The iPhone as cultural pornography

One fruit to rule them all?
The iPhone 5 release event in NYC; photo by thomasebunton/Flickr

Sometimes it couldn't be more blatant. My favorite nerd site, Ars Technica, ran two stories yesterday separated by a mere 17 minutes. Here they are in the order I saw them in my Twitter feed:

1. iPhone 5 sales top 5 million during launch weekend (9/24, 9:17am)
2. Foxconn worker riot closes factory (9/24, 9:00 am)

Line from the first story:

"Demand for iPhone 5 has been incredible and we are working hard to get an iPhone 5 into the hands of every customer who wants one as quickly as possible," Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement.

Awesome, how are they going to do that? Well...the second story has some clues:

TUAW speculates that the riots (at Foxconn) were in no small part caused by the recent long iPhone 5 production ramp-up; Engadget links to a (non-English) report discussing "practically compulsory" overtime related to iPhone 5 production.

Seeing the game: Constraints on virtuous online discourse

Image from Rob Annable/Flickr

My techno-linguistic-virtue brain has been working overtime today as I've encountered a few pieces online. First I came across this great little piece from author/church-planter, J.R. Briggs, offering 10 self-reflective questions for making status updates on Facebook. They are:

1. What is my motive?
2. Will this matter in a month?
3. Is this wise?
4. Is it worth it?
5. Does everyone need to read this?
6. Am I encouraging conversation or shutting it down?
7. How’s my tone of voice?
8. Is this honoring?
9. Is this truthful?
10. Could I be investing my time more wisely by doing something else?

While the list is a bit longer than you'd want to write down and tape next to your computer monitor for every single time you post something to Facebook, it nonetheless offers great reminders, especially the first question on motive. "What is this status update for? From what desires does it spring, and are those legitimate?"

Virtuous discourse is something I think and write about from time to time - so it's nice to see other leaders in the church encouraging the same. And then I saw this tweet from Adam Graber:

We must learn to see technology the way we see language, "as transparent conduits of meaning."

Reforming Reformation: Non-coercive witness

Church ruins at Heptonstall;

photo by David Sykes via Flickr

In a review for what looks to be a fascinating book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society by Brad Gregory, reviewer Kathleen Crowther summarizes a segment of Gregory's argument:

[In the wake of "sola scriptura"], the only way Protestant groups (and Catholics) were able to command assent to their particular readings of scripture was to back them up with political force; the "magisterial" reformers and Catholics managed to do this while the "radical" reformers did not. This led to "the coercive, prosecutory, and violent actions of early modern confessional regimes" (p. 160). Where caritas had once reigned as the central virtue in European Christianity, it was replaced in the early modern period by "obedience" to both divine and secular authorities. (Inner quote is from Gregory's book.)

Looking at the index, I know that Gregory makes use of Alasdair MacIntyre's work on the loss of the virtue tradition in Western societies after the Enlightenment, so his reference to the loss of caritas caught my eye, but so did the reference to confessional coercion, even violence, by Protestants and Catholics. Radical reformers, especially the early Anabaptists, were often the target of such coercion.

Now check out this working definition of "evangelical" by John Howard Yoder from The Priestly Kingdom:

I take the term in its root meaning. One is functionally evangelical if one confesses oneself to have been commissioned by the grace of God with a message which others who have not heard it should hear. It is angellion ("news") because they will not know it unless they are told it by a message-bearer. It is good news because hearing it will be for them not alienation or compulsion, oppression or brainwashing, but liberation. Because this news is only such when received as good, it can never be communicated coercively; nor can the message-bearer ever positively be assured that it will be received. (p. 55, emphasis added in bold)

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. 

Pietist theology for civil discourse

Philipp Jakob Spener
Forefather of Pietism & neck braces
(Wikimedia)

There's a great piece over at Chris Gehrz's blog, The Pietist Schoolman, a guest post from Christian Collins Winn. Gehrz and Winn are both professors at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the post is Winn's address to the school's opening chapel service yesterday:

Pietism and Civil Discourse

In the piece, Winn identifies four characteristics from the Pietist tradition, specifically from its forefather, Philipp Jakob Spener, characteristics that comprise a Pietist theology for civil discourse. (Civil discourse being something that is sorely needed these days, and something I tried to model yesterday in my response to a piece by Michael Shank on Mennonites and politics.)

But here are the four characteristics with some commentary:

1. A spirit of good faith - In virtue terms, I'd call this "charity" in the more classical sense of caritas, which connotes "costliness, esteem, affection." A related virtue would be kindness.
2. A genuine openness to being taught - Winn rightly notes this requires the virtue of humility. We cannot assume beforehand that we are in the right, and we must always be open for the pleasant surprise of being wrong, learning something new, or understanding someone at a deeper level.
3. A love for one's neighbor - I'll note here the brilliant quote I came across from Jamie Smith the other day: "The neighbor could be a friend or an enemy, a foreigner or a brother. The call to love the neighbor is a call to love all of them - that is why all of Jesus' injunctions to love are taken up in the call to love the neighbor."
4. The hopeful commitment to God's peace - Hope and peace both being virtues/gifts/fruits of the Holy Spirit that, along with joy, ensure that we not become dour and spiritlessly duty-bound, where life becomes "just one damned thing after another."

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.

The providence of proximity

[Life context note: Last weekend my wife and daughter moved back to our home state of Iowa, after four years of living in lovely Harrisonburg, Virginia. I'm hanging around H'burg for a few more months to finish my work at EMU before I join them. So this weekend, I had a lot of time on my hands, and...]

With said free time I read most of the essays in Jamie Smith's The Devil Reads Derrida. Man, what a great book! It is a collection periodic essays from 2002-'07, and it is exactly the kind of intellectual writing I try to here at Restorative Theology. (Albeit with much more modest intellectual capacities than Smith's...) Here is a Christian scholar who is committed to his intellectual craft for the sake of the church and the fidelity of the body of Christ and its place in God's mission in this creation. There's all kinds of underlines in this book I made yesterday, but this little passage is too good not to post. The opening paragraph of the chapter, "The Architecture of Altruism: On Loving Our Neighbor(hood)s":

When Jesus summarizes the "greatest commandment," it is a two-fold obligation that hinges on love: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart" and "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Luke 10:27 echoing Lev. 19:18). It is intriguing to me that when Jesus points to the centrality of love, he also invokes a metaphor which is not familial (e.g. "brother" or "friend") or ethnic (e.g. "your people"), but almost geographical: we are to love the neighbor - the one next to us, who happens (by providence) to be in proximity. The neighbor could be a friend or an enemy, a foreigner or a brother. The call to love the neighbor is a call to love all of them - that is why all of Jesus' injunctions to love are taken up in the call to love the neighbor. (Emphasis added.)

This text also happened to be in the lectionary this weekend, so I heard it in the two church services I attended this weekend. (Hey...I was lonely and needed to be with my "first family.")