Regarding a Sam Harris video from TED which a friend asked me to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj9oB4zpHww&feature=player_embedded

What is going on here is that Harris is presupposing an Enlightenment understanding of “values,” and then and saying that, contrary to much pop opinion, this is really not at all in different sphere from modern science. He might be right, because these two realms are, to invoke Aristotle, “contrary propositions within the same genus.” They are apparent opposites, but in reality they are kissing cousins, two sides of the same coin.

But what if we were to frame the debate in terms of representation versus participation?

That is, what if we were to grant that modern science and enlightenment-based values, are, in fact, overlapping spheres, but then to challenge the common assumptions of this sphere: that our minds interact with the “external world” or creation according to a scheme of representation (ie, “pictures in the brain”)? Over and against this modern assumption (espoused, for example, by Descartes) is the premodern approach to knowledge which is participatory: the form of the tree migrates into my mind (and vice-versa) much like small particles of fragrant coffee are wafting into my nostrils even as I write this.

What needs to be challenged, therefore, is the enlightenment, representationalist worldview which is shared by both privatized “values” and the modern science establishment.

“Values are certain kinds of facts: facts about the well-being of conscious creatures” presupposes a positivistic epistemology. He is letting modern science define his terms and frame the issues.

“There is no notion of values that I have ever come across that is not reducible to a concern about conscious experience.” Really? How about the “notion of values” of Ancient Jews? Or of 5^th century Athens?

Notice how he reduces religion-driven values down to the “afterlife.” Perhaps he should try reading the Bible sometime. Paul almost never speaks of “the afterlife,” let alone Jesus and the Old Testament. “The afterlife” is a term which hegemonically imposes a modern conception of self and religion upon Christian theology.

He assumes that “adding cholera to the water” would “probably not be a good thing.” I’m surprised to hear him say this, since he is not a pacifist. Surely there might be, given his worldview, a time and a place to add cholera to the water, for example, as strategy in the middle east of Afghanistan in the American Empire’s “war on terror?”

4:55 Brain versus mind. This is a huge example of begging the question. He argues that variant understandings of human flourishing are reducible down to culture-induced changes in the brain (but how does he know this?), and so we can understand these differing value systems through “a maturing science of the mind: neuroscience, psychology, etc.”

He speaks repeatedly of a “state of wellbeing.” What is that, and who gets to choose? Is it “not killing each other?” That seems rather shallow and unambitious. (What if we start killing ourselves?) Is it pleasure? That is certainly what the Epicureans and the radical skeptics thought, but the Stoics trenchantly disagreed. Who is right? Will modern science settle this debate?

What is wonderful, however, about Sam Harris is that he is passionately concerned about human flourishing. Would be that more “Christians” shared his passion.

In addition, I agree that “there are right and wrong answers” to the best ways to promote human flourishing.” How to determine those, however, is where the disagreement starts.

One more thought: I love TED!

I suppose that one of the things I learned from my almost 4 years as a Starbucks barista was the fun of introducing customers to new things: new coffees, new pairings, new ways to drink tea, etc. (Actually, I have always loved to do this. Even when I was a little kid I liked to experiment with drinks, for example & 7Up — not Sprite — with various fruit juices, and then share my new discoveries with sisters and parents.)

Recently here in Tyler, an area somewhat beer-challenged (though I love many things about Tyler!), I have enjoyed sitting at a bar somewhere, and starting a conversation with a Bud Light drinker (for example).

“Bartender, give him a Fireman’s Four on me, please,” followed by a discussion about the ways this beer is superior to his former go-to.

Another good beer in this situation would be New Belgium Sunshine Wheat, but, alas, I’ve not seen that one (especially on tap) in these parts, east of Dallas.

In other words, Fireman’s Four and Sunshine Wheat are good examples of bridge beers which can help a person transition from beer which, having little redeeming value, can only be called “cheap” to a truly wonderful beer, rich in flavor and full of body.

Another good bridge beer is Shiner Bock. I have seen many a beer drinker enhance their quality of life by moving from cheap beer to robust stouts and porters by way of Shiner. (Shiner Bock to Shiner Black to a good stout is a natural trajectory.)

Now, just as there are bridge beers, so also there are bridge churches. In my journey the PCA was just such a church. I was blessed to get a taste of liturgical and sacramental worship in the PCA in Austin while still retaining the sense that I was rooted in the evangelical world.

But over time (to make a long story short) I needed more. I needed to go deeper. I needed the full experience, the full body, the full depth of layer and subtlety.

Now, as an Episcopal priest, I have the joy and privilege to be forming a new worshiping community of young people in the context of an Episcopal Church (kind of like a church plant but with fewer of the intense challenges that accompany that monumental project).

One of the things going on with the “Epiphany Eucharist” is this idea of bridge worship. What we are trying to do here is to provide access to the liturgy and sacramental life of the church for folks for whom this way of worshiping the Triune God is quite foreign and awkward.

Just as (for Calvin) God “lisps” in the Incarnation, so also we are wanting not to “dumb down” the liturgy, but rather to implement creative ways of making it more accessible, more reachable, more natural.

Just as a Bud Light drinker usually has trouble going straight to Old Rasputin or Young’s Double Chocolate Stout or Dogfish Head Raison d’etre, so also many folks have trouble going straight from secular culture or megachurch culture (which are basically the same thing, I think) to the Rite I Eucharistic Liturgy.

I would love nothing more than if, after a year or two of folks worshiping with us in the Rite III Epiphany Service, they were to come up to me and say, “You know, I have really enjoyed and grown from this Epiphany Eucharist over the last many months, but I think I would like to try that Rite I Service downstairs.”

“Great!” I would respond, thinking to myself all the while, “mission accomplished.”

The Eucharist is, quite literally, a re-membering of the body of Christ. His scarred, fish-eating resurrection body (known in the ancient church as the soma typicon or “typological body”) which hung on the cross, becomes the living members of his true body (corpus verum), you and me.

Theologians call this “participation,” but as is painfully obvious, there quite simply are no words to describe this. In a way which transcends the “one flesh union” of my wife and me, we quite simply are members of Christ. We are his body. We are his body for the world and for the world’s life. Which is why the Eucharist involves a third body as well: what the ancients knew as the “mystical body:” the corpus mysticum. This bread, together with the wine, imports the world into the church: the world of harvesting, the world of threshing, the world of trade and commerce, the world of civilized humanity created as God’s image-bearing cultivators of his good world.

And so, do you see? As members of his body, we are enacting the world’s true culture and civilization. We are brining about the new world of the living, victorious Christ.

A couple of friends have asked me to share my thoughts about this conference.

Anglican1000 is a yearly church planting conference (which just ended) which was held at Christ Church Plano, a parish in the northern suburbs of Dallas which left the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas a few years ago. (The rector, David Roseberry, who planted the church in the mid-1980′s and grew it to become the largest parish in the entire Episcopal Church when it exited that church body, then led the church into the Anglican Mission in the Americas, and then subsequently changed affiliations to the ACNA.)

Some thoughts:

1. Praise God for the missional energy and excitement which is spreading in this group. The planting of biblically-based local churches can only be good.

2. It was kind of a surreal experience, on the other hand, being in the midst of a group of folks who are forming a reactionary or alternative church body, in opposition to a more liberal one. This was the air in which I lived and moved and had my being for about a decade in the Presbyterian Church in America, including several years as a pastor. The temptation for such a new body to define themselves against the “apostasizing ones” is absolutely undeniable, as is the potential arrogance and self-congratulation which go along with that.

3. It was also surreal to hear Tim Keller in this group. Keller’s rich, nuanced, thoughtful, culturally savvy theological engagement (which I have been studying for a decade) was soaked up by them like parched desert soil soaking up a shower of life-giving rain.

4. I noticed a tendency in the group (there were perhaps 500 church planters and other interested parties in attendance) to push for a more confessional Anglicanism, something I had known about previously at a more theoretical level from Dr. Philip Turner, who has argued against a confessional framework against Stephen Noll from Trinity School for Ministry. Several folks with whom I spoke explicitly argued for this, the need for a more confessional commitment as something that will bind the church together in unity. I continue to think, however, that this is not classically Anglican, and, quite frankly, that this makes this group tantamount to the PCA (especially since one can find great liturgies all throughout the PCA).

5. Connected to #4 above, this conference has deepened my commitment to catholic liturgical practice as the only way the Church can withstand the onslaught of modernity. (To play devil’s advocate for a moment, the strongest argument against this posture is the global south: that is, a non-liturgical christianity could well outlast and outflank modern secularism by continuing to take root in Africa and other 2/3 worlds countries, which then continue to bring this evangelical faith back to the post-Christian west.) It is clear that for these Anglican brothers and sisters at this conference, it is not the liturgy which binds the church together in unity. As a result one sees wildly divergent ways of worshipping among the church plants and a longing for a more robust commitment to confessional standards.

5. I did attend one workshop during the conference put on by a group in New England (led by Bishop Bill Murdoch) that is embodying a “new monastic” way of practicing intentional community that was truly encouraging, motivating, and inspiring. God willing, I will implement some of these practices in my ministry, and the worshipping community that God is forming, in Tyler.

All in all, I am grateful to God for doing a new thing in this group, and that “denominational” disputes cannot stop the work of God in the world. However, as a liturgical catholic Christian who embraces a “communion ecclesiology” (along the lines of Rowan Williams, Radical Orthodoxy, the Windsor Report, and John Zizioulas) who enjoys the oversight of a godly bishop, I am glad I am not directly numbered among them.

Inspired by a recent Facebook post from my friend Cynthia Nielsen I am reminded of an amazing passage by Graham Ward in his Cities of God (tied for the best book I read in 2010).

The body of Christ is a multigendered body. Its relation to the body of the gendered Jew does not have the logic of cause and effect. This is the logic which lies behind those questions, ‘Can a male saviour save women.’ This is the logic of Hegel’s description of the relationship between God and the Church.

As one who disagrees with Ward at the end of the day on same sex issues in the church, I nevertheless find his logic here compelling.

In fact I often think of Ward and this book during the service of Holy Communion, at the altar rail during the Distribution of the Elements. Frequently I will give a consecrated wafer to a woman saying, “The Body of Christ for you, my sister,” but then, before I finish that phrase, I am now giving a wafer to a man, calling him “sister.” It is a powerful reminder / suggestion to me, enacted during the liturgy, of the way sex and gender are deconstructed in the church.

Of course what I’m saying here presupposes the theology of the Three-fold Body of Christ, promulgated among others by Henri de Lubac.

Those of you familiar with the teachings of Tim Keller will see realize that the title of this post is “stolen” from him, as is the basic point of the Epiphany teachings we are doing as we delve into Paul’s letter to the Galatians.

Where we’ve been in Galatians so far:

1. We started out by looking at the so-called Parable of the Prodigal Son as a “lens” through which we view Galatians (thus “reading Scripture with Scripture”). This parable from Luke 15 is really about two sons, and not just the sinful, lost, younger son. As we have seen, the older brother is just as much in need of repentance as the younger brother who wasted his father’s inheritance in Las Vegas living it up, gambling, drinking, carousing, and (as the text says) sleeping with prostitutes. The elder brother is just as much as in need of repentance: just as much as the younger brother, he is using his father as a means to an end. Just as much as the younger brother, he is trying to control his father, the only difference being that the elder brother is trying to control the father through his obedience, through doing what’s right, through “the works of the law.”

2. Who is Jesus always getting upset with in the Gospel stories? Elder brother types: scribes, Pharisees, teachers of the law. The squeaky clean types, the cultural and religious conservatives, the ones who believe in absolute truth, the morally upstanding types, the ones who would be much happier living in red states.

3. What is Galatians about? It is a polemic levied against the “elder brother types,” but in this context they are not called “Pharisees;” they are called “the Circumcision.” Different characters from the Gospel stories, but the plot remains fundamentally the same.

4. Now, what’s crazy is that Paul himself is, by nature and by nurture, an “elder brother type.” As he states in Galatians 1, he had been a “Pharisee of Pharisees,” more zealous than his contemporaries for the purity of the law.

5. However Paul is a man who has been changed by grace! The risen Christ appeared to him (see the book of Acts), knocking him off his horse and onto his can. And after a season of meditation in the desert, trying to figure out what in the world had happened to him on that road to Damascus, trying to make sense of the Scriptures (for us, the “Old Testament”) in light of this shocking revelation of Christ, he begins to reach out in love to the very ones he had so murderously despised: the Gentiles! The Gentiles: the unclean ones, the sinners, the younger brother types.

6. This is the heart of Galatians: the life of Christ is not one of status quo religion, whereby we assume our own superiority over those who are different from us (this is the basic posture of the human heart, and the basic nature of so much of what passes for “religion”).

7. OK, then, what is the Christian life about? Two things (which we will consider together on Thursday nights for the next few weeks):

a. A New Law of Freedom (ch 5).

b. A New Community or Family (ch 6).

51 Christians were killed in Baghdad at a single shooting last week, the NT Times reports.

An excerpt:

In an emotional service interrupted twice by applause, the Rev. Muklis Shisha told the congregation, “The church is a martyr,” adding: “The cross needs blood, and the blood is happiness because Jesus is our happiness. I congratulate our country and ourselves for our martyrs.”

For many Christians here, the attack underscored a bitter irony of the American-led invasion. It opened the door for warfare on one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.

According to the Society for Threatened Peoples, a nongovernmental organization in Germany, more than three-quarters of Baghdad’s 400,000 Christians have left the capital since the invasion, and many have left the country. With a few exceptions, the country’s Jewish population left years ago.

“I don’t think the American people care about this,” said the Rev. Meyassr al-Qaspotros of the nearby Sacred Church of Jesus, whose cousin was one of the priests killed at Our Lady of Salvation, adding, “The Americans are the cause of all this.”

In his sermon to his own congregation, he said, he planned to stress the existential meaning of human suffering and the need for forgiveness, even in the face of horrific bloodshed. “God allowed man to torture Jesus, he will allow this as well, because he gave freedom to all people,” Father Qaspotros said. “We are willing to live with them as our brothers, and teach our sons to love them, because we are no different from them. We are all human.”

In light of a good convo with a friend last night, and in light of our upcoming “Monster’s Ball,” I thought I wd repost this, from St. GK.

“The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other sound rules–a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.” –”Omar and the Sacred Vine,” Heretics

Happy (early) All Saints Eve!

Enjoy this excellent article by James Jordan on the origins of Halloween, or All Hallows Eve:

Concerning Halloween

James Jordan

It has become routine in October for some Christian schools to send out letters warning parents about the evils of Halloween, and it has become equally routine for me to be asked questions about this matter.

“Halloween” is simply a contraction for All Hallows’ Eve. The word “hallow” means “saint,” in that “hallow” is just an alternative form of the word “holy” (“hallowed be Thy name”). All Saints’ Day is November 1. It is the celebration of the victory of the saints in union with Christ. The observance of various celebrations of All Saints arose in the late 300s, and these were united and fixed on November 1 in the late 700s. The origin of All Saints Day and of All Saints Eve in Mediterranean Christianity had nothing to do with Celtic Druidism or the Church’s fight against Druidism (assuming there ever even was any such thing as Druidism, which is actually a myth concocted in the 19th century by neo-pagans.)

In the First Covenant, the war between God’s people and God’s enemies was fought on the human level against Egyptians, Assyrians, etc. With the coming of the New Covenant, however, we are told that our primary battle is against principalities and powers, against fallen angels who bind the hearts and minds of men in ignorance and fear. We are assured that through faith, prayer, and obedience, the saints will be victorious in our battle against these demonic forces. The Spirit assures us: “The God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly” (Romans 16:20).

The Festival of All Saints reminds us that though Jesus has finished His work, we have not finished ours. He has struck the decisive blow, but we have the privilege of working in the mopping up operation. Thus, century by century the Christian faith has rolled back the demonic realm of ignorance, fear, and superstition. Though things look bad in the Western world today, this work continues to make progress in Asia and Africa and Latin America.

The Biblical day begins in the preceding evening, and thus in the Church calendar, the eve of a day is the actual beginning of the festive day. Christmas Eve is most familiar to us, but there is also the Vigil of Holy Saturday that precedes Easter Morn. Similarly, All Saints’ Eve precedes All Saints’ Day.

The concept, as dramatized in Christian custom, is quite simple: On October 31, the demonic realm tries one last time to achieve victory, but is banished by the joy of the Kingdom.

What is the means by which the demonic realm is vanquished? In a word: mockery. Satan’s great sin (and our great sin) is pride. Thus, to drive Satan from us we ridicule him. This is why the custom arose of portraying Satan in a ridiculous red suit with horns and a tail. Nobody thinks the devil really looks like this; the Bible teaches that he is the fallen Arch-Cherub. Rather, the idea is to ridicule him because he has lost the battle with Jesus and he no longer has power over us. (The tradition of mocking Satan and defeating him through joy and laughter plays a large role in Ray Bradbury’s classic novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, which is a Halloween novel.)

The gargoyles that were placed on the churches of old had the same meaning. They symbolized the Church ridiculing the enemy. They stick out their tongues and make faces at those who would assault the Church. Gargoyles are not demonic; they are believers ridiculing the defeated demonic army.

Thus, the defeat of evil and of demonic powers is associated with Halloween. For this reason, Martin Luther posted his 95 challenges to the wicked practices of the Church to the bulletin board on the door of the Wittenberg chapel on Halloween. He picked his day with care, and ever since Halloween has also been Reformation Day.

Similarly, on All Hallows’ Eve (Hallow-Even – Hallow-E’en – Halloween), the custom arose of mocking the demonic realm by dressing children in costumes. Because the power of Satan has been broken once and for all, our children can mock him by dressing up like ghosts, goblins, and witches. The fact that we can dress our children this way shows our supreme confidence in the utter defeat of Satan by Jesus Christ – we have NO FEAR!

I don’t have the resources to check the historical origins of all Halloween customs, and doubtless they have varied from time to time and from Christian land to Christian land. “Trick or treat” doubtless originated simply enough: something fun for kids to do. Like anything else, this custom can be perverted, and there have been times when “tricking” involved really mean actions by teenagers and was banned from some localities.

We can hardly object, however, to children collecting candy from friends and neighbors. This might not mean much to us today, because we are so prosperous that we have candy whenever we want, but in earlier generations people were not so well o_, and obtaining some candy or other treats was something special. There is no reason to pour cold water on an innocent custom like this.

Similarly, the jack-o’-lantern’s origins are unknown. Hollowing out a gourd or some other vegetable, carving a face, and putting a lamp inside of it is something that no doubt has occurred quite independently to tens of thousands of ordinary people in hundreds of cultures worldwide over the centuries. Since people lit their homes with candles, decorating the candles and the candle-holders was a routine part of life designed to make the home pretty or interesting. Potatoes, turnips, beets, and any number of other items were used.

Wynn Parks writes of an incident he observed: “An English friend had managed to remove the skin of a tangerine in two intact halves. After carving eyes and nose in one hemisphere and a mouth in the other, he poured cooking oil over the pith sticking up in the lower half and lit the readymade wick. With its upper half on, the tangerine skin formed a miniature jack-o’-lantern. But my friend seemed puzzled that I should call it by that name. `What would I call it? Why a “tangerine head,” I suppose.’” (Parks, “The Head of the Dead,” The World & I, November 1994, p. 270.)

In the New World, people soon learned that pumpkins were admirably suited for this purpose. The jack-o’-lantern is nothing but a decoration; and the leftover pumpkin can be scraped again, roasted, and turned into pies and muffins.

In some cultures, what we call a jack-o’-lantern represented the face of a dead person, whose soul continued to have a presence in the fruit or vegetable used. But this has no particular relevance to Halloween customs. Did your mother tell you, while she carved the pumpkin, that this represented the head of a dead person and with his soul trapped inside? Of course not. Symbols and decorations, like words, mean different things in different cultures, in different languages, and in different periods of history. The only relevant question is what does it mean now, and nowadays it is only a decoration.

And even if some earlier generations did associate the jack-o’-lantern with a soul in a head, so what? They did not take it seriously. It was just part of the joking mockery of heathendom by Christian people.

This is a good place to note that many articles in books, magazines, and encyclopedias are written by secular humanists or even the pop-pagans of the so-called “New Age” movement. (An example is the article by Wynn Parks cited above.) These people actively suppress the Christian associations of historic customs, and try to magnify the pagan associations. They do this to try and make paganism acceptable and to downplay Christianity. Thus, Halloween, Christmas, Easter, etc., are said to have pagan origins. Not true.

Oddly, some fundamentalists have been influenced by these slanted views of history. These fundamentalists do not accept the humanist and pagan rewriting of Western history, American history, and science, but sometimes they do accept the humanist and pagan rewriting of the origins of Halloween and Christmas, the Christmas tree, etc. We can hope that in time these brethren will reexamine these matters as well. We ought not to let the pagans do our thinking for us.

Nowadays, children often dress up as superheroes, and the original Christian meaning of Halloween has been absorbed into popular culture. Also, with the present fad of “designer paganism” in the so-called New Age movement, some Christians are uneasy with dressing their children as spooks. So be it. But we should not forget that originally Halloween was a Christian custom, and there is no solid reason why Christians cannot enjoy it as such even today.

“He who sits in the heavens laughs; Yahweh ridicules them” says Psalm 2. Let us join in His holy laughter, and mock the enemies of Christ on October 31.

Until this last week I had not heard of “Tell Me More” or Tell Me More’s “Barbershop” discussion on NPR. Now, though, I’m a fan.

This discussion in particular, about the Juan Williams incident, was riveting for me, and I only wish I had time to gather my sisters, parents, and wife into a room to discuss it. (Pub club in Austin would be another desireable dialogue community for this one.)

Bella: “Daddy, I don’t want to go outside and play in the front yard because I’m afraid that the bad guys will get me.”

Daddy: “Sweetheart, who are these ‘bad guys’ you’re talking about?”

Bella: “You know, the bad guys Auntie M. told me about, the bad guys on the news who kidnapped and did real bad things to that little boy last night. I saw it on the news, Daddy.”

Daddy: “Sweetheart, those people should not have done those bad things, and we must be careful and aware of our surroundings, but do you remember last week in the playground that you spit on your friend when she took your Hello Kitty ball away from you?”

Bella: “Yeah, I’m sorry I did that, Daddy.”

Daddy: “I totally forgive you, Sweetie, but since you did that, I mean, since you hit her and spit on her, does this make you a ‘bad guy?’”

Bella: “No, Daddy! I’m a good girl!”

Daddy: “But at that moment your heart was just as angry and hurtful as some of the people you see on the news.”

Bella: “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

Daddy: “And, guess what else, Bella?”

Bella: “What, Daddy?”

Daddy: “I once knew a man who got thrown into jail for stealing a lot of money. That’s bad, right?”

Bella: “Right.”

Daddy: “Well, did you know that that same man loves his little daughter just like I love you?”

Bella: “How do you know, Daddy?”

Daddy: “Because that man is your Uncle ‘S.’”

This dialogue is typical of ones I have with my seven year old daughter, Bella. What I’m trying to do here is to show her that, in a sense, there is no such thing as “good guys” and “bad guys.”

With one exception, I tell her, and that is the case of characters in stories. Characters in stories can be good or bad. So for example, Saruman in the Lord of the Rings is truly bad, with no qualifications.

I would argue that something similar holds for the story of Holy Scripture which finds its climax or fulillment in (the paschal mystery of) Christ, which is one reason I have a different take on the role of narrative for the Christian understanding of violence than those who argue that there is no place for violence in the Christian story or in Christian theology.

What I want to show in the rest of this essay, however, is that, in another sense, there is such a thing as “bad guys.” The moral tradition of Christian virtue teaches that man is a functional concept. That is, the human being, created by God for a concrete and specific end or telos, is analogous to a human-made tool, for example, a hammer. A hammer can be said to be a good hammer if it successfully drives nails into pieces of wood. Alternatively a hammer (or a clock or a chair) may be said to be a poor hammer (or clock or chair) if it fails to fulfill its telos, the purpose for which it was made, properly.

According to the Christian tradition, rooted in Holy Scripture, the telos of humanity is to glorify God or (alternatively stated) to participate in the mystery of the triune God. To the extent that a person does this well and properly, she is a good woman. To the extent that a little boy or girl or grown-up fails to do this, he or she is a bad person.

Where does this leave us? It leaves me with a tension, a dilemma which might be undecideable. When forming the character of my seven year old, I want to discourage her from viewing the other (in particular those who are different from her) as “bad guys.” I want her to examine her heart and to verify the biblical truth that “all have sinned,” that “the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, who can know it?”. I want her to pluck the beam out of her own eye first.

I think this posture is biblical and consistent with the spirit of Jesus, for whom the only “bad guys” were the power-mongers of religiosity of his day.

Since, like my seven year old, I have the capacity (even the tendency) for violence in my own life, I’m not really justified in speaking of others as bad guys.

And yet, I must admit that the moral tradition of Christian virtue ethics also maintains that there is such a thing a “good guys” and “bad guys.”

At the end of the day, am I myself a bad guy? In my view, that is for my (Christian) community to judge.

My good friend Brady recently loaned me a copy of Henri Nouwen’s The Selfless Way of Christ. I found this passage good & convicting:

Only a life on ongoing intimate communion with God can reveal to us our true selfhood; only such a life can set us free to act according to the truth, and not according to our need for the spectacular…. This is far from easy. A serious and persevering discipline of solitude, silence, and prayer is demanded. Such a discipline will not reward us with the outer discipline of success, but with the inner light which enlightens our whole being, and which allows us to be free and uninhibited witnesses of God’s presence in our lives. – Henri Nouwen, The Selfless Way of Christ pp 59-60.

Episcopal monk Martin Smith writes,

I may be so overwhealmed with grief and shame over some serious lapse that I feel too alienated from God and my fellow Christians to take part in worship – thus I am cut off even from the general absolution given there. Someone else may find that the sheer familiarity of general confession and absolution after years of repetition has muffled its impact, so that when he experiences the need for renewal of relationship with God something more is needed. For one person the problem might be one of healing: how is she to use God’s grace to change a sinful tendancy? She needs practical advice about how to seek changes in her life, which only a priest sensitive to the trouble through hearing her confession could give. Yet another may be drawn by a powerful need to unburden himself of the sin which weighs on his conscience, and discharge the oppressive sense of guilty secrets bottled up inside. Only the act of bringing everthing out into the full light of day in the presence of another will suffice to bring release and relief, the assurance of really handing over sin to God. – Martin Smith. Reconciliation: Preparing for Confession in the Episcopal Church.

There are so many people today who feel that they would love to experience God and Christian community, but they just can’t bring themselves to enter the door of a church and be around actual Christians. I’m really wondering if part of the problem is the need to experience this kind of healing love.

From Augustine’s Homilies on the First Epistle of John:

Then let us rejoice and give thanks that we are made not only Christians, but Christ. Do you understand, brothers, and apprehend the grace of God upon us? Marvel, be glad, we are made Christ. For if he is the head, we are the members: the whole man is he and we… The fullness of Christ, then, is head and members. Head and members, what is that? Christ and the Church (In. Io. XXI.8).

Thanks, David Thomas.

Yet again, it seems to me that NT Wright has spoken profoundly and faithfully to a listening world, which is asking good and difficult questions, but which seems to resist the depth of truth which the church (at its best) offers.

Listen to then Bishop of Durham discuss and defend Archbishop Rowan Williams (and many other things besides) in the face of a round of questions which makes assumption after assumption with which then Bishop Wright gently takes issue.

About a month ago I heard a podcast of “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross in which she interviewed both Eliza Griswold, daughter of former Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, as well as Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family and 2010 Blandy Lecturer at the Seminary of the Southwest.

Sharlet has an article in this month’s Harper’s on homosexuality in Uganda called “Straight Man’s Burden” which is interesting reading.

After hearing the interview I purchased the book and started reading, largely to prepare myself for the upcoming visit to Christ Church Tyler of the Most Reverend Benjamin Kwashi, an Anglican archbishop in Nigeria. (God willing, I also have the amazing opportunity, at the Archbishop’s request, to travel to Nigeria next summer with a group from Christ Church.)

I plan to blog on this book over the next few days. For now, here’s a great quotation (from page 11):

Today’s typical Protestant in an African woman, not a white American man. In many of the weak states along the tenth parallel, the power of these religious movements is compounded by the fact that the “state” means very little here; governments are alien structures that offer their people almost nothing in the way of services or political rights. This lack is especially pronounced where present-day national borders began as nothing more than lines sketched onto colonial maps. Other kinds of identity, consequently, come to the fore: religion above everything – even race or ethnicity – becomes a means to safeguard individual and collective security in this world and the next one.

Thanks to a good friend here in Tyler, I am finally reading a book that has been on my radar screen for a while now: The Life You Save May Be Your Own, by Paul Elie, senior editor at Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. This book weaves together the life stories and religious journeys of four 20th century American Catholic writers: Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy.

About a year ago, I read for the first time Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain. But there was something about the story that really bothered me, something I discussed with several people.

Merton’s story is the dramatic and sustained retelling (in the form of a Joycian “mosaic of jagged fragments”) of his journey to Christ, but it is a journey that, crucially for Merton, had to pass through the emptiness and disappointment of sin. And even though Merton does paint a compelling portrait of this emptiness, nevertheless one walks away from the story with the feeling that, well, his exploits just don’t seem all that bad. Yes, he gets drunk a few times. Yes, he hangs out with ladies and seems vaguely to be aroused by their company. Yes, he is clearly motivated by his own pride in his various affairs.

But, still, one gets the feeling that the story would be more filled-out, more complete, if he were to have included something really bad, something which, after coming to his senses (like the prodigal son in Luke 15) truly left him in the gutter, like a dog returning to its vomit.

But there is nothing like that in the whole story.

And now, thanks to Elie, I know why. There was, in fact, some kind of sexual misadventure which Merton engaged in, and which truly caused him to hit rock bottom, leaving him with the deep sense of the emptiness of life apart from God. However, his editors (monks at his monastery Gethsemani in Tennessee) censored this part of the story.

What is more, something similar is the case in Dorothy Day’s autobiography, as Elie points out. The key difference here, being, that her deletion was self-imposed, coming from her own sense that such a revelation would just be too scandalous for her readers.

Now, I find all this interesting for many reasons, but I will elaborate only on two.

First, I would like to compare this to the autobiography of St. Augustine. Even though I have read the Confessions two or three times, I cannot quite remember if, or how, Augustine casts his own sexual “misadventures,” and how he portrays them as playing a role in his journey to God.

Second, and more importantly, I am so happy to have my hunch confirmed that, actually, sexual sin played a central role in Merton’s story. (I think it is not just my own life experience but also years of reading Walker Percy novels, chock full of sexual smut, which created such a strong suspicion of this in my reading of The Seven Story Mountain).

Consider the personalities and characters of Merton and Day. They were true pilgrims. They were hard core and rigorous about separating mere convention from true meaning and responsibility. In this sense they were good existentialists in the tradition of Dostoevski. They were serious and disciplines about their journey into self-knowledge and truth.

Both had the ability to see through the false pretensions of puritan religious culture, bourgeois conservatism and mores. They were both willing to let the things that don’t really matter truly slide (Fight Club reference there). Both were more than willing, like Jesus, to flaunt and defy those who would create rules and regulations which are not truly about faithfulness to God, which are not truly about what it means to be genuinely human.

And yet, for both Day and Merton, when they in their 20th-century, American autonomy tasted the experience of “free,” unfettered sexual indulgence, completely isolated from any reference to God or the community of God’s people, they both realized that this experience, in particular, was bankrupt and destructive.

They both realized that, when it comes to sex, there is something more going on than just some kind of traditionalist attempt to impose rules on people and to stifle their freedom and fun.

Here, uniquely, is something sacred. Here, in human sexuality, is a signpost to God which compelled them both to hit the pause button, to reflect on the true nature of being human, and to strive toward a life lived in God’s presence.

One last thought: after I finish this book I need to finish James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, to compare and contrast.

… whose feast day is today.

“Lord God, the light of the minds that know you, the life of the souls that love you, and the strength of the hearts that serve you: Help us, following the example of your servant Augustine of Hippo, so to know you that we may truly love you, and so to love you that we may fully serve you, whom to serve is perfect freedom; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

- From Lesser Feasts & Fasts

It was deeply satisfying to preach this sermon.

I’m saddened by the news of Anne Rice’s departure from the church.

Perhaps if she had the same view of the church that Graham Ward articulates in his CIties of God or that Rowan Williams describes in his recent work on Dostoevski, she would be slower to take her ball and go home.

Trust me, I know that living with people in the church with whom you disagree is difficult. But the church is an irreducible feature of the Christian life. It is an icon of God, that is, a participation in God, who is a community. It is the Body and Bride of Christ, such that to reject her is to reject him.

What the church is not, much to the chagrin of Anne Rice, is an “organized religious institution.” Not, that is, unless secular reason is our primary vantage point. Of course secular reason and secular culture (founded upon the former) will view the church as an “organized religious institution.”

But this is to view the church through a secular lens. An equally rational approach, however, would be to look at secularity through lens of the church and her scriptures. This is equally rational, but much more beautiful, much more mysterious, much more fruitful.

Christian community, centered on God’s Word and the breaking of bread in fellowship (yes, even with people who might make my skin crawl) is a — some would say the — sine qua non of following Jesus and knowing God.

Thomas Chalmers, the great 19th century Scottish Presbyterian minister said,

There is not one personal transformation in which the heart is left without an object of ultimate beauty and joy. The heart’s desire for one particular object can be conquered, but its desire to have some object is unconquerable. The only way to disposses the heart of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one.

This is from his sermon, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.”

From a Tim Keller sermon (“Christ our Life”), a quotation is from former Chaplain at Duke University, William Willimon:

The dominant culture in which we live is that of expressive individualism since the Enlightenment. People like to say, “Well, what the church says may be alright for some, but I think you have to determine right or wrong for yourself.” But they are not thinking for themselves. They are doing exactly what the culture tells them to do. In reality they are espousing the very way of knowing which has been imposed on them by their culture, and a very white, western, individualistic one it is.

The question, “Do you think we ought to convert people to Christ” assumes that there are already unformed, untouched people out there, and there are these pushy Christians trying to convert them to their way of thinking.

No. Everyone has been deeply formed into some point of view that is not innate. The real question you must face is “Which externally imposed formation will have its way with me?”

From Joan Chittister’s The Rule of St. Benedict:

The ancients say that once upon a time a disciple asked the elder, “Holy One, is there anything I can do to make myself Enlightened?”

And the Holy One answered, “As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.”

“Then of what use,” the surprised disciple asked, “are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?”

“To make sure,” the elder said, “that you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.”

There is so much in this little story to notice:

1. the importance of awareness in the spiritual life.

2. the miraculous nature of the rising of the sun.

3. the ways of grace: how all we can do is to “stack the deck” in favor of some kind of inner gift of the experience of God.

Yesterday, in my first week “on the ground” here in Tyler (see here), I went on an 8-mile run with some amazing members of the community here, ranging from age 55 to 28.

At one point during the run, the 28 year old man mentioned that he has been impressed by the teaching ministry of Ravi Zacharias (who also greatly influenced Bouquet and me in our college years at UT).

Of course, I said nothing disparaging about Ravi on that run, and I do have tremendous respect for him.

And yet, one of the interesting things about being here in Tyler is that I find myself in a new community, who have no idea what motivates me in ministry, or, for example, why I chose to become an Episcopal priest, thus having to leave the more “conservative” Presbyterian Church, the PCA.

So this afternoon I was re-reading Peter Leithart’s Against Christianity, and it hit me in fresh way: this is the real difficuIty I have with folks like Ravi: the church plays a very little role in their teaching, certainly not a central role, as it did for the Apostle Paul. Here’s the quotation:

“The Bible gives no hint that a Christian “belief system” might be isolated from the life of the Church, subjected to scientific analysis, and have its truth compared with competing “belief systems.”- Peter Leithart, Against Christianity, page 14.

The point is not at all that what we believe does not matter (2 Pet 3:15). Rather the point is that the enemies of the faith (colluding with gnosticism) have succeeded in disembodying what the book of Acts describes as “the Way.” Being a Christian is not simply about believing the right set of propositions, but rather about living a life in solidarity with the community of faith: confessing the faith with them, serving and being served by them, sharpening them, etc.