End of the year book reviews, part III

Robert Fitzgerald's translation of the Aeneid surpasses anything else I've read that he has translated. I was forced to purchase and read his translation of the Odyssey the summer prior to my first year at Luther College. Ask any graduate of Luther in the past 10-15 years, and they will tell you the same. By and large, we come to the enterprise unprepared, a bit confused, and befuddled. It's hard to make sense of the classics when you haven't had a classical education, but you can't have a classical education without exposure to the classics, and since modern pedagogy has repudiated the idea of a "classical" education in any event (via a Foucaultian critique of knowledge as power), well, you end up with a bunch of high school grads who know THAT there's a Homer but haven't read him.

Of course, the summer before you go to college, the last thing you really want to do is start your homework early. But then you're also a bit curious, because the book assigned is a marker, a small clue as to what is coming, the mystery of college and life away from home. So I forced my way through the text, failed to understand large patches because I got bored of reading what seemed like a prose narrative composed in meter. Also failed to take notes.

About four or five years ago, I actually started to value what at that time I found somewhat burdensome and strange. I would be lying if I said that I'm always reading "classics" (whatever classics are), but I do try and read back into the history of the traditions in which I have interest. Theology, philosophy, literature. So in 1998 I started this tradition of reading a piece from the classical repertoire (meaning dead Greek or Latin writers) as a way of entering the New Year. Thus buy the book in December, start to work, and try and finish before heading out for New Year's festivities December 31.

1998 was the Iliad. Read it mostly on the train between Kosice and Berlin. Fagles translation. Fagles was brilliant in reiterating Homer's set phrases in captivating phrases, like "after they had put aside desire for food and drink" as the line to start story-telling and argumentation, or "his bowels gushed out and as he fell the life dimmed from his eyes" (this second a very oft repeated phrase in the Iliad).

1999 was Heaney's translation of Beowulf (I know, this is a violation of the dead Greek or Latin writer rule). It's of course great and quite readable, but the best part is that the poem begins "So." Just like an English speaker would tell a story.

2001 was Purgatorio. Oops, once again violating the Latin Greek rule. But since Dante was so deeply into the classic tradition, it seemed not so much of a leap. By this time I had been learning that one of the important tricks to reading classics and actually appreciating the process was to choose excellent translators. I'd read the Inferno in an inferior translation, but Merwin translated the Purgatorio in this year, and brought it back to the English speaking public.

Which brings me back around to the Aeneid, because Virgil is Dante's guide through the underworld, and after you've read Dante, you end up wondering what it is about Virgil that made Dante put him in this prominent place. And the Aeneid is just as fun and fascinating as the Odyssey and Iliad, and it is simply amazing that Virgil could try to, and succeed at, making his book a "third" in the series that begins with the Odyssey. What a work. and now I realize as I'm going through the process of writing this, I feel somewhat silly and commonplace, because to simply praise those things which have been praised seems a little disingenuous and flat. And yet there it is, just like a beautiful red sky in the evening, no matter how many times you see it, it's as genuinely worth gazing at as the last time. So too the Aeneid. No other comment necessary.

It's always harder to say positively what the alternative is to the dominant paradigm than it is to launch a critique of the same. Here are some quotes from Levinas in Ethics and Infinity that are "on the way" to a constructive alternative to virtue ethics.

"Ethics occurs as an an-archy, the compassion of being. Its priority is affirmed without recourse to principles, without vision, in the irrecuperable shock of being-for-the-other-person before being-for-oneself, or being-with-others, or being-in-the-world, to name some of th econtemporary philosophical formulas of post-metaphysical thought" (10)

Here quoting Kafka- "It is an extremely painful thing to be ruled by laws that one does not know" 15)

This one particularly enigmatic- "The incarnation of human subjectivity guarantees its spirituality (I do not see what angels could give one another or how they could help one another). Dia-chrony before all dialogue... the other man, his face, the expressive in the Other (and the whole human body is in this sense more or less face), were what ordains me to serve him... the face orders and ordains me" (97).

"There is prophetism and inspiration in the man who answers for the Other, paradoxically, even before knowing what is concretely required of himself. This responsibility prior to the Law is God's revelation. There is a text of the prophet Amos that says: "God has spoken, who would not prophecy?"

The language of practices takes no account of this primacy of the face, of the neighbor. It replaces what in Luther's language speaks of the perfectly free lord of all, perfectly save, subject to all, with a system of abstract rules and systems. Instead of the urgent and necessary encounter with the neighbor as the primary ethical category, it develops "systems of behavior" that take place over time and train one in righteousness.

There is probably no clearer biblical text that contradicts virtue ethics than the good samaritan neighbor narrative. Here, two pass by the one robbed on the road, at least in part because of having learned certain habits and virtues. The one who stops to help humbles and dirties himself, violates all kinds of customs and habits, and simply helps the face, the whole body, the neighbor in need. At their worst, virtues and practices actually hinder the Christian in being a Christian-before-the-neighbor. And one can't tell if the rule that applies is virtues as the sine qua non.

End of the year book reviews, part II

The ELCA has started a campaign on "discipleship" trying to address issues of ethics and spiritual practices in congregations. It is called, variously, teach the faith, growing in discipleship, living faith, or fanning the flames of discipleship. No matter what you call it, the basic idea is to encourage a third facet of congregational life.

Growing in Discipleship and/or Teach the Faith

Church's generally don't forget the first facet, worship, and they usually spend lots of time on the second, that is, daily vocation (although they may not carefully relate the two), but the discipleship movement works to instill a third component, spiritual "practices" or "marks" of discipleship. These practices, of which the ELCA has listed seven, 1) pray, 2) study, 3) worship, 4) invite, 5) encourage, 6) serve, and 7) give, are all designed to round out congregational discipleship, make it more three dimensional.

The list is great, as far as it goes. Nobody would really want to argue against service, giving, studying, prayer, inviting, etc. The problem for Lutheran ethics is that the model of "practices" arises out of an ethical framework that doesn't jive with Lutheran theology. There's considerable conversation these days, both in Roman Catholic communities and Protestant ones, about what basically can be called "virtue ethics". On the Catholic side, you have Pope John Paul II's encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, which defines prudence, the basis of virtue ethics, in this way: "Prudence, working through the moral virtues, disposes a person to good actions... it is the heart converted to the Lord and to the love of what is good which is really the source of true judgments of conscience... knowledge of God's law in general is certainly necessary, but it is not sufficient; what is essential is a sort of 'connaturality' between man and the true good" (this quote from Servais Pinckaers The Sources of Christian Ethics). In other words, for the living of the Christian life, more is needed than knowledge of the law... grace brings about a "connaturality" of man and the true good- this is the basis for understanding ethics as grounded in virtues.

So, lots of books have come out of this thought. You've got a lot of evangelical Protestants, especially based out of Fuller Theological Seminary, appropriating the writings of Wittgenstein and MacIntyre (MacIntyre's After Virtue is seminal) to come up with their own Protestant version of virtue ethics based a) in Wittgenstein's philosophy of language as it relates to speaking one's way into "going on" as such, and b) MacIntyre's thesis that practices are those things which, well, he's got this really long and clumsily formulated sentence that practices produce a greater ability to practice the virtues. These Fuller theologians, especially Brad Kallenberg in his Grammar as Ethics, spell out a program for understanding congregations as "language communities" that speak their way into new forms of living, and this grammatically formed practicing community becomes itself virtuous in and through these practices.

The arguments are much more nuanced than this, if anyone has another take or critique, feel free to respond.

There are also, on the other coast, such theologians as Hauerwas, who argue that the Christian community needs to be itself a "parable of the kingdom". This is to get beyond the social gospelers focus on bringing about the kingdom of God through particular works and the transformation of society, but is instead the definition of church as an alternative society that is itself a sign of God's coming kingdom living in (and thus speaking to) the world. So Hauerwas also argues in some way or another for "practices" as part of the Christian life. I must confess that this particular approach holds some appeal for me.

What both of these have in common is the proposal of a new law, the law of love, new laws and guidelines for how one is to practice the faith. Although these two traditions have a strong history and influence in Christian thinking, it is my contention that they are wrong-headed, and inasmuch as Lutherans themselves begin to appropriate them and adopt them as models, we have our own distinctive voice stifled.

So, just some preliminary notes. First, Lutherans believe that they have in the law already given by God everything we need to know about how to live in the world, as well as knowledge of our inability to live up to these laws. This contra the Popes saying we need something more than this "natural" law. Second, to set forth practices as such as norms for Christian living go against two distinct pieces of our theology. First, an understanding of Christian freedom, and second, our constant life in sin and life in salvation simultaneously. Against Christian freedom, because the Christian believes that once they have been called by the gospel, they have been set free from all compulsions, thus a radical critique of all "practices"; against simul iustus, because our continuing life "in the flesh" means even practices cannot drive out the devil. Only our new life in Christ assures that.

So, what are some better sources for Lutheran ethics. In the next post, I'll work with Luther's work on Christian freedom, and explore some of the writings of Levinas and his primary ethical category of "the face of the neighbor".

TOMPAINE.com - On The Justification Of Civil Disobedience

End of the year book reviews, part I

The official numbers are in, and the U.S. processed approximately 26,000 refugees in 2002. This is about 40,000 short of what George W. Bush had stated at the beginning of the year as our commitment (for more detailed info, click on the LIRS link on the right side of this page). This makes two years in a row where we processed far fewer refugees than we were committed to admitting [the numbers fell after 9-11, even though refugees go through an extensive screening process and are never actually suspected of terrorism]. In real terms, this means thousands of people around the world who are in danger and poverty have to remain where they are. The INS is now going to be restructured under the new Homeland Security Act, and this is potentially a good thing (for example, new laws regarding the handling of unaccompanied minors), but our government and presidential leadership is proving again and again that we are committed to our own safety and security without any understanding that a) the world's security and safety and sense thereof has an impact on our own, that is, we will be more secure if we act as a good neighbor, and b) that we have a responsibility as citizens to take care of the oppressed, the foreigners in our midst or those who request asylum. Our history as a nation is a history of welcoming the stranger and the refugee. The current administration's failure to recognize this proves that they are the ones who are unpatriotic.

Two things seem most troubling. First is the inability of our leadership to admit failure, to ask for forgiveness, to confess to wrong-doing. We simply leap right up and start labeling everybody evil. Certainly, Hussein is a harsh and terrible despot. Nobody questions that. What I question is our complicity in many of the evil systems in the world. We need to admit, confess, ask forgiveness, if we are actually going to work for healthy change. If we refuse to do this, then we ourselves end up with a president who is a harsh and terrible despot.

The second is even more troubling. Seems the current administration will not allow critique. Anyone who criticizes the government is unpatriotic. Worse, they might themselves be a terrorist. Never mind that our entire system of government is grounded on checks and balances and the freedom of citizens to speak their minds, including minds that find fault with the government. Freedom of the press, freedom of expression, etc.

Ok, so all of this as preparation for recommending two books. The first, Mary Pipher's The Middle of Everywhere, an account of her experience working in Lincoln, Nebraska with refugee families. She shares the story of their struggles to adapt, interviews with them and the officials who help them get to the U.S. The new work and life and stress issues that arise when they arrive. And she shares the very specific ways that she works as a "cultural broker", helping them to adjust and learning much in the process. One of her most impressive insights- that although the average refugee arrives in the U.S. with enough terrible experiences to warrant post-traumatic stress syndrome, they normally become self-sufficient economically within three months of their arrival in country!

The second book, Ann Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, is also a narrative of refugees, this time sharing the story of one Hmong family and their epileptic daughter. Here she illustrates the difficulty of negotiating between traditional Hmong thinking and Western medical practices. In fact, it is more like a collision than a negotiation. Fadiman's book is reporting, like Pipher's, but less sociological and more literary. She writes well, and it reads quickly. Read the two in tandem, and you learn a little bit of how to perceive your own homeland from a stranger in a strange land's perspective. Always a worthwhile endeavour.

Reflecting on Vestments

A somewhat distant relative of ours refuses to attend churches where the pastor wears a robe. Actually, I think the relative in question called the robes "skirts". On the flip side, last night in a conversation with a friend, I heard dismay in his voice when I mentioned that in a Lutheran congregation I know, the pastors don't wear vestments; in fact they don't even wear clerics (the special shirt with white colars). Clothes may or may not "make the man", but at least in a number of instances lately, the clothes do or don't make the worship and make the pastor.

But to do this story justice, I have to step back a number of years. I grew up in a congregation where "vesting" for worship was simply the thing that was done. I didn't really wonder at it at all. We wore gowns if our youth choir sang from the front of the sanctuary, there was a complete collection of robes back in the sacristy for the acolytes, worship assistants, and pastors to wear, and all of this white linen seemed completely natural. I don't remember paying a huge amount of attention to the stoles and other colorful things that the pastors wore, although I do remember them matching the liturgical seasons.

It wasn't until some time in college that I learned that someone might consider leading worship without these vestments. And it was a mind-blowing experience the first day I actually heard somebody say they were OPPOSED to wearing vestments in worship. Apparently, they were of the opinion that the pastor should wear a shirt & tie so as not to appear flowery, or fake, or Catholic, or old fashioned, or, well, I can't really remember the reason.

I went through a rather long period of not caring too much about what worship leaders wear in worship. I've since attended worship in enough places to have seen almost everything (or at least to expand my imagination of what "everything" is or might be). I've seen jeans, cowboy boots, and a frilly shirt. I've seen the classic black cassock and white frill collar of the German and Slovak churches. I've seen the pageantry of the cardinals and pope in Rome. I've seen church leaders from Africa, as well as the high church African-American Methodist Episcopals with their cross between high church Episcopalian and traditional early 20th century American. I watched a pastor in San Antonio texas change clothes three times for three morning services, the first in alb and stole, the second in clerical colar and jacket, the third in t-shirt and jeans. And I've seen all kinds of earthy, evangelical services where the worship leaders came in the same clothes they would wear to a coffee shop or Applebee's.

I think my not caring too much had something to do with an idealist anti-materialism, I didn't want to seem to care too much about clothes, it seemed too surfacey- to care too much about clothes in worship was to get away from the essentials of worship, and it was somehow anti-thetical to the "spiritual" nature of worship. Worship isn't about clothes, it's about God, right?!

But I had two conversations in Germany that began to alter my thinking somewhat, the first with a pastor in Braunschweig who wears vestments similar to those in traditional American Lutheran contexts, Alb and stole. They maintain the liturgy as it was translated by Luther in 1526, and as a way of maintaining that tradition, they also stick to the vestments the Catholic church would use for similar services, alb and stole, with an additional chasuble for presiding at the Lord's Supper, and a few other pieces for high feast days, etc. Then, I learned from another much less liturgical pastor down in the Rhine valley that the traditional black cassock that the pastor's where in the Protestant churches in Germany has connections to old Prussia. In other words, the black cassock is secular, not churchly, garb, or at least has it's origins in secular institutions.

Which is also true of the suit and tie, which came about in 19th century bourgeoise England. Or jeans and a t-shirt, which came out of the casual culture of mid-20th century America. Or the spectacular vestments that the Eastern Rite Catholics wore at their creation as cardinals in Rome. Or name any other article of clothing, and the same rule applies. Clothes have a history, and they mean something, everywhere and always. It's why, when special occasions come up, we concern ourselves with what we are wearing, even when the thing we choose to wear is chosen specifically to make it look like we weren't concerned about what we were to wear.

As I've been examining worship more and more from an aesthetic as well as a dogmatic and ethical standpoint, I'm coming to the increasingly firm conclusion that a church should be careful about what it has the pastor wear when they lead worship. There are the traditional arguments, that the alb allows for the pastor to be in and signify the office they are filling, rather than wearing clothes that accentuate their individuality. That the alb has a tradition and history behind it from and for the church. That it helps set the tone and space for worship.

But the more convincing arguments have to do with aesthetics. In worship we work with symbols, we communicate things, and one of the ways the church has always communicated has been visually. At a very early stage in the churches life, in fact, we called it a heresy to REJECT images. Iconoclasm is not a virtue. It is a heresy. We do have art in worship, from the cross to the altar frontal to the stain-glassed windows. And everything visual in worship contributes to the liturgy, makes the space for it. Thus it is important how one constructs a sanctuary. It is important what one puts on the walls.

It is extremely important NOT to hang an American flag in the sanctuary.

And so on and so forth. Table and baptismal font to remind us of the sacraments. Word placed in a prominent place. Incense and candles burning to make the smell of the space also worshipful. All of this is important for the worship space, because it works together with the music, the readings, and the sermon, to communicate the gospel.

Therefore, the vestments, the clothes of the presiding minister, do matter. They should communicate something of the gospel themselves. They should be beautiful, so as to give glory to God. They can and should be pictorial, like the cross that graces so many chasubles, or the pictures and colors that decorate stoles. All so that, when you kneal at the communion rail to receive communion, and you look up at the pastor who is handing you Christ's body, you don't see a golf tie hanging there from their chest, or a t-shirt with U2 pictured on the front, but instead the cross of Christ, the presence of the sublime.

Not all churches will be able to afford fancy vestments, and probably churches should be careful not to go too far in lavishing large amounts of money on them. Today at Luther Memorial where we currently worship, the congregation had received spectacular, beautiful Advent vestments as a gift, so that the pastor, altar, pulpit, and assisting ministers could all be dressed in similar material, and although this was incredibly beautiful, the combination of the beauty, the note in the bulletin, and the conversation we ended up having on it, ended up being almost too much the other way. The simplicity of the clerical shirt and collar may be sufficient in many cases. It still serves much the same purpose as the alb. It signifies an office.

I remember a particularly beautiful scene from O.E. Rolvaag's Peder Victorious. The community that has begun to grow up around Beret hasn't seen a pastor for many years. Many people have common law marriages, some people pray and read the Bible in their homes, but no pastor has yet to arrive. Then, one day, an itinerant Lutheran pastor arrives on horseback. The community is over-joyed. Common law married folk run up and ask to have the blessings of the church. Others want to confess sin, to have children baptized. It's a touching scene. But the first thing the pastor does is announce that they will hold worship with preaching and communion in one of the largest barns on a farmstead. He carefully removes a large bag from his horse and goes into the home at which he has arrived to lay out and smooth out his vestments. Later, when all have gathered to worship in this barn, these clothes, quite worn but still beautiful, change the whole space so that it becomes a church. Really, the clothes don't do anything at all, it's Christ present in His word and sacrament. But swaddling clothes do matter, and that small touch, that the pastor thought enough to bring along clothes fitting for the occasion, communicated something both in the novel and to those people, that couldn't be said only with words.

Today I witnessed something amazing. Amanda is working on a project for one of her library science courses. In this particular case, she had to classify our kitchen. It started weeks ago when she opted for the project, continued last weekend when she went through every single cupboard counting what was there, and has come to a sort-of conclusion this weekend as she designs the classification system for the project. In this case, it includes organizing the contents of our kitchen according to some kind of logic, then ordering things within various systems according to even more intricate systems of logic- danger during use, likelihood of use, tastiness, spiciness, I'm not even sure what all. Today she discovered that our Mac has an incredible number of fonts, some of which are symbols rather than letters, so these were put to use to provide the "classification system", not exactly like Dewey decimal or Eric, rather symbolic and playful and sometimes surprising.

But none of this counts as surprising. The surprising thing was the energy invested in the enterprise, the number of hours spent on a free Friday, and how all of this is done in a kind of voluntary fashion. We have all these neighbors up in Eagle Heights who are also grad students. They wake up each morning heading out for projects for which they are not paid; in fact, projects for which they are often paying, they are assigned these tasks by faculty who may or may not review intently that which they produce, and nevertheless, almost to a fault, they work super hard and invest hundreds and thousands of human hours. that's the surprising part. My wife invests this same kind of time.

Speaking of which, I spent the morning reading some theology written in 2002 on evangelism, tried to get up to date on the news and some modern fiction in the afternoon, and continued that work into late in the evening on Heidegger, all with no job, not actual use to which I might put these things, all in the mood of inquiry, interest, insight. What is this that drives us forward, often in spite of ourselves, to invest ourselves in something that lends meaning, funds our imagination, makes us part of something bigger? The works that humans engage in to do things that have nothing to do with subsistence are constantly surprising. Self-justification? Compulsion? Neighborliness? Civility? Habit? Innate goodness? Self-preservation? Often, I have no idea. But it helps us all go on, doesn't it?

The title for the blog has changed, as has the format, but the intent will be the same. A public journal, reflections on life, recipes (i've actually never thought to post recipes here, but it's as good an idea as any), and now, a links section!

Perseus Digital Library