An Empty Continuum, Gracelessly Enclosed

What follows is a rather perceptive statement about the way of mind in much of the contemporary world. We find ourselves living in a wash, the colors fading and an emptiness opening deeper and deeper into the caverns of our thoughts and feelings - into our very souls.

Today there is, so they say, a cult of the possible; everything is possible. Certainly, but there is also a new cult of fate: everything can be superseded. Resignation is the undertow to the sense of possibility. The two, the cult of managing our fate on the one hand and the cult of apathy on the other, belong together like two sides of a single coin. The understanding of reality that guides the scientific-technological domination of nature and draws its energy from the cult of the possible, is deeply marked by a representation of time as an empty continuum, growing evolutionarily into endlessness, in which everything is mercilessly, gracelessly enclosed. Even a planet consumed by nuclear explosion is still given up to the empty hypothermia of evolution. This understanding of time eradicates every substantive expectation, and thus engenders that secret identity-crisis that eats away at the souls of modern people. It is difficult to decipher because it has long been practiced successfully under the ciphers of progress and development, before, in brief moments, we discover it at the roots of our souls. ~ Johann Baptist Metz, A Passion for God (1998), translated by J. Matthews Ashley.

Thinking about God in a world of Terror

August 2012, a stopover in Oxford after a project in Nairobi, Kenya.

  

Preface 

A bare fact of our world is that some people mix politics and religion. The point of this series is not to argue whether the mixing of the two is good or evil. Rather, the point is to remind ourselves that many people do think that it is good, or at least necessary, to see politics through spiritual eyes. If we wish to work for peace and for justice then we must, because of the global reality of religion, deepen our understanding of what politics and religion are, and why, for some, their mixing is important, even unavoidable. We must begin listening to the thoughts - the hopes and fears, successes and failures - of the outsiders.


This first article deals with the reality of a relatively new outsider in the realm of ideas in the West - Christian theology. Many would step in here and say, "Look around us, religion has all sorts of power!" I agree. But many religions, if not most, are losing any significant influence in the realm of accepted cultural ideas. Christianity, of the orthodox tradition in the West, has a voice outside of the State and outside of pop-culture; but within those two realms it is silenced. Christian theology is barred from public discourse, and yet 77% of Americans claim to be Christian, and 27% of Americans claim to be broadly of the orthodox tradition, focusing on the historical death and resurrection of Jesus and its implications for all people. These things must be discussed openly and directly. If we wish to unify, then we must understand our differences.

The book of Isaiah will be a great place to start.


I: Introduction

Imagine, if you will, that like me you believe that the following verses are true.  (Remember, they contain mental-visual poetry; the meanings are retained but the images are not meant to be taken 'literally.' For example, in the first verse below God is not imagined to be sitting down 'somewhere up there', materially; rather, God is to be understood from the various imagery as the all-knowing, all-wise, and all-loving true sovereign.)

  It is he - who sits above the circle of the earth,

and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers -

who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,

and spreads them like a tent to dwell in;

  who brings princes to nothing,

and makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness.

                        ... 

The Lord is the everlasting God,

the Creator of the ends of the earth.

He does not faint or grow weary;

his understanding is unsearchable.

  He gives power to the faint,

and to him who has no might he increases strength.*

The views, political or otherwise, of many orthodox Christian thinkers** today reflect the central ideas that are found in these verses. Political theologians have, for more than two-thousand years, structured their political concerns on the concerns of God. "What is God like?" the theologian asks. "And if God is like that, how does that knowledge of God's nature, character and purpose change human meaning?" Political theologians have drawn their knowledge of God's concerns from both God's revealed essential character and God's action in the world (the technical terminology of God's essential character and action in the world are 'the immanent Trinity' and 'the economic Trinity,' respectively).

The phrase that I used above, "revealed essential character and ... action...", needs some explanation. Orthodox Christians believe (1) that God intends and desires to communicate with humanity and (2) that God has done so in and through the Bible, especially in the person of Jesus. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world believe this. Those who believe this think that human beings are responsible to someone other than ourselves and our environment. However, remembering the character of God, especially as displayed in God's self-sacrificial death on the cross and subsequent resurrection after death, to be responsible to God includes loving others and caring for the environment.

To sum up so far: The beliefs (1) that God is the creator of all things and (2) that God has communicated his character through his actions in real, material human history - these beliefs greatly change the way that a person views the world, politically or otherwise. The first, God as creator, is the centerpiece of this post.


II: Creation

"The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth" (Isa. 40:28). This belief alone drastically changes the way that people and political organizations work together. I've often said that when people believe the first five words of the Bible - "In the beginning God created..." - they make different life decisions. Beliefs do actually influence actions, not least political actions.

Not only is God seen as creator, but an historically orthodox Christian believes that God is other than creation, and therefore not beholden to the laws of nature (biology, physics, and so on). The material laws, in this view, have a beginning, a source. God is the source of those laws. One significant implication of God's difference from and sovereignty over creation is this: If the laws of nature work in such a way so as to propagate evolving life, this does not mean that God isn't centrally involved. Consider afresh the meaning of the voice of God in Genesis 1:24:

Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth...

If God is the source of the natural laws, and is sovereign over them, it necessarily follows that, whether the truth is in evolution or six-day creation, the ever-deeper, ever deepening truth is that the whole universe - natural laws included - are sourced in God.*** And this deeper and deepening truth is the politically important bit.

It is important because it divides. For a non-believer, ethics, morality, politics, and so on, are all based on a purely material world in which there is no 'Creator'. The materialist need not consider what God wants done with the world. The way in which person thinks and acts toward people and things will be altered by their beliefs about God and the world. Perhaps this earth is just a speck in a blind, ever-expanding cosmos. Perhaps not.

Isaiah 40, in the portion quoted above, proclaims God's status as Creator immediately following the statement that God "brings princes to nothing, and makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness." God is, in this text, unimaginably more powerful than any human leader; Christians believed that people, political rulers among them, have been created by, through, and for the just and loving God, and are ultimately responsible to God.

This is just the beginning. A person's understanding of the character of God profoundly alters the way that person views and responds to all of life.

________

* Isaiah chapter 40, verses 22-3 and 28-9. (Isaiah is a poetic, prophetic book in the Hebrew Bible - in the Christian Bible, the Old Testament)

** I say orthodox based on the creeds and canons of the Church over the course of approximately two-thousand years. Orthodox Christianity has been incredibly steady in its core beliefs, nevertheless situating itself within the surrounding culture in peripheral matters.

*** Whatever the case may be, let the Church not divide over science, or even the interpretations of the poetry that presents the world in Genesis 1. Those verses have been interpreted in myriad ways by the most influential figures in Church history. Augustine (3rd century AD), the father of many of our specific theological and political categories, thought that the all-powerful God must have created everything in an instant, because of the influence of Plato's philosophy. Augustine interpreted the first chapter of Genesis allegorically. Others have said other things. C.S. Lewis thought that evolution was true, though the product of intelligent design and the guiding hand of the Designer. On the other hand, the push for literalism in the creation account of Genesis is very new - we're talking less than 75 years. Western Christians desire that the Bible address explicitly all cultural concerns. Science is a significant cultural concern. There is this fear that if Genesis doesn't refer to the insights of modern science then the truth of the Bible is in question. This simply is not the case. We are bringing massive interpretive lenses to the text when we expect that the first chapters of Genesis were written in modern categories with scientific precision. The point is this: however God created, God is sovereign. If evolution is true, it proves nothing of God, except perhaps that he is a God of careful, lasting life that changes and adapts to meet the needs of its environment. That to me doesn't sound too bad. And, incidentally, it makes sense both of the line, "Let the earth bring forth...", and of God's long and adapting treatment of his son among the nations - ancient Israel - in the grand narrative of the Hebrew Bible.

Je Suis Charlie? Terrorism, the Left, and Religion

In the following bit of cultural commentary there is much on Islam. I am not directing a critique toward all of Islam. I do not think that all Muslims are Islamists. Far the contrary. There are hundreds of millions of Muslims in the world who actively despise acts of terror. Countless clerics and rulers and Islamic organizations constantly and publicly denounce these acts. Even the Hezbollah chief has recently condemned terrorist violence (whatever his definition of terrorism might be).

I: The Spirit of Marx is Dancing

On Jimmy Kimmel Live a few nights ago, Bill Maher claimed that hundreds of millions of Muslims applaud terrorism, because when you insult the Prophet "all [non-violent] bets are off." I'm unconvinced. I simply don't know what most Muslims harbor in their hearts about the Prophet and terrorism. And I know enough of Maher's anti-religious utopia. But as a Westerner - an American holding a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies from a State University, currently enrolled in a graduate political theology course at Harvard - I am able to think critically about the heart of the cultural seas around me. (edit: I don't say these things to boast, only to emphasize that I'm deep within Western culture, as an outsider.)

In the same 5 minutes with Jimmy, Bill Maher criticized American liberals, of whom he is a part. Liberals in the West, Maher implied, are part of a weak nation (he used a different word) of political correctness and tolerance. Liberals have forgotten what it means to be the critical, liberal Left. They are, according to Maher, supposed to fight for the oppressed with  ideology critique and social justice.

While I applaud true Leftists for their zeal for social justice and ideology critique, I am critical of their strong tendency toward a unique ideology, their own propaganda. Since the French Revolution, and probably before, the Left has used mass-produced vulgar satire to change opinions and incite violence. And when violence is incited, the world watches. This time, it happened in Paris - a figurehead capitol in the West. The world is watching.

What's more, the staff of Charlie Hebdo had been attacked before. They knew that they were flirting with death. They died for a cause. They died for the Party. People love martyrs. We always have. In the second century CE, Tertullian wrote this, of Christian martyrs:

...Those who see us die, wonder why we do, for we die like the men you revere, not like slaves or criminals. And when they find out, they join us.

The world is on the side of the martyrs. This martyrdom is an unprecedented victory for today's Leftists. Even YouTube has cast its vote. Of some 400,000 views, 5,082 people liked the five-minute, anti-religion Leftist satire by Bill Maher; 2,513 disliked it. That's a two-thirds majority for Leftism from viewers of Jimmy Kimmel and Bill Maher (a widely varied audience). The spirit of Marx is dancing.



II: The Ideology of the West

David Brooks published an op-ed in The New York Times on January 8th slamming the West for its failure to be self-critical, focusing his attack against political correctness. The West has failed to be Charlie Hebdo:

The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down.

But before we thoughtlessly leap onto the 'freedom of speech' bandwagon, we should remember, as Brooks cautions, that to be intentionally hateful and malicious toward the views of others is not helpful. On the other hand, I don't agree with the slogan that says, "if you mess with the mean dog, you're gonna get bit." The purpose of satire is to show the satirized party their own ridiculousness, so that progress can be made. But satire should not be done simply out of malice and contempt. Such acts are, without a doubt, childish. If we treated each other as fellow humans, even in satire, we'd be much better off. Nevertheless, satire should not be stopped by the rule of law. That would be censorship.

Maher rightly pointed out that gay people are being beheaded in the Middle East by followers of extreme forms of Islam. He also asked the audience to imagine the response in the West if the Vatican were beheading gay people. But his imagined example fails. The Vatican does not represent the same sector of society as extremist religion in an extremist country. In extremist countries, the political power is in the religion. But in the West, the power is in secular, liberal, mass-proliferation of ideas. Television shows are cancelled due to a character's stance on homosexuality. ESPN sports reporters are canned because their views go against the reigning ideology. What if they had been shot? Would the ideology be so very much different? In extremist countries, to be ir-religious is grounds for silencing through death. In the West, on the other hand, to be religious is grounds enough to be ostracized from the world of ideas. Is Charlie Hebdo of a propagandistic tradition? (Someone asked a similar question in an NPR interview I caught this morning). Are the martyrs on the good guys' side? What is the truth?


'Political correctness' requires censorship, from kindergarten to the university. In public schools the propagation of ideology is very effective. It's no wonder that political activists aim for college campuses, and that the President wants to make the first two years of State-funded community colleges free for all. Those who control the schools control the power base. They are the Vatican, and they are silencing the opposition. They are the wannabe Charlie Hebdo, but more pernicious, insidious.

People who hold views opposed to the cultural norm are silenced. They have no real voice; no real martyrdom. Perhaps if, and when, they start dying for their views, then the masses will notice the contradiction of 'tolerance.'

III: Now, to Islamic Extremism.

A common problem, even in the academic field of Religious Studies, is that non-believers have a very difficult time empathetically understanding what being a believer is truly like. A believer has a vision of the end in which he hopes; he believes - if he's of the Islamic extremist camp - that the fury of Allah should be unleashed against those who dishonor his Prophet. 

In 2001, following the attacks on the Twin Towers (2985 people died, mostly American), the United States declared an ‘official’ start to the ‘War on Terror.’ The country was ringing in shellshock. The idea of a 'war,' though elusive in its real object, helped many people respond, however unconsciously, to the horror that had just brutalized the nation. The tremors of the attack rattled the whole world, and continue to frustrate and terrify, daily. Post-9/11 airport security, anyone?

During the Sydney hostage siege, I spent about two hours monitoring Twitter, constantly refreshing the search feed for #sydneysiege—one of the highest trending Twitter feeds of the year, though now totally dwarfed by #jesuischarlie. I observed a significant pattern in the content of these tweets. There were tweets from extremists somewhere, that said things like this: “See what happens when you align your politics against us, Australia! Submit to Allah!”, often accompanied by a video or an ideological image or symbol(s). On one occasion, I clicked on one of these videos. I was transported to the sands of the Middle East. A man stood in the sand, a white Canadian with a blonde pony-tail, with a black and white bandana neatly tied about his forehead (he looked like the blonde male character from Street Fighter, Ken). He spoke, in HD video, in plain, educated English for several minutes about the wrongs of the West and the need for radical Islamic extremism. He said, “If you aren’t coming here to help us, then you had better be fighting where you are.” He was convincing. Sharp. Articulate. Handsome, even. And he ended his sermon with a reminder of Allah's return with swift, severe judgment.

The problem with the ‘War on Terror' is this: we are not fighting terrorists. We are fighting a really convincing idea; especially for the oppressed peoples of the world. We are fighting an idea that promises liberation - "If only we'd fight for true doctrine, then the world would be at peace!" We’re dealing here, even, with apocalyptic eschatology. What that means, basically, is an ‘end times’ vision: a promise of future justice and dominance and the vindicating return of Allah! This is a religious war. Fundamentally. Ideologically. These people are serious, committed believers, with a passionate zeal for a supreme being who they believe demands recompense and dominance for and from them. These are ideologically trained, completely convinced, believers in the extremist idea.

Saint Paul said this of the war:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Again: We’re trying to fight terrorists, but we can’t. Because we’re actually fighting an idea. And ideas, as Dostoevsky reminded us somewhere, cannot be killed. Or hunted down. Ideas must be converted, they must be transformed. From the ground up, from the inside world, these ideas must be confronted. But ideas are too magnificently powerful for us. All we can do is kill and spread propaganda. We need to learn how to transform ideas.

One significant source of an ideology's strength comes with the digital revolution we’re living in. Personal technology is an outrageously effective tool for the communication of ideas, especially in short, easy to read ideological slogans and videos. We are not witnessing the work of a simple, old-fashioned ideology; we’re living in an age when complex ideas and global communication tools are instantly accessible to nearly everyone. 

Islamic extremist ideas, which gained a revival in the mid-twentieth century, have been incredibly influential among fringe groups of Muslims, especially among the emotionally wounded, radically motivated youth with a pre-existing propensity to political violence. This is a very convincing ideology for them.

I notice, around social media especially, a tendency to minimize the involvement of “true spirituality” in the daily lives of perpetrators of terroristic violence. I would like to graciously point out how flatly wrong this view is. The news reports from a broad range of international outlets and YouTube videos featuring live-action terrorist takeovers of Christian or ‘heretical’ villages (there are many videos there, but truly brutal and to be avoided) - these are enough evidence. Each video is full of prayers and expressions of devotion to Allah from the mouths of masked terrorists as they behead or slaughter innocent people. In the Charlie Hepbo tragedy, the men were shouting “Praise Be to Allah!” as they shot.

Furthermore, the police went into the Jewish market in Paris when they did because they heard the terrorist reciting his prayers, the prayer for salvation, to be recited just before death. This is not purely political violence. It is an idea. A very, very powerful one. A religious idea. It is an idea that tells of the swift and coming return of Allah to pay recompense on oppressors—and that’s us, the Western, Gluttonous, non-believing world.

But this idea can be stopped. And not, sadly, through satire. It must be stopped through worldwide nuclear strikes. Just kidding. I hope that doesn't get me arrested. It is unclear how it can be stopped without more bloodshed and terror. This ideology has the momentum of a rather large snowball, bowling down steep terrain, building ever larger and destroying or pulling into itself all that it touches.

IV: (Part Of) The Solution

While it is certainly the case that terrorism does not represent normative Islam, to say that some interpretations of Islam are not to blame for the headlining stories in Nigeria and Kenya and France and the United States, would be to ruin our chances of being critical toward certain twisted worldviews and ideologies.

Religious discourse must be incorporated into the public square. We live in a religious world. If we do not understand one another, death and destruction will forever ensue. When two people, even in a long term romantic relationship(!), don't understand each other and are each constantly forced to confront the problems of the other, a fight is coming. We are beginning to feel the pains of the other's anger.

But the world does not need another war. God help us. The world needs its leaders - teachers, parents, school principals, tax advisers, and so on - to take a critical and thoughtful approach to their own ideology, and that of others; other worldviews, other religions, are being propagated around us. The goal is not first to stop them, but to understand them. If we cannot understand them, we cannot stop the violence.'They' are the embodiment of an idea.

We're surprised that we can't understand what would make someone want to commit acts of terror in the name of a god. Because we never talk about it. And if we do, we're seen as weird. But here's the thing: ideas and beliefs can easily lead a human being to commit public acts of terror and suicide.

It's called religious zeal, and it's nothing new. Charlie Hebdo, in fact, in their acts of zealous cartooning and subsequent martyrdom, showed a similar type of zeal - yet for Leftist ideology. Suicidal zeal, almost.

We're told to tolerate everyone. One love. But we're not allowed to learn anything about them, from them, in our schools, because we are afraid of those ideas. American teachers get fired for talking about religion. And they're forced to talk about things in their curriculum that many of them do not want to teach. But they do, because the State says so. If the teacher is a believer, wouldn't that teacher be the best person to explain that religion to the students? Shouldn't there be a freedom of ideas? Shouldn't we be allowed to express ourselves? Are you really Charlie Hebdo? Should you be?

edit 01/12/15: We are being confronted by a powerful Idea and its violent fruit. But we are so confused by our own messes, our own spoiled fruit, that we fail to see clearly how to stop this Idea without hateful propaganda and violence. This has been the case in world history with nearly every political entity that has ever existed. Propaganda and violence. That's what we're good at. We must confront our own bad ideas before we can confront those of others. It must start with you and with me.

We are all humans, made in the image of God, and we all therefore deserve love and justice, regardless of our differences. We must understand one another. We must be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

He Was One Who Owned Much Property

Mark 10:17-23

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to Him and knelt before Him, and asked Him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” 

And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘do not murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not bear false witness; do not defraud; honor your father and mother.’" 

And he said to Him, “Teacher, I have kept all these things from my youth up.” 

Looking at him, Jesus felt a love for him and said to him, “One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” 

But at these words he was saddened, and he went away grieving, for he was one who owned much property.  

And Jesus, looking around, said to His disciples, “How hard it will be for those who are wealthy to enter the kingdom of God!”

Interpreters often point out that Jesus leaves out the first four commandments, all of which have to do with putting God first: "don't have any other gods before me; don't make idols; don't take the name of God in vain; keep the Sabbath set apart." 

But even after Jesus lists the latter six commandments, and the wealthy property owner says that he has kept them, Jesus doesn't go on to list the first four. Instead, he points the man to give up what he values most, to give it to the poor, and to follow him.

Jesus is looking to the heart of the law. The man's property has taken the place of God as the giver of security, personal value, purpose, and so on and so on. Thus, property has become the man's god. And this god consumes him, and it consumes the poor.

None of this interpretation is new. Neither is the question, "What is your god?" 

Slavery, Freedom and Christian Leadership in the 21st Century

Recently a friend suggested that I read In the Name of Jesus, a little book that Henri Nouwen wrote in the late 1980s about Christian leadership in the coming century, in which we now find ourselves. The following excerpt resonated deeply.

The task of future Christian leaders is not to make a little contribution to the solution of the pains and tribulations of their time, but to identify and announce the ways in which Jesus is leading God’s people out of slavery, through the desert to a new land of freedom.

Christian leaders have the arduous task of responding to personal struggles, family conflicts, national calamities, and international tensions with an articulate faith in God’s real presence.

They have to say “no” to every form of fatalism, defeatism, accidentalism or incidentalism which make people believe that statistics are telling us the truth.  They have to say no to every form of despair in which human life is seen as a pure matter of good or bad luck.

They have to say “no” to sentimental attempts to make people develop a spirit of resignation or stoic indifference in the face of the unavoidability of pain, suffering and death.

In short, they have to say “no” to the secular world and proclaim in unambiguous terms that the incarnation of God’s Word, through whom all things came into being, has made even the smallest event of human history into Kairos, that is, an opportunity to be led deeper into the heart of Christ.

This is a hard discipline, since God’s presence is often a hidden presence, a presence that needs to be discovered.  The loud boisterous noises of the world make us deaf to the soft, gentle, and loving voice of God.  A Christian leader is called to help people to hear that voice and so be comforted and consoled.

Žižek: A Very Brief Introduction, and His Critique of Western Buddhism

Some have called him dangerous. Some have called him a bête noire ("black beast" - something that is particularly distasteful or difficult and to be avoided). Some - perhaps most - have never heard of him. The Slovenian political philosopher (and I give him that title because I'm not sure how else to classify him, if not bête noire), Slavoj Žižek, is the patron saint of the young European intellectual elite (if in fact we've entered an era in which sainthood can be conferred upon the living), and he'll be shaking things up with the hipsters on this side of the pond soon enough. Although, if history offers a key to understanding the process of culture shaping, Žižek's influence will probably linger just below the surface, waiting for a posthumous eruption.

I've been reading a couple of his books in my current research, The Sublime Object of Ideology and The Monstrosity of Christ. Before you get tripped up on "monstrosity," know that it does not mean what you probably imagined at first glance. With "monstrosity," Žižek refers to Hegel's notion (which Žižek shares) of the subversively powerful claim that God, the divine Logos, the Word of God, "became flesh and lived among us" (John 1:14). Here's Žižek on the matter:

Hegel uses this unexpectedly strong word,"monstrosity,” to designate the first figure of Reconciliation, the appearance of God in the finite flesh of a human individual: “This is the monstrous [das Ungeheure] whose necessity we have seen.”¹ The finite fragile human individual is “inappropriate” to stand for God, it is “die Unangemessenheit ueberhaupt² [the inappropriateness in general, as such].”³

So much for introductions. I'll let you wrestle with the Incarnation. I began this post with the intention of presenting a few of his insights on Western Buddhism. To those we now turn. Oh, and it's important to know that he's a Marxist:

Spiritual meditation [and here Žižek means the so-called "pure" forms of meditation - mindfulness, Zen, "sitting," Transcendental Meditation (TM), etc.], in its abstraction from institutionalized religion, appears today as the zero-level undistorted core of religion: the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core. The reason for this shift of accent from religious institution to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism.⁴

Elsewhere, in an interview with Believer, a San Francisco based magazine that concerns itself with issues of hipster culture, Žižek elaborates on Buddhism and Capitalism:

...This basic Buddhist insight that there is no permanent self, permanent subject, just events and so on, in an ironic way perfectly mirrors this idea that products are not essential. [What is] essential is this freedom of how you consume products and the idea that the market should no longer focus on the product. It is no longer: this car has this quality, blah blah blah. No, it’s what you will do with the car. They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i.e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like, how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?

 To which the Believer interviewer responds,

OK, so ironically, when Westerners buy into a Buddhist mentality, then they set themselves up to be perfect consumers in contemporary capitalism. It is kind of sad and funny at the same time. While looking for spirituality or God, they become ideal consumers to marketing executives. Sounds like science fiction.

Science fiction, or the high point of Western Civilization as it is today. Have you ever noticed that a great deal of the highest quality clothing and gear at REI is branded with Buddhist names? "The Zen," "Prana" ("breath" in Sanskrit), and so forth. They don't even attempt to conceal it.



_________________________________________


I owe a great deal for my understanding of Žižek to my friend, Vincent. You know who you are.

¹G. W. F. Hegel, Theologian of the Spirit, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1997), p. 238-9.

²G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, vol. 17 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), p. 272.

³Slavoj Žižek, John Milbank, and Creston Davis. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), p. 74.

⁴ibid, p. 28. Italics added for emphasis.

A Theology of Immigration

Like a happy little cloud, the thought of beginning with a satirical cartoon floated through my mind's sky. But you've seen enough of those, and they aren't all that happy. This is a space for real conversation, and careful consideration isn't exactly fostered through pencil-sketch mockery.

This is no small issue. Immigration, I mean. Especially for the so-called "Religious Right." But if the "Right" is so very "Religious," which in the West invariably means "Christian," how is it that Immigration reform for the good of the immigrant is such a taboo topic? It certainly isn't taboo in the Bible. Both Testaments have a great deal to say about the treatment of foreigners, even if that shouldn't necessarily be applied to public policy. We do live in a post-Christian society, whether we wish to admit it or not, and that isn't going to change. But shouldn't the Christians be the ones advocating for the foreigners? I reckon that neither the Right nor the Left's immigration policy has anything to do with Christianity.

While it may be an oversimplification of an anything-but-simple issue, I would point to a single passage when it comes to Christian Immigration:

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34; cf. Deuteronomy 10:19; Exodus 22:21)

Translation: Treat those who are not natives in your country just like you'd treat your own kids. Would you want your own kids to be able to go to the hospital, even if they'd gone down the wrong path and spiralled into drugs? I did that once, and I'm sure glad people treated me well. Would you want your children to be allowed a job in a safe and healthy environment? Or a spot in a classroom with their peers?

And the justification for all of this? "Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt." Mutual understanding; intimate knowledge of the suffering of the foreigner. It is a problem, I'd be willing to argue, that most of the Right doesn't have much intimate knowledge of the position of a foreigner. Neither do I. But there is a second justification:

I am the Lord your God.

The emphasis misses us in the English, but consider reading the "I" as of foremost importance here.  I am the Lord your God.

"Me - the one who has grace for the lost and lowly, who has mercy on the sinner, who has chosen you to be the light of the world, who is faithful even when you are not, the one who sees your trouble and cares for you - it is I who am your source of life, your leader, your provider. I am the Lord your God."

And so, love the outsider. Act with grace toward the addicted immigrant. This is evangelical.