has an artistic purity to it that is lacking in your garden-variety schmuck.

What O’Connor says about the reader’s soul is even more true about the writer’s. The battle is fought elsewhere. I have the authority to offer my personal vision of the world only because I personally am saved by grace–not because it’s necessarily accurate or because it will motivate you to get baptized. I can offer it but I can’t impose it. God has given me the right to show up. You, too.

Be Kind to Writers


Alegria’s poignant, passionate comment on my David Foster Wallace memorial post reawakens some questions about our interpersonal connections and responsibilities as writers, both to other writers and to our audience (who are often the same people). As her experience suggests, artists require tremendous ego-strength to endure public hostility or incomprehension of the offerings they bring forth, with pain, from their intimate depths. On the other hand, that self-preservation instinct easily devolves into a frantic scramble for significance at the expense of others, or a type of writing that repels with its aggressive brilliance and drives away the community that the writer needs. I have been guilty of both.

No stranger to the Hobbesian jungle of academia, the award-winning poet Gabriel Gudding posted on his blog some months ago, under the heading “A Rationale for Writing Poetry with a Kind Mind”, this welcome proposal to reunite the aesthetic and the moral. It followed a debate on his blog about whether the Bollingen Prize committee should have denied Ezra Pound this prestigious award because of his pro-Nazi radio broadcasts. Gudding rejects the “high Modernist” ideology that a poem can be judged objectively, as a pure aesthetic object, apart from the moral positions of both the writer and the reader, and how they are implicated in systems of oppression. Postmodernists are often called cynics and relativists, but Gudding finds that insight into power relations can actually lead writers in a more humane direction:


If the aesthetic is closely federated with the ethical, the practice of verbal and cognitive skills necessarily entails the practice and modeling of dialogic emotional skills such as forthrightnesss, forgiveness, renunciation and lovingkindness. Conceiving the aesthetic as inseparable from ethical questions is especially important for anyone who considers herself a practitioner of “poetry” writing, a genre culturally perceived as all too often marked, since the Modernist moment, by a clear fetish of isolative emotionalism, reactive “expression” of affect, monologic narcissism and aesthetic preciosity, over civically responsive and ethical concerns.

This genre is in fact so fraught with symbolic violence, with its social economies relying so heavily on disincentives toward the development a warm vibration, that you kinda havetah wonder if poets in particular shouldn’t richly buy into an overt and activist devotion to lovingkindness as a means of proactively countermanding the profound brutality of this genre.

No reason that poets should continue to see themselves as exempt from normative socioemotional economies. Our imaginative, cognitive, and linguistic skills must be founded in an overt and almost activist devotion to the good. It’s an old fashioned and conflicted term, but by “the good” one might mean those actions and attitudes that shape and support the cultivation of goodwill at both civic and interpersonal levels. In fact, I straight up tell my students that to write exceptionally well, to think creatively and perspicuously, it is necessary to have a mind that is rooted in the good and characterized by kindness and tenderness. You don’t need to be a jerk to write well — tho I can see how folks might think so, given that “being a jerk” is an effective tactic for consecration….

On the other hand I think it’s probably true that certain writing communities have throughout the history of letters helped in the restructuring of reactive, harmful, automatic (that is to say knee-jerk) cognitive and socio-emotional habits. I would in fact go so far as to argue that the tactical modeling of positive affect styles has been a principle function of certain writing circles throughout the last three centuries (I think immediately of certain positive affect styles modeled by NY School folk, e.g., jubilation, rejoicing, attentiveness, renunciation [of authoritarianism both aesthetic and political in particular]). By forwarding subaltern positive affect styles, these circles have probably time and again exercised the power to re-calibrate an imaginary and reformulate an affective milieu. Because the ideologic binds to us principally through affect and emotion, becoming aware of the functionality of affect in one’s life, and actively cultivating helpful affect states, could be considered a social responsibility, if not a civic duty.

And though it is not a principle reason for doing so, the active cultivation of a loving mindstate will almost certainly improve one’s own writing. My thinking in this is in accord with Emerson’s who writes in “Friendship” that “Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection.” Emerson saw in 1841 what social scientists have recently begun studying with hard data: cognition and emotion cannot be separated; an open, vibrant mind is predicated on an open, vibrant heart. It is a fact that no longer can be pedagogically ignored: people learn better and write better within environments that are positive, humorous, and filled with genuine warmth.

Following Emerson, such a mind, a kind mind, is more likely to be sharp and easily concentrated. It is, further, more likely to be flexible, light, ductile, malleable, plastic, and creative. The virtues are inherently dialogic, in the Freierian sense, and a mind that actively practices the virtues will inevitably become invested with confidence, courage, straightforwardness, honesty, wonder, determination, discipline, concentration, forgiveness, patience, tolerance, renunciation, sympathetic joy, compassion, lovingkindness, generosity, and equanimity. Such a mind is willing to take the risks necessary to effectively write and think and act in the face of adversity. Such a mind is to better able to retain the capacity to be surprised. Such a mind is better able to remain responsive to the variety of worlds, both textual and actual, that it will encounter. This is the perfect mind to cultivate in the transtemporal worldwide writing seminar and the transhistorical literary commune we sometimes call humanity.

Gudding’s first collection, A Defense of Poetry, is a work of mad genius, combining satire, invective, childish babble, and surreal imagery to puncture the vanity of violent ideologies. It also contains a lot of farting, and I approve of that. Buy it now.

Flannery O’Connor Appreciation Week (Part 3)


“Last spring I talked at [this school], and one of the girls asked me, ‘Miss O’Connor, why do you write?’ and I said, ‘Because I’m good at it,’ and at once I felt a considerable disapproval in the atmosphere. I felt that this was not thought by the majority to be a high-minded answer; but it was the only answer I could give. I had not been asked why I write the way I do, but why I write at all; and to that question there is only one legitimate answer.

“There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.

“A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us. Usually the artist has to suffer certain deprivations in order to use his gift with integrity. Art is a virtue of the practical intellect, and the practice of any virtue demands a certain asceticism and a very definite leaving-behind of the niggardly part of the ego. The writer has to judge himself with a stranger’s eye and a stranger’s severity. The prophet in him has to see the freak. No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made….

“St. Thomas [Aquinas] called art ‘reason in making.’ This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, it is because reason has lost ground among us. As grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art. The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees. For him, to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself. This is not an easy or simple thing to do. It is to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth….


“One thing that is always with the writer–no matter how long he has written or how good he is–is the continuing process of learning to write. As soon as the writer ‘learns to write,’ as soon as he knows what he is going to find, and discovers a way to say what he knew all along, or worse still, a way to say nothing, he is finished. If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.”

 
       –“The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), pp. 81-83.

Flannery O’Connor Appreciation Week (Part 2)


“People are always complaining that the modern novelist has no hope and that the picture he paints of the world is unbearable. The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal.

“People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.”

        –“The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), pp. 77-78.

Flannery O’Connor Appreciation Week (Part I)

“In the greatest fiction, the writer’s moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgment is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery….

“It may well be asked, however, why so much of our literature is apparently lacking in a sense of spiritual purpose and in the joy of life, and if stories lacking such are actually credible. The only conscience I have to examine in this matter is my own, and when I look at stories I have written I find that they are, for the most part, about people who are poor, who are afflicted in both mind and body, who have little–or at best a distorted–sense of spiritual purpose, and whose actions do not apparently give the reader a great assurance of the joy of life.

“Yet how is this? For I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that. I don’t think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these times to make transparent in fiction….

“My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. In some cases, these writers may be unconsciously infected with the Manichean spirit of the times and suffer the much-discussed disjunction between sensibility and belief, but I think that more often the reason for this attention to the perverse is the difference between their beliefs and the beliefs of their audience. Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.

“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock–to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

        –“The Fiction Writer and His Country,” in Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), pp. 30-34.

Kick Ass Bloggers: Spread the Love!


Around our house, when one of us is getting revved up to speak truth to power, we like to channel the spirit of the Crocodile Hunter as portrayed on South Park: “This croc has enough power in its jaws to rip my head right off….So, what I’m gonna do is sneak up on it and jam my thumb in its butthole….This should really piss it off!”

So I was especially honored when Steve Emery tagged me as a “Kick Ass Blogger”, a meme started by MammaDawg, whose list of ass-kickers now exceeds 200. Go check out Steve’s blog for beautiful artwork and meditations on creativity and spirituality. His watercolor “Hounds” will be on the cover of my forthcoming chapbook from Southern Hum Press.

Here are the criteria for the Kick Ass Blogger award, along with my five choices:


Do you know any bloggers that kick ass?

Maybe they’ve got incredible, original content. Or they’re overflowing with creativity. Is it someone that helps you become a better blogger? Or a bloggy friend you know you can count on? Or maybe it’s someone who simply inspires you to be a better person… or someone else who sends you to the floor, laughing your ass off.

Whatever the reason may be, I’m sure you know at least a couple of bloggers that kick ass. Well… why not tell ‘em so?

The rules to this are as follows:

1) Choose five other bloggers that you feel are “Kick Ass Bloggers”
2) Let them know that they have received an award.
3) Link back to both the person who awarded you and also to http://www.mammadawg.com
4) Visit the Kick Ass Blogger Club HQ to sign Mr. Linky and leave a comment.

And the nominees are…

Callan: Heartbreaking and inspiring, this transgender woman blogs about her journey toward self-affirmation and the ever-imperfect balance between sacrificial caregiving and self-nurturing. Our lives are different yet our souls are similar. Callan shows that transgender is not a weird or extreme “lifestyle,” but only an unusually visible example of the quest for a self that transcends society’s stereotypical roles. A lot of us don’t have the courage to confront the ostracism that goes along with that quest, so we react badly to those who show us that conformity is not the only choice: hence trans-phobia. Callan says, “Broken mirrors,/denying reality,/don’t change the world.//They only break hearts/which continue to beat/even when made invisible.”

Of Course, I Could Be Wrong: “MadPriest” is a cheeky Anglican priest in Newcastle-on-Tyne who lives to satirize intolerance in our beloved church. Check out his frequent photo-caption contests; you’ll never look at ++Rowan Williams the same way again. MadPriest has a loyal following of equally insane bloggers who send him rather good dirty jokes, for which he disavows all responsibility. I especially liked this one (I am SO the American woman).

Eve Tushnet: Separated at birth! Another 30-ish Jewish-to-Christian convert who loves all things dark, campy, and incarnational. Eve identifies as a lesbian who is celibate in obedience to Catholic doctrine. While I don’t agree with her conclusion that this is right or possible for every Christian, she expresses her point of view with remarkable fairness, nuance and humility. Plus her blog is just plain fun. Where else will you find discussions of ethical philosophy alongside comic-book reviews, quotes from New Wave songs, and recipes? Eve’s blogroll was my first gateway to the online Christian community. Now we know who is responsible for my lack of productivity since 2001.

Hugo Schwyzer: Hugo may be famous enough not to need my blog-love, and if he’s not, he should be. Christian feminist, gender-studies professor, environmentalist, chinchilla-rescuer, giver and receiver of second chances, Hugo inspires me to believe in redemption and challenges me to discipline my imagination when it strays toward idolatry and greed.

Betwixt and Between: Christopher, an Episcopalian layman and Benedictine oblate-novice, bears cogent witness to the blessedness of same-sex partnerships as a form of Christian brotherhood, and intelligently dissects the failures of both “liberals” and “conservatives” in the Anglican Church who use GLBT people as a pawn in their culture wars. From a recent post on Christians’ uses and misuses of sacrificial language:


“Self-emptying” tends to be understood by many as absence of a self, and though literally kenosis might mean self-emptying, self-gifting or self-giving-for-others might be a more accurate theological understanding. This “absence of self” may be perfectly appropriate spiritually for those who are encouraged in our culture and church to have a large ego, but can be deadly to those who are encouraged to only be a mirrored mesh of relations around them.

I know when I hear self-empyting language used, I become suspicious because of the history of how that term is often used, and often as a bludgeon. As Sr. Laura Swan, OSB points out in her book, Engaging Benedict, “self emptying” language is often used by Christians in dominant positions and by the culture more generally to tell especially women, but I would dare say African-Americans, gays, and others in “minority” positions not to have a self or to have a self rooted only in serving the greater. As early Desert Ammas make clear, however, as does the witness of generations of Benedictine women, on the contrary, in a dominant situation, having a self is often the first and necessary possibility of offering oneself for others.

Sponsor a Soulforce Q Equality Rider


This October, interfaith GLBT activist group Soulforce will launch its third annual Equality Ride, sending 18 young adults to tour universities in the southern U.S. with a message of inclusion and critical awareness of how our religious ideologies can perpetuate oppression. From the Equality Ride website:


Every day, thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people suffer harassment, violence, and blatant discrimination at the hands of those who do not understand them. This oppression usually hides in plain sight, masquerading as rigid doctrine or timeless tradition. Consequently, it often goes unchallenged and unchanged. Guided by principles of nonviolence, we at Soulforce Q approach controversial issues with a readiness to meet people where they are. It is our belief that open and honest discussion begets understanding and healing, and that philosophy is at the heart of our work.

The Equality Ride is a traveling forum that gives young adults the chance to deconstruct injustice and the rhetoric that sustains it. The idea is this. We get on a bus and journey to various institutions of higher learning. Through informal conversation and educational programming we explore concepts of diversity, weighing the effects of both inclusive and exclusive ideologies. More practically, we share and gain insights about how our beliefs influence policy and culture, thereby impacting society. Our goal is to carefully and collectively examine the intersection wherein faith meets gender and human sexuality. Such discourse plays an essential role in creating a safe learning and living environment for everyone.

Soulforce pays up front for the Equality Riders’ training, transportation, food, lodging, and educational materials. Supporters’ donations are always needed to cover these expenses. Visit this page to read personal testimonies by the 2008 Riders who are seeking sponsors. Some examples:

Danielle Cooper, age 18, writes:


While attending Howard University, the Harvard of historically black colleges and universities, I grew unhappy with the campus and the way I was being taught. Originally, I had fallen in love with the rich history of the school and the countless people of color who walked the campus unafraid of being different, people who graduated and went on to make history. But, I eventually left the university after only spending one semester there. The euphoric feeling of being a part of something great disappeared as I began to better understand the social rules that guided the campus.

It was extremely difficult to be on a campus where some facets of diversity were considered wrong, a campus where many people believed heterosexuality was an affirmation of blackness. Although there are no discriminatory policies, it was commonly understood that LGBTQ people could be treated differently, looked over and forced into rigid stereotypes. What hurt most was the general willingness to speak about influential black figures like Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Bayard Ruston, and Angela Davis without acknowledging their queer identities.

My experiences at Howard taught me how important conversations were to education and growth. For some people on that campus, I was the first openly gay person they had ever met. And through our friendship, they were able to see me as a person, not an abstract idea. So, after I heard about the Equality Ride, I jumped at the chance of a nationwide dialogue about religion, gender, sexuality, and race. The Equality Ride is an invaluable opportunity to learn and teach from experience, both of which are needed so that we can move towards understanding and equality for all people.

And Caitlin MacIntyre, age 19, writes:


For as long as I can remember, I’ve sat in church pews every Sunday, singing hymns and listening to the word of God. My father played the church organ and my mom taught Vacation Bible School. We were the perfect Christian family. That is until my father came out of the closet. After many painful denunciations of my father from the pulpit, I began to turn away from the faith I loved. That is until I met Pastor Mike. He led me back to Christ and showed me the part of Christianity that we all too often forget: love your neighbor as yourself. Because of his guidance and love I am proud to be a Jesus follower, with a renewed sense of faith and passion. Pastor Mike is also a gay man.

The church has beaten and bruised him but he continues to walk in faith. He has spoken up with great personal cost and I cannot be silent. I want to ride for him. I want to ride for my father who played the organ in church since I was a little girl, but has been rejected by the church for finding authenticity and love with a wonderful man. I am riding for all of those people who have had church doors slammed in their faces because of whom they love or who they are. My gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender brothers and sisters have endured suffering and rejection at the hands of the church, and I feel honored to sacrifice my own time and comfort if it changes even one heart or comforts one battered soul. I hope one day we can all love (or at least try to love) as Jesus did.

This year’s group of riders includes several straight allies, such as Abigail Reikow, age 23, who observes that because of her activist work, “I have even begun to conceptualize my own sexuality and gender identity in new ways. I now understand that much like the LGBTQ community, my freedom to express either is policed by a society that continuously places my body in a box.”

Abigail’s statement underscores that the struggle for an open and affirming theology is not merely a “gay issue”. It’s about resisting the temptation to pride ourselves on worldly privileges, such as being straight in a heteronormative society, when we should find our righteousness in Christ alone. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, a number of progressive Biblical scholars have made the case that the anti-sodomy passages in the Old Testament refer to pagan temple prostitution. How ironic that our contemporary Christian witness may be compromised by idolatrous worship of heterosexual sex. Soulforce hopes to reverse that trend. Give generously, folks.

Last Word on Lambeth


The Lambeth Conference, the worldwide Anglican Communion’s decennial conference of bishops, has ended with 5 million pounds spent and no resolution on the sexuality issue that is supposedly dividing the church. I say “supposedly” because we Christians seem to have lost a common vocabulary to discuss our more fundamental theological differences — issues such as, What is the Anglican Biblical hermeneutic, and should there be one or many? Should our denomination move toward an Anglo-Catholic centralization of authority, or continue its trajectory toward a Congregationalist model? It’s possible that the Anglican compromise, which held together a diverse church by politely avoiding discussion of these issues whenever possible, is a relic of a more reticent age and can no longer withstand the harsh partisanship of modern identity politics. 

As both sides become more committed to a pick-and-choose attitude toward the authority of bishops — with liberals saying they will flout the Archbishop of Canterbury’s requested moratorium on same-sex weddings and ordinations, and conservatives vowing to continue to claim oversight of sympathetic parishes outside their geographical jurisdiction — it’s time to ask whether Anglicanism as a whole is dead. What seems clear is that in a world where millions lack food and shelter, Jesus would not want the church to spend vast sums on empty bureaucratic conclaves. The UK’s Daily Telegraph puts it best:


Lambeth Conference branded ‘exercise in futility’

The Lambeth Conference was denounced as an “expensive exercise in futility” as it ended with both sides in the battle over homosexuality refusing to compromise.

By Martin Beckford, Religious Affairs Correspondent

In his final address, the Archbishop of Canterbury urged the 670 Anglican bishops to put an end to their divisive actions that have driven the Anglican Communion to the brink of schism.

In a tacit admission that the problems may never be solved, Dr Rowan Williams pleaded with the American church to halt its liberal agenda of electing gay clergy and blessing same-sex unions, and told conservatives to stop “poaching” bishops from other provinces.

But both sides insisted they would not abide by the ceasefire.

The Rev Susan Russell, the head of the pro-gay Integrity USA group, said: “It’s not going to change anything on the ground in California.

“We bless same-sex unions and will continue to do so.”

The head of the Anglican province that covers much of South America, The Most Rev Gregory Venables, also pledged to carry on taking conservative North American parishes into his church.

Traditionalist church leaders from the developing world also complained once more that they felt patronised and ignored by those in the West during the conference.

As Lambeth ended with the Communion no nearer to solving its problems, one bishop branded the 20-day meeting, which cost £5 million to stage and which is facing a £2 million shortfall, as a waste of time and money….

Read the whole article here. But I’ll give the last word to the invaluable cultural critic Garret Keizer, who wrote in the June issue of Harper’s Magazine:


Some will find the idea of American conservatives using foreign bishops to support the interests of a white male hegemony in the Episcopal Church altogether preposterous, though it is perhaps no more preposterous—or less effective—than using the votes and tax dollars of working-class Americans to further the interests of the corporations that take away their jobs. It’s the old drill of building a network, capitalizing on the most divisive issues, and locating the funds.

What would be preposterous, I think, is to see the strategic maneuvers of conservatives as motivated by anything less than the absolute sincerity of their beliefs. That a bishop would risk his church pension or that a congregation would risk losing its buildings and assets in order to retain some vague sense of “patriarchal power” seems like too little bang for the buck. For me, it is the methods more than the motives that invite scrutiny, and the similarity of these methods to those of corporate culture that has the most to say to readers outside the church. What is “provincial realignment,” at bottom, if not the ecclesiastical version of a corporate merger? What is “alternative oversight,” if not church talk for a hostile takeover? For that matter, how far is “hostile takeover” from the sort of church talk that makes frequent reference to the mission statement, the growth chart, and evangelism’s “market share”? Martyn Minns, Peter Akinola’s irregularly consecrated missionary bishop to the breakaway churches of the conservative Convocation of Anglicans in North America, told me that he had learned more during his years at Mobil Oil Corporation than he’d ever learned in seminary. I suspect that is a much less exceptional statement than either Bishop Minns or the rest of us would care to admit.

I was more surprised, when I asked Minns what writers in the Anglican tradition had most influenced him, to have him cite Philip Jenkins’s The Next Christianity and Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. Friedman’s status as an Anglican aside, this is a ways from Richard Hooker. This is sola scriptura with a weird appendix, Matthew, Mark, and Mega-trends—and it is this aspect of the “global crisis” in Anglicanism and of the cant attending it that one would expect to be of greatest concern to any person marching under the flag of orthodoxy: this reverential awe for the “global forces” that we ourselves animate, the idols that speak with our voice. The global dynamics of Anglican realignment work in a manner not unlike the global dynamics of outsourcing and extraordinary rendition: the Galilean carpenter (or the Kabuli cabdriver) has his part to play and his cross to bear, but it’s the little Caesars calling the shots.

It would be misleading to imply that every knowledgeable member of the Anglican Communion interprets the newsworthy events of its recent past in terms of a crisis. For church scholar Ian Douglas, the situation in the Anglican Communion and beyond represents “a new Pentecost,” one in which marginalized countries and marginalized groups of people are both rising and converging, with plenty of friction in the process, but with an ultimate outcome in which “the Ian Douglases of the world: straight, white, male, clerical, overly educated, financially secure, English-speaking, well-pensioned, professionally established,” will move to the margins while people previously marginalized will come to the center. “So my salvation is caught up in the full voicing of those who have historically been marginalized. What we’re seeing in a lot of these church antics is an attempt at a reimposition of an old order.” Douglas is among those who see the rise of religious fundamentalism not as a reaction to modernity but as modernity’s “last vestiges,” the remains of a binary worldview of us and them, black and white, orthodox and heretic.

This all sounds compelling to me, though, as I tell Douglas, I remain an unreconstructed binary thinker, my view of the world being pretty much divided between people who have a pot to piss in and people who don’t. My tendency—perhaps my temptation—is to see the church crisis, at least in America, as I see most other political disputes between bourgeois conservatives and bourgeois liberals: as cosmetically differentiated versions of the same earnest quest for moral rectitude in the face of one’s collusion in an economic system of gross inequality. It goes without saying that by touting this stark binary, I, too, am seeking to establish my rectitude. Still the question remains: How does a Christian population implicated in militarism, usury, sweatshop labor, and environmental rape find a way to sleep at night? Apparently, by making a very big deal out of not sleeping with Gene Robinson. Or, on the flip side, by making approval of Gene Robinson the litmus test of progressive integrity, a stance that I have good reason to believe would impress no one so little as Gene Robinson himself. Says he:

“I don’t believe there is any topic addressed more often and more deeply in Scripture than our treatment of the poor, the distribution of wealth, of resources, and the danger of wealth to our souls. One third of all the parables and one sixth of all the words Jesus is recorded to have uttered have to do with this topic, and yet we don’t hear the biblical literalists making arguments about that.” If this is sodomy, sign me up.


Read the whole article here, and then go out and buy Keizer’s books The Enigma of Anger and Help: The Original Human Dilemma. Buy a few copies, actually, because you’ll love them so much that you’ll want to share them with a friend.



 

Lose Your Life, But Don’t Forget to Find It


There are days when I can barely say the St. Francis Prayer that pops up at the end of the Episcopal morning prayer service. I say it with a lump in my throat, with mental fingers crossed, with my own revisions, if I say it at all. This is the famous prayer that begins “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,” and goes on to say, “grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.” And all the while my heart is aching for that more-than-human consolation, and for relief from the duty to appear compassionate, sane and cheerful no matter how difficult certain relationships become.

Callan frames this dilemma with her usual eloquence in a recent post about caring for her elderly depressed mother, who doesn’t accept Callan’s male-to-female transition:


Get the ego out of the way, say the Eastern masters. They don’t mention the part where you replace it with the will of a self-pitying narcissist, though many of the gurus, well, they do have their own sense of self.

Hope may be the thing with feathers, but a plucked chicken never has to worry about falling, though her life may be short, fat and consumable by others.


My theory has always been that classic Christian writing puts so much emphasis on shrinking the ego because theology was written by men whose main challenge was avoiding the pride and callousness that went along with their dominant position. For women, who are trained to take responsibility for others’ feelings even at the risk of suppressing our own, taking these teachings at face value can push us more out of balance. It’s interesting that Callan, raised as a man, has for a long time found herself in this typically female situation. Further proof that gender and personality don’t correlate as neatly as ideologues across the spectrum would have us believe.

In any event, her post reminds me of the main stumbling block I faced before I could become a Christian. All this talk of selflessness–didn’t that just put you at the mercy of corrupt human authority figures who were only too happy to prevent you from developing ego-strength? Well, yes and no.

The fools’ gold of Christian morality is a subtle form of works-righteousness that looks (to ourselves and others around us) like true humility. When we are afraid to say “no” to someone who has become a tyrant in our lives, we may think we are demonstrating unselfish Christian love toward them. But are we really doing what is best for them? If not, is it love that moves us, or merely the fear of being wrong?

Jesus said we lose our life in order to find it. If we’re not finding it, and the beneficiaries of our sacrifices also seem to be moving deeper into the prison of the ego and further away from the freedom of life in Christ, it’s time to consider whether we’ve let someone other than Christ be our master.

(A world of thanks to Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, Christian psychologists, for their book Boundaries, from which the above insights were taken. This book saved my life and set me on the road to baptism.)

Other Sheep “Christianity & Homosexuality” Seminar in Nairobi


In the wake of the conservative Anglicans’ GAFCON conference in Jerusalem, the Anglican Church of Kenya has now demanded that gays and lesbians stop attending their churches unless they repent and renounce their sexual orientation.

Meanwhile, Steve Parelli and Jose Ortiz’ Other Sheep East Africa ministry continues its brave work to support GLBT Christians overseas. This week, they are offering a “Christianity and Homosexuality” seminar in Nairobi that will address “how biblical scholarship today demonstrates that the received views of ‘Sodom and Gomorrah,’ the Romans 1 ‘against nature,’ and other texts, have been seriously misunderstood, and in turn, unjustly misappropriated against sexual minorities.” Trained as a Baptist minister, Parelli takes seriously the authority of Scripture and has the skills to interpret these controversial Bible verses in their historical context and original language.

Can’t get to Nairobi? Read his extensive seminar notes here (opens as MS Word doc). Key points include: References to “sodomites” in the King James Version are mistranslations of a word for the male and female priest-prostitutes of Canaanite fertility cults. The issue was not their sexual orientation (a concept unknown to pre-modern writers) but the fact that they used their sexuality for idol worship. The story of Sodom itself is concerned with male gang rape as an act of inter-tribal hostility, which has no bearing on the morality of consensual same-sex partnerships, any more than the instances of heterosexual rape in the Bible undermine the ideal of male-female marriage. Similarly, the obscure words Paul uses to allude to same-gender sex acts in the Epistles, to the extent that they can be accurately translated, are concerned with the disordered and abusive quality of the relationship (pederasty, self-indulgent promiscuity, idol worship again).

Whether or not these are the only ways to interpret these verses, Steve and the long list of scholars he cites in his bibliography have made a reasonable case that Bible-believing Christians can support gay rights. Their position is also more in line with New Testament values of charity and inclusiveness, and supported by the evidence of GLBT clergy and lay people who manifest the gifts of the Spirit. Let us disagree if we must, but let us hear no more of the abusive fiction that opponents of homosexuality are the only “orthodox” Christians.

Donations to Other Sheep East Africa can be made here. They particularly need laptop computers for Rev. John Makokha (UMC) and Rev. Michael Kimindu (Anglican Priest/ MCC Minister), who have been persecuted in their churches because of their sexual orientation.