Finding Beauty in a Broken World, Parish Retreat 2009

After 9-11, Utah author and environmental advocate, Terry Tempest Williams stood facing the ocean in Maine, desperate for ‘one, wild word’ to help her ‘retrieve the poetry’ she had lost.

And the word the sea rolled back to me was “m o s a i c.”

In her book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, the word ‘mosaic’ takes her on an inspiring and thought provoking journey from the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, Italy, through Bryce Canyon, Utah, observing endangered prairie dogs, to a Rwandan Survivors’ Village, where with Barefoot Artist Lily Weh, she helps create a memorial to the victims of the genocide.

This was a wonderful book to take with us on our annual Parish Retreat up at Bishops’ Ranch, Healdsburg. Over fifty of us (ages 6 months to over 90!), explored the idea of mosaics, both naturally occurring and humanly created, both real and metaphorical. We discussed the idea of broken pieces and how they can be reassembled (a conversation that had to be quite loud in order to ride over the happy sounds of the children working with Lego in the center of the circle!). More Parish Retreat photos!

The Theology of Battlestar Galactica – RESCHEDULED

Here’s a question: What modern sci-fi (or if you prefer, psy-fi) television show offers a multi-layered commentary upon the Biblical Exodus story, the 4th century Roman empire (when the powers that be were Christianizing the empire at the point of a sword), as well as the United States post-September 11?

That’s right: Battlestar Galactica. And no, not the version from the 1970’s–the one of the past 5 years. And yes, it really does have that much on its mind. We’re not making it up.

A bunch of BSG obsessives from St. Bede’s will offer a presentation on the subject tomorrow evening, May 14 next Thursday evening, May 21 (along with dinner), from 6:30 – 9 pm. We hope to win some converts to the show along the way. So please join us!

Why Is The Bible Such a Big Deal?

This is what I love about our Seekers Dinners.

Tomorrow night, we will be discussing The Holy Bible. Specifically we will be attempting to address the following questions, as raised by one of our young adults in an email to me earlier this week:

One thing I’m interested in is what the Bible should mean (and how it should be used) by modern, rational, serious Christians (or agnostics). Knowing what modern scholarship says about the history of how the Bible was written, compiled, interpreted, etc., why (and how) should we give it any mind? Why preference the bible over other religious/spiritual sources as a focus of study or inspiration? I doubt most people want to turn this thing into a Bible Study, but it’s something I’m interested in… So what’s the justification for being so focused on the Hebrew and Christian Bible?

Great questions! I’m not sure we’ll settle on any definitive answers tomorrow night, but it’ll be fun to try. Which reminds me of a quip I heard yesterday from a Bay Area Episcopal priest I’d just met:

“The Episcopal Church: You’ve got questions… We’ve got questions.”

- Jamie McElroy

The Mysterious “Unaffiliated”

The Pew Forum has released the results of a complex and fascinating survey of American adults about whether, why and how they switch or stick with the religious affiliation of their childhood.

Most interesting to me, as someone raised unaffiliated, is the finding that a majority of those who were raised unaffiliated (54 percent) have since become affiliated with Evangelical Protestantism, Mainline Protestantism, Catholicism or some other non-Christian faith as adults. Meanwhile, only about 14 percent of those raised Christian, either Catholic or Protestant, have become altogether unaffiliated with an organized religion. And most (68 percent of those raised Catholic and 52 percent of those raised Protestant) have continued as adults with the particular denomination in which they were raised.

What does this mean? Well… I don’t know…

At first blush, it seems to contradict some of the recent assertions that religiosity is steadfastly declining in America. But this column in the New York Times went further and asserted that the survey results indicate humans must naturally crave ways for experiencing the divine and/or the group identity that comes from affiliation with one faith or another. That column, in turn, inspired this blog post which led to a torrent of comments theorizing about the extent to which the religiosity of human beings is (1) a product of culture or (2) a product of our neural wiring.

Here’s one interesting comment…

From Pastafarian to Episcopalian

I’m a little late to this, but St. Bede’s parishioner Michael Chen has totally redesigned his blog and it is very much worth checking out. Also he recently posted an interesting response to our last Seekers Dinner. Here’s an excerpt:

The Seeker’s dinner on Thursday was a fascinating look at the composition of St. Bedes. Technically, the topic was “organized religion,” which turned into a somewhat one-sided debate about how bad organized religion is. Which is ironic since the debate took place at a dinner in our church.

I’m honestly not a fan of organized religion. I think it’s potential for being psychologically damaging (see: fundamentalist) is not outweighed by its social good. Especially nowadays, I think it detracts too much from rational knowledge (see: intelligent design). Its community organizational purpose is still valid, but organized religion has lost some of its poise as a governmental check (in a typically American paradox).

Still, there are some good aspects, mainly related to community building I feel. But I think St. Bede’s is rare…

Even the services Christina and I attend on Sundays are not 100% comfortable to me–reciting things sounds, at best, droning and, at worst, cult-ish. I enjoy the singing, mainly because when else could I sing? I enjoy the food and gathering with other intelligent individuals. But that actual “organized” part? Meh. Still, I understand the merits of all these aspects, just as I understand that historical precedence is often what drives these arcane rituals that I dislike so much. I am still uncomfortable identifying with a wider religious community, precisely because I do not want to be associated with the ignorance and bigotry that often discolors faith. It took me a lot of willpower to change my Facebook identification from “Pastafarian” to “Episcopalian.”

- Jamie McElroy

Let the Greening Begin

This past Sunday, while the adults were in the Great Hall discussing environmental ethics with Stanford Philosophy doctoral candidate Lauren Hartzell, as well as the environmental impact of future landscaping and building projects on the Bede’s site with ecologist, Ryan Navrotil, our  kids were out behind the Great Hall breaking ground for the new St. Bede’s Community Garden.

Small-space farmer extraordinaire, Brian Leen is overseeing the project and this summer, we will put to work all the kids who participate in our Eco-Camp (August 17 – 21 — register today!), digging, planting and otherwise cultivating this new garden.

- Jamie McElroy

How Do We Know?

Jane raises some very good questions in the post below regarding knowledge (what we know, how we know it) when she asserts that she is not an agnostic since she does feel that she knows/believes whole-heartedly things she cannot fully explain.

I call myself an agnostic in the context of the theist/atheist debates largely because those debates are generally conducted in philosophical and scientific terms–which is to say in strictly rational terms. Therefore, I think that when we define knowledge as that which we may know according to reason, we must all be agnostics, since none of us can logically prove much of anything regarding the presence or lack of presence of a benevolent, omnipotent God.

However, as Jane rightfully alludes to, there are many other ways of knowing besides the strictly rational. After all, we rely upon intuitions and feelings and other non-rational forms of insight all the time. We wouldn’t be able to function in the world if we didn’t–as neuroscience writer, Jonah Lehrer’s recent book, How We Decide, lays bare.

That said, I think that, as Christians or believers more generally, it’s important for us to remember the fact that, in rational terms, we lack of knowledge–we are, in this sense, agnostics. Reason serves as a very, very important counterbalance to the knowledge/belief that comes from one’s felt awareness of God. Reason helps us to live into that most Christian of virtues: humility.

We know but we do not know.

- Jamie McElroy

David Hume and Ye Olde Atheism

Contra the New Atheism of the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher, philosophy professor, Simon Blackburn, longs for the more erudite, funny and respectful atheism of 18th century philosopher, David Hume (a favorite thinker of mine, I must admit). Blackburn writes:

I suspect that many professional philosophers, including ones such as myself who have no religious beliefs at all, are slightly embarrassed, or even annoyed, by the voluble disputes between militant atheists and religious apologists. …The annoyance comes partly because of the strong sense of deja vu. But it is not just that old tunes are being replayed, but that they are being replayed badly. The classic performance was given by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, written in the middle of the 18th century. Hume himself said that nothing could be more artful than the Dialogues, and it is the failure to appreciate that art that is annoying.

But Blackburn’s beef with “The New Atheism” is not merely a problem of style or artfulness. He  concludes:

So is Hume himself an atheist? The word does not fit, and he never described himself as such. He is much too subtle. Philo the sceptic says that we cannot understand or know anything about a transcendent reality that explains or sustains the ongoing order of nature, while theists such as Demea say that we cannot understand or know anything about the transcendent reality, which is God, that explains or sustains the ongoing order of nature. Since the inserted clause does not help us in the least, the difference between them is merely verbal. And this is Hume’s conclusion.

As I’ve asserted before, and as Hume would seem to think himself: There are no true atheists or theists, since certainty on either side of the question is beyond our human ability. Rather, we are all agnostics.

- Jamie McElroy

Something Tells Me…

…that this advertisement for the Sacrament of Confession–targeted, obviously, at teens and young adults–isn’t going to have the effect that the Catholic Church is going for.

Having gone through the Episcopal Church’s Sacrament of Reconciliation, I can say that irony and parody kind of feel antithetical to the whole thing. Owning up to one’s sins is, in my opinion, the ultimate act of sincerity. I don’t see how an ad that reeks of sarcasm is going to convince anyone to wade into such thorough-going self-examination.

Not that there’s anything wrong with irony and parody and sarcasm, like this, for instance. I just wouldn’t use such stuff to “sell” confession.

- Jamie McElroy

God Can’t Be Contained

In anticipation of our next Seekers Dinner this coming Thursday evening, 7:30 – 9:30 pm, here’s blogger Justin McLachlan telling a story about his late-night encounter with a homeless marijuana seeker, named Wolf Fang(!), on the mean streets of Muncie, Indiana:

I’ve never had a stranger conversation. To Wolf Fang, more amazing than that I didn’t sell drugs was that I didn’t use them either. This is unconscionable, he said. How do I get by, he wondered?

“Blow by blow,” I told him. Looking back, that was a particularly poor choice of words. But I think Wolf Fang got what I was saying. Over the next half-hour, we talked about everything from God to bicycle maintenance to politics (though he believed Reagan was still in office. The transition out of the Eighties was a blur for Wolf Fang). And as we talked, my impression of him slowly changed. Kind of. He was still a guy that I’d cross the street to avoid. But, my prejudice not withstanding, I found this particular homeless man intelligent, sensitive – seeking.

Who would’ve thought? It also turned out that he knew God better than I did. That’s a big deal when you consider my private, Christian college education. I should’ve been the one revealing God’s nature to Wolf Fang, not the other way around. “God lives on the streets, too, ya know,” Wolf Fang said.

Try that one on for size…

Strangeness

The news coming out this week from Iowa and Vermont (as well as my hometown, Washington, DC) has been very exciting to me. I and many others can be counted among those Christians who are very happy to have gay marriages legally recognized–and even celebrated in our churches.

But some Christian activists continue to feel threatened by gay people having their committed and loving relationships legally recognized by their state governments.

Here is a rather misleading advertisement in which various actors claim to be specific citizens (doctor from California, parent from Massachusetts, member of a New Jersey church group and so on) who have been somehow persecuted by gay people who wish to get married. It uses the apocalyptic Biblical imagery of thunder and lighting and ominous dark clouds. And it includes the actors saying things like, “My freedom will be taken away!” and “They want to change the way I live!”

Below are clips of the actor auditions for the ad, which, I think, hi-lights the strangeness of this whole issue. Why-oh-why is gay marriage controversial?

A Consideration of Evil

With Good Friday fast approaching, it seems appropriate to consider Ruth Franklin’s recent review (in The New Republic) of Jonathan Littell’s ambitious new novel, The Kindly Ones (winner of two of France’s top literary prizes), in which a fictional cog in the Nazi killing machine tells his life-story–in over 950 pages. To put it mildly, Franklin does not recommend the book. She calls it, “one of the most repugnant books I have ever read.”

Franklin is specifically concerned about the book’s obsessive interest in the nature of evil even as it fails to offer any coherent thoughts regarding the nature of evil. As such, her criticism of Littell’s work reminds me of my own frustration with many modern depictions of evil–be they in the movies of Quentin Tarantino, or in TV shows like the gory “Criminal Minds” and “Dexter,” or even in the cable news coverage of brutal atrocities committed the world over. As a society, we seem fascinated by evil and yet ill-equipped to reflect upon where it comes from and how it should be dealt with. (Hence our country’s seeming disinterest in the now blatant fact that we have subjected prisoners in our American jails to torture techniques identical to those employed by Soviet Russia and, yes, Nazi Germany.)

At one point during the review, Franklin quotes Littell attempting to explain his moral world-view.

John Rawls, Lapsed Episcopalian

An article in the Times of London Literary Supplement discusses the progressive Christian ideals that served as the foundation for John Rawls’ influential political philosophy.

The writer of A Theory of Justice, and the father of modern American political liberalism, Rawls (who died in 2002) apparently considered entering seminary as a young man and pursuing ordination in the Episcopal Church, but ultimately walked away from the church, earned a Ph.D in philosophy and became one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century.

Recently, his senior philosophy thesis from his time as a Princeton undergrad, written in 1942, and entitled “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An interpretation based on the concept of community,” has been found.

From the Times article:

The moral importance of the separateness of persons, a fundamental theme of Rawls’s work, is strikingly anticipated in the moral and religious conception of community that lies at the heart of the thesis. Rawls proposes that the essential feature of human beings is our capacity for community, that sin deforms our essential nature and destroys community, and that faith is the realization of our nature through integration into community: our “openness” to God and other persons overcomes the terrible aloneness that issues from sin. Although the term “community” may suggest otherwise, the human fellowship in which we realize our nature does not destroy the separateness of individual persons, but is founded on an affirmation of their distinctness. Here is a revealing passage:

“We reject mysticism because it seeks a union which excludes all particularity, and wants to overcome all distinctions. Since the universe is in its essence communal and personal, mysticism cannot be accepted…

Men’s Retreat Tomorrow

On Saturday, March 28, St. Bede’s will hold its fourth annual Men’s Retreat from 10 am to 3 pm. 16 of us guys, including a few members of our youth group, will gather to better get to know one another, and to sing songs like this:

Just kidding. (Sorry: couldn’t resist.)

Click here for how we’ll actually spend our time. In brief we’ll be exploring questions of repentance and reconciliation as inspired by scenes from David Lynch’s “The Straight Story,” and Robert Duvall’s “The Apostle.”

Social Entrepreneur 5: Fabio Rosa

In chapter 3 of David Bornstein’s How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas (Oxford, 2007), there is the story of Fabio Rosa, a Brazilian agronomic engineer who revolutionized the way Brazilian farmers get access to water with the help of cheap, low-tech electrical systems in rural Palmares, Brazil. (For all posts in our social entrepreneur series, click here.)

Rosa was raised a gaucho and trained as an agronomic engineer. A classmate invited him to southern Brazil, to meet his father, Ney Azevedo, then the governor of the state of Palmares, in Rio Gradne do Sul, a rural farming region of Brazil similar to the Mississippi River delta. Over dinner Rosa and Azevedo talked about how to improve life for the local villagers of Palmares. Azevedo ultimately asked Rosa to become secretary of agriculture for the state.

Rosa accepted and began to talk with the area’s farmers about their needs. The rural villages wanted to boost rice production and farm income, but a quarter of their production cost was for water.

Rosa found a book by a Brazilian who had learned of artesian well irrigation for rice production in Louisiana. But Brazilian electrification was designed and delivered by high-tech standards for large producers, pricing the poor out of the system. Rosa found Ennio Amaral at the Federal Technical School at the nearby city of Pelotes. Amaral had developed a low-tech, inexpensive electrical system for rural areas.

Of Presses and Parishes

Yesterday, I read this blog post by Clay Shirky about the unfortunate demise of the local daily newspaper. (Shirky is a freelance writer with a focus on technological issues and he also teaches a “New Media” class as an adjunct professor at NYU.) In it, he argues that the necessity of drastically changing the way that newspapers do business was fairly obvious at least 15 years ago, but that very little real change was implemented and so most local dailies, once cultural institutions, are now on the brink of failing all over the country (the Seattle Post-Intelligencer just stopped its presses for good and will now operate only as a news website with a skeleton staff, and our own San Francisco Chronicle is in dire straits, just to name two prominent examples).

I bring this up because there are similar concerns that have been out there for years regarding the growth (or lack there-of) of the Episcopal Church and other mainline American Protestant churches. St. Bede’s is a very healthy and robust parish with strong children and youth ministries as well as a vibrant cadre of young adults who are actively engaged with the life of the parish as a whole, as well as a wide array of outreach ministries which extend our mission and message throughout the wider Bay Area community. But many parishes are struggling to attract and maintain younger congregants and are struggling to make ends meet financially and don’t have the resources to actively reach out to the wider community. Why? And what is to be done about it?

One could offer many, many reasons. (Bede’s Blog’s discussion of the recent Trinity College religious-affiliation poll here and here offers one important reason.) But all those reasons could be summed up by the fact that our culture has radically changed since the hey-day of the Episcopal Church in the 1950’s and 1960’s. For years, the church has attempted to address those cultural shifts and prayerfully attempted to stay true to the Gospel while framing Jesus’ message of peace and love and hope in a way that will resonate to young Americans of today. If we believe that Jesus’ teaching and example offer a universal path toward God, toward that which is good and right and true, then cultural revolutions should not be able to keep us from spreading our faith.

An American Via Media?

More thoughts regarding that recent Trinity College survey of Americans regarding religious affiliation that Bede’s Blog referenced last week–this time from Andrew Sullivan in the Times of London and Frank Rich in the New York Times.

Sullivan and Rich are both interested in the fact that the fastest rising self-classification since 1990, according to the survey, is “no affiliation,” which jumped from 8 percent to 15 percent over the past 18 years. This finding is coupled with the fact that “no affiliation” is now the third most populous group behind only “Catholic” and “Baptist.”

Rich sees this as evidence that scientific modes of thought are finally beginning to, in some sense, emerge victorious in the long-standing “culture war.” Sullivan, meanwhile, longs for an American via media–a middle way between thoughtless fundamentalism on the one hand and on the other hand, rigid anti-religiosity (typified by the “new atheism” Bede’s Blog has discussed previously). Sullivan argues that this American via media used to be occupied by mainline Protestant churches, including the Episcopal Church. However, as we all know, the rise of evangelical fundamentalism and atheism has coincided with the decline of mainline Protestantism–including the decline of the Episcopal Church.

But I really like the idea that our role as Episcopalians (and Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists, etc.) is to provide a middle way between atheism and fundamentalism. Can we get the word out and let our fellow Americans know that there is such a via media available to them?

Click below for the excerpts.

Fewer and Fewer Young Christians

Why are more and more young Americans refusing to identify themselves as Christians?

A recent survey conducted by Trinity College in Hartford has found that the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christian as shrunk from 86 percent in 1990 to 75 percent. This is connected to a decline in religiosity of Americans aged 18 – 30. (Check out the graph here.) So why the decline? Mark Silk, the Trinity College researcher who conducted the poll, opines:

“In the 1990s, it really sunk in on the American public generally that there was a long-lasting ‘religious right’ connected to a political party, and that turned a lot of people the other way. In an earlier time, people who would have been content to say, ‘Well, I’m some kind of a Protestant,’ now say ‘Hell no, I won’t go.’”

I’m afraid that this theory rings very true to me.

The Kingdom of Heaven Will Be YouTubed

Israeli musician Kutiman has put out an album entitled ThruYOU which consists entirely of his mixes of independent YouTube posts. Check out the taste below. If you really want to blow your mind, click here.

This is, in my opinion, the internet at its best. An incredibly talented guy in Israel has mixed together homemade musical videos posted by random individuals from all over the world to create something so much greater than the sum of its parts. When I see and hear this mix of people digitally coming together across time and space to create such amazing music, I feel as though I’m getting a glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven. To think that YouTube didn’t exist four years ago.

Christian Hipster?

Brett McCracken, a 20-something progressive Evangelical, is writing a book about what it means to be an (Evangelical) Christian hipster. And he’s blogging about it.

Here’s a recent post that sheds light on what he’s talking about. I’m happy to know that this exists but I only find myself relating to it here and there. I can attest that there is a parallel Christian Hipster-type trend in a more mainline-Protestant vein, of which I suppose I am a part.

But I bet that is a much smaller phenomenon.