Reading John Adams

Portrait of John Adams,
painted by Asher Durand

In my grad school years I made it quite a sport to criticize American politics, particularly foreign policy. I also became convinced that the Enlightenment was a boogeyman (and the logical next step of the Reformation). Being trained in an Anabaptist-Mennonite seminary with a heavy dose of Stanley Hauerwas in the water no doubt was the primary motivator for this.

So it's with some surprise that in the past two weeks I've found considerable pleasure reading two works of Revolutionary American history and biography, both by David McCullough. First I read 1776, which focuses primarily on George Washington and the military battles of that year, and I'm now mid-way through his biography of John Adams.

Inspired by a few of Adams' philosophical thoughts quoted by McCullough, I made my way into reading Adams' brief letter/essay, "Thoughts on Government," written in April 1776. It would later serve as a reference point for his writing of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (still active), itself a model for the drafting of the Constitution of the United States of America. So this is quite an important little document in American political thought and practice.

Having read a bit of moral and political philosophy over the past few years, this kind of essay is juicy sweet brain food for me. A few thoughts as I read through it...

Hope when nothing changes

"Nothing changes on New Year's Day" -U2 (video)

Trellech on New Year's Day 2009
Photo by Keith Moseley via Flickr

I am more than happy to bid adieu to 2014. It was a dismal year in ways both personal, societal, and global. As a recent article at Wired suggested, "2014 proved to be a year in which long-festering social, environmental, and political problems were exposed in ways we have not seen in a very long time."

That this statement appeared in Wired is itself telling, given that publication's raison d'etre, promoting the belief in progress via science and technology. It's not exactly known for its sober reflection on how those articles of faith might not actually be bringing about global progress and prosperity.

So anyway, yes: Goodbye to the year when I experienced my first psychosomatic breakdown/panic attack. Goodbye to the year that saw the parodies of justice around police brutality and racial profiling, showing how far we've not come in terms of our society's history of racism. Goodbye to the year that saw an increasing acknowledgment (thanks to folks like Naomi Klein) of the link between environmental degradation and our globalized consumer-capitalist order.

If the Christian imagination is one that should be marked by the embodied virtues of faith, love, hope, and joy (i.e. the fruits of the Spirit), then the grounds for those virtues to be cultivated in communities of Jesus' disciples seem to me to be more elusive than ever before. But maybe my sense of that is more my own white boy problems than anything. Or maybe not...

Either way, in 2015 I hope for less anxiety about personal, local, societal, and global issues (while not inoculating myself from them). I hope to be better attuned to seeing God's love for us and all creation at work, and for seeing it despite the fact that, in some very real ways, "Nothing changes on New Year's Day."

And yet marking new years is itself a sign that humans seem to be creatures prone to a rugged and resilient kind of faith and hope, seen in American culture by our various and silly "resolutions."

For my part, I resolve to be loved more freely and to love more faithfully as a child of God. Or to continue the Bono-channeling...

Say it's true, it's true
We can break through
Though torn in two
We can be one

Immigrant or Refugee?

Master and protégé - Gustave and Zero in "The Grand Budapest Hotel"

There's a moment in "The Grand Budapest Hotel," which I watched last night, that struck me as particularly poignant social commentary. For the sake of not spoiling any of the plot, I'll speak as generally as I can...

Morality and culture change in Tama-Toledo

Heath Kellogg, Director
Tama Co. Economic Development

The saga of the closing of the Iowa Juvenile Home (IJH) here in Toledo, Iowa, continues. This week the Director of Economic Development in Tama County, Heath Kellogg, used his weekly column in the local paper to directly address our state's governor on his order to close the facility.

After opening with his characteristic folk tale, Kellogg has a few great things to say here. In his appeal to the governor, he's attempting to bypass the political and even economic dimensions of IJH's pending closure, and pushes into the realm of morality and culture, two things that I have an abiding intellectual and ministerial interest in.

The political eschatology of Les Misérables

Eschatology at the barricade; Photo by Laurie Sparham/Telegraph.co.uk

Here in the little town of Toledo, we have a local treasure: The Wieting Theater. It's been in town for ages, but had started to fall on hard times and was threatened to close until a few years ago when local citizens and the theater guild - who didn't want to see this public gathering place die at the hands of a 60" HDTV in every home - got organized. Because of their efforts, today we have a beautifully restored classic small-town theater with a state-of-the-art digital audio and projection system, and a great stage for the periodic live performances that run. The movies are usually a few months behind, but for someone like me who couldn't care less about seeing most movies right when they come out (except "The Hobbit"), this is fine.

Well this past weekend, the recent movie production of Les Misérables was at the Wieting. My wife went on Friday night with a few other gals, came home and said "I'm going again tomorrow night." So Saturday night, my wife, daughter, and I caught it together.

It is stunning. It is incredible. Wow. There are a hundred directions this could go for me, but I want to focus on something peculiar I noticed at the end of the movie, having to do with eschatology or "kingdom(s) coming, on earth as in heaven." But first a bit of set-up...

Reading and politics in the new nearby

At last!

I've been waiting a long time to have enough bookshelf space to stick all my books from grad school. For the past four years, they had to live scattered across a number of bookshelves at home, some in my study carrel, and some even had to get packed into boxes. I longed to see them all together and in a place where I could easily get to them when needed.

And this week, that's finally happened. Thanks to a generous donation from my brother and his wife and transportation services from my parents, big beautiful bookshelves showed up at our new house. One went into the office and appears to the right. Aaaaah...

But something strange is going on. Despite having a number of those books on my "to-read" list, including one I'm reading for an academic journal review gig, I'm having trouble finding time and motivation to get after it. Gone are the rhythms of the academic calendar that drove me ever into more and more and MORE books, and absent now are the syllabi telling me to write papers from all those important books.

After Election Day Communion...

From first I laid eyes on it, the Election Day Communion movement has had my support. And when I saw that my pastor had committed to conducting a service at our congregation, I was in. Despite a few cautions I gave in a post from early September, I've watched with bemusement and pleasure as the largely social media-driven movement has, at last count, enlisted the support of over 700 congregations in all 50 states in the U.S. to celebrate the Eucharist on the night of the presidential election. A few days ago, as I was marveling at the 50/700 mark, it struck me...

"What happens after election day?"

Depending on who wins, for instance, will there be Inauguration Day Communion or State of the Union Communion? With all the momentum this movement has built, I'll offer three suggestions for the organizers of EDC...

• Gather reflections from participants - Get pastors and church leaders and other participants to write reflections on social media and see how this thing worked itself out in some of the 700+ congregations. Start a hashtag on Twitter, ask people to post on the Facebook page.
• Turn participants to the sacred-liturgical calendar - "State of the Union Communion" is a bad idea. On the (Western) church calendar, Advent is starting in a few weeks. What would it look like for EDC to shift its focus back into the church calendar? What does Advent - the period of waiting for the remembered birth of the humble king of all creation - do to the national-liturgical calendar? (My answer: subverts it...so let's talk about that.)
• Poll the global body of Christ - EDC is a U.S. thing. How can they help remind U.S. Christians that their participation in the Lord's body crosses borders and time? Have any non-US connections been made through the formation of this movement? Can a sister or brother in Christ from another country "look in" to this movement and offer a word?

What other questions should the EDC organizers be pondering, or what kinds of things can they shift to, when their raison d'être passes in two night's time?

Voting: Ritual or Responsibility? - A response

[Note: The following text was presented at an on-campus event at EMU today, "Voting: Ritual or Responsibility?" I was one of three main presenters, along with EMU professors, Ted Grimsrud and Jayne Seminare Docherty. Ted and I have had significant conversations over the past weeks, online and at the pub, and Jayne is one of my former professors at the Center for Justice & Peacebuilding/CJP. The discussion was facilitated by Jonathan Swartz and Matthew Bucher, both dual-degree students like I was, in the Seminary and CJP. Thanks to everyone involved at the event, and I welcome more conversation below in the comments! - Also, check out Ted's three posts on this topic, where I also have some comments posted.]

In a 1977 article in Sojourner’s, John Howard Yoder had this to say about the then-current context: “American political culture, a comparatively solid crust of common language and rules of thumb, floats on a moving magma of unresolved debate between two contradictory views of what the state is about.” In this article, entitled “The National Ritual: Biblical realism and the elections,” Yoder goes on to argue that we shouldn’t get ourselves too worked up about this system, or take it too seriously. But nonetheless this weak system is one that we can and perhaps should participate in.  I quote:

[Voting] is one way, one of the weaker and vaguer ways, to speak truth to power. We may do well to support this channel with our low-key participation, since a regime where it functions is a lesser evil…than one where it does not, but our discharge of this civil duty will be more morally serious if we take it less seriously.

This position of Yoder’s I take to be the basic position taken by Ted in his arguments, both here and on his blog. And I’m sympathetic to both, and don’t necessarily disagree. But I want to sound a few cautions.

I’ll start with a quote by Yoder’s one-time colleague at Notre Dame, Alasdair MacIntyre, who made these comments in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election. I quote:

When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither. And when that choice is presented in rival arguments and debates that exclude from public consideration any other set of possibilities, it becomes a duty to withdraw from those arguments and debates, so as to resist the imposition of this false choice by those who have arrogated to themselves the power of framing the alternatives.

Political Theology: Elected to be consumed

Challa bread photo by the.pinoyboy via Flick/CC license.

I have a new post up at Political Theology's "There is Power in the Blog"...blog:

Elected to be consumed

As I say in the intro:

I hope to show why...tactical abstinence from American politics and news media is not necessarily irresponsible, but can be seen as righteously “therapeutic” (in a Wittgenstinian sense) or as residing in what Mennonite writer, Tim Huber, has recently called a “holy silence.” I will do so by meditating on the word “election” in light of two different traditions. First, in the context of American politics, and then in the biblical/covenantal sense.

I also do a bit of eucharistic theology at the end and make reference to the Election Day Communion movement, started by a few Mennonite pastors. 

The Mennonite vote?: A response to Michael Shank

Photo by Ken Wilson via Flickr

I'm not typically into the whole "a response to [so and so]..." style of positing, but a friend of mine asked me to write a quick response to a piece by Mennonite-raised Michael Shank, who works in Washington D.C. and also happens to be a fellow alumni of EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Here's the piece...

Republicans and the Mennonite Vote (The Hill)

One thing I've appreciated about Shank's writing is that he talks openly on DC-affiliated media about his Amish-Mennonite heritage and tries to appropriate this faith heritage into his public policy work and his public commentary. Someone talking so openly about how and why religious faith matters to public life is admirable in such a work environment. In this piece he reflects on the experience of talking politics at a family gathering, feeling a bit like a fish out of water because of his party affiliation (Democrat) amongst his largely conservative Republican relatives.

Economics and anarchy

(Photo by Nils Geylen via Flickr)

As of yesterday I am able to say for the first time in my life that I have read the entire Old Testament of the Bible. For some reason this continues to strike me as odd given that I spent four years in seminary, but that's not the focus of this post.

1

My reason for mentioning this is that, at least the way the Christian canon is arranged, the last 17 books of the OT are prophetic literature. Which means that's where my biblical head's been buried for a while, and it's affected my imagination (as it should).

The prophetic books cover the last few hundred years of two-kingdom monarchy in biblical Israel, a project that was - by many prophets' own accounts - a calamitous failure. The divine negative judgment was often focused on the kings and economic and religious elites of the nations, and their collective idolatry and unfaithfulness. Such idolatry was often constituted by gross injustice exercised on the marginalized in society - the widow, the orphan, and the alien. Such injustices were violations of God's covenant laws.

Nearly two years ago I griped about about a NY Times piece by Paul Krugman, who was asserting that economics is somehow amoral. This struck me as deeply wrong, and my response then was "Economics is ALWAYS a morality play." After two more years of reading lots of political theology and philosophy, that sense has only deepened. It's only the dichotomous, fragmented kind of Enlightenment thinking that makes it possible to imagine that economics doesn't somehow assume, exude, and "educate" a certain kind of morality.

Political Theology: Chick-fil-A, Capitalism, and Free Speech

Mmmm....Culver's...

"There is Power in the Blog" - the amazing name of the blog for the Political Theology journal, has just put up my first contribution there...

There’s no such thing as a free chicken sandwich.
(And it’s a good thing, too.)

Here's the summary:

In this post I want to focus on two interrelated things: 1) The capitalist logic to expressions of morality in the digital age, and 2) its effect on our understanding of the principle of free speech. What I’ll argue is that contemporary moral discourse is marked by a sense of victimhood which fuels the vitriolic and polarized nature of its expressions. In a society saturated by competing values disconnected from substantive moral traditions, this vacuum is filled surreptitiously by the moral logic of the “free” market. Moral discourse and outrage, then, has a deeply economic quality with a thin ideological sheen. The second part of my argument rests upon the first in that appeals to the principle of Free Speech – e.g. the Chick-fil-A flap – act simply as a screen for the phenomenon described in point one. Finally, my brief constructive remarks belie a vision for radical ecclesia which resists such destructive practices by enacting a politics and economics which emanates from the story-shaped practices of the body of Christ.

Check it out...

Hauerwas is like a fine wine

His dad's name was Coffee for crying out loud!

He gets better with age. The Australian Broadcasting Company's always-excellent Religion and Ethics website has posted what I think may be Hauerwas' most succinctly argued essay which covers the broadest range of topics he's tackled over the years. It's long but oh dear is it worth the time...

The politics of the church and the humanity of God

One big point that's been a hallmark of his work is highlighting the story of modernity, including the accommodated church's complicity in modernity and its dire consequences. There's this nugget:

(David Bentley) Hart observes when Christianity passes from a culture the resulting remainder may be worse than if Christianity had never existed. Christians took the gods away and no one will ever believe them again. Christians demystified the world robbing good pagans of their reverence and hard won wisdom derived from the study of human and non-human nature. So once again Nietzsche was right that the Christians shaped a world that meant that those who would come after Christianity could not avoid nihilism.

This is paired with the critique of constantinianism, which he picked up from John Howard Yoder (and which people consistently miss when they accuse him of wanting a "theocracy"). He also spends a good bit of time talking about Barth, which helps keep his political and ethical comments theologically rooted (which sometimes gets missed in his episodic writings, and which he also gets accused of downplaying). His pacifistic, non-coercive theological understanding also finds voice in respect to topics he's tackled before:

The humanity of that God Christians believe has made it possible for a people to exist who do in fact, as Nietzsche suggested, exemplify a slave morality. It is a morality Hart describes as a "strange, impractical, altogether unworldly tenderness" expressed in the ability to see as our sisters and brothers the autistic or Down syndrome or disabled child, a child who is a perpetual perplexity for the world, a child who can cause pain and only fleetingly charm or delight; or in the derelict or broken man or woman who has wasted their life; or the homeless, the diseased, the mentally ill, criminals and reprobates... Such a morality is the matter that is the church. It is the matter that made even a church in Christendom uneasy.

Virtue, language, and narrative also get small treatment. To cut off my temptation to elaborate further, I'll simply let the snippets here speak and hope that a few people take the time to think of the huge implications for the Christian faith if Hauerwas is correct (and I continue to think he is, in large measure, correct on a good number of things).

Tales from the Enlightenment: "religious freedom"

Gather 'round, kids; grandpappy Kant has a story to tell!

For a few weeks now I've been avoiding any news media outlets - which for me are entirely online. As election season has ramped up, I noticed how even my go-to-guys - Stewart and Colbert - have become almost exclusively fixated on the ugly vetting process for the Republican presidential candidate. It's become a sort of interpretive black hole, whereby all issues are sucked into its inescapable pull and "read" in light of that incredibly nasty public spectacle. So I've switched off...kind of.

I'm still regularly on Facebook, so I continue to hear about this stuff through the various news pages that I "like" and from my friends who are following the news. A decent number of my friends are leftish peaceniks, so last week I heard a collective liberal wail of moral outrage against Rush Limbaugh for some reason or another (I happily don't know why). And the week before that it was Catholics, insurance companies, and birth control, with pictures posted of a bunch of men on a congressional panel talking about women's reproductive rights (the ironical outrage!). This issue was connected to a particular contemporary Catholic candidate for the Republican ticket and references back to a speech from an earlier Catholic candidate seeking the Democratic ticket in the early 1960s, each having various things to say about "religious freedom."

So it's that notion - religious freedom - that I want to talk about, particularly how it gets used in modern political discourse and processes. I'm riffing off a fantastic post from Saba Mahmood at the Immanent Frame blog - Religious freedom, minority rights, and geopolitics (part of a whole series of posts they have running about religious freedom) - but mostly my current reading project, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue and past reading of William Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence. With these folks, I'll argue that "religious freedom" is a particular story told this side of the Enlightenment, with particular definitions given to the constituent terms "religion"and "freedom." Much like I argued last fall about the creation myth of human rights, things such as "religious freedom" and "human rights" are far from self-evident, timeless truths available to all people in all places for all times. They are, rather, contingent constructs that purport to provide something that current, dominant forms of geopolitical ordering and organizing (nation-states) are ultimately unable to deliver.

Encircling a falling hero

Emperor Haile Selassie I

Over the Christmas break I was able to read a book which was neither theological nor philosophical, which needs to happen far more often than it does. The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski details the final years of Ethiopa's last monarch, Haile Selassie, who fell to a communist military junta, the Derg, in 1974, and who died in captivity a year later. The book originally got on my list since it was acknowledged as a key source for Abraham Verghese's breathtaking novel, Cutting for Stone, which I mostly read on the plane ride home from Ethiopia and wrote about last summer.

The author, Kapuscinski, was a Polish investigative journalist who was able to spend time in Ethiopia before and after the coup, conducting interviews with servants and counselors to the august emperor. Much of the story comes directly from interview transcripts themselves, so the subjects speak most and other than "silent" editorial control, Kapuscinski interjects his voice only periodically.

The stories are at once gripping, mundane, and pathetic. What struck me most about this book was the deep ambivalence on the part of the subjects interviewed. These were for the most part people who served their emperor proudly and took seriously the royal mythology that linked the long line of Ethiopian monarchs directly to the biblical Israelite king, Solomon. The ambivalence arises when these loyal servants and subjects reflect on the anachronistic and horrendously corrupt and inefficient monarchial government, struggling mightily for development and modernization in the rapidly changing world leading up to the last quarter of the twentieth century. These subjects were loyal but they were not delusional.

The ROI of RJ: Rehumanization

Photo by Jeff Frost via Flickr

In an impassioned op-ed piece over at NationofChange, Christopher Petrella paints a troubling picture of the state of corrections in the United States and the paths which brought us here. Particularly troubling is what Petrella calls "the circuitous pathways between race, citizenship, containment, and profitability."

Not only is the phenomenon of for-profit prisons becoming more common, in the midst of state budget crises across the nation, California is even suggesting that inmates pay for the services of the correctional facilities to which they're being sent. How inmates from predominantly impoverished backgrounds would actually be able to pay for those services (they couldn't) is part of the scheme. Even after leaving facilities, ex-offenders would then be financially indebted to the facilities, effectively shifting their "incarceration" to another form, economic. As Petrella point out, these people cease to be "criminals" in the eyes of the system and now become "consumers."

But it doesn't have to be this way. One of the most important aspects of restorative justice is its emphasis on rehumanization of all involved in instances of wrongdoing, criminal or otherwise. A privatized corrections system assumes an anthropology of literally captive consumers (structured economic individualism), whereas restorative justice assumes an anthropology of relationship and responsibility amidst community. Restorative approaches seek to heal the personal and social wounds done in instances of wrongdoing, whereas a privatized corrections approach seeks to extract capital to buoy the ailing state. Therefore, restorative justice  entails an implicit critique of systems such as privatized corrections but also the assumptions that underwrite such approaches at levels social, political, and economic.

So to use capitalist jargon, the "return on investment" of restorative justice is a return to pre-modern understandings of justice, rooted in embodied, accountable relational networks rather than abstract ideals and institutions. Such a return is well worth the investment.

The occupation of policing social movements

Conversation at Occupy Chicago
(Photo by Michael Kappel via Flickr)

James Cavanaugh, a retired ATF executive, offers a good picture of the role of police in the #occupy movement in this op-ed piece posted to Tickle the Wire, a site focused on federal law enforcement.

Most notably, he encourages the "greatly underutilized" resources of police negotiators to form relationships and build trust with #occupy movement leaders, and to coordinate plans on a day-to-day basis. As Cavanaugh states, "It does not mean that the police will do everything that the protesters want, but it insurers that police will not act without first building trust and communication."

This to me seems right on. Part of the problem I've seen in citizen coverage of police presence in the #occupy movement is the militarized/SWAT stance. Granted, there is also a problem with how many in the movement view and antagonize police (including in said citizen coverage), so it's not like protesters are lily white. Less emphasis should placed on militarized police forces and more placed on building collaborative relationships with protesters, and a segment of protesters should stop demonizing the police. Such moves could encourage an already mostly-nonviolent movement to stay that way, and keep them on course toward substantive change.

So John Howard Yoder, Gene Sharp, and Bashar al-Assad walk into a bar...

...and they all order "Peace."

(Or the boring title: "Christological-theopolitical pacifism and strategic nonviolence in conversation.")

Syrian protests in Washington D.C.
(Photo by Elvert Barnes via Flickr)

On the heels of my intellectual-existential catharsis last week about theology and peacebuilding, I had a conversation with one of my fellow graduate students at the Center for Justice & Peacebuilding, Mohammed, who is Syrian. He's been here in the States since last year and has watched with horror and heartbreak over these recent weeks at the events unfolding in his home country, as Bashar al-Assad's regime violently cracks down on protesters. Mohammed referred to this crack-down as "the mowing machine," a grimly apropos metaphor for the ruthless and bloody attacks on protesters which have left a trail of dead. (To which the protesters have not responded with organized violence, unlike rebels in Libya.)

When Mohammed and I spoke, I was in the midst of reading this article: The Syrian revolution as Gene Sharp sees it (GlobalPost), to which I promptly sent him a link, especially after he spoke so glowingly of the scholar and advocate of nonviolent resistance. Sharp's name also came up earlier this year when our peacebuilding program was discussing the revolution in Egypt, which one of our alumni saw up close and personal. As I read through Sharp's reflections on the situation in Syria, it got me thinking about the connections and departures between strategic nonviolence and Christian pacifism.

Easter after Communism

Pirin Mountains, viewed from Bansko
(Photo by Daria's friend, Vili)

My friend Daria grew up in the town of Bansko, situated in the shadow of the Pirin Mountains in southwestern Bulgaria. Another shadow cast over the whole country was that of communism, effective from 1944 to '89. Under that shadow in her youth, Daria describes the Orthodox church in her hometown as only being frequented by grandmothers and the priest. Everyone else had too much to lose under the fear of being monitored and reported, thus losing jobs and livelihoods.

Daria recalls being drawn by a spiritual hunger for the biblical narrative at a young age, and the only place in which it could be experienced in these conditions was secretly in the home. So her grandmother would read her stories from an old, dusty family Bible. Even at a young age and under such tight restrictions, Daria had a quiet reputation for knowing stories from the Bible. For instance, her eye doctor would ask her to recite them for him when she spent a few weeks in the nearby town where he practiced. The doctor had no other way to hear these stories than from this five year old girl.

Not a game I'd like to play

For a class assignment this week at CJP, we were to watch a 4-part video series on game theory. I'll tip my hand by saying this is not a theory I'm inclined to jump on board with, but it's had some interesting consequences in its history, not all of which are bad. Check out the videos and then after the break I have some commentary...

Game Theory - Parts 1-4
(I'd embed them here, but they're not embeddable.)