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Coming Out As a Heretic

religionnerd — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:03:27 +0000

Not religious, not spiritual, not atheist—what’s left?

By Kate Blanchard, Religion Dispatches

I could very much relate to the recent NPR story about a Christian minister losing her faith. Like her, I once counted myself among the über-faithful but then “fell away” in my twenties. Despite marrying a clergyman and spending lots of time in theological school, I never made it back to the one true way.

But there is a major difference in my story and this minister’s story, which is that she has embraced the name “atheist,” while I cannot bring myself to do so.

This reluctance is not because I have anything obvious to lose. Being an atheist would not cause any new familial strife; and unlike the pastorate, my career does not demand any particular religious orthodoxy. The major issue for me is an aversion to militant secularism, akin to some people’s aversion to “organized religion.” The new atheism, of the sort that has celebrities, conventions, media outlets, or protest marches, is not simply about doubting the existence of traditional deities. It is more often about intellectual elitism, and sometimes even outright racism toward people whom Christopher Hitchens referred to as “semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions.” Orthodox secularism, it seems, is about feeling superior to those poor, deluded souls who still cling to religion—that weird little psycho-social appendix left over from some earlier stage in human evolution.

Other common categories don’t seem to fit well either. The ever-popular “spiritual but not religious” implies a particular type of interior life—one grounded in emotion and experience more than cognition. A Jewish friend of mine calls herself “religious but not spiritual,” but this doesn’t seem to work as well in a Protestant framework, where individual faith is emphasized over ethnicity or outward traditions. The “Emerging Church” is a possible refuge, but it still strikes me as vaguely imperialistic; and try as I might, I simply don’t see myself among the so-called “rise of the nones.”

Thus, for folks who are unorthodox but aren’t atheists, who care about metaphysics but who aren’t mystics, perhaps the good old-fashioned term “heretic” will satisfy. The kind of heresy I’m talking about here is what Thomas Aquinas defined as “restricting belief to certain points of Christ’s doctrine [as determined by the Roman Catholic hierarchy] selected and fashioned at pleasure.” (I would question only the implication that heretics are unique in “selecting and fashioning” their beliefs “at pleasure.”)

I find this name appealing for multiple reasons, not least of which is that it allows me to claim some connection to Christianity. The more I’ve learned about the history of Christianity, the more I’ve come to accept its ongoing diversity. The earliest Christians, as evidenced by both the New Testament and ancient theological writings, did not agree on the nature of Jesus or his work. In the fourth and later centuries, Christians made valiant (if misguided) attempts to unify their beliefs and practices by stamping out what they saw as errors; but Jesus people haven’t agreed since then either, despite centuries of the religious elite claiming otherwise.

Embracing heresy is a way of asserting my place—however tenuous—in this ancient tradition, while acknowledging that most of what I think and do will not pass creedal litmus tests. In a religion of more than two billion adherents, this is hardly a surprise.

I also like “heretic” because it is different, at least in my mind, than secularism, atheism, or “none.” Heresy implies not rejection of or indifference toward religion and its objects, but rather curiosity and engagement. Just because I can’t see or make sense of God doesn’t mean I don’t want to, or that I hate believers; on the contrary, I respect—with fear and trembling—the powerful role that religious experience plays in the lives most humans. Heresy demands a particular religious vocabulary, though it also allows for unabashed syncretism (call it a salad bar if you must). I can be what one of my students called a “Chreaster” who looks to the Daodejing for wisdom, who reads my child Bible stories but also Zen parables, a biography of Muhammad, and Greek myths.

Yes, acknowledging our heresy might be just the thing for non-religious non-atheists. It’s certainly better than opting out altogether, ceding the sacred turf to those lucky enough to have found answers to all their questions. Indeed, we may even be doing them a favor. After all, where would orthodoxy be without heresy to remind it of what it’s not?

Religion Dispatches May 10, 2012

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Kate Blanchard is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Alma College in central Michigan. She is the author of The Protestant Ethic or The Spirit of Capitalism: Christians, Freedom, and Free Markets (Cascade 2010).

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“You Can’t Reason with a Crazy Person”: The Un-politics of American political discourse

religionnerd — Wed, 09 May 2012 12:42:26 +0000

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By James Dennis LoRusso, Religion Bulletin

Were you to travel one segment of the Eisenhower Expressway in Illinois this morning, you might discover a curious billboard. The display features a mugshot of Ted Kaczynski, the self-confessed “Unabomber,” coupled with the question, “I still believe in Global Warming. Do You?” The new billboard campaign lining various commuter routes is the latest initiative of the Chicago-based conservative think tank, the Heartland Foundation, to call into question prevailing scientific consensus around climate change.

Predictably, progressives have responded virulently, claiming that Heartland has sunk to a new low in its effort to undermine and politicize “mainstream” science. In a scathing response, Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Beast characterizes the strategy as “a brutalist style of public propaganda that focuses on guilt by the most extreme association.” In other words, by linking belief in global warming to the likes of Kaczynski, Castro, and Charles Manson, all of whom presumably agree with the thesis of climate change, Heartland implies that anyone subscribing to such views must also be degenerate.

While Sullivan’s critique is warranted, it also reveals something significant about the shape of American political discourse more generally. To borrow a notion from Roland Barthes, esteemed scholar of twentieth-century myth, American political discourse has becomedepoliticized. Barthes writes: “Myth is depoliticized speech… Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact.” (Mythologies, 143) Barthes wishes for us to see how myths transform historically situated and contested knowledge into concepts beyond the pale of critique.

At first glance, the billboard appears to perform precisely the opposite function of myth; After all, isn’t it calling into question something which “mainstream” science simply acknowledges as “a statement of fact?” Well, yes… and no. Barthes also reminds us that all is not as it appears in myth. He writes, “myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.” Similarly, these billboards clearly intend to question global warming, and to associate this view with various serial killers, dictators, and cult leaders. Nothing is hidden here. The mythic component, however, operates at a higher order: It is the underlying assumption, as Barthes suggests, which inflects the meaning of the billboard for the passerby.

By including Kaczynski, the billboard presents global warming as pathological rather than political. At least in American popular discourse, his actions represent those of a sick and demented mind, rather than a politically motivated individual (despite the vast amount of evidence that the “Unabomber” saw himself as utterly political). By extension, then, anyone who subscribes to the idea of man-made climate change must also be experiencing some form of mental illness.

Curiously, in his critique of the billboard campaign, Andrew Sullivan merely inverts the main characters, reproducing the same myth. After carefully pointing out how the Heartland Foundation has rendered “the left” as some monolithic bloc of mentally deranged psychopaths for believing in global warming, Sullivan concludes: “Large sections of the American right are now close to insane as well as depraved. And there is no Buckley to reign them in. Just countless Jonah Golbergs seeking to cash in.” Here, he reduces the conservative audience towards whom these billboards are aimed to a mob of mentally deranged subjects.

What, then, does this analysis of political squabbling accomplish? Well, employing Barthes’ lens exposes contemporary American politics as pathological, even bipolar. Each side deploys the language of pathology in order to construct an “other” that is neither political nor rational (perhaps not even human), but ill or evil. This strategy insulates one’s position from critique, as it simultaneously depoliticizes the issue (in this case global warming). “Something must be wrong with those people,” we say.

Taking the attitude that “you can’t reason with a crazy person,” however, seems troubling to me, as I look out on a world filled with violence, suffering, and increasingly concentrated undemocratic power in the form of transnational corporations. Democracy, I was always taught, requires that we accord human dignity to others, even those with whom we disagree politically. It demands that we take our adversaries as thinking individuals; it asks that we assume that they, despite our differences, believe that they have the best interests of society at hand, and finally, it challenges us to engage in reasoned debate with one another to establish the grounds for practical solutions. Contemporary political actors on all sides instead engage in competing forms of myth-making, designed to dehumanize the opposition and depoliticize the issues.

Of course, Barthes might claim that I am merely constructing a myth of my own, one that naturalizes all humans as reasonable and well-intentioned. But as he states, “the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology.”

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4 big myths of Book of Revelation

religionnerd — Wed, 02 May 2012 12:50:15 +0000

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By John Blake, CNN Belief Blog

(CNN) – The anti-Christ. The Battle of Armageddon. The dreaded Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

You don’t have to be a student of religion to recognize references from the Book of Revelation. The last book in the Bible has fascinated readers for centuries. People who don’t even follow religion are nonetheless familiar with figures and images from Revelation.

And why not? No other New Testament book reads like Revelation. The book virtually drips with blood and reeks of sulfur. At the center of this final battle between good and evil is an action-hero-like Jesus, who is in no mood to turn the other cheek.

Elaine Pagels, one of the world’s leading biblical scholars, first read Revelation as a teenager. She read it again in writing her latest book, “Revelations: Visions, Prophecy & Politics in the Book of Revelation.”

Pagels’ book is built around a simple question: What does Revelation mean? Her answers may disturb people who see the book as a prophecy about the end of the world.

But people have clashed over the meaning of Revelation ever since it was virtually forced into the New Testament canon over the protests of some early church leaders, Pagels says.

“There were always debates about it,” she says. “Some people said a heretic wrote it. Some said a disciple. There were always people who loved and championed it.”

The debate persists. Pagels adds to it by challenging some of the common assumptions about Revelation.

Here are what she says are four big myths about Revelation::

1. It’s about the end of the world

Anyone who has read the popular “Left Behind” novels or listened to pastors preaching about the “rapture” might see Revelation as a blow-by-blow preview of how the world will end.

Pagels, however, says the writer of Revelation was actually describing the way his own world ended.

She says the writer of Revelation may have been called John – the book is sometimes called “Book of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine” but he was not the disciple who accompanied Jesus. He was a devout Jew and mystic exiled on the island of Patmos, off the coast of present-day Greece.

“He would have been a very simple man in his clothes and dress,” Pagels says. “He may have gone from church to church preaching his message. He seems more like a traveling preacher or a prophet.”

The author of Revelation had experienced a catastrophe. He wrote his book not long after 60,000 Roman soldiers had stormed Jerusalem in 70 A.D., burned down its great temple and left the city in ruins after putting down an armed Jewish revolt.

For some of the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus, the destruction of Jerusalem was incomprehensible. They had expected Jesus to return “with power” and conquer Rome before inaugurating a new age. But Rome had conquered Jesus’ homeland instead.

The author of Revelation was trying to encourage the followers of Jesus at a time when their world seemed doomed. Think of the Winston Churchill radio broadcasts delivered to the British during the darkest days of World War II.

Revelation was an anti-Roman tract and a piece of war propaganda wrapped in one. The message: God would return and destroy the Romans who had destroyed Jerusalem.

“His primary target is Rome,” Pagels says of the book’s author. “He really is deeply angry and grieved at the Jewish war and what happened to his people.”

2. The numerals 666 stand for the devil

The 1976 horror film “The Omen” scared a lot of folks. It may have scared some theologians, too, who began encountering people whose view of Revelation comes from a Hollywood movie.

“The Omen” depicted the birth and rise of the “anti-Christ,” the cunning son of Satanwho would be known by “the mark of the beast,” 666, on his body.

Here’s the passage from Revelation that “The Omen” alluded to: “This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six.”

Good movies, though, don’t always make good theology. Most people think 666 stands for an anti-Christ-like figure that will deceive humanity and trigger a final battle between good and evil. Some people think he’s already here.

Pagels, however, says the writer of Revelation didn’t really intend 666 as the devil’s digits. He was describing another incarnation of evil: The Roman emperor, Nero.

The arrogant and demented Nero was particularly despised by the earliest followers of Jesus, including the writer of Revelation. Nero was said to have burned followers of Jesus alive to illuminate his garden.

But the author of Revelation couldn’t safely name Nero, so he used the Jewish numerology system to spell out Nero’s imperial name, Pagels says.

Pagels says that John may have had in mind other meanings for the mark of the beast: the imperial stamp Romans used on official documents, tattoos authorizing people to engage in Roman business, or the images of Roman emperors on stamps and coins.

Since Revelation’s author writes in “the language of dreams and nightmares,” Pagels says it’s easy for outsiders to misconstrue the book’s original meaning.

Still, they take heart from Revelation’s larger message, she writes:

“…Countless people for thousands of years have been able to see their own conflicts, fears, and hopes reflected in his prophecies. And because he speaks from his convictions about divine justice, many readers have found reassurance in his conviction that there is meaning in history – even when he does not say exactly what that meaning is – and that there is hope.”

3. The writer of Revelation was a Christian

The author of Revelation hated Rome, but he also scorned another group – a group of people we would call Christians today, Pagels says.

There’s a common perception that there was a golden age of Christianity, when most Christians agreed on an uncontaminated version of the faith. Yet there was never one agreed-upon Christianity. There were always clashing visions.

Revelation reflects some of those early clashes in the church, Pagels says.

That idea isn’t new territory for Pagels. She won the National Book Award for “The Gnostic Gospels,” a 1979 book that examined a cache of newly discovered “secret” gospels of Jesus. The book, along with other work from Pagels, argues that there were other accounts of Jesus’ life that were suppressed by early church leaders because it didn’t fit with their agenda.

The author of Revelation was like an activist crusading for traditional values. In his case, he was a devout Jew who saw Jesus as the messiah. But he didn’t like the message that the apostle Paul and other followers of Jesus were preaching.

This new message insisted that gentiles could become followers of Jesus without adopting the requirements of the Torah. It accepted women leaders, and intermarriage with gentiles, Pagels says.

The new message was a lot like what we call Christianity today.

That was too much for the author of Revelation. At one point, he calls a woman leader in an early church community a “Jezebel.” He calls one of those gentile-accepting churches a “synagogue of Satan.”

John was defending a form of Christianity that would be eclipsed by the Christians he attacked, Pagels says.

“What John of Patmos preached would have looked old-fashioned – and simply wrong to Paul’s converts…,” she writes.

The author of Revelation was a follower of Jesus, but he wasn’t what some people would call a Christian today, Pagels says.

“There’s no indication that he read Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount or that he read the gospels or Paul’s letters,” she says. “….He doesn’t even say Jesus died for your sins.”

4. There is only one Book of Revelation

There’s no other book in the Bible quite like Revelation, but there are plenty of books like Revelation that didn’t make it into the Bible, Pagels says.

Early church leaders suppressed an “astonishing” range of books that claimed to be revelations from apostles such as Peter and James. Many of these books were read and treasured by Christians throughout the Roman Empire, she says.

There was even another “Secret Revelation of John.” In this one, Jesus wasn’t a divine warrior, but someone who first appeared to the apostle Paul as a blazing light, then as a child, an old man and, some scholars say, a woman.

So why did the revelation from John of Patmos make it into the Bible, but not the others?

Pagels traces that decision largely to Bishop Athanasius, a pugnacious church leader who championed Revelation about 360 years after the death of Jesus.

Athanasius was so fiery that during his 46 years as bishop he was deposed and exiled five times. He was primarily responsible for shaping the New Testament while excluding books he labeled as hearsay, Pagels says.

Many church leaders opposed including Revelation in the New Testament. Athanasius’s predecessor said the book was “unintelligible, irrational and false.”

Athanasius, though, saw Revelation as a useful political tool. He transformed it into an attack ad against Christians who questioned him.

Rome was no longer the enemy; those who questioned church authority were the anti-Christs in Athanasius’s reading of Revelation, Pagels says.

“Athanasius interprets Revelation’s cosmic war as a vivid picture of his own crusade against heretics and reads John’s visions as a sharp warning to Christian dissidents,” she writes. “God is about to divide the saved from the damned – which now means dividing the ‘orthodox’ from ‘heretics.’ ’’

Centuries later, Revelation still divides people. Pagels calls it the strangest and most controversial book in the Bible.

Even after writing a book about it, Pagels has hardly mastered its meaning.

“The book is the hardest one in the Bible to understand,” Pagels says. “I don’t think anyone completely understands it.”

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We Are All Nuns

religionnerd — Tue, 01 May 2012 12:24:07 +0000

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By Mary E. Hunt, Religion Dispatches

When it comes to the Vatican’s crackdown on women religious, I believe it’s time to declare that for the purpose of this struggle: we are all nuns.

The mandate by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to reform the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) via the appointment of an Archbishop Delegate to bring the nuns back in line—below and behind the bishops—has outraged those who respect its rich legacy.

If you can spell Catholic, you are probably asking: how dare they go after 57,000 dedicated women whose median age is well over 70 and who work tirelessly for a more just world? How dare the very men who preside over a Church in utter disgrace due to sexual misconduct and cover-ups by bishops try to distract from their own problems by creating new ones for women religious?

While this story is focused on nuns, it doesn’t stop there. Flowery medieval rhetoric by the Vatican about the nuns’ “special place in the Church,” and the ﬁction that religious women have “full participation in all aspects of the Church’s life” (while ordination is still for men only—come on!) make the dictum especially pernicious.

But it’s really about all of the laity, especially women, who see the world in terms of needs we can fulﬁll, not power we can hold; of radical equality, not hierarchy; of the many, not the few.

Delicate Souls

So, what happened?

Apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back was the collaboration of the Catholic social justice lobby NETWORK, founded forty years ago by 47 nuns from two dozen communities, and the Catholic Hospital Association in supporting the Obama health care plan.

More progressive feminist Catholics, myself included, rued the fact that the plan did not cover the full spectrum of reproductive health care—including abortion. Nevertheless, the pragmatic nuns offered bona ﬁde Catholic support for the proposal as written, over and against the US bishops who, to this writing, continue to oppose the legislation because it includes coverage for contraception without enough exemptions to satisfy them.

The fact that President Barack Obama and members of Congress took the nuns to be normatively Catholic—or at least as Catholic as the bishops—was just more than the delicate souls in Rome could stand.

This latest mandate to reform the LCWR—indeed to put it out of business—has been in the works for years. In a process that began in 2008, the “doctrinal assessment,” as it is known, was aimed at investigating the “serious doctrinal problems which affect many in Consecrated Life.” In the face of wars in several parts of the world, ecological crises throughout the planet, and severe economic injustice, it is morally embarrassing that the Vatican chooses to spend its time on such trivia. But given that the result is aimed at some of the very people whose lives are dedicated to peace making, Earth enhancement, and economic sharing, it is worth clarifying what is at stake.

The crux of the matter, as it were, is that most of the nuns, like many Catholics, have matured beyond the Vatican’s imaginings. The notion that postmodern Catholics assent to “the doctrine of the faith that has been revealed by God in Jesus Christ, presented in written form in the divinely inspired Scriptures, and handed on in the Apostolic Tradition under the guidance of the Church’s Magisterium,” (or, simply, the fathers know best) is simply ludicrous. As one observer asked me, “What Bible do they read?”

The truth is, most Catholics no longer look to Rome for guidance on our personal lives, or anyone else’s. Nor do we live within the narrow conﬁnes of a cultic Christianity, or, as women, accept male leadership and priestly ministry as if theirs were God-given and ours were not. We appreciate the complexity of these matters and strive to create forums in which to listen, discuss, discern, and pray.

In short, our ways of being are as different from the Vatican’s as are our views.

The Vatican knows this, is not pleased, but can’t do much about it. It is trying to put LCWR in the untenable position of having its every conference, publication, and public utterance subject to episcopal veto. The real aim, in my reading of the situation, is to replace LCWR with the Council of Major Superiors of Women (CMSW), a group of conservative, habit-wearing, bishop-obeying nuns that Rome has been cultivating all along. That group’s blueprint for religious life is expressed in The Foundations of Religious Life: Revisiting the Vision, a volume that reads like Vatican ofﬁcials wrote it. Perhaps they did. Although what is more disturbing is that the Vatican has set women up against one another. Conservative women religious collaborated on the Apostolic Visitation and will be appointed to the Archbishop Delegate’s Advisory Team.

The effort to rein in LCWR is meant as much to scare the rest of us into line as to corral the nuns. I can say with conﬁdence that it won’t work.

Roman Catholic Church history is unfolding before our eyes. The difference these days is that tactics Rome employs are transparent. Just as Archbishop William E. Lori was recently rewarded for his work on contraception and “religious liberty” by being named bishop of Baltimore (and will likely become a cardinal soon) we can predict that Archbishop Delegate Peter Sartain of Seattle who is doing this work on behalf of Rome has already had his head measured for a new hat.

Catholics schooled in the ways of justice—largely by the nuns—recoil at the power play this mandate represents. Three things are especially repugnant. First, there is no real discussion. The Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Cardinal William Levada asserts that “the ﬁrst step in the implementation of the ﬁndings” is a personal meeting “in a spirit of mutual respect and collaboration.” This is rather fanciful since the LCWR leaders who received the document were not at all sure it was coming. They went to Rome with the intention of engaging in dialogue, not being presented with a fait accompli.

Second, this move seems like an effort to cut off the head of lay people in the Church, beginning with the nuns. The Vatican acknowledges, “the inﬂuence the LCWR exercises on religious Congregations in other parts of the world.” Add to that its political inﬂuence in the US and the hydra that is LCWR was ripe for beheading.

I insist on the larger lay component of this chapter in church history because groups like Women-Church Convergence and Catholic Organizations for Renewal represent far more progressive theo-politics than LCWR. Because those groups and others like them are canonically independent of the Vatican they simply can’t be touched, but they are no less Catholic. LCWR was punished for associating with such groups, including Women’s Ordination Conference, New Ways Ministry, and others of “radical feminism” of my intimate acquaintance. Efforts to squelch LCWR are simultaneously efforts to discredit those groups.

And finally, there’s the current “war on women,” with Catholic bishops leading the charge. In the U.S., it is manifest in the skirmishes around reproductive rights. Young and poor women suffer greatly, but all women are implicated in these policy conflicts. Around the world, we find the Vatican successfully making alliances with other religious fundamentalists to prevent UN-based consensus on women’s reproductive health care. Casualties are many among poor and young women, the very ones the nuns would protect. So it is no surprise that the same bellicose ways operate within the kyriarchal church itself.

The question is how to stop the cycle of violence, how to refuse to cooperate in structures that oppress, how to “engage impasse” as some of the most creative nuns have tried to do.

LCWR will ﬁnd its way with a great deal of support and solidarity from the rest of us lay Catholics and those clergymen who are able to distance themselves from the hierarchy. Likewise if the Apostolic Visitation results are similar to the LCWR debacle, I predict that the individual communities will also ﬁgure out strategies for moving forward.

I am less sure that the Vatican will recover.

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NASA, the Mayan Apocalypse, and the Study of Non-Events

religionnerd — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 11:17:01 +0000

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By Matt Sheedy, Religion Bulletin

A recent article posted on the Scientific American website entitled, “NASA Crushes 2012 Mayan Apocalypse Claims,” provides a good example of what is wrong with common secular approaches to religion in the public sphere. The article features a three-minute video put out by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where spokesperson Don Yeoman discusses “false claims about the Mayan apocalypse,” including fears that we will fall prey to solar flares, tidal effects or, even more fantastically, that the “imaginary planet Nibiru, will collide with earth,” a premise that, he notes with a chuckle, is impossible, for if it were true “we would have seen it long ago.” All things considered we can rest assured, the article’s author tells us, that this is a “non-event.”

While happily affirming the logic of these scientific claims, it is worth considering what type of social ontology this line of reasoning suggests. Among other things, this hermeneutic works through a binary logic where the actions or claims of an individual or group are measured solely on the basis of whether they are able to follow and assent to certain logical propositions about evidence-based reality regarding the workings of the natural world. What is concealed here are the ways in which this strategy serves to privilege a particular method of reasoning and system of knowledge production, while excluding the larger social field of political, historical, and cultural explanations that also contribute to seemingly bizarre claims.

Although the implications of this kind of taxonomy may appear relatively benign when classifying those who believe in the Mayan apocalypse, it is worth recalling how a similar taxonomy was deployed by the “New Atheists” in their classification of religion (especially Islam), where large groups of people from different countries, cultures, etc., were often reduced to the category of irrational social actors in need of our help, be it through forceful arguments or, failing that, through bombs raining down from the sky.

A more fruitful approach to phenomena like the Mayan apocalypse is one that begins with social practices as the primary site of investigation and expands outward towards other convergent ideas, be they historical, political, cognitive, or what have you. For example, Kate Dailey-Baley’s recent post, “Theorizing Zombies” looks at the ways in which Haitian zombies and the American zombie apocalypse genre are tied to 1) a history of colonial and racial oppression and 2) a culture of fear amidst economic troubles and the War on Terror. While this general approach is no doubt familiar to many of us, it is worth considering its value not only in the world of scholarship, but also as an alternative to more popular secular discourses about religion in the public sphere. While not discounting cognitive explanations like those offered by Yeoman, this approach has the additional merit of showing how seemingly irrational beliefs and practices must be explained not only in terms of individual minds, but also in relation to larger social forces that implicate society as a whole, thus making explicit the fact that we are all in the soup together.

At the risk of sounding apologetic, in this year of 2012, where increased public attention on the theme of apocalypse is on the rise, it is also worth considering how this so-called “non-event” offers scholars of religion an opportunity to contribute to a broader public conversation, drawing attention, for example, to how fears of apocalypse are connected to other myths and narratives, both historically and in the present, how they are reflected in popular culture (e.g., Hollywood films), or how this interest in the Maya might be situated in relation to new age movements and the long-standing Western idealization of so-called “Eastern” and/or polytheistic traditions. In these frightening and uncertain times (read “under the yoke of neo-liberal economic policies”), this may be just the kind of publicity that the academic study of religion needs to help save it from what looks to some like the dawn of our own impending doom!

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Good Friday Christianity

religionnerd — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 22:50:00 +0000

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Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., Huff Post

One of the least remarked aspects of the early Christian reporting of Jesus’s death by crucifixion is the following:

Jesus let out a great cry and expired. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom Seeing this, the centurion who was standing near him when he expired said “Truly, this man was the Son of God.” (Mark 15: 37-39)

Make no mistake about the implications here: a Roman soldier presiding over this ghastly execution was converted to the correct view about Jesus by observing the way he died, not by seeing him raised from death. There was something about the death of Jesus that was unique, and even revelatory, according to Mark.

That was not Paul’s view of the matter, by all accounts. The epistolary Apostle goes so far as to say that if Jesus were not raised from death, then the Christian faith is literally nothing more than a vanity.

If there is no rising of the dead, then Christ has not been raised either; and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching has been vain and your faith has been vain. (First Corinthians 15: 13-14)

The consensus view is that Paul’s letters were written in the mid-to late 50s, whereas Mark’s Gospel was written right around 70 C.E., after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple by centurions very much like the one he describes observing Jesus’s death.

Some important implications of this dating are the following. It could be the case that Mark was responding directly to Paul’s claims in this letter. It could be the case that he had never heard Paul speak, nor ever read this letter. It could be the case that Mark was responding to the kind of beliefs articulated by Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians, whether Paul was the original author of such views or simply one especially vocal proponent of them.

What is not in doubt is that the death of Jesus on a Roman cross represented a scandal with which all of his early followers had to deal. They dealt with it in many ways. We are witnessing a very significant fault-line here within the foundational texts of the New Testament, a fault-line that calls into question both the nature of Jesus’s death and its ultimate meaning. It’s a major theological parting of the ways, a parting easy to miss because it’s all contained in the same Scripture, point for point and book for book.

Let’s call it the parting of the ways between Good Friday Christianity and the Easter Sunday version.

Other Gospel writers tried to split the difference between these two versions, the one emphasizing the revelatory power of Jesus’s death versus the other emphasizing the revelatory power of being raised from death. According to Matthew, a number of “saints” were raised from their graves in the same moment that the Temple curtain split and Jesus expired; it was the vision of tombs opening that caused the centurion to draw his dramatic conclusion abut Jesus (Matthew 27: 52-54). According to Luke, when the centurion saw Jesus breath his last, he concluded that the Roman authorities had made a mistake: “Surely this man was innocent!” (Luke 23:47), he says.

Because of all this confusion over the details of Jesus’s dying and rising, it is worth taking a closer look at Mark’s brand of Good Friday Christianity. It presents us with a shattering vision, in every way.

It all began in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the night when Jesus’s ministry begins to come unraveled. We are told that Judas had decided to betray his teacher, and Jesus clearly has some sense of this as well. He prays to God, reminding his heavenly father than anything is possible to God, even delivering him from the coming trial. He begs to be so delivered; he is not. Instead, the disciples he asked to stand guard and stand their ground fail him. First they fall asleep, three times; later they flee. Jesus, suddenly powerless, is swallowed up by an imposing crowd and spirited away. His disciples will not see him again.

Jesus was tortured physically and emotionally, humiliated in a way that far exceeds the merits of the case or the normal practices of Roman centurions in their provinces. Mark spares no detail, no matter how horrible. Utterly abandoned and alone, Jesus is even mocked by the two men who were crucified alongside of him; this is another of those details that is easy to miss, but horrible to imagine. (Luke could not stomach this; in his version, one man mocks Jesus, whereas the other defends him, and Jesus promises that they will meet later in paradise, Luke 23: 43). Jesus’s final words are a quotation from Psalm 22, one of David’s purest anguish-songs: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Mark 15: 15:34). Then he expired (Luke couldn’t bear this detail either; in his version, Jesus’s last words are “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” Luke 23: 46).

Mark makes a point of telling us that Jesus’s disciples failed him repeatedly in the end, and failed even to be present at his death. This is shocking. Only some women who had followed him from the Galilee remained: Mary Magdalene, his mother Mary (she is called “the mother of James and Joses,” but since Mark earlier tells us that these were names of two of Jesus’ brothers, Mark 6:3, this seems like a coded reference to Jesus’s own mother), and Salome. These three women stand with Jesus until the end, then presumably also witnessed the centurion’s conversion to the correct view of things.

They also saw an unknown man who was favorably disposed to Jesus’s teaching, Joseph of Arimathea, take responsibility for Jesus’s corpse, and arrange for it to be buried in a nearby grave. That is why it was these three women who returned to that gravesite the next day to dress out Jesus’s body properly, as they had not had time to do the day before, in the whirl of violent Roman events.

That is when they find the stone at the mouth of the cave rolled away, and a mysterious man inside who informs them that “he is not here,” but rather has gone on ahead of them, returning to Galilee. They are ordered to return with this amazing news to the disciples, and especially to Peter, “but they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16: 8).

That is how Mark’s Gospel originally ended; all of the most ancient manuscripts end there. It isn’t the case that Mark doesn’t know of Jesus’s rising; in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus himself predicted it three times. Mark knows of the rising, but Mark does not want to show it to us. That’s Easter Sunday Christianity, not the Good Friday version. Mark’s Gospel is designed as a tragedy, and it ends as one.

(By the way, when Paul reminds his audience in Corinth that he has reported what was reported to him, he makes no mention of these three women. According to Paul, Jesus appeared after his rising to Peter, then to the twelve [whether this included Judas is not clear], then to five hundred people all at once, then to James, then to all the apostles, and then in the end, to Paul himself on the Damascus road, First Corinthians 15:3-8).

Of course the main question is, Why? Mark’s Jesus expires with that question on his lips. Why would Mark tell the story this way? Who is he trying to convince? And how could he think this brutal story would be convincing to anyone?

There are several answers to this question, but the first one Mark answers pretty clearly in the passage with which I began. Mark thinks this way of telling Jesus’s story, the Good Friday version, will be convincing to Romans. The centurion who witnessed Jesus’s death did not need to see his rising to be convinced. Jesus’ death convinced him. The Roman audience Mark had in mind was schooled on Greek tragedy, and was very familiar with the idea that certain kinds of outrageous suffering can actually be redeeming. Salvation, in these peoples’s view, was through suffering, not from it.

Jesus’s unique suffering is what Mark urges us to consider, and never to forget.

If you tell the story of Good Friday merely as a prelude to Easter morning, then it is impossible to feel its raw power. Mark takes us as close to catastrophe and the heart of human suffering as a writer can go. Mark leaves us there, insists that we look more closely at the details of the thing. Really he is trying to make us feel it, ever and anew. That seems to be what the yearly commemoration of Jesus’s dying meant to Mark and his followers. And clearly, his Gospel is also a warning to anyone who confidently concludes that martyrdom is the surest path for the follower of Jesus to secure salvation. It was not easy for Jesus, Mark insists; it will be not any easier for you. All of Jesus’s disciples failed him in the end, every one. Romanticizing death, whether Jesus’ or his followers’, is the most tragic mistake the Christian community can make, in Mark’s judgment.

Good Friday Christianity was one important aspect of the early Christian movement, and it remains an important undercurrent in many more contemporary representations of Christian witness. Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke in these tragic tones when imprisoned by the Nazis; he wrote some remarkable letters in the Good Friday spirit before he was killed in prison. Dr. Martin Luthe King Jr. Preached a remarkable sermon in the spirit of Good Friday the night before he was assassinated. Cornel West, echoing his amanuensis, has made Good Friday Christianity, spiced with a liberal dose of his tragicomic blues sensibility, the very centerpiece of an activist, Afro-American Gospel. Such a liturgical sense of the Gospel’s tragic heart is alive and well in the Greek church, these days more than most.

Good Friday is celebrated — or rather, commemorated — in somber ritual tones in churches the world over, for the western churches it takes place this week, and for the eastern churches on the next. Mark is its premier evangelist. On Good Friday, if on any day, it is Mark’s shattered and shattering Gospel that demands close Christian attention, before we move up and away from it to the joyous epiphany of Sunday morning. Good Friday Christianity puts the agony in the ecstasy, insisting that there is no other way.

4 big myths of Book of Revelation By John Blake, CNN Belief Blog (CNN) – The anti-Christ. The Battle of Armageddon. The dreaded Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. You don’t have to be a student of religion to recognize references from the Book of Revelation. The last book in the Bible has ...
The Christian—Pagan Mix-and-Match Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University After Christmas and Easter, what’s the most important Christian holiday? It’s not really a very Protestant question—since you need saints and Mary, and the whole ritual calendar they entail, to pose it—and even in the ...

Not All Choice is Free: Why demand religious exemption for contraception, but not the death penalty, torture, or unjust war?

religionnerd — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:20:58 +0000

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By Louis A. Ruprecht, Religion Dispatches

On November 2, 1984, Velma Barfield became the first woman to be executed in the U.S. since 1962, and the first to be executed in the State of North Carolina after the nationwide moratorium on the death penalty was lifted in 1976. She was 52 years old.

For those of us who had worked on her clemency petition, it was a devastating blow. Then-Governor Jim Hunt was running for a seat in the US Senate against arch-conservative Jesse Helms. Inexplicably, Barfield’s clemency hearing had been scheduled just six days prior to the election. Helms made it a campaign issue, of course, suggesting that, were the Governor to grant Barfield clemency, then his true liberal stripes would be clear to everyone.

By contrast, even the staff at the Women’s Prison in Raleigh had written in support of Barfield’s petition; her work in counseling and religious instruction behind bars even earned her praise from the likes of Billy Graham. Everyone agreed there was no stronger clemency case on death row in the state.

But the governor’s peremptory meeting with those who presented the clemency petition lasted little more than half an hour, and it was clear to us that his mind was already made up.

The Barfield execution came back to life in the following spring, in the form of a letter from an eloquent if quirky citizen of the State of North Carolina; one who was opposed to the death penalty for religious reasons. He had calculated the approximate cost of executing Velma Barfield—not just the lethal injection, but the years of legal wrangling as well. According to his calculations, and given the current population of the state, exactly one cent of his own tax payment had been used to execute Velma Barfield—so he enclosed a check to the North Carolina State Tax Commissioner for 1984, in which he had withheld that suspect penny.

As you might imagine, the state took a different view, taking issue especially with this self-imposed tax break. Their point was that you do not get to pick and choose which state services you are willing to pay for, not even for religious reasons.

Especially not for religious reasons, since there are so very many of them.

The cash-strapped State of North Carolina spent a lot more than one cent to get that penny back. As they should have done, though this citizen’s symbolic point had been made quite eloquently by then.

No Picking and Choosing

I have returned many times to that story as I have listened to Catholic churches, Catholic institutions from hospitals to universities, and two Catholic presidential candidates all insist on what that poor guy from North Carolina was asking for: a religious exemption from paying for state services to which he was opposed on moral and religious grounds.

The state’s answer was simple in the spring of 1985: you don’t get to pick and choose the services you pay for, regardless of the reason.

This case raises an issue of considerably sharper interest, I think, given the Catholic Church’s consistent opposition to the death penalty, to preemptive wars (especially those conducted primarily through interdiction), to abortion, and now, we are told, to contraception.

So why has there never been a similar stink about Catholic exemptions from death penalty provisions? Why no such tax withholding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And why is the state bending over backwards to accommodate these religious sentiments about contraception, rather than some others?

One explanation might be historical: what a difference a generation makes. After thirty years of hammering away at the need for the secular state to accommodate religious objections to virtually every damn thing it does, the state is backpedaling and the Church is on the offensive. From 1979 to 2012, politicized Christianity isn’t just taking its place at the table, it’s trying to rewrite the menu. Anti-feminism has loomed large in that effort.

Clerical Hysteria

Which brings me to a second explanation, one that is not historical so much as it is hysterical. I mean that quite literally.

Hysteria is a term that derives from the Greek word for the uterus, and this is indeed a battle over women’s uteruses: over what goes in them and what stays out. The death penalty and international warfare simply do not energize the sex-obsessed American electorate the way that women’s sexual autonomy does.

What is the problem with contraception? It enables women to be sexually active without paying the price, as it were; the massive biological and sociological and personal costs that may come with unwanted pregnancy and bringing such pregnancies to term.

The end of the sexual act is procreation, from the Catholic perspective; sexual pleasure or expressions of love and affection are not legitimate ends if they are detached from the procreative intention. Contraception enacts that detachment. Moreover, by separating the sexual act from the intention of conception, contraception encourages women’s sexual promiscuity—so goes the Catholic thinking.

Rush Limbaugh’s tirade to this effect, for all of its bile, well describes what is at stake in this debate, for some people. The fact that men’s sexual promiscuity does not register as a concern of equal standing for such persons is itself quite telling.

To my eye, the most significant thing that has happened between 1979 and 2012 has been the significant and at times studied erosion of feminist achievements in mandatory, state-sanctioned equality. I’m talking about the basics here, the principal First and Second Wave achievements:

political equality, symbolized by a woman’s right to vote and to hold political office; and

economic equality, symbolized by the ideal, if not the reality, of equal pay for equal work.

But when the sexual equality of men and women is at issue—not sexual sameness, let’s be clear about that, just sexual equality—then the howling starts, and churches start withholding their money and support.

The debate is, in this sense, hysterical. And there’s a pretty simple solution to it. If you want to run as a Catholic hospital or a Catholic university and not offer the full array of health care services to women as mandated by the state, then don’t implicate yourself in any federal or state funding. Not one penny.

All the World a Stage

Now, I admit that this argument must seem overdrawn at first glance. There seems to be a fundamental difference between a citizen and/or organization withholding taxes for state services with which they do not wish to be identified, and a citizen and/or organization being asked to provide those services themselves.

The problem is that this creates a false distinction between the state as an actor and people as actors. State services are, all of them, provided by organizations and by people. Catholic institutions are claiming an exemption from the obligation to provide such services because they are religiously opposed to them. They are engaging in a selective opt-out, just like the guy from North Carolina.

I am not convinced that any of the charities, hospitals or universities involved in this debate are truly independent religious institutions that receive no federal dollars. An institution’s tax exempt status alone casts that into grave doubt. And these institutions seem not to recognize that one way for the state to insist on its way, and for them to gain their administrative freedom, would be to abrogate that curious tax exemption for an institution as wealthy as the Catholic Church in a time of real fiscal crisis. But clearly, this would lend itself to the very Big Brother vision of the federal government that created this controversy in the first place.

Instead, President Obama, ever the patient compromiser, attempted to create a new distinction, one of limited practical usefulness but great symbolic value, suggesting that insurance providers would be paying for these services, not the institutions themselves.

And that is when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, sensing weakness, intensified its position, indicating that it is not just opposed to being asked to pay for such services, but that any of the Catholics for whom they speak would be asked to provide them. This is fascinating; the Catholic Bishops now appear to be claiming the right to opt out of anyprograms with which they disagree. Here is their response to the president’s proposed compromise, in their words:

[this] continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions.

It’s not just about the money; it’s about Big Brother. And so:

We will therefore continue—with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency—our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government.

So the problem is not with government per se, just with the president. This is why it is so rhetorically critical for them to refer to “Obamacare” rather than the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” thereby conveniently forgetting that this was a law passed by the Legislative branch of the US Government, not an Executive Order.

Now, it is perfectly within the Bishops’ rights to petition the US Congress to change a law, or even to vacate it and to start over, as it is their right to question the constitutionality of a law in the courts.

But that is why I began with the story from North Carolina. The question that should be asked is why the US Catholic Bishops are exerting so much energy and money and time on the matter of contraception, with no similarly public cries of outrage against the death penalty, state-sponsored torture, or the two preemptive wars in which the U.S. has involved itself for fully a decade.

Clearly there is a lot more to this debate than the First Amendment. It has to do with one of the most powerful patriarchal religious organizations in the world—be sure to recall that the bishops are all men, every last one of them—placing itself squarely in opposition to women’s sexual equality and autonomy.

SLUT By Maureen Dempsey, RNC-OB Just what exactly is a slut? According to Rush Limbaugh, because Sandra Fluke thinks that all insurance providers – even those with a religious objection – should provide coverage for contraception, she is a slut. “She wants ...
We Are All Nuns By Mary E. Hunt, Religion Dispatches When it comes to the Vatican’s crackdown on women religious, I believe it’s time to declare that for the purpose of this struggle: we are all nuns. The mandate by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the ...

Religion Lately: Jedi Training Camps and Marian Visions in Texas, Gay-ing Dead Mormons, & St. Valentine was a Pagan Too?

religionnerd — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 23:24:46 +0000

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By Kenny Smith, Emory University

In Austin, Texas, yet another “Jedi Camp”offers training for youngsters. In San Francisco, adult Jedi demonstrate advanced light-saber fighting skills. Exactly how much Jedi-based social production does it take to constitute a “religious movement,” anyway?

Down the road in Houston, neighbors continue to bring devotional offerings to an oak tree in one man’s yard, in which they claim to see the Virgin Mary. Fortunately, said resident has no plans to take the tree down and violate their religious freedom to come onto his property.

While the Church of Later-Day Saints of Jesus Christ has been busy baptizing dead Jews (such as Anne Frank) into Mormonism (and apologize for it), one website offers to make dead Mormons gay, since “sadly, many Mormons throughout history have died without knowing the joys of homosexuality.”

Glenn Beck, apparently, now self-identifies as Catholic as well as Mormon, since “Catholic” means “a person of faith” who stands up to government oppression.

Verging on incoherence, a spokesperson for the Santorum campaign temporarily denounced President Obama’s “radical Islamic environmental policies.” Speaking of which, one (billionaire) Santorum supporter argues for a more traditional and cost-effective solution to the contraception-debate: “have girls put an aspirin between their legs,” while one longtime evangelical (Chuck Colson) compares government requirements to provide insurance coverage for contraception to Nazi attempts to exterminate the Jews.

In Sweden, a self-identified vampire and cannibal are to be married, presided over by a priest form the Church of Satan, despite the fact that both are “permanently confined to the high-security Karsuddens psychiatric facility for crimes that shocked the country.”

One state legislator in Delaware is said to have taken a knee and “Tebowed” after his sponsored bill passed successfully through the chamber.

Seven members of Michigan’s Hutaree militia are on trial for conspiring to kill a police officer (and bomb his funeral procession). Defense attorneys, though, argue that the Hutaree were preparing for war against the biblical anti-Christ, not the federal government. Since when did militias draw this fine of a distinction?

At the Monroe Institute in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, ordinary folk learn to tap the mind’s hidden powers, up to and including voyages out of the body.

While half way between the celebration of pre-Christian, spring-based holidays such as Imbolc (Feb. 2) and Ostara (March 21), modern-day Pagans and Wiccans recall the pagan roots of St. Valentine’s Day.

For busy Christians on the go, some churches offer Ash Wednesday drive-throughs, while others bring the sacred ritual out into the streets. Elsewhere, this same approach is being tried out by funeral parlors, with drive-through viewings of loved ones, though not so much the “bring the viewings out in the street.”

In one northern Italian town, wives have forbidden their husbands from patronizing a new brand of racy coffee bars offering “sexpressos.”

The son of Hollywood director Oliver Stone is said to have converted to Islam (as a Shiite, not a Suni), and plans to make a film (to be shot in Iran) about the 13^th century Sufi poet Rumi.

In North Carolina, some Baptists are arguing against a constitutional amendment that would rule out the possibility of same-sex marriages.

In Tennessee, “a former FBI agent who claims mosques in nearby Nashville, Tenn., have no legal right to exist” has been hired to train local police “about Islam and the threats of terrorism.” Sounds fair and balanced to me.

It’s been two weeks, and Niki Minaji’s performance at the Grammys, “in which she confessed to a priest in Anglican dogcollar, was tied to a Catherine wheel, danced with some scantily clad altar boys, knelt in prayer and, at last, was exorcized,” is still surreal.

Religion Lately: Extraterrestrial Christs and Jedi Blues, Salem Witches Counter Tebow-Magic, Domestic-Violence Video Games By Kenny Smith, Emory University Explore artistic renditions of Christ-figures blended with the extraterrestrial, technological, and trans-human. Star Visitor theology, anyone? A journalist ponders the odds of extraterrestrial encounters, arguing that UFO-based religions require as much faith as any other. Rev. Ed ...
Religion Lately: Transhumanism, Rise of the “Preppers,” & Apocalypse Tomorrow, Surf Now! By Kenny Smith, Emory University Unsatisfied with an average lifespan of 70 odd years? Consider the emerging tradition of Transhumanism which seeks to convince traditional religions to open their minds (and souls) to fusion with the technological.
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See, for example, ...

Mourning John Hick: One of the Greatest Theologians of Our Time

religionnerd — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 22:43:28 +0000

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By Joe Winkler, Huff Post

With a deep sadness in my heart, I write of the recently deceased Christian theologian John Hick. I feel utterly unqualified to provide a proper eulogy, or even the requisite encomium for one of the 20th centuries most important religious thinkers. Given his impact on my religious personality and thought I can only express my immense gratitude towards this insightful thinker. Hick, in his books, interviews, articles and essays, not only clarified numerous theological issues including pluralism, eschatology and the truth of scripture, all in the light of modern thinking, but just the way he thought, his methodology: infused with generosity, reason, and a fullness of spirit continues to serve as a model. He taught instead of preached; he lived his life according to a well thought out system of principles, and worked hard to heal the wounds from a breakdown in interfaith communications. Hick freed so many of us from the chains of our dogma to embrace our fellow human beings.

I first stumbled upon Hick, as I floundered, drowning in a sea of swirling existential, philosophical and theological questions that grew from the intersection of a rigorous Judaic studies program coupled with an entrenchment in the leftist leaning, atheistic bent of a strongly liberal literary education. I began to doubt some of the deepest religious certainties of my life. I found little to bridge the gaps between a world suffused with the divine, and the literary world, disenchanted, drained of any trace of transcendence. I sought, in vain, answers from past theologians, regardless of religion, but found little resolution or solace in these writers. Then I found Hick. Hick wrote with a complete transparency as to his methods and assumptions, which allows you to follow the process of his prodigious thought as he struggled with his own religious belief. He sought to merge the never-ending questioning of philosophy with the religious assumptions of theology, an endeavor, in my opinion, in which he achieved important results. Though a consummate academic, Hick shunned dense, prohibitive prose and sought instead to write with clarity on the most complex topics including a trenchant and persistent analysis of theodicy. He did not write from the perch of a sermon, nor did he write from the defensiveness of an apologetic. He simply wrote from a dedicated personal vision, a well thought out sysem that attempted to account for both the aspirations and ambivalence of religion. Hick never shunned controversy, instead he hewed to the truth, regardless of the consequences, unafraid to say, “Even Jesus was fallible.”

Hick, a prolific writer, wrote on immortality, the metaphors of religion, faith and doubt, eschatology, but importantly for me, he wrote extensively on one of the essential problems of religious belief today, the problem of choice. The more I read and experienced, the further I empathized with the lives of other people. I grew more compelled by new and different truths. As another prominent religious thinker, Charles Taylor writes, we live in an era in which religion presents itself as much of a choice as either another religion, or atheism. We no longer feel compelled by the fear of hell, but by the fear of a meaningless existence. Consequently, we are faced with the question of the mutually exclusive truths of particular religions. We all know, intuitively, that each religion must view itself as the true religion, otherwise, it undermines its ability to perpetuate itself. However, in our age of exploration, where every lifestyle presents itself to us as, in the words of Wiliam James, “live options,” we must reconcile the conflicting claims of each religion. Hick, with eloquence and elegance achieves this goal. I hesitate to quote a writer as such great length, but his words speak better of him than anything I could write. Here Hick elucidates his vision of a the need for a pluralistic view of religion:

“Now given that the large majority of human beings are born and live, and always have lived, outside Christianity, does it make sense to think that it is God’s will that ‘Jesus shall reign where’er the sun does his successive journeys run’? … There are saints and sinners in more or less equal proportion within each of the great world faiths.

So I believe we have radically to rethink our understanding of the place of Christianity in the global religious picture. And we have to face the fact that it is one path amongst others, and then reform our belief-system to be compatible with this. This is the big new challenge that theologians and church leaders have yet to face. We have to become consciously what are called religious pluralists… Finally, this is not going to happen from the top down. Change comes from the grassroots. Many of us have friends of other faiths whom we greatly admire. We simply don’t believe that they are religiously disadvantaged, even though our official theologies imply that they must be. And in the end reality will inevitably prevail over traditional dogma — at least for all who are not encased in the impenetrable armour of a rigid fundamentalism. Why does all this matter? We only have to look at the state of the world to see why. The Catholic theologian Hans Kung has said that there will never be peace between the nations until there is peace between the religions. And I would add that there will never be genuine peace between the religions until each comes to recognise the equal validity of the others. Let us all do in our time what we can to bring this about.”

He walked a fine line between embracing the divine in life along with feeling guided by the plain, sensical skepticism we carry around because of life. He saw both sides, but still managed to live a religiously committed, humanistic, sensitive, rationally driven life. His example itself lent viability and relevancy to religion today.

To end on a more playful note, for Hick displayed a healthy sense of playfulness and humor, I recall one small story that makes me smile. Once I began reading Hick, I sought out one of the books he edited entitled “The Existence of God” to which he contributed an introduction and an essay. I searched for the book, to no avail, and I felt compelled to find it without the help of the Internet. Then, one day, traveling in Nowhere, Connecticut, on a camping trip I found a book sale filling a whole parking lot. There, hidden amongst thrown out books of yore, I found his book, beaten up, battered, cost: 50 cents. I brought it back to the woods and sat there reading his introduction in which he proceeds to tear to shreds the whole pretense of proving God through rational means, a slightly curious way to open up a book on the existence of God. But for me, therein lied the greatness of John Hick. Never what you expected, but always what you wanted. Thank you, John Hick. You are loved.

Follow Joe Winkler on Twitter: www.twitter.com/josephwinkler

4 big myths of Book of Revelation By John Blake, CNN Belief Blog (CNN) – The anti-Christ. The Battle of Armageddon. The dreaded Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. You don’t have to be a student of religion to recognize references from the Book of Revelation. The last book in the Bible has ...
Seeing the Lord’s Prayer in a New Light Controversial biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan finds in Jesus' words an evocation for 'distributive justice,' making sure all are cared for. By Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times Reporting from Santa Rosa — "Our father …" Most Christians can fill in the words ...

Religion Lately: Uller Fest, Atheist Religion , & Tim Tebow, Harbinger of Doom?

religionnerd — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:12:18 +0000

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By Kenny Smith, Emory University

In Breckenridge, Colorado, the town council passed a resolution allowing public consumption of alcoholic beverages for “Uller Fest,” a day-long celebration, complete with a bonfire, dedicated to Uller, the Norse god of snow.

Despite the positive effects of popular TV series such as Big Love, the Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon,” Jon Huntsman’s and Mitt Romney’s presidential bids, and a national public relations campaign, concerns have grown among Mormons about those who grow up and leave the church, as well as the inability to control information about LDS history (e.g., that Joseph Smith was a polygamist and defended this practice as divinely mandated). Mormons make up approximately 2% of the American population and nearly half feel that they are discriminated against on religious grounds, though are nonetheless optimistic about their future.

New research from the Pew Forum tracks changes in political preferences (since 2008) among the largest religious groups. Will Evangelicals support Mitt Romney, that is, a Mormon, for President? A smart piece in Rolling Stone looks to history to American history to figure this out.

With some 30 nations now possessing weapons of mass destruction, do we need a mega-dose of “let’s all just get along”? If so, does Tim Tebow signal our inevitable demise? One blogger argues that he does. Doomsday prophecies may seem depressing, but they make for excellent tourism.

In Philadelphia, Atheist organizations find that even the most innocuous advertisements anger some religious folk. Would it be easier if Atheists reframed their views as a religion? We may yet find out. One well-known British thinker has called for a new kind of Atheism, one that will “let atheists deny a creator and yet not forsake all the other good things religion can offer—tradition, ritual, community, insights into living a good life, the ability to experience transcendence, taking part in institutions that can change the world, and the rest,” including a magnificent Atheist Temple in the heart of London, and potentially other cities around the world as well. Is this the coming global religion? In Rhode Island, one Atheist teenager who protested a public display of religion in her school, now receives phone threats and needs a police escort to attend school.

In Rome, some reports have it that the mere public presence of the Pope exorcised demons from the possessed in attendance, and to dramatic effect. In the US., people pay good money for such services.

One author considers the possibility that an implicit Star Wars theology, learned from a young age by virtue of George Lucas’ films, has “ruined our lives.” Australian scholar Carole M. Cusack discusses her research in “invented religions” (such as Jediism) and why scholars should take them seriously. Listen here.

Want to grab your teammates’ asses after a dramatic play? Great, just don’t do it in Iran, where soccer players may face (quite literally) a public lashing for inappropriate touching. Yet another study finds that Muslims in the US and Canada do not want Sharia implemented as the law of the land.

In Indiana, state legislators passed a bill that would allow for religious creation accounts to be taught in public schools, including Scientology.

In Sacramento, CA, The Church of Scientology has opened a new center, and in doing so has completely renovated one of the city’s “finest surviving example of the Spanish Colonial Revival style,” the Ramona Hotel, which first opened in 1930. In Tampa, the Church of Scientology has come under criticism for suppression others’ freedom of speech, while cherishing its own.

In Atlanta, the controversial minister Eddie Long was wrapped in a Torah scroll by a Messianic Jewish Rabbi and proclaimed “King,” in a public ritual that seemed to offend just about everybody.

For a psychedelic initiation into the Church of Bob (i.e., the Sub-Genius), view here, or here, or below.

Religion Lately: Extraterrestrial Christs and Jedi Blues, Salem Witches Counter Tebow-Magic, Domestic-Violence Video Games By Kenny Smith, Emory University Explore artistic renditions of Christ-figures blended with the extraterrestrial, technological, and trans-human. Star Visitor theology, anyone? A journalist ponders the odds of extraterrestrial encounters, arguing that UFO-based religions require as much faith as any other. Rev. Ed ...
Religion Lately: Rise of the New Evangelicals, Star Seed Possibilities, Perfect End-Times Beverage, & The Roof-Top Sex-Preacher By Kenny Smith, Emory University Imagine Evangelical Christians who reject militarism, consumerism, and cultural triumphalism, in favor of social justice, environmentalism, and religious reconciliation with other faiths. They might represent the coming norm. If so, will these new Evangelicals distance themselves ...

Religion Lately: Transhumanism, Rise of the “Preppers,” & Apocalypse Tomorrow, Surf Now!

religionnerd — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:59:02 +0000

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By Kenny Smith, Emory University

Unsatisfied with an average lifespan of 70 odd years? Consider the emerging tradition of Transhumanism which seeks to convince traditional religions to open their minds (and souls) to fusion with the technological.

See, for example, “The Cyborg Buddha,” which explores the possibility that the goals of Buddhism (freedom from suffering) might well by grafting organic and technological components in a new and improved humankind. Yes, they’re serious.

Hoping to attract the attention of “nones” (i.e., the 18% of Americans who have no use for “organized religion”), one chaplain contemplates “disorganized religion… I’d take the Ten Commandments from the Jewish faith, but I might not be able to keep them in their original order. I’d bow toward the east like the Muslims, but I might lean more toward Minot, North Dakota. Like Christians, we’d look for a Second Coming of the Messiah, but we’d hit the snooze button to wait for the second trumpet.” Psychological research links religion with increased levels of self-control. So, does this make the whole disorganized thing more, or less, likely?

In what is bound to be far more controversial research, a cluster of attitudes frequently associated with religious and political conservativism (hierarchy, resistance to chance, racism, bigotry) have also been correlated with lower intelligence scores.

Don’t have Jedi powers yet? Don’t worry, just purchase a Vodaphone. But whatever you do, do NOT turn to the bark side.

You-Tube is said to be “raging” with responses to Jeff Bethke’s “Why I hate religion, but love Jesus,” video.

At the CCN religion blog, one writer predicts that Gingrich’s past marital woes will be no problem with Evangelical voters, and he was of course correct.

Apparently, there are atheists in foxholes, and they want better protection of their freedom to disbelieve without harassment while serving in the armed forces.

One writer for Skeptic magazine predicts the demise of Scientology. The primary factor? The church’s growing inability to control information, control members, and intimidate critics in the age of online social media. In Hollywood, CA, the local Scientology center offered invitations to come over and watch the NFL playoffs. In Tampa Bay, visitors to the county fair were greeted by Scientology volunteers handing out self-help materials, and Scientology volunteers likewise participated in public celebrations of the MLK Jr. holiday.

An emerging American subculture of “preppers” prepares for the apocalypse by stockpiling food, arms, ammunition, and survival supplies.

What does the apocalypse look like for surfing devotees?

In Arizona, some legislators seek to mandate high school courses that study the Bible and its influences upon Western culture in study, while banning ethnic studies (e.g., of Latino Americans especially) on college campuses.

In North Carolina, one lawmaker hopes to bring back public executions by hanging, something the whole family could enjoy together (as happened at the last public hanging in America in 1936, which attracted some 20,000 spectators). More, he hopes to begin with abortion providers.

In New York, the NYPD has been widely criticized for its overblown training film, intended to “educate” officers about Islam in America, “The Third Jihad.”

Religion Lately: Extraterrestrial Christs and Jedi Blues, Salem Witches Counter Tebow-Magic, Domestic-Violence Video Games By Kenny Smith, Emory University Explore artistic renditions of Christ-figures blended with the extraterrestrial, technological, and trans-human. Star Visitor theology, anyone? A journalist ponders the odds of extraterrestrial encounters, arguing that UFO-based religions require as much faith as any other. Rev. Ed ...
Religion Lately: The Religion of File Sharing, Sex Toys for All the Abrahamic Faiths, the Rise of the So-What’s? By Kenny Smith, Emory University Do you think that information is holy, and that the practice of sharing it is tantamount to an act religious worship? If so, the new religion of Kopimism, whose holy symbols are those that suggest ...

Religion Lately: Extraterrestrial Christs and Jedi Blues, Salem Witches Counter Tebow-Magic, Domestic-Violence Video Games

religionnerd — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:47:58 +0000

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By Kenny Smith, Emory University

Explore artistic renditions of Christ-figures blended with the extraterrestrial, technological, and trans-human. Star Visitor theology, anyone? A journalist ponders the odds of extraterrestrial encounters, arguing that UFO-based religions require as much faith as any other.

Rev. Ed Young’s “24-hour live streaming online bed-in,” in which he and his wife discussed healthy Christian marriage and sex, ended in a minor eye injury. With Young’s recent “sexperiment,” Marc Driscol’s new book about Christian sex, and a thriving Christian sex toy industry, some believe that Evangelicals have become overly preoccupied with the topic.

Complaining that America has become a place where “school children are prohibited from wishing our troops Merry Christmas,” Rick Perry has called for a “next great awakening” making America “that shinning city of a hill” and sweeping away the social/political hegemony of secularists and liberals.

For Muslim American Republicans, Ron Paul’s libertarian commitments make him the candidate of choice. Among the next generation of American Muslims, religious careers (e.g., as imams) are emerging as a popular option.

A day in the life of a lazy Jedi.

Dudeism, “the slowest growing religion in the world,” boasts some 150,000 ministers worldwide. But one would-be Dudeist wonders “if a woman can really crack the Dudeist way. While I’ve met plenty of Dude-ish men over the years, many women, it seems, have trouble slacking off.” Indeed, this is a point Dudeists have pondered for some time now.

In preparation for the NFL playoff game between the New England Patriots and the Denver Broncos, a group of self-identified witches in Salem, MA gathered to “raise energy” and help the Patriots in their battle against Tim Tebow’s Christian magic. After the Broncos’ crushing defeat, some Christians have begun to wonder whether it’s wise to hook religious faith to sports fandom.

In Hungary, Wiccans, Pagans, and other religious minorities, are struggling against constitutional changes that delegitimize their traditions. In North Carolina, expansive notions of “religious freedom” that entitle Christian religious organizations to bring their literature into public schools suddenly “vanish” when a Wiccan a mom shows up with a spell-book.

One young rapper offers a You-Tube-futation of last week’s “Why I Hate Religion But Love Jesus” video,

while another offers a Muslim version.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNGqrzkFp_4

An Atheist’s defense of religion, Alain de Botton’s, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, is critiqued as historically interesting but theologically shallow.

If only 9% of Americans identify religion as “the most important thing in their life,” why is it so important in our politics?

An American Rabbi argues that 2012 is the year for “Occupy Religion,” since it, much like Wall Street, “does not work for enough people.” In Israel, the question of ultra-conservative religion, the role of women, and the control of public spaces, may be reaching a crisis.

Tired of playing Angry Birds? Try Angry Brides, “a Facebook game in which you play an angry Indian wife who bludgeons her husband with frying pans and shoes,” wracking up “anti-dowry points.” Yes, it’s bizarre.

Or, to explore more fully the virtual genre of spousal abuse, check out Domestic Violence: The Video Game (which presumably teaches children not to engage in such behaviors).

In Nashville, TN, the local Church of Scientology is distributing its well-known “Way to Happiness” guide throughout the community, a book offering “21 precepts that point out that… without the survival of others, neither joy nor happiness is attainable.” Over the years, some 95 million copies have been handed out in 180 countries and 100 languages.

Religion Lately: Rise of the New Evangelicals, Star Seed Possibilities, Perfect End-Times Beverage, & The Roof-Top Sex-Preacher By Kenny Smith, Emory University Imagine Evangelical Christians who reject militarism, consumerism, and cultural triumphalism, in favor of social justice, environmentalism, and religious reconciliation with other faiths. They might represent the coming norm. If so, will these new Evangelicals distance themselves ...
Religion Lately: Transhumanism, Rise of the “Preppers,” & Apocalypse Tomorrow, Surf Now! By Kenny Smith, Emory University Unsatisfied with an average lifespan of 70 odd years? Consider the emerging tradition of Transhumanism which seeks to convince traditional religions to open their minds (and souls) to fusion with the technological.
Click here to view the embedded video.
See, for example, ...

Why Do Southerners Call Mormonism a Cult? A brief history of anti-Mormonism

religionnerd — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:00:20 +0000

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By Joanna Brooks, Religion Dispatches

Patrick Mason is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and author of The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (Oxford University Press, 2011). He is the nation’s leading scholarly expert on anti-Mormonism. I spoke with him this morning about the controversy surrounding Mormonism at last weekend’s Values Voter Summit.

RD: Last weekend at the Values Voter Summit, Robert Jeffress, Senior Pastor at First Baptist Church of Dallas, introduced Rick Perry as a “genuine follower of Jesus Christ” and later characterized Mormonism as a “cult” to reporters. Help us understand the history behind anti-Mormon sentiment in the American South.

PM: Mormon missionaries were proselytizing in the American South from before the Civil War, and wherever Mormonism went, anti-Mormonism followed. Some of it was basic theological opposition to Mormon doctrine presented in tracts, books, pamphlets, and so forth. That’s reasonable in a free marketplace of ideas, and Mormons have certainly said that other churches were wrong. Theology is fair play.

But something changed around the Civil War. In 1857, LDS Apostle Parley P. Pratt was killed as retribution for alleged polygamy. And that’s the spark that motivated the rise of violent anti-Mormonism: the perception that Mormons were coming to steal women and corrupt Southern womanhood. After the Civil War especially, Southern manhood was defined in large part through the protection of Southern womanhood. This rationale helped whites in the South justify the lynching of African-Americans. It drove anti-Mormonism as well: not just theological difference, but the fear that they’re coming for our women.

That helps me understand the edge I hear in the contemporary caricaturing of Mormonism as a “cult.” It’s not just theological differentiation. There’s an edge to the accusation. It’s a residue of the anti-Mormon violence of the nineteenth century.

Yes. Once Mormons drop polygamy in the late nineteenth century, anti-Mormon violence stops. Violent anti-Mormonism disappears, whereas African-American lynching does not. But latent ideas of Mormons as polygamists continue to dominate the Southern imagination.

Usage of the word “cult” as a descriptor for Mormonism picks up steam in the 1960s as a reaction to new religious movements like the Moonies, Jonestown, Scientology, and so forth. It also indexes a feeling of eroding religious authority on the part of mainline and evangelical Protestants who have had a custodial relationship to culture in the American South. Beginning in the 1960s, with greater secularism, there comes a sense that this Protestant custodial relationship is under threat. “Cult” becomes a catch-all phrase to catch new and unrecognizable religious movements.

And then in the 1970s and 1980s comes the rise of what I describe as “organized anti-Mormonism”: people who make careers producing anti-Mormon print and video content and networking distribution of anti-Mormon content with other pastors and media figures.

In the early 1980s, Ed Decker produces a book and a video titled The Godmakers. In Salt Lake City, Jerald and Sandra Tanner in establish Lighthouse Ministries and produce sophisticated anti-Mormon literature based in historical research. Interestingly, it parallels the rise of the new Mormon history and new historical consciousness among Mormons, giving a historical gravitas to the anti-Mormon movement. People like the Tanners go back and look at nineteenth-century sources and find esoteric aspects of Mormon tradition—Anglo-American folk magic, temple ceremonies, esoteric teachings of Brigham Young—and they say, “That’s not recognizably Christian.” That’s where Jeffress is coming from. He comes out of a tradition that says there are so many things coming out of Mormonism that do not seem to fit within Christianity as it has been constructed over the past hundreds of years. Then, the LDS Church counters by asserting that we are, of course, Christian. The two camps largely talk past each other.

It’s comparable in some respects to what Catholics have experienced, then? The word “Christian” has been instrumentalized to mean Protestant, or perhaps even more specifically evangelical Protestant, and then used to convey or withhold legitimacy.

This was the language that was used against John F. Kennedy, too. And Mormons have a bit of an uphill climb. But there are people out there like Richard Mouw, who wrote a very nice post at CNN this weekend. Mouw is very careful in how he uses theological language. He says, effectively, let’s be rigorous and not just throw words at one another.

It should be noted that anti-Mormonism is also a term that gets used carelessly in Mormon communities. Folks who differ on one point or another, or criticize the tradition at all, sometimes get called “anti-Mormons” by very rigid LDS Church members, and the term has edge.

Yes, among Mormons, anyone that says anything a little different is subject to being called an “anti-Mormon.”

Final question. Jon Huntsman called the weekend’s controversy a “sideshow.” Mitt Romney responded to it all by maintaining his dignity and criticizing Bryan Fischer. Both candidates seem to be determined to avoid getting caught up in a century-old mess of misunderstanding. What advice would you have for Mitt Romney?

I think Romney is handling it about as well as he can. He learned lessons from 2008. He knows he can’t win by making religious arguments or trying to get up there and defend his faith as an apologist. What he’s doing is defending himself personally as a believer. He’s saying he believes in Jesus Christ and that his faith is central to his identity. That’s a message that people on the Christian right should be able to hear. For him to even attempt to get into an educated conversation about how Mormonism fits within historical Christianity—that’s not his job, and no one should expect him to do that. A certain hardcore element on the right is never going to accept him. He knows that. He needs to write those people off. There’s nothing he can say or do to convince them. Shrug it off. There are bigger issues that need attention.

***************

Joanna Brooks has been named one of “50 Politicos to Watch” for her coverage of Mormon life and politics. She’s also an award-winning religion scholar. Find more of her writings and podcasts here.

IS WHO A CHRISTIAN? By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University I suppose it was inevitable that the evangelical push-back within the Republican Party would eventually make Mormonism an issue, no matter how hard the Republican establishment tries to make it go away. And now ...
Most U.S. Protestant Pastors Doubt Beck, Obama are Christians-Poll By Ed Stoddard, Reuters FaithWorld What do conservative TV and radio personality Glenn Beck and U.S. President Barack Obama have in common? Most U.S. Protestant pastors doubt their Christian credentials. These are among the findings of a survey released this week by ...

Religion Lately: Rise of the New Evangelicals, Star Seed Possibilities, Perfect End-Times Beverage, & The Roof-Top Sex-Preacher

religionnerd — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 01:30:06 +0000

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By Kenny Smith, Emory University

Imagine Evangelical Christians who reject militarism, consumerism, and cultural triumphalism, in favor of social justice, environmentalism, and religious reconciliation with other faiths. They might represent the coming norm. If so, will these new Evangelicals distance themselves from religion?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IAhDGYlpqY

The future may be a ways off yet, as recent studies of American ministers note one major area of disagreement prevails: not creationism, nor the belief in the literal truth of the Bible, but whether or not the earth is 6,000 years old.

In Texas, Rev. Ed Young, often known as the “sex preacher” because he urges married heterosexual Christian couples to have far more sex than they typically do (every day if possible), is offering (along with his wife) a full 24-hour discussion about healthy sexuality and marriage streamed live from a bed atop Rev. Young’s church.

A skeptic considers the possibility that he is a “star-seed,”and a California psychotherapist offers a (free) online questionnaire designed to measure the degree to which human beings have been genetically and energetically “upgraded” by Star Visitors, and hence become star-seeds whether they know it or not.

In Clearwater, Florida, after 13 years of planning and building, the Church of Scientology prepares to open its new $145 million, 377,000 square foot “Flag Mecca” building, where wealthy Scientologists will receive “infinite power.”

In Salem, Missouri, a local library has been slapped with a lawsuit after blocking patrons’ online access to Wiccan and Native American websites on the grounds that they constitute “occult” and therefore “criminal” sources of information.

Young Christian celebrities, most notably Justin Bieber (sporting his new Jesus tattoo), Tim Tebow (with his unlikely win over the Pittsburg Steelers), and Demi Lovato (Disney star) may be making the Gospel cool for generation Z-ers. Speaking of Tim Tebow, a new Japanese anime video would seem to have it all: terrible things done to Tebow, Jesus and Satan dueling on Xbox, NFL executives cynically cashing in on football/Christianity, and an Atheist running amok.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxF1VoJwFf4

The “countdown” to the Mayan apocalypse of 12/21/12 began on 12/21/11, and we’ve already had a Christian minister make a late-May rapture prediction (not Harold Camping). So, if you’re stressing out about the upcoming apocalypses, try new Island Time, a “lightly carbonated relaxation product [that] uses melatonin, valerian root and rose hips to provide a relaxing effect,” specifically recommended for allaying end time anxieties. “As we get closer to the end of the world people are going to feel a lot more stress,” says Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Wealth Management in Stamford, CT, “people need to come to terms with the end of everything and the fact that they can’t do anything about it. [This drink] can’t save the world but it can make people more relaxed” about it! And while you’re at it, put some Island Time on ice for the “annihilation of humanity” party slated for Friday December 21, at 11:10pm, and don’t forget to RSVP on Facebook!

For hungry Jedi looking for guidance on their fast food journey, check out Darth Vader and Jedi Burgers. Is the Jedi spiritual path poised to really take off in America, becoming a faith for everyone?

Is American the Mecca of “make your own religion?”

The National Atheist Party calls for “no government favoring support of religion,” though they have also taken positions on other issues such as “gay marriage (for it) gun control (tighten it), abortion (a woman’s decision), immigration (reform it), energy (green it), and the economy (legalize recreational drugs to create revenue and jobs).” So far, they have 7,500 hundred registered members and a chapter in all 50 US states. While young Pakistanis have not quite arrived at this point in their politics, some are “adopting Atheism and openly questioning the existence of a God,” perhaps as a way of pushing back against “the rise of Islamist militancy in Pakistan as well as access to social media and other technological tools that allow people to share and explore new ideas.” Good luck with that.

In West Virginia, the state government plans to invest gambling revenues in this year’s “Jesus Fest” celebration.

In Great Britain, recent studies suggest that traditional religion may in fact be on its way out, with half of the adult population claiming no religious affiliation whatsoever, and over half of those who do identify as religious saying that they never attend religious services.

Religion Lately: Extraterrestrial Christs and Jedi Blues, Salem Witches Counter Tebow-Magic, Domestic-Violence Video Games By Kenny Smith, Emory University Explore artistic renditions of Christ-figures blended with the extraterrestrial, technological, and trans-human. Star Visitor theology, anyone? A journalist ponders the odds of extraterrestrial encounters, arguing that UFO-based religions require as much faith as any other. Rev. Ed ...
Religion Lately: The Religion of File Sharing, Sex Toys for All the Abrahamic Faiths, the Rise of the So-What’s? By Kenny Smith, Emory University Do you think that information is holy, and that the practice of sharing it is tantamount to an act religious worship? If so, the new religion of Kopimism, whose holy symbols are those that suggest ...

Make-Your-Own Religion

religionnerd — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:29:11 +0000

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By Claude Fischer, Made in America

In their best-selling 1980s book on the tensions between community and individualism in America, Habits of the Heart, my Berkeley colleagues Robert Bellah and Ann Swidler, along with three other coauthors, described the version of religion that a woman whom they called Sheila had described to them. She believed in a faith of loving and being gentle with oneself; she labeled this theology “Sheilism” – “just my own little voice.” The authors of Habits saw her declaration as an expression of a growing tendency in America toward isolation and self-absorption raised here to an ethical principle. (The term “Sheilaism” is now so well-known it has its own Wikipedia entry.)

There were and are other signs of a make-your-own religious boom. Outside of the standard religious structures, we see the excavation of old, pagan traditions like Wicca and the construction of hybrid, New Age faiths and Eastern blends with practices such as yoga and Kabalistc mysticism. Inside standard religious structures, variants such as independent churches, new liturgies and rituals, and even re-defined theologies have emerged. Some religious leaders describe all this as “cafeteria-style” faith: take what you like and disregard the rest. (And there is a Wikipedia entry for “Cafeteria Christianity,” too.)

Such religious inventions may well have burgeoned in recent decades, especially since the 1960s. Getting good numbers to test that assumption would be difficult, especially when so many “new religious movements” are informal and some even hostile to becoming formal institutions. But one thing is clear: This is not new.

Old Time Religions

The 19th and 20th century witnessed the creation of many American-born religious movements that remain with us such as Scientology, Krishna Consciousness, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Reconstructionist Judaism, and yet earlier, Christian Science, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), Disciples of Christ, and Seventh-Day Adventism. Yet, many more, whether invented here or imported, have come and gone – or come and stayed under the radar.

During the early 19th century, in particular, America was Awash in a Sea of Faith, as an important book by Jon Butler is titled (subtitled,Christianizing the American People), by which he means that America was flooded by all sorts of religious campaigns and frenzies. Some, like the Mormons and the Baptists, developed into major and lasting institutions; many more flared up and burned out. Many “faiths” of the day were roughly Christian; others were magical, quasi-pagan, or cult-like folk beliefs. It would take until late in the century before most Americans were conventionally “churched” in the way we take for granted today, a convention that really did not solidify until the 1950s.

Even Sheilaism, a self-defined individual faith, is not new. For example, in the early 19th century, a Mrs. Lucy Mack Smith of New Hampshire decided, as others like her occasionally did, to follow her own reading of the Bible rather than her church’s interpretations. Eventually, she persuaded a minister to baptize her as, in effect, a Christian of her own individual denomination. Her son Joseph later founded the Mormon faith.

“No Religion” Faith

In 2002, Michael Hout and I published a study that drew remarkably widespread attention and replication. We tracked the increasing percentage of American survey respondents who, since about 1990, chose the last option in this question: “What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?” In 2010, 18% picked that option, up from 7% c. 1990. Recently, Robert Putnam and David Campbell expanded on these findings and arguments in American Grace.

Critically, the increase in the “no religion” answers is only weakly tied to atheism. In the 2008-10 General Social Surveys, for example, 66% of those who chose the “no religion” option nonetheless said that they believed in a higher power or God; 20% of them said that they had “no doubt” of God’s existence. And 54% of them said that they probably or definitely believed in “life after death.” (Rather than being a thought-out rejection of theism, the increase in “no religion” answers is largely a rejection of organized religion and a reaction against its growing identification with the political right.)

I suspect that many, perhaps most, of these “no religion” Americans are really “new sort of religion” Americans, seeking a way of keeping faith in something beyond the corporeal despite their skepticism toward organized religion. This may lead them to join others in new “spiritual” practices or even to a Sheilaism of some kind. In these ways, they’d be true to a long American faith tradition.

***************************

Originally posted on Made in America, December 20, 2011

More Americans Tailoring Religion to Fit Their Needs By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY If World War II-era warbler Kate Smith sang today, her anthem could be GodsBless America. That's one of the key findings in newly released research that reveals America's drift from clearly defined religious denominations to faiths cut to fit ...
Who ‘owns’ religious practice? By Brad Bannon, State of Formation There is an interesting debate brewing over yoga. The Hindu American Foundation posted an article entitled “Yoga Beyond Asana: Hindu Thought in Practice” on its website. The article seems primarily educational. It simply explains ...

Nazi Christianities

religionnerd — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:05:22 +0000

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By Kate Daley-Bailey, Religion Bulletin

In my two previous Bulletin posts, I discussed the efforts of prominent Nazi intellectuals (such as Gerhard Kittel and Alfred Rosenberg) who, during the 1930s, worked to buttress the German Reich through the appropriation of Christian symbols, images, and narratives. It is worth noting that Rosenberg and Kittel offered competing presentations of a Nazi Jesus and a Nazi Christianity, each of which was intended to unify the German churches and people. For Kittel, this meant the wholesale separation of Judaism and Christianity in hopes of persuading fellow Nazis that the Christian narrative was ideologically compatible with larger Nazi social projects. For Rosenberg, it meant reclaiming the image of Jesus as an Aryan warrior-chief in the age-old battle against Judaism. This present post looks at yet another attempted Nazi Christianity, so-called “Positive Christianity” in the discourse of the NSDAP (The National Socialist German Worker’s Party).

The term ‘positive Christianity,’ a vague type of non-denominationalism not beholden to any particular religious institution, makes an appearance in the 25 points of the NSDAP (set forth in 1920 by the founding party members). Point 24 is brief but significant, considering that the Nazi party is so often cast as monolithically anti-Christian. These points demonstrate an attempt to present a systematic worldview to the German population. Point 24 distances Positive Christianity from the denominational conflicts (and institutional oversight) of the day and binds it to a nationalistic rhetoric which links Christian morality with the Germanic race:

24. We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race. The Party as such advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the framework: common utility precedes individual utility. (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/1708-ps.asp)

This somewhat amorphous sense of religious community was defined primarily by its struggle against the perceived threat that German Jews were said to represent, and its concurrent desire to protect “the moral senses of the Germanic Race.” It resisted any absolute expression of institutional form… or rather had too many institutions vying to represent it. In the nascent years of the NSDAP, the party offered a synthesis of various Christian ideologies, nationalistic loyalties, and racial/cultural investments, and honed in on the characteristics and beliefs which many at the time shared, such as a belief that Jesus was not Jewish, a desire to define Christianity in opposition to Judaism, a hope for a unified and empowered Germany, and an antagonism towards Capitalism, liberalism, Marxism, and secularism.

Also referred to as ‘Practical Christianity’ or ‘Active Christianity,’ this protean tradition was meant to supersede the denominational strife in Germany and unite German Christians under one banner- the Reich. Hitler repeatedly stated that to get bogged down in theological details was political suicide and would only help Germany’s true enemy- the Jew. In Mein Kampf, he writes that Jesus as a critic of Judaism who “drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God” and was “nailed to the Cross for his attitude towards the Jews.” In a 1939 speech in Munich, Hitler claimed that the party was itself more Christian in deed than their Christian critics. According to his reasoning, National Socialist Germany programs were Christian in that they “cloth the poor and feed the poor.”

For example, the Winter Relief Program (Winterhilfswerk), while not an innovation of the Nazi Party, quickly became an institutionalized part of its public outreach. With unemployment and poverty high, this program clothed, warmed (via coal and fire wood), fed, and employed many destitute Germans (in the winter months) from 1933 until the regime’s demise in 1945. Public funding of this program was ‘voluntary,’ although intimidation and shaming tactics were utilized to bolster funds. The program was also local in nature… meant to be reminiscent of the Germanic clan ideal. According to Thomas E. de Witt’s article, “The Struggle Against Hunger and Cold”: Winter Relief in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939, the first winter program received support from 1.5 million volunteers. For Hitler, the purpose of the Winter Relief Program was to create solidarity between fellow Germans as well as assist the needy, and it appealed to many German Christians who saw it as their duty as Christians and Germans to help their fellow man.

How could such a program, which appeared to engender a type of Christian brotherhood, be driven by such a ruthless regime? The answer rests in the concept of categories: for these Nazi Christians, Jews and other ‘deviant’ groups were not categorized by the Nazis as ‘brothers.’ Even Jewish coverts to Christianity were seen as problematic because for the Nazis being Jewish, just like being German, was about blood not about religious choice.

What is unclear is precisely how much social and ideological force Nazi Christianity, as opposed to welfare programs like that discussed above, actually exerted. Susannah Heschel’s book, Aryan Jesus, describes the anti-Semitism in the German churches as “the glue that united the otherwise warring factions” (7). She argues that Nazi ideology represented “a colonization of Christian theology,” one which utilized Christian anti-Semitism for its own purposes (8). Luther had already planted anti-Jewish ‘seeds’ in the church… the economic and social repercussions of the Versailles treaty simply cultivated the growth of anti-liberal, anti-Jewish, German nationalism. Thus, racializing processes had been set in place centuries before the Nazis came to power, and some scholars have suggested that it was not merely coincidence that Kristallnacht fell on Martin Luther’s birthday.

*********************

More of Kate’s work can be read on Religion Bulletin

Hitler’s Mythographer By Kate Daley-Bailey, Religion Bulletin Goring, Goebbels, Hitler, Himmler, Hess, and… Rosenberg? The first five men listed here might easily be recognized as the architects of the infamous Third Reich, whose atrocities still haunt European history. Rosenberg, however, is less ...
The Sacred and the Strange: Occupying the Tea Party Rhetoric? By Kate Daley-Bailey American Nazis support the Occupy Wall Street Movement? This headline ripped through the conservative news outlets like wildfire. Christmas came early for Fox News. My curiosity was peaked… I am a fence sitter regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement… ...

Religion Lately: The Religion of File Sharing, Sex Toys for All the Abrahamic Faiths, the Rise of the So-What’s?

religionnerd — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:35:31 +0000

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By Kenny Smith, Emory University

Do you think that information is holy, and that the practice of sharing it is tantamount to an act religious worship? If so, the new religion of Kopimism, whose holy symbols are those that suggest a desire to copy or be copied (e.g., “CTRL+C”), may be just what you’re looking for. According to the good news of Kopimism, all file-sharing should be made legal and copyright laws abolished, as both inhibit the free expression of religion.

It’s not just Evangelical Christians who are enjoying religiously approved sex toys at websites such as “holy hooking up,” but also Orthodox Jews and Muslims in search of Kosher and Halal “marital aids.” Apparently, it’s a rising part of a $15 billion a year industry.

Speaking of cosmically-themed sex, a sci-fi themed brothel is in the works for Las Vegas Nevada, replete with faux Carry Fishers and “Captain Kirk’s green alien lady friend” from the original Star Trek series. Yes, prostitution is legal in several US states, including Nevada.

Michelle Bachman has apparently re-thought God’s command (back in 2006) that she seek the presidency of the United States. No fears, though, God has let Pat Robertson in on our political futures.

In an effort to repair his reputation, evangelical minister Ted Haggard plans to appear on ABC’s Celebrity Wife Swap. On a serious note, it’s obvious that Evangelicals are fragmenting (for instance, by their inability to agree on a single conservative presidential candidate) but are they also shifting to more liberal positions on, for instance, unmarried couples living together, abortion, homosexuality?

Scientology may offer “space drama,” with tales of lost and wayward souls hailing from an ancient galactic civilization, but it also offers rather intense institutional dramas, as instanced by a recent email sent out to some 12,000 Church members by (former) Scientology insider Debbie Cook. As Janet Reitman explains, Cook “accused Scientology’s leadership of hoarding more than $1 billion in donations; spending lavishly on new churches; punishing former executives with draconian measures; and overselling Scientology books and services to members already stretched by high-pressure sales tactics.” And by the way, the Church of Scientology does celebrate Christmas, and in fact official Scientology teachings express reverence for the founders of most if the world’s religious traditions.

Recent sociological studies of American religious affiliation have brought to light sharp increases over the past twenty years in “nones,” those claiming “no religion,” amounting to as much as 15% of American adults. Much larger percentages, however, identify as “so whats?,” that is, as folk who spend no time seeking out eternal wisdom, worrying about whether they are going to heaven, or believe that God has a plan for their lives.

In some late Christmas-wars news, Claremont Methodist Church displayed a nativity scene featuring silhouettes of straight, gay, and lesbian couples holding hands. The gay and lesbian silhouettes were apparently assaulted, which has been classified as a hate crime by local police.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6lB3P6Y2Lg

Do religious folk tend to have lower IQs? Some research may support this conclusion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHSa2zV–xw

Religion Lately: Transhumanism, Rise of the “Preppers,” & Apocalypse Tomorrow, Surf Now! By Kenny Smith, Emory University Unsatisfied with an average lifespan of 70 odd years? Consider the emerging tradition of Transhumanism which seeks to convince traditional religions to open their minds (and souls) to fusion with the technological.
Click here to view the embedded video.
See, for example, ...
Religion Lately: Rise of the New Evangelicals, Star Seed Possibilities, Perfect End-Times Beverage, & The Roof-Top Sex-Preacher By Kenny Smith, Emory University Imagine Evangelical Christians who reject militarism, consumerism, and cultural triumphalism, in favor of social justice, environmentalism, and religious reconciliation with other faiths. They might represent the coming norm. If so, will these new Evangelicals distance themselves ...

What Does The Book Of Revelation Really Mean?

religionnerd — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:28:13 +0000

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By Greg Carey, Huff Post Religion

This is the first installment of a three-part series.

We’ve survived Harold Camping. We survived Y2K, albeit with less distress than our ancestors survived Y1K. The world has survived end-time predictors as diverse as Billy Graham, William Miller and Jonathan Edwards. Now we face the purported final year of the Mayan Calendar.

Nevertheless, most Christian bookstores devote entire sections to the sort of “Bible Prophecy” literature that uses the Book of Revelation, among other biblical literature, to tell us that we are currently living in the last days.

Here’s the truth: no academic interpreter of Revelation understands the book as a roadmap for the future, much less as telling contemporary Christians that these are the last days. Instead, scholars understand that Revelation originally spoke to the conditions of its own time and place. It offered a specific group of first century Christians not only hope for the future but also an interpretation — a “revelation” — of the world they inhabited. In other words, the best way to understand Revelation does not require an official Dick Tracy Apocalyptic Decoder Ring. We best understand Revelation when we read it like any other ancient text, in its own historical and cultural context.

What makes biblical scholars so certain that Revelation does not provide a roadmap for the future? Two basic considerations lead us to this conclusion.

First, the book itself insists that it’s addressed to a specific group of churches to speak to their own circumstances. Let’s begin with Revelation’s introductory words (my translation, with notes):

A revelation (Greek: apokalypsis) of [or from] Jesus Christ, which God gave by means of him to show his [God's? Christ's?] slaves the things that must happen soon, and he [God? Christ?] made it known by sending his angel to his slave John, who testified to the word of God and the testimony of Jesus, everything he saw. Blessed is the one who reads aloud and blessed are those who hear the words of the prophecy and keep the things that are written in it, for the time is near. John, to the seven churches that are in Asia…

Working back, we observe several things. First, Revelation is addressed to seven churches in the Roman province of Asia. We’d locate them in western Turkey today. Identified in chapters two and three, these churches inhabited some of the major cities in the Roman Empire, including Ephesus, a top five city of the day. Second, Revelation’s author John describes the vision as speaking to things that must happen “soon” for “the time is near.” This is no minor point, nor is it to be spiritualized to mean something other than what it says. At several points Revelation reminds those ancient Christians to expect their redemption to come “soon” (1:1, 3, 19; 3:11; 22:7, 12, 20). Revelation was written not to tell us what to expect in our future but to give ancient Christians hope for dealing with their own. While modern interpreters disagree on many points, almost all agree on the basic historical circumstances addressed by Revelation.

(We’ll address Revelation’s message to those ancient believers in our next post.)

Second, we know a lot about the kind of literature Revelation represents. Revelation is an apocalypse, a form of literature with which biblical scholars have grown quite familiar. Indeed, Revelation constitutes the first book that calls itself an apocalypse. (The Greek word apokalypsisstands as the book’s very first word.)

Between the third century B.C.E. and the second century C.E., Judaism and Christianity produced several great literary apocalypses, along with a host of related literature. See my book “Ultimate Things” for an introduction to this literature or my entry, “Apocalypses,” in the new “Oxford Encyclopedia of the Books of the Bible.”) All of these books share some distinctive features. They all relate a vision experienced by a single visionary. The visionary receives instruction and guidance from a heavenly being, usually an angel. And the vision reveals either otherworldly affairs or the resolution of history. Readers encounter what’s going on in heaven, the arrival of the messiah, and the final judgment, among other topics. Striking images that require imaginative interpretation are common to all these works. Revelation provides a classic example of an apocalypse, as it includes every one of these features.

The Protestant Bible includes only two apocalypses, Daniel and Revelation. However, the Ethiopian Orthodox canon includes 1 Enoch, perhaps the greatest of the literary apocalypses. The New Testament epistle of Jude alludes to 1 Enoch on two occasions, and at least 11 copies or fragments of 1 Enoch were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Several important Jewish apocalypses date from about the time of Revelation’s composition, including 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, 3 Baruch and the Apocalypse of Abraham. Within decades of Revelation’s composition several other Christian appeared, including the Shepherd of Hermas, the Ascension of Isaiah and the Apocalypse of Peter.

Sharing many common traits, these literary apocalypses show us that the apocalypses represent a developing literary tradition, a form of ancient theology expressed in poetic symbols and sequences. If someone were to stand up in church and read a passage from 4 Ezra or Hermas, nearly everyone would assume the text was from Revelation.

On the second night I had a dream: I saw rising from the sea an eagle that had twelve feathered wings and three heads (2 Esdras 11:1, New Revised Standard Version).

The sun began to shine a bit and suddenly I saw an enormous wild beast, something like a sea monster, with fiery locusts spewing from its mouth (Hermas 23:6, trans. Bart Ehrman).

The apocalypses teach us that Revelation describes a moment of acute crisis for its own religious community, those seven churches in Asia. Like the other apocalypses, it critiques current events, even major political and cultural developments, from a divine perspective. And like the other apocalypses, it calls its ancient audience to rigorous, even dangerous, levels of faithfulness under challenging circumstances.

Revelation does not predict events in 2012 or some other future date; it spoke to our ancient ancestors in the faith, who had enough challenges of their own.

In future posts we will explore both the circumstances of Revelation’s composition and the lifestyle to which it called its audience.

******************************

Article written and published at Huffington Post by Greg Carey.

Greg Carey is Professor of New Testament at Lancaster Theological Seminary (PA). His most recent book, Sinners: Jesus and His Earliest Followers, pursues the role of transgression in early Christian identity. His Ultimate Things: An Introduction to Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature provides a widely used textbook for courses on apocalyptic literature. His research interests include apocalyptic literature, the Gospel of Luke, and literary and rhetorical interpretation of the New Testament, and he has appeared on the PBS, BBC, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic Channel. A layperson, Greg serves as Scholar in Residence at Lancaster’s Evangelical Church of the Holy Trinity.

4 big myths of Book of Revelation By John Blake, CNN Belief Blog (CNN) – The anti-Christ. The Battle of Armageddon. The dreaded Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. You don’t have to be a student of religion to recognize references from the Book of Revelation. The last book in the Bible has ...
Prophets of the Environmental Apocalypse By Peter Laarman, Religion Dispatches Twilight wars in the Middle East, Japan’s nuclear catastrophe, Deepwater Horizon, worldwide crop failures, massive die-offs of long-established species: it’s all so very scary. Looming over all of it is the idea that we foolish ...

The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible

religionnerd — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 15:54:50 +0000

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By Marilynne Robinson, New York Times

The Bible is the model for and subject of more art and thought than those of us who live within its influence, consciously or unconsciously, will ever know.

Literatures are self-referential by nature, and even when references to Scripture in contemporary fiction and poetry are no more than ornamental or rhetorical — indeed, even when they are unintentional — they are still a natural consequence of the persistence of a powerful literary tradition. Biblical allusions can suggest a degree of seriousness or significance their context in a modern fiction does not always support. This is no cause for alarm. Every fiction is a leap in the dark, and a failed grasp at seriousness is to be respected for what it attempts. In any case, these references demonstrate that in the culture there is a well of special meaning to be drawn upon that can make an obscure death a martyrdom and a gesture of forgiveness an act of grace. Whatever the state of belief of a writer or reader, such resonances have meaning that is more than ornamental, since they acknowledge complexity of experience of a kind that is the substance of fiction.

Old Jonathan Edwards wrote, “It has all along been God’s manner to open new scenes, and to bring forth to view things new and wonderful.” These scenes are the narrative method of the Bible, which assumes a steady march of history, the continuous unfolding of significant event, from the primordial quarrel of two brothers in a field to supper with a stranger at Emmaus. There is a cosmic irony in the veil of insignificance that obscures the new and wonderful. Moments of the highest import pass among people who are so marginal that conventional history would not have noticed them: aliens, the enslaved, people themselves utterly unaware that their lives would have consequence. The great assumption of literary realism is that ordinary lives are invested with a kind of significance that justifies, or requires, its endless iterations of the commonplace, including, of course, crimes and passions and defeats, however minor these might seem in the world’s eyes. This assumption is by no means inevitable. Most cultures have written about demigods and kings and heroes. Whatever the deeper reasons for the realist fascination with the ordinary, it is generous even when it is cruel, simply in the fact of looking as directly as it can at people as they are and insisting that insensitivity or banality matters. The Old Testament prophets did this, too.

A number of the great works of Western literature address themselves very directly to questions that arise within Christianity. They answer to the same impulse to put flesh on Scripture and doctrine, to test them by means of dramatic imagination, that is visible in the old paintings of the Annunciation or the road to Damascus. How is the violence and corruption of a beloved city to be understood as part of an eternal cosmic order? What would be the consequences for the story of the expulsion from Eden, if the fall were understood as divine providence? What if Job’s challenge to God’s justice had not been overawed and silenced by the wild glory of creation? How would a society within (always) notional Christendom respond to the presence of a truly innocent and guileless man? Dante created his great image of divine intent, justice and grace as the architecture of time and being. Milton explored the ancient, and Calvinist, teaching that the first sin was a felix culpa, a fortunate fall, and providential because it prepared the way for the world’s ultimate reconciliation to God. So his Satan is glorious, and the hell prepared for his minions is strikingly tolerable. What to say about Melville? He transferred the great poem at the end of Job into the world of experience, and set against it a man who can only maintain the pride of his humanity until this world overwhelms him. His God, rejoicing in his catalog of the splendidly fierce and untamable, might ask, “Hast thou seen my servant Ahab?” And then there is Dostoyevsky’s “idiot” Prince Myshkin, who disrupts and antagonizes by telling the truth and meaning no harm, the Christ who says, “Blessed is he who takes no offense at me.”

Each of these works reflects a profound knowledge of Scripture and tradition on the part of the writer, the kind of knowledge found only among those who take them seriously enough to probe the deepest questions in their terms. These texts are not allegories, because in each case the writer has posed a problem within a universe of thought that is fully open to his questioning once its terms are granted. Here the use of biblical allusion is not symbolism or metaphor, which are both rhetorical techniques for enriching a narrative whose primary interest does not rest with the larger resonances of the Bible. In fact these great texts resemble Socratic dialogues in that each venture presupposes that meaning can indeed be addressed within the constraints of the form and in its language, while the meaning to be discovered through this argument cannot be presupposed. Like paintings, they render meaning as beauty.

The Easter service that is the climax of “The Sound and the Fury” is a study in the workings of fiction and Scripture as reciprocal interpretation. Like Dostoyevsky, Faulkner represents Christ in the person of an “idiot.” Yet while the epileptic Prince Myshkin is unworldly and rather childlike, he’s not truly idiotic except in the eyes of those offended by him. Faulkner takes the idea a step further by limiting his 33-year-old Benjy to the perception and understanding of a child of 3. Groaning and disruptive as he is, he accompanies the endlessly patient servant Dilsey to the celebration in her little church. A minister brought in for the occasion preaches a sermon so purely allusive as to seem no more than a series of fragments, except to his hearers, who know his language so well they are “beyond the need for words.” This recalls Paul’s saying that when prayer is insufficient the Spirit intercedes “with groanings, and with sighs too deep for words.” Speaking in idiom and in cadences that are in effect a liturgical language, the preacher conflates the long captivity in Egypt with the numberless generations that have passed while the world awaits its renewal. He invokes the tender realism of Christ’s infancy, all infancy, and conflates the massacre of the innocents with the Crucifixion. These are classic methods of interpretation. The biblical narratives are themselves allusive in this way, anticipating the death of Christ and recalling these foreshadowings and others drawn from Old Testament prophecy as the story proceeds to its climax. The preacher describes the death of generations in the language of the world-desolating flood in Genesis and then “de arisen dead,” who have the blood and the recollection of the Lamb.

It is an Easter sermon, full of assurance that beyond death there is life, that the “immolation and abnegation and time” that have corroded Dilsey’s face will end, and end gloriously. But the central and most moving words come in the minister’s descriptions of the crucified, “de thief en de murderer en de least of dese.” His use of the phrase “the least of these” to mean Jesus comes from the Parable of the Great Judgment in the 25th chapter of Matthew, in which the enthroned Son of Man says, “I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. . . . Insofar as you did it unto the least of these, you did it also unto me.” In the moment Christ’s grandeur is revealed, his identity is conflated with those most profoundly in need. So Faulkner’s Benjy and every Benjy in the world is in fact Christ, not metaphorically but metaphysically. Dilsey, in assuming her endless burden of care for him, has fed and clothed Christ himself, and she has been Christ in her care of him. She must have known this all along — the text is not obscure — but a good sermon changes even known truth into profound realization. The word that has seized the preacher is, again, Christ, who according to the tradition is present in vulnerability, in mercy and in truth. The absolute character of Dilsey’s vision is expressed in her saying, “Ise seed de first en de last,” and “I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.” This is the language of Revelation, and these are the words of “the Lamb that was slain,” the apocalyptic Christ of the sermon. The whole novel is comprehended in the nexus of allusion that makes up the sermon, another tale told by an “idiot,” superficially incomprehensible and in fact profoundly meaningful.

In our strange cultural moment it is necessary to make a distinction between religious propaganda and religious thought, the second of these being an attempt to do some sort of justice to the rich difficulties present in the tradition. The great problem for Christianity is always the humility of the figure in whom God is said to have been incarnate, and the insistence of the tradition that God is present in the persons of the despised and rejected. The failure of the notionally Christian worlds of Russia and Mississippi to be in any way sufficient to the occasion of Christ among them would be a true report always and everywhere. But theology is only in part social commentary. Crucially it has to do with the authority of a vision, of a world that is only like this world in essence. The sermon interprets Benjy’s wordless first chapter, a tale told as passionate memory of gentleness and love, Faulkner interceding to evoke for Benjy thoughts that are too deep for the words of any writer but one who is generous and also great. Everyone knows that life is profaned when such thoughts are neglected, as they so often are. As a statement about human consciousness and the reality that contains us, this vision is always familiar and never easier to accept. Paul quotes an ancient hymn in his letter to the Philippians that says Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” And this recalls the servant described in the book of Isaiah, “one from whom men hide their faces,” who “was despised, and we esteemed him not.” In its emphatic insistence that the burden of meaning is shared in every life, the Bible may only give expression to a truth most of us know intuitively. But as a literary heritage or memory it has strengthened the deepest impulse of our literature, and our civilization.

**************

This article originally appeared on New York Times, December 22, 2011

Marilynne Robinson is the author of three novels, including the Pulitzer-winning “Gilead,” and three books of nonfiction. Her essay collection “When I Was a Child I Read Books” will be published in March.

What Does The Book Of Revelation Really Mean? By Greg Carey, Huff Post Religion This is the first installment of a three-part series. We've survived Harold Camping. We survived Y2K, albeit with less distress than our ancestors survived Y1K. The world has survived end-time predictors as diverse as Billy Graham, ...
4 big myths of Book of Revelation By John Blake, CNN Belief Blog (CNN) – The anti-Christ. The Battle of Armageddon. The dreaded Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. You don’t have to be a student of religion to recognize references from the Book of Revelation. The last book in the Bible has ...

Religion Lately: Atheists v. Pagans, Jesus Toasters, & “Sin-Free” Egyptian Vacays

religionnerd — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 23:51:34 +0000

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By Kenny Smith, Emory University

Atheist bloggers turned out in force for a record-setting $180,000 in donations for Doctors Without Borders, to which some Christians replied “thank God!” Not bad for a widely distrusted minority (a new study suggests that many people have more faith in the ethics of rapists!) While fighting Christianity, Atheists wonder whether they should be fighting Wiccans and Neo-Pagans as well. They are, after all, religious.

In Santa Monica, CA., where a lottery determined who would have access to “vandal-proof, cage-like areas surrounded by chain-link fencing” in which to place their public holiday displays, Atheists won 18 of 21 such spaces, with just two going to a coalition of churches, and one to a Jewish group.

In New Jersey, American Atheists billboards suggest that “free thinkers’ can be found in every family, if we only bother to look. Conservative Catholics have responded with an “adopt an atheist” campaign aimed at helping those suffering from atheism to “recover their inner [and no doubt Catholic] self.”

The Evangelical group, American Family Association, released its long awaited list of merchants said to be friendly to and hostile to Christianity. “The litmus test is whether retailers use ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Holidays’ in their ads. The latter is considered offensive because it takes away the focus on Jesus…” For some potentially real Christmas warfare, visit the South and North Korea’s DMZ, with its three steel Christmas trees, “adorned with lights and topped with crosses,” and surrounded by barbed-wire.

In Long Island, New York, two high school students were suspended for “Tebowing” in the halls, deemed a safety hazard.

In Omaha, Nebraska, Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups are coming together to form a 35-acre “tri-faith” campus.

Lowe’s has removed its commercial spots from TLC’s “All American Muslim” after complaints by Christian anti-Muslim groups such as the Florida Family Association, and a petition drive to smack down the retailing giant has already begun.

For those weary of waiting for an image of Jesus to miraculously appear in their morning toast, $31.95 buys you a Jesus Toaster at Burnt Impressions.com, which turns out miracles on demand. “Press a button and save a couple of souls, Jesus!” Don’t wait, though, they’re selling 50-100 daily while supplies last.

Some have tried to understand Newt Gingrich’s “war on Sharia,” his experimentation with various Christianities, and his Dickensian view of the poor. For the first time in American history, voters in Republican presidential primaries may have to choose between two non-Protestant candidates, a Mormon (Romney) and a Catholic (Gingrich, assuming this lasts through the primaries).

A Canadian judge has ruled that smoking marijuana is not a religious act, even if participants understand their practices in explicitly religious terms, for instance, as partaking of the “tree of life… to share a collective consciousness, which is an aspect of God… a common belief in countless mystical traditions.”

There’s a new Jedi Order in town, and their website offers links to a host of other Jedi communities and resources. More, the Jedi are showing up in larger numbers and in more places. In the Czech Republic, for instance, where nearly half of the country’s 10.5 million residents are not affiliated with religion, some 15,000 have listed their religion as “Jedi Knight.”

We all know there are UFO-based religious movements, but is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence itself a religion? Michael Crichton apparently thought so.

The Church of Scientology recently celebrated “Human Rights Day” (the 63^rd anniversary of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights) “with seminars, rallies, concerts, round tables, forums and festivals… and more than 80 human rights walks in 26 countries…”

Physicists say they are “hot on the trail” of the elusive (and some say non-existent) “God particle” (otherwise known as the Higgs Boson), which would allow cosmologists to explain why mass occurs in the universe, apparently an important variable.

In what promises to make Egypt an international party Mecca, newly elected legislators have ruled that tourists must observe a “sin free” lifestyle during their stay: no alcohol, no bikinis, no men and women swimming together. Good times!

Religion Lately: Disappointingly Tame Atheist Billboards, Christmas and Politics, Atheists In Church, and the Gingrinch Who Stole Christmas By Kenny Smith, Emory University Whereas last year’s atheist billboard at the Lincoln Tunnel, NJ was said to be overly direct (it told you that Christian stories were myths), this year’s is said to be so tame (they ask you whether ...
Religion Lately: Early Nativity Wars, Jedi and Sith Marry & Which Religion Is The Most Fun? By Kenny Smith, Emory University As we approach the end of the year holidays, Public Display Wars have already begun, with one Virginia county offering public space to the first ten groups/persons to apply. An interesting solution. The result? As one frustrated ...

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