For those who don’t know, Biola University is a conservative evangelical Christian college. It was once the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, before that unwieldy handle was trimmed to the more palatable acronym we all know and love. Biola is very conservative. As an institution it officially holds to the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy and premillenial dispensationalism, and requires its faculty to live in accord with these doctrines.

Two Biola students recently told me that the root of this brewing controversy was a recent request, by LGBT Biola students, to the administration, that Biola create a safe space for conversation around LGBT issues and the Christian faith. That request was denied, and seemed to be answered more emphatically earlier this month when Biola published its “Statement on Human Sexuality”.

From the Underground’s website:

The recently published policy, eighteen months in the making, did not bring change except to make it clearer that Biola views “any acts of sexual intimacy between two persons of the same sex as an illegitimate moral option for the confessing Christian.” It did not even attempt to address those with transgender or other non-conforming gender identities. Nor did it speak to the consequences for those who do not view their own or other’s homosexuality as “a struggle to maintain sexual purity.”

It will be interesting to see if the campus administration responds in a more direct way, but according to the students I spoke with, the immediate affect has been a noticeable increase in the use of hateful and homophobic speech on campus by other students and on online in Facebook threads discussing the topic.

Frankly, Biola can’t change its stance on homosexuality. So many of Biola’s core ideologies would have to change, that in the end it would cease to be Biola. Maybe that would be a good thing – but it’s not going to happen.

However, I do think Biola could keep its conservative street cred and engage with this issue in an extremely healthy and productive way. So far, rather than proactively create a safe space for dialogue, Biola’s reticence to engage with an increasingly visible group of its own students and staffers has inadvertently led to a more dangerous campus atmosphere.

Whatever Biola’s view of human sexuality, it has a moral and ethical responsibility to cultivate a safe space for its constituents. And whatever it’s beliefs are, Biola has an intellectual responsibility to foster open, sympathetic, and critical dialogue on issues that are relevant to the Christian faith and it’s surrounding culture.

These values of openness are perfectly Christian – but even if they weren’t, any Christian institution in a post-Christian culture must be prepared to carefully consider how it might virtuously engage the pluralistic mores of the society in which it is situated.

In that spirit, I’ll simply say this: the Biola Queer Underground are an incredible gift to Biola University. Biola has a huge opportunity to take a lead role in how conservative Christians engage LGBT people in a way that is respectful and relevant to the surrounding culture. There is no better opportunity to do so than by welcoming the Biola Queer Underground as partners in the creation of an open, compassionate, and intelligent space for dialogue on human sexuality, for the purpose of bringing about reconciliation, healing, and understanding between people who had previously been enemies.

What could be more Christian than that?

Technorati Tags: Biola Underground, Biola University, Gay, LGBT

Fellow San Diegan Jason Evans wrote a thought-provoking piece the other day on missional discernement. It’s good stuff, as usual, from a talented leader. You should read it.

I do have some thoughts on what he wrote regarding being missional, but I’ll share those in more depth later. His post comes at an interesting time for me: today marks one year since announcing the close of our missional church plant, Ikon Community, and that has prompted me to conduct a little ‘missional discernment’ of my own:

What is the status of our ‘mission’ one year after closing our official ministry?

I’ve finally settled into a post-ministry career

Unlike a lot of planters, I didn’t seek to be bi-vocational. For better and for worse I decided to become an entirely non-professional minister. I was (and still remain) convinced that the future of professional ministry in the United States is grim at best, and problematic for trying to connect with post-Christian groups.

But for 2.5 years, and all during our church planting effort, I worked feverishly in vain to find a new career after 12 years in professional ministry. It was more than frustrating, it was humiliating.

Then, not long after closing Ikon, a new opportunity presented itself at my workplace. I’ve been in that new role for 7 months now and I’m hopeful about our family’s fiscal prospects for the first time in years.

Another funny irony is that I am now, essentially, a professional fundraiser – exactly the task I dreaded most while trying to plant a missional church. I went from struggling to raise $40,000 a year for the church plant, to being responsible for raising $9 million a year for a local nonprofit.

(As an aside, what I have learned about fundraising in the last 17 months has immensely impacted my perspective on how we could be funding missional work. There is a great deal missional leaders could learn from the nonprofit sector. Moreover: there is a gigantic window of opportunity to capture massive amounts of wealth as it is transferred from one generation to the next. And that window is rapidly closing; that transfer is happening right now. Churches in particular are doing a poor job of securing that wealth, and by all accounts the next two generations won’t have nearly as much disposable wealth to give.)

We’ve finally settled into our local community

For 2.5 years we really struggled to connect with people. But almost immediately after shutting down Ikon, local relationships began to open up to us in a remarkable way. In fact, in this past year, our family has somehow gained a larger and deeper network of friends than we’ve ever had in our entire lives – mostly with people in our neighborhood.

I recently had lunch with a local church planter and I mentioned this curious development. He asked, “Why do you think this happened immediately after closing your church plant?” I answered, “Because we don’t have an agenda for people anymore.”

And it’s true, we really don’t. At least, not a one-sided agenda for enlisting them into our own little fiefdom. I definitely have a personal interest: I want their friendship, and I want to give them mine. I deeply desire the fraternity and equality reciprocity brings to neighbors.

Almost none of them attend church – certainly none of them are committed to any kind of faith community – and, to be honest, I have no interest in converting them. The idea alone feels like a form of betrayal.

Also, I’ve been humbled by the quality of their community. By and large, Jenell and I agree that these people do friendship and community better than any church we’ve ever been in. I’ve come to realize it is a conceit of the church that we are the authority on ‘true community’, and it may very well be a particular conceit of the missional/emerging church. Just as with nonprofit fundraising, I think Christians have a great deal to learn from secular communities on this matter.

I am starting to gain an interest in Jesus again

In my conclusion to the missional postmortem, I said I needed to learn how to be a Christian without getting paid for it. Well, I still haven’t. My personal faith has been radically stripped. I could write whole books on what I don’t believe anymore, but would struggle to fill a fortune cookie with what I do.

Yet, recently I’m experiencing an interest in Jesus again. In fact, I work with people of all kinds of faiths, and I’m more convinced than ever that we could all learn a great deal about life and love from Christ, regardless of our creed.

Along those lines, our family has started sporadically attending a local Presbyterian church. The place is so uncool it makes me want to weep for joy. Like Lewis once said, a good liturgy should be like lacing up an old shoe; you hardly notice it’s there – which is exactly what I need right now.

So, what is the state of our ‘mission’?

Well, in some ways, I suspect, it’s better than ever. In other ways, not so much. I successfully transitioned out of the professional side of ministry, but dropped ministry along the way. We’ve connected with an unchurched community, but have no desire to get them ‘churched.’ I’m more committed to Jesus, but less committed to Christianity.

Actually, I really am more keenly aware than ever that different Christian groups mean subtly but significantly different things by the word ‘mission’. For now, suffice it to say that our ‘mission’ is simply to be decent people; that is, good partners, good parents, good friends and good neighbors.

As far as that goes, I think we’re doing alright.

Technorati Tags: Ikon Community, missional

Food nourishes us. Without it we die. Within it reside the elements of the earth, of which we are composed and with which we are daily renewed. Food revolutionizes us through an internal, hourly insurrection of the new overthrowing the old.

Food demonstrates the intimacy of grace and work: it grows as a gift freely and abundantly the world over, yet requires effort to cultivate, process, prepare and store. Through it we have access to become not merely grateful recipients, but faithful stewards of life.

Through food we are conscripted as co-conspirators with the impossible political agenda of the universe: the cause of life over death, daily struggling to resist the entropy of the flesh until, one day, for each of us, death seemingly triumphs – only to become, in the end, food for new life.

Food represents the time-fullness of grace. Often it comes just when needed. And when it does come, food must be consumed soon or risk rotting on the shelf – no longer good for today. Content to teach us patience for tomorrow’s timely gift.

Through food we affirm that life burns more than merely fuel, but runs upon the joy of beauty and flavor as well. We skewer and sauté, dice and drizzle and gift our confections one to another for family, friends, holidays, or simple lunchtime rituals.

At it’s best, food transforms to become the consumable love of others. When we serve a meal, we serve our hearts. With it we accept, affirm, celebrate, please, delight, enjoin, and seal ourselves to one another. (At its worst, food becomes the empty and dangerous substitute of love unrequited or forsaken.)

In all these ways, and more, food feeds not only our bellies, but our hearts and minds too. More than any other single thing, it is with food that God enables the suckling of humanity’s soul.

And yet, even with an abundance of resources, one in five American families with children don’t get enough to eat. This erodes the health, creativity, dignity, and joy of millions of people in the U.S. alone and demonstrates a systemic denial of their basic human right to participate in the gift of food. Worldwide, food insecurity is nothing short of a major crisis, especially, right now, in places like Somalia

This is why ancient Jewish and Christian teachings concerning the just practice of economics draws centrally upon a story about a miracle involving food (Exodus 16 and 2 Corinthians 8). This is why the most politically subversive acts of Jesus involved sharing a meal with others (Matthew 9, Mark 2, Luke 5, etc). This is why Jesus’ very presence is symbolized by a dinner party where everyone gets plenty to eat (1 Corinthians 11) – and not, I might add, by a musical concert. And this is why Jesus’ litmus test for righteousness was not a measure of religious adherence, nor doctrinal purity, nor personal piety, but rather by the simple yet self-giving act of providing relief to the hungry and thirsty, the naked and alone (Matthew 25).

So do something about it.

If you know people who have less, invite them for lunch or dinner – often. If you don’t know people who have less, find them. Get to know them. Have a dinner party, with bread and wine. Treat them as equals, because that’s what they are.

Find a food pantry or food bank nearby and help out. Organize a food drive at work, at school, or in your neighborhood. (If you need it, I can give you step-by-step instructions). Consider giving to UNICEF’s relief fund for the famine in Somalia.

If you happen to be in North County San Diego, Interfaith runs two food pantries – one in Oceanside and one in Escondido – where last year alone we provided 480,000 meals. And we are in desperate need of donations because the need continues to increase.

Where there are hungry people, there is no gospel without food.

Technorati Tags: Food, Food insecurity, food pantries, Grace, nutrition, social gospel

Not long ago I predicted the coming of “term marriage.” Well, it looks like that possibility might actually be sprouting in the rich soil of popular American celebrity life.

Divorce among celebrities, of course, is nothing new. It has long been a popular American spectator sport. What’s new is the happy, even jovial celebrity divorce. This, I propose, is not only novel, it is the harbinger of a genuinely new cultural institution just beyond the horizon: term marriage.

Exhibit A: Psychologist Judith Sills’ commentary on the “failure” of Al and Tipper Gore’s 40 year marriage. Who says this is a failure? asked Sills, when they clearly had many beautiful years? That is, after all, far more successful than most marriages in the United States. Why not celebrate what they had for so long rather than condemn its ending?

Exhibit B: Yesterday it was reported that Jack White and his wife Karen Elson have invited their friends and family to a “divorce party.” Yes, it’s time for Jack and Karen to end their marriage, but this is no somber affair. After all, they enjoyed 6 successful years together. Their divorce simply marks a transition to a renegotiated friendship.

Commenter Dr. Jane Greer loves Jack and Karen’s approach, remarking,

“All I can say is good for them. Throwing this party is an important way to remember and hold on to the good times in their marriage, celebrating the way they were, but no longer are.”

I believe these are merely the leading edge indicators of a steadily rising tide that harkens the emergence of a new kind of marital contract being negotiated right before our eyes by the icons of national secular mores. Celebrities are the priests of our culture and they set a prophetic tone for what is good and right in our society. I don’t mean that as a judgment; it’s simply a fact.

You may disagree but I think this is a big deal. In fact, I would argue it’s a far bigger cultural shift than gay marriage, because the latter is simply an extension of essentially traditional conservative family ideals into the realm of homosexuality. This may be very uncomfortable for people unaccustomed to same sex relationships, but it isn’t really an innovation of the marriage covenant itself.

The real innovation will be the legal removal, in part or by degrees, of the contractual restraints of fidelity and perpetuity that are intended to incubate intimacy between two formerly distinct people. Practically speaking, this is what we already see with the culturally-curious-yet-familiar practice of “open marriage” (which is hardly new) as well as the still culturally shunned (and yet even more ancient) practices of polygamous and polyamory marriages.

(For the record, I think term marriage will be the bridge that connects us to the utterly free practice of virtually any form of institutionalized relationship between consenting adults of any number, any gender, and for nearly any period of time).

These new forms marriage contracts would be, on the positive side, contracts of greater freedom and peace (albeit in a very limited sense of those words)…and that is precisely why cultural commentators like Judish Sills and Jane Greer gush over these enlightened celebrity splits – because they appear to be far better alternatives to the cliché of anger and abuse that divorce has come to represent over the past 40 years. And frankly, I think they’re right. Some people should terminate their marriages and peaceful departures are far better than violent ones.

But in my view, and perhaps ironically, these new marriages will require contracts of significant individual vulnerability and isolation in order to achieve the kind of peace and freedom our society values most. Personally, I don’t think the trade-off is worth it. Better still to find a mate with whom you can spend a lifetime learning to love – a task which requires a large enough space with high enough walls to overcome the unhappiness, conflict and boredom that, at times, will inevitably arise between any two people on any journey of significance.

But then, I still believe in a genuine two-shall-become-one-flesh kind of human intimacy (call me old-fashioned). Still, whatever you may think of innovative marriages, I remain convinced they are coming in institutional form sooner rather than later.

For better or for worse.

Technorati Tags: Divorce, Jack White, Marriage, News, Term Marriage

She may actually be the person for the job. Miller herself embodies a kind of religious plurality – raised a secular Jew, then later married by a Rabbi and an Episcopal priest in an interfaith ceremony, then finally joining a “progressive, inclusive” Jewish synagogue where she attends regularly with her daughter in order to reconnect with her Jewish heritage.

Given this thoroughly secular Modern pedigree – journalist, theological liberal, and enculturated believer –  Miller would be easy to dismiss by orthodox devotees and she is often the recipient of harsh criticism, particularly from religious fundamentalists. But read this brief article and get to know her just a bit. She is a woman who, every week, weeps during the recital of the Shema. She is a mother who broods over the spiritual development of her daughter, and she is a person whose own religious fears and discomforts are assuaged by a firm belief in “a God who’s love extends beyond the tribe.”

And this, I propose, explains a great deal about Lisa Miller’s book Heaven. In it, she plays the role of spiritual midwife for a culture caught in the terrifying pangs of a pluralistic birthing. Miller has been there, as a daughter, as a wife, a student, a journalist and now as a mother, she has grappled with the tensions of competing religious beliefs that from the inside appear as strangers but from the outside resemble countrymen. She brings this tension to her explorations of the afterlife: “Like so many Americans, then, I approach religion from an uneasy, untraditional place, and like so many, I have struggled with what I believe about heaven” (xxvi).

Miller goes about her task of cultural peacemaking by comparing diverse visions of heaven through a tapestry of traditional teachings, scholarly alternatives, folk reflections, and pop cultural depictions. She writes with the eye of an anthropologist, the mind of a journalist, and the heart of a mother. It is genuinely educational; there is surprising depth of inquiry for a popularly written book and details that most people will find surprising. She wrestles openly and honestly with the influences of outside cultural and cultic beliefs on the development of Judaism, Christianity and even Islam. She places liberal and conservatives in dialogue and uncovers the deep yearnings and affections that feed the comfort that heaven provides.

Yet Miller has a dog in this fight – albeit a reluctant one. Early, while reflecting on research into incipient Judaism, she asks hypothetically, “[If I were an ancient Hebrew] What if my Rabbi’s told me that [the semitic pagan cult of the dead] was forbidden? That these family customs violated God’s law? What would I do? How would I think about my dead?” (36-37). Her proposal is that, in order to find comfort, ancient Hebrews coming to grips with an emerging religion that forbade a daily, imaginary interaction with the souls of dead loved one, the best conceptual alternative might have been the invention of a distant home for dead loved one. For Miller this is more than an honest sympathetic inquiry because it cuts to the heart of her metaphysical assumptions.

The trouble is that Miller, along with most of her theologically liberal cohorts, has more in common with her fundamentalist critics that she realizes – both are Modern foundationalists. Because she believes that a sure knowledge must rest on indubitable foundations, she cannot help but treat mere belief with a kind of paternalism. It’s not just that she handles such beliefs and traditions with skepticism (as we all should), it’s that she never treats these traditions and accounts as potential evidence because, for her, religious beliefs and traditions could never possibly qualify as evidential.

The end result is that the whole book comes off as a bit patronizing with strong undertones of melancholy – because in it we see Miller herself finally lay down any remnant of a belief in an afterlife. Like any foundationalist of the liberal variety she can only protect her own religious belief by bifurcating epistemology and relegating faith to the path of subjective personal experience. Consequently, it doesn’t matter what millions of people from one generation to the next have discovered about God. What matters is her own experience, and, when it comes to heaven, that experience is empty:

Whenever I have asked myself – over and over – “Do you believe in heaven?” I always think of my grandfather. I try to visualize him. I love him, I was there when he died; I miss him and my grandmother every day of my life. Surely if I believe in heaven, I would see them there in my minds eye. Sadly, I don’t (241).

So, despite having written a book that compiles mountains of evidence that that there may indeed be something beyond the grave, Miller is unable to integrate that knowledge into a holistic worldview that takes faith seriously as a tradition of knowledge. As a result, Heaven, while educational, touching, poignant, and lucid, ultimately comes of as a sad commentary on the impotence of the Modern era to satisfy the deepest longings of humanity. For Miller, this means she believes in some kind of God for goodness’ sake, but can’t seriously accept the notion of God’s present power in human life beyond the immanence of culture.

No wonder she weeps when she hears the Shema.

(I was provided with a copy of this book in return for the review I’ve written. I was in no way required to write either a positive or negative review of the book.)

Technorati Tags: Books, Heaven, Lisa Miller

Not that A View From the Back Pew isn’t good.

Actually, Tim is a solid writer. He tells engaging and often funny stories about his journey of faith. His prose can get a bit labored at times as he guides the reader through the basics of various religions as he sees it, but that’s just because he wants us to accompany him on his journey.

Tim writes with a missionary zeal, partly because he wants to spare others the demons he wrestled for the better part of forty years. Tim understands that the nuns who so rigorously constrained him as a child in Catholic school were well-meaning, “But mostly fear prevailed. I was afraid of Hell, I was afraid of yardsticks, and I was afraid of nuns.” Tim doesn’t want that fear to be the prevailing spiritual condition for anyone else seeking God.

And let’s face it: he’s right. Fear is often the motivating dynamic in religions of all stripes.

What made this book so interesting for me was that Tim’s message is basically identical to the gospel of American Evangelicalism – “Knowing religion is not the same as knowing God” (xiv) – except Tim jettisons any and all blind allegiance to the authority of the Church (as he was taught as a Catholic) or Christian scripture (as he would have been taught if he were Protestant).

The end result is that Tim crafts a spirituality for himself, governed entirely by himself. Typical of Modernist thinkers, Tim requires a reductionist kernel; an epistemological foundation that can be unimpeachably and universally applied from the bottom-up to serve as the prime mover in a causal-chain that reliably governs his life. For Tim, that foundation ends up being, quite literally, a feeling in his gut – “that trusty vibration in my solar plexus” (233).

Many Christians will scoff that this as nothing more than subjective emotionalism (others will just call it heresy, since Tim is heavily influenced by the gnostic gospels), but, frankly, it’s not all that different from the fundamental rationale I’ve heard from countless other Christians (and leaders) over the years. Tim just has the courage to admit that he really is the final arbiter of truth according to his worldview. In reality, religious fundamentalists are no different; they’re just playing a mental shell-game where Descartes’ cogito ergo sum wears the guise of tradition or scripture (or tradition about scripture, really) and is re-imagined as a delusion of objectivity.

What Tim is lacking is a nuanced view of truth as a tapestry of meaning that weaves together threads of culture, tradition, enquiry,  relationships, and circumstances, etc., as well as personal experiences in a pattern of ever-emerging knowledge and wisdom. My hunch is that Tim would embrace the idea – right up to the point where he had to submit to it in the form of someone else.

Still, although I think he misses the mark theologically and epistemologically, A View From the Back Pew is full of culturally relevant and brutally-honest (and, I think, often true) critiques of religion. If you can read it through a sympathetically critical lens, I recommend it as a window into the world of hyper-modernist spirituality and a partial peek into the landscape of a post-Christian future.

(I received a galley copy of A View From the Back Pew free of charge by the publisher in return for agreeing to review the book. I was not asked to offer either a positive or negative review.)

Technorati Tags: A View From the Back Pew, Books, Christianity, Epistemology, Gnosticism, Religion, Tim O'Donnell

Oceanside would like nothing better than to clean up its gang-and-graffiti stained reputation by attracting new businesses to re-create an idyllic beach-front ambiance on historic Coast Highway.

Businesses like Bull Taco, an edgy new taco shop about a half mile from my house, are exactly what this town wants.

But this morning, Bull Taco owner Justin Lewis was dismayed to discover his shop had been vandalized by a stencil-graffiti rat. Wearing Hollywood sunglasses. Flying a kite. With a kite-flying and fleeing immigrant family emblazoned upon said kite.

Fortunately, before Lewis could paint over the crime-depicting-crime (“As the owner of a restaurant, it feels weird that I have a rat on the wall.”), reporters had turned up to chronicle what appears to be the latest occurrence of a global phenomenon.

Yes, Banksy appears to have hit Oceanside.

Put us on the map baby. We have arrived.

Technorati Tags: Banksy, Graffiti, Oceanside

My review of the book is on the way. In the meantime, take a moment to enjoy this surprising quote touching on theology, atheism, and quantum mechanics from his recent conversation with Tony Perez from Tin House:

TP: There’s a quiet spirituality to your work that I think is lacking in a lot of contemporary fiction (your old teacher Marilynne Robinson being an obvious exception) and I’ve heard you’re a big reader of theology. I wonder if you could talk about how your work or your thinking is influenced by people like Karl Barth, or Martin Luther. Or even someone like William James?

PH: All the people you’ve just described I think you can sort of line up in parade formation, they all come out of the same tradition—reformed Protestant thinking. I grew up here in Boston kind of a neutral atheist. I read my Nietzsche and what not, but I wasn’t a dogmatic atheist—I wasn’t doctrinaire; I didn’t have anything against religion. And then after having studied with Marilynne Robinson for a number of years, it occurred to me that if I asked her where the source of her aesthetic, and intellectual, and soulful kind of integrity and sophistication came from, she would tell me that it was her religion. She would tell me that it came out of her reading in this tradition. Given that I respect her so much, I would be inclined to respect her answer, her own accounting of herself. So I just started to read these things and I found them to be incredibly beautiful— deeply concerned with narrative and cosmology. It was so much more than the popular sand kicking you hear in the press between Richard Dawkins and Creationists—the crummy little cartoon versions of these things. The more deeply I read into them, the more I realize that if you isolate yourself from these traditions of thinking, you’re isolating yourself from most of Western intellectual history, up until, almost post-World War II thinking. It almost feels like a type of censorship, like “religion’s bad for you, don’t bother looking at theology.” I read someone like Karl Barth and it’s just the most beautiful, aesthetically pleasing human thought I’ve encountered. In Tinkers, since it’s fiction, I’m not under the obligation to engage in apologetics or offer proof, but I can explore things. I can play around with them dramatically and aesthetically, and sort of see how these people account for themselves in terms of spiritual conceptions of who they are in the Universe.

If you look at Emerson, he was a Unitarian minister and he left the church. The common rap about that is, you know, he left the church for greener pastures. But if you look at the tradition out of which he came, there’s a strong argument to be made that he left the church to find God. That’s the Protestant tradition—at least the writing and thinking with which I’m familiar. There’s a built-in anti-authoritarianism, the presumption that the institutional church is a human construction; it’s always going to ossify, and it’s antithetical to truly pious thinking. For them, really what it comes down to, is you and scripture. The Unitarians broke away from the Calvinists; the Calvinists broke away from the Lutherans; the Lutherans broke away from the Catholics; the Catholics broke away from the Jews; the Jews broke away from the Babylonians. That’s a beautiful tradition, and seems hardwired into this understanding of what pursuing religion and that kind of thinking is. The best theologians, for example Karl Barth, view the Bible as a work of literature, and that does not demean its normative or holy authority. He’s a close reader of a text. It’s a much more sophisticated use of the imagination and the intellect, and just makes you think about what we talk about when we talk about God. When you go back to someone like Dawkins, he just perverts all that stuff by saying, “if you believe in God, you believe in an old man with a white beard sitting on a throne.” Of course that’s ridiculous. But then you realize that people like Dawkins have never read a word of theology, they rely on popular prejudice—or all this material positivism that they misheard in their, you know, Wittgenstein 101 class. If everything is made of matter, and there is no such thing as the spirit, then all that means is that we have no idea what the nature of matter is. I’m perfectly willing to grant that everything is made out of stuff, but that just means that we don’t really know what stuff is. To me, theology and poetry and art go hand-in-hand with physics. That version of materialism is totally antiquated, out-dated, Newtonian mechanics. They’re always complaining that it’s not testable, it’s not falsifiable, but the most sophisticated quantum mechanical experiments only make the nature of matter more ambiguous than it ever was before—it’s all observer dependent. If you’re a writer, there’s a very cool anti-realist strain in quantum mechanics. Supraluminal influence and observer dependent reality—all of that speaks to the experiential and participatory nature of human consciousness. When translated into fiction, it’s part of character. There’s a passage in Tinkers where Howard is walking through the woods, and when he turns around to look at his wagon, he’s certain that every time he turns his head, everything behind him disappears or changes. In a way, that’s just fooling around with quantum physics, just in a narrative sense.

Love, love, love that bit about Wittgenstein 101. So funny. Seriously, read the whole article. And the book.

Technorati Tags: art, Church, Culture, Paul Harding, Physics, Theology, Tinkers

For parents with daughters like me, how do you counteract this kind of cultural message? Is it important to?

For whatever it’s worth, here’s what I’ve tried to teach my three girls:

1. I am deeply, over-the-moon in love with them,
2. Being a woman is not a moral crime,
3. They have far more power than they realize and must wield it wisely.

I’ve noticed that kids often hold God responsible for the parents they are given (#1), the way they have been made (#2), and the destiny they see (or don’t see) unfolding before them (#3). If Jenell and I do a good job with all three above – which usually has more to do with asking the right questions than with giving the right answers – they will probably come to see God as good in spite of evil, see themselves rooted securely in that goodness, and see it as their responsibility to reflect that goodness in an uncertain world.

I think all this tends to make the inane superficiality of pop culture rather transparent.

Oh, and…

4. Boys are stupid and will say and do nearly anything to get what they want from a girl, but the decent one’s usually come to their senses sometime in their mid-to-late twenties.

Just kidding on that last one.

Sort of.

So, how do you counteract the message of fetishism with your girls (or boys, for that matter)?

Technorati Tags: Culture, Daughters, Family, Parenting

I met Andre in the hallway, where he was waiting patiently for a case manager. I first noticed him because he was alone – which is unusual since I mostly notice families these days. I introduced myself  and we shook hands. He was friendlier that most men you meet; eager to make contact.

I learned he was a commercial truck driver but lost his job due to cut backs. I learned he was from Long Beach and had a son who was good with computers. I could tell by his posture and manner of speech that he had the kind of optimistic hopefulness that is sometimes mistaken for confidence.

I noticed the beads hanging from his neck.

I have the same beads, I told him, pulling mine from under my shirt to prove it. Andre burst into a smile, inspecting the plastic crucifix at the end of my beads while unconsciously fingering his own.

He must not have been convinced of my eternal security (or maybe of his own) because he immediately started to testify. Soon he’d worked his way into a homily and was moving headlong in the direction of a full-blown extemporaneous sermon. He started to swagger a bit and find his cadence – summoning the spirits of a thousand charismatic preachers from street-corner churches, big tent revivals, and cable TV miracle hours. If I’d let him go on he might have baptized me in the lobby drinking fountain. And I night have let him. Andre isn’t the only one looking for a home these days.

Instead I politely interrupted and said I needed to get back to work, but could I take his picture? I wanted to remember his face long after I’d forgotten his words.

Technorati Tags: homeless, Interfaith Community Services