Preventing Re-Murder: Christianity and Radical Democracy

This is post is part of an ongoing series on the book Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary, by Stanley Hauerwas & Rom Coles. This series is being authored by Jonathan McRay, Jonathan Swartz, & Brian Gumm. This post continues our reflections on ch. 2, a letter to Hauerwas from Coles.

Soon after I graduated from college, several friends and I started a reading group called The 451, in honor of Ray Bradbury’s novel. We each nominated several books to a shortlist and decided together which ones to read. Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being, in many ways a poetic anti-theodicy, was one of the finalists. As Brian pointed out in the previous post, Coles references the unbearable theme of suffering throughout Dillard’s book that reminds us of our responsibility to the dead. “Under emperor’s orders,” says Dillard, “living workers crushed their fellows’ dead bones and stuck them into the Great Wall as fill.” Coles wonders out loud how we might live haunted by these disasters that have already happened, because responsibility to the dead can’t mean preventing physical violence because the “disaster has already occurred” (33).

Burning olive groves at Ni'lin to clear a path for the wall.
Photo by Jonathan McRay

During my time in Palestine I occasionally worked in a small village called Ni’lin. Three Israeli settlements on hilltops surround Ni’lin. In 2008, Israel began constructing the Separation Wall through the outskirts of the village. Like many Palestinian villages, Ni’lin depends on its olive and citrus groves and livestock. But the wall annexed or destroyed 6,000 trees, many of which were the oldest and most productive. The wall also impeded Ni’lin’s access to neighboring towns and cities, schools, and healthcare facilities. In response to construction, Ni’lin residents launched a grassroots nonviolent campaign to resist the seizure of land. I was in the village the day the bulldozer came to begin construction and when the nonviolent protests started.

In 2009, Ni’lin residents organized a tribute to Holocaust victims through a village memorial exhibition held at their municipality. Most of the villagers had read about the genocide but this event was the first time many of them had seen pictures. The exhibit tried to remember and lament this disaster, to express that Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust, and to acknowledge that fate has now put these people together on the same land. These villagers give one response to Coles’ question. We need more responses like this. We need litanies for those who died and survived like Against Forgetting, an anthology of poetry from the 20th century’s wars and conflicts.

Upon these innumerable bones: Historical harms and ethics

A mass grave in post-genocide Rwanda
(Photo copyright AP)

This is post is part of an ongoing series on the book Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary, by Stanley Hauerwas & Rom Coles. This series is being authored by Jonathan McRay, Jonathan Swartz, & Brian Gumm. This post kicks off our reflections on ch. 2.

This chapter takes the form of a letter which Coles wrote to Hauerwas in July, 2006, from his mother-in-law's house in northern California. After telling Stanley a bit about the surroundings, Coles leads off his response to the essay found in the previous chapter with a rather striking image:

Have you ever read Annie Dillard's For the Time Being? She writes there in a way that repeatedly evokes the unfathomable numbers of dead humans and nonhumans in the earth underneath our feet... I'm frequently overtaken by this sensibility. By a sense of the dead everywhere around me... by a sense that responsibility travels backwards, first toward the dead - their works, their unfulfilled dreams, their memories. (31, emphasis added)

RAGBRAI 2013: A coffee snoot's dilemma, Pt. 2

Photo by Richard Masoner/Flickr

This is the second and final post on my thought experiment/journaling last week while riding my bike across the state of Iowa on RAGBRAI. See part one.

RAGBRAI Day 2: Mon. July 22; Perry, IA

I'm writing from the house of an extraordinarily hospitable Presbyterian minister, a colleague-of-a-collueague-of-a-pastor/friend...the kind of connections you make when trying to secure your own overnight stays for RAGBRAI. We didn't know this lady one little bit before tonight but she's treating us like royalty, even with her difficulty getting around due to health issues and simultaneously babysitting her adorable grandson. So grateful.

No entry for yesterday due to passing out from exhaustion, and I'm getting there tonight. Adventures in coffee snobbery continue: Yesterday on the route, just outside Council Bluffs, there was a Fair Trade and Organic coffee hut. All the magic words to which coffee snoots swoon! The place was called "Fair Shot" (cute). But I passed it by; the guilt of Day 0 was still too close at hand. Later, my sister-in-law expressed her being impressed by my self-control. I didn't tell her it was based in shame.

This morning, though, I had a hankerin' for Good Coffee. We left Elk Horn... (We stayed there instead of the official overnight town of Harlan because we have family there. We ended up riding 10 extra miles the first day and 10 fewer miles the next. So we kinda cheated.) - Anyway, we left Elk Horn just before 6am this morning and got to our mid-point of Guthrie Center around 9am. Due to said cheating we were very early, and there were very few cyclists in the vendor village set up in the city park at the edge of town. I only found one vendor selling coffee, and I hovered there, consulting with Erin - who was at that point supportive of my quest for Good Coffee.

A few teenaged boys working the stand, watching me hover, asked me if I wanted anything. "Um...aaah...what kind of coffee do you have?"

RAGBRAI 2013: A coffee snoot's dilemma, Pt. 1

Photo by Richard Masoner/Flickr

Last week, the Bros. Jonathan and I took a break from our book-blogging series. For my part, I completely disconnected from digital technology, hopped on my bicycle to ride across the state of Iowa with my wife's family and tens of thousands of other cyclists in the proud Iowa cultural liturgy called RAGBRAI.

When I get away from computers, the slower pace - and whatever else - tends to put me in an observant, reflective mood. I notice things, something catches in my eye-and-brain, I think about it for a while, and sometimes I write about it.

And before we even got to the western edge of the state to our starting town of Council Bluffs, something struck me and stuck with me. So what follows in the next few posts is a topical travelogue of sorts for my RAGBRAI 2013 experience, culled from the pages of my diary/journal, in which I scribbled as we traversed the state from river to river, Missouri to Mississippi - seeing again after four years on the east coast the subtle beauty of my home state. Now, the entire experience for me was much more fun and awesome than what follows, but this is what got written down...

5 theology-rocking books

Photo by Aaron Suggs via Flickr

While the series on the Hauerwas & Coles book proceeds here on Restorative Theology with the Brothers Jonathan, I'm slipping this post in as part of an ad hoc NuDunkers "summer interlude" series. We've been too busy with summer commitments to organize any topical discussions, but Josh Brockway had the great idea for each of us to write up a list of "5 books that 'rocked my theology."

Dana just put hers up Saturday, Josh put his up today, and mine appears below. I'm looking forward to the other NuDunkers chiming in! And as always, anyone's more than free to join the conversation in the comments on any of these posts and at the NuDunkers G+ community page.

Like Dana, I share a distaste with systematic theology as a genre. My only substantive engagement with anything considered "systematic" is the three-volume series by James McClendon (which was an intentional short-circuting of the systematic genre). I found McClendon's work somewhat helpful but it doesn't make the list below. Next, this list will not strike some theology snoots as "proper theology," so what I'm listing below are books that have profoundly shaped my theological approach, rather them being straight-up works of theology. Finally, I'll be listing the books below in the order in which they appeared in my life (a narrative approach), thereby rocking my theological world.

Ghosts and Water: Radical Democracy and Christianity

This is post is part of an ongoing series on the book Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary, by Stanley Hauerwas & Rom Coles. This series is being authored by Jonathan McRay, Jonathan Swartz, & Brian Gumm. This post continues the conversation about the first chapter.

Radical democracy haunts Hauerwas, which indicates that he still sees himself as an outsider to that praxis. This first chapter charts his friendship with Coles, whose appropriation of Yoder is the bridge between these Durhamites. But Rom Coles haunts the high-church Yoderian just as Yoder hovers over the shoulder of the radical democrat: these specters rattle the walls of fortified thought and propel engagement with new ideas (17). Coles reminds Hauerwas of stories about radical political imaginations that see Christianity and radical democracy as partners. Our deepest convictions are troubled by ghosts and noises in the night. They whisper open-ended questions in our ears. Coles sees democracy not as a possession but as the practice that listens to these voices (18), almost akin to deconstruction. As John Caputo says:

deconstruction describes the ghosts that haunt us, the spirits that inspire us, and the difficulty of discerning among these several spirits. Deconstruction . . . is not a determinate position . . . but a ‘how,’ a way of holding a position, of being under way or being on a path. It is an affirmation without being a self-certain and positive position.

I think radical hermeneutics (borrowing from Caputo) and radical discipleship (borrowing from Ched Myers) help contingency and commitment haunt one another. The former deconstructs our stories by exposing their utter contingency alongside traces of other possible meanings: “God” is a cultural and historical construct shaped over time. The latter exposes the roots of our socioeconomic and historical crises by recovering the transformative roots of our stories: “God” is the wild ruach that in the naming refuses to be named. Because in the end stories are all we have. We are sustained and subverted by our stories in their very contingent reality. “Why do you call me good?” Jesus asks the rich landowner in a book clearly depicting Jesus as, at the very least, good. The star of the show takes himself out of the spotlight. The story deconstructs itself even as it commits to the story it’s telling.

Maybe this is why I don’t have the jealously for Jesus that Hauerwas does. I’m not that possessive, though I’m not wholly opposed to jealously. As Hauerwas and Coles note, certain accounts of jealously can be “unavoidable, necessary, and helpful in resisting odious forms of power” (22). But I don’t think I’m willing to risk ruling to place a bet on my own preferences, as Hauerwas says he and Yoder are willing to do (22). Coles is concerned that Yoder’s insistence on biblical language, like “Jesus is Lord,” could mute postcolonial, liberationist, and ecological voices (and, as Osage theologian George Tinker notes, these voices from the underside of history show that you don’t need Derrida, or Caputo, for deconstruction).

Augustine on war and martyrdom: Grounding death in humility

This post is part of an ongoing series on the book Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary, by Stanley Hauerwas & Rom Coles. Brian's post today continues our discussion on the first chapter, "A Haunting Possibility: Christianity and Radical Democracy," by Hauerwas. See Jon's previous post, and make sure to check out the comments!

Sculpture of Augustine by
Jan Baptist Xavéry; photo by
Haags Uitburo

First, these words from Augustine:

(I)s it reasonable, is it sensible, to boast of the extent and grandeur of empire, when you cannot show that men lived in happiness, as they passed their lives amid the shedding of men's blood - whether the blood of enemies or fellow citizens - under the shadow of fear and amid the terror of ruthless ambition? (From City of God, quoted on p. 26)

Just before the U.S. Independence Day this month, I made a post about technology and the impossibility of a "just" war, wherein I described Augustine as "the imperial church's first political theologian" to preface a striking observation from a post by Vietnam veteran-turned-Christian pacifist, Stan Goff, that:

Augustine's idea that a good human heart could guide the sword never grasped the reality - the reality I have seen with my own eyes in the modern military - that the sword can drive every goodness out of one's heart.

The Anabaptist tradition isn't exactly known for its high esteem of the church fathers such as Augustine, and I certainly absorbed that bias/ignorance from my upbringing in the Anabaptist stream. But I've been warned by a wise Mennonite theologian that we peace church folks shouldn't be so quick to write off the likes of Augustine, and I think the quote above is a good example of that. It seems to temper any imperial bloodlust that pacifist-types (like me) might want to read back into him, and may offer a rejoinder of sorts to Goff's observation (which I still think is powerful and should be taken seriously).

But why is Hauerwas using it here, in a discussion on Christianity and radical democracy?