Well, listen to this eloquent description of Badiou’s understanding  “EVENT” by Terry Eagleton:

…the Event is that miraculous occurrence which surges up from an historical situation to which it simultaneously does not belong. Events for Badiou are … utterly original happenings founded purely in themselves, pure breaks and beginnings which are out of joint with their historical ‘site’, in excess of their contexts, sprung randomly and (as it were) ex nihilo from an established orthodoxy which could not have foreseen them. They are purely haphazard acts, as incalculable as grace…

Being in Badiou’s view is an inexhaustible multiple, which comes to us in recognizable chunks or distinct situations only through the operation of being ‘one-ed’ or provisionally unified by a human subject. Otherwise, it is as infinitely inaccessible to us as Kant’s noumenal sphere.  In the presence of an Event, however, it is as though the ‘inconsistent multiplicity’ which this counting-as-one conceals bursts momentarily out again, granting us a privileged glimpse of the disorderly infinity of pure Being. Events are explosive, ineffable exceptions to the rule, epiphanies of truth entirely without foundation.  (Trouble with Strangers:  A Study of Ethics, 260-61)

It seems to me that what the Buddha meant by Enlightenment, and what it is to live our Buddha-nature, or to live  a truly mindful life, is to realize that every single moment of our life is an Event –  that life is a constant succession of Events.  Every moment is a “privileged glimpse,” ” an ineffable epiphany of truth.”  — Or, to switch to my Christ-nature, as Thomas Merton put it: “It’s all grace.”

Can we really live a life in which Badiou’s notion of Events as “explosive” or “out of joint” or “haphazard”  are experienced as the normal, but wondrous, reality of our everyday lives?   Buddha and Jesus would seem to indicate that we can.

I'd Rather Love A Jesus Who Loves Us All

It’s National Coming Out Day today. We’ve also heard a lot lately about LGBTQ teen suicides. If you haven’t yet, I implore you to read Rev. Dr. Patrick Cheng’s Huffington Post article on the suicides, Rev. Irene Monroe’s Huffington Post article on bullying and homophobia and spend some time in thoughtful reflection on what your church has or has not done for LGBTQ people whether they are teenage, pre-teen, adult or senior.

I am not gay, and cannot therefore offer a queer perspective on these issues. I defer to others that they might speak for themselves as regards their own pain and joy. But homophobia is my problem too. It is my problem because it hurts people I love. It is my problem because too many people cloak their prejudice in the language of faith and that hurts every person of faith. It is my problem because every day straight allies neglect to speak out against it is another day that homophobia remains a “socially acceptable” prejudice. It is not acceptable. If we profess that we are made in the image of God, then God is also a gay man, a lesbian, transgender, transsexual, gender non-conforming AND yes heterosexual too.

If God is a God of justice, mercy and righteousness, then God is queer. God is with the terrorized young people of our world–never in judgment but always in love.

I’ve been surprised to be on the outside of that consideration before. My wife jokes that I’m a “heathen Protestant”, but that’s in good fun. I did have a professor remark that we were all Christians in a classroom, with the aside “or near enough to it” directed my way referencing my Quaker beliefs. Sure, I could have argued that George Fox was pretty thorough-going as a Christian and that the majority of Meetings worldwide are more likely to be mistaken for a Methodist Church than anything outside the umbrella of generally considered “Christian” belief, but frankly I’m tired of doing so. When I first started attending Meeting in the mid-1990s, I had to explain to my mother that yes: Quakers believe in Jesus Christ. Generally. We’re just not compelled to do so by authority. And that’s where it gets complicated.

To my reading of the Gospels, Jesus didn’t lay out too many dogmatic guidelines for a church to follow his teachings. Anything we have that we can turn to for such guidance comes from at least twenty to thirty years after the crucifixion: a very long time indeed in an oral culture. So without firm guidelines, we turn to a version of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy in defining the beliefs of others for them. For those unfamiliar, this circular argument runs as follows:

• No Scotsman eats sugar in his porridge.
• Angus from Glasgow eats sugar in his porridge.
• OK, fine then. No TRUE Scotsman eats sugar in his porridge.

And we do this all the time in Christian communities. “No Christian would do or believe X” becomes “No TRUE Christian would do or believe X” when confronted with a Christian who has in fact done or believed X. So Billy Graham’s son has decided that no TRUE Christian can behave or believe as Barack Obama does. Thankfully, it’s not up to Franklin Graham to decide what does or does not constitute a true Christian. And quite frankly if being a TRUE Christian means following Franklin Graham, I’d rather be false.

What Eagleton is saying applies, I think, to a lot of liberals.  And we have a lot of liberals here at Union. (I’m one of them.) We seem to have a bit of an allergy to people who speak passionately.  So often in class discussions, when someone waxes passionate about what they are proposing,  warning signs start to flash on  faces around the circle.  Is it because passion sounds like proselytizing? Like someone is imposing their views on us as the only really true view?  This is especially the case when passion is about religion.   It’s one thing to be passionate about the Yankees. Quite another to be passionate about Christianity.

But being passionate is not necessarily the same thing as being authoritarian or exclusive or narrow-minded.  When you’re passionate about something it’s because you think it is true and valuable. That doesn’t mean you necessarily think it’s the only thing that is true and valuable. (Okay, Yankee fans might.)   If I really believe that something is true and good, I’d better be passionate about it. I’d better want to tell others about it.  Otherwise, I don’t really believe it’s true and good.  We need more passion.

But it has to be passion that respects and is open to the passion of others.  And that means,  I think, that if we need to speak with passion, it should be passion-plus-humility.  We’re convinced about what we believe and we want to tell others why.  But if we’re humble as well as passionate, we will recognize that the truth that we hold, as sound and beautiful as it is, can never be the whole truth. There’s always more. And that leaves room for other truths and other people who are passionate about their truth.

If we can be passionate and at the same time humble, we won’t scare people with our passion.   On the contrary, our passion will be a dialogical passion — one that calls out the passion in others.

Pascal: We must love things before we can know them.

Kierkegaard: A believer is someone in love.

St.Anselm: I believe in order to understand.

To really understand something we have to be in a relationship with it, involved with it, to some extent given to it. I guess that’s what Pascal was getting at.

But that’s really what “faith” is.  It’s not a rational assent to a given truth — like “I believe in God.”  Rather, it’s a commitment, a trust, a giving of oneself to a way of life that is based on what we trust is true.  And when we are so committed, when we are “walking the truth,” we come to know and be able to “talk the truth.”  I guess that’s what Kierkegaard was getting at.

So Anselm is right:  When we have faith in something — that is, when we trust and then act on that trust, we discover what is real and worthwhile.

So truth doesn’t grab us by the brain. It grabs us by the heart.  –  And then, what we know with our heart, we have to think about with our brain.

Joel Gretsch portraying Father Jack Landry

As part of the ongoing project that is The Wheat and The Chaff, I want to look not only at the news media’s interaction with religion but also at the popular media’s interaction with religion and religious themes. I owe a shout-out and a hat-tip to the excellent and engaging work of Natalie and Kathryn over at The Moth Chase. Please give them a read.

One of my favorite childhood TV shows was the miniseries/series/reunion TV movie “V”. In it, one watched a post-“Beastmaster” Marc Singer and a pre-“Nightmare on Elm Street” Robert Englund fight to save the Earth from a race of masquerading reptilian conquerors-from-beyond. Seriously.

The show has been re-launched and updated. The main plot seems to be the same: aliens promising peace arrive unexpectedly, some people suspect shenanigans, aliens are shown to be literal monsters, etc. This time there’s an interesting twist: one of our main “freedom fighters” is a Catholic priest.

The title of this post comes from a decision laid at the feet of Father Jack Landry: “You need to decide whether you’re a soldier or a priest”. This line is delivered after it’s revealed that Father Jack knows how to throw a punch because he did two tours in Iraq as an Army chaplain. He’s been running around for four episodes blowing things up and occasionally reflecting on what it means to his faith in God that we homo sapiens are not the only creatures capable of building a spaceship, but finally someone points out to him that there’s a choice involved.

The Ontological Question, theology of violence, military and imperial complicity, explosions, motorcycles and space aliens. This is a show that has it all.

Levity aside, I do think that the presentation of this particular character brings up some issues worth pondering. Does it make any difference to our belief in God that there may be other intelligent life in the universe? When do you put down the crucifix and pick up a gun?

As someone who prefers to conceive of “priestly freedom fighters” in the mold more of Oscar Romero, Ammon Hennacy, Thich Nhat Hanh and Jesus, I am pretty uncomfortable with the idea that violence and ministry can play nicely together. I think that the choice alluded to here is a deep and existential one, and I think that it may be one that goes unasked far too often. Can Christianity be true to itself and still ordain ministers who serve in uniform in areas of military conflict? Is the decision between being a “priest” and a “soldier” strictly either/or or can it be both/and?

And I think that blaming it for the financial collapse is a horrific example of “blame-the-victim” scapegoating.

Yes, African-Americans and Latinos held more sub-prime mortgages than did whites and yes, African-Americans and Latinos are broadly represented in Prosperity churches. This is correlation, not causation. The holders of those toxic mortgages are not the people who originated the loans. They are not the people who profited from risky lending. We often hear the term “predatory lending” in these situations. The predators were the banks; the people in Prosperity churches were the prey. Quoting Rosin’s article about Pastor Garay’s congregation:

One other thing makes Garay’s church a compelling case study. From 2001 to 2007, while he was building his church, Garay was also a loan officer at two different mortgage companies. He was hired explicitly to reach out to the city’s growing Latino community, and Latinos, as it happened, were disproportionately likely to take out the sort of risky loans that later led to so many foreclosures. To many of his parishioners, Garay was not just a spiritual adviser, but a financial one as well.

In pointing this passage out, what I want to make clear is that it is dishonest to just blame a particular church or theology without looking at the relationship between that church/theology and capital markets. Rosin does a fine job of pointing out troubling aspects of Prosperity Gospel thinking but she leaves off any implications for or indictment of the markets in which Prosperity preachers operate. It borders on racism to lay blame for the sub-prime collapse at the feet of African-American and Latino borrowers while not mentioning the White bank executives who invented sub-prime mortgages in the first place.

None of the foregoing should be understood, however, as a defense of Prosperity Gospel’s claims about Christianity. I want only to point out that–theologically and sociologically speaking–Rosin has not sufficiently examined the issues before her. As to Prosperity preaching itself, I think it does enough damage on its own:

Once, I asked Garay how you would know for certain if God had told you to buy a house, and he answered like a roulette dealer. “Ten Christians will say that God told them to buy a house. In nine of the cases, it will go bad. The 10th one is the real Christian.” And the other nine? “For them, there’s always another house.”

Pastor Garay has argued his way right into logical fallacy: the self-sealing argument. This is merely one example of many given in the article. Others include poor exegesis, proof-texting, torturous re-imaginings of the social messages of the Gospels, love of this-worldly status… I could go on, but that’s another article entirely.

In many ways, this blog will attempt to bridge a gap between the journalistic worldview of religion and the academic/seminarian worldview. It will bring the audience to the stories of religion in the news in hopes that we all will think critically about what we’re seeing and reading. Is what’s showing up in the news accurate? Is it unfairly partisan or potentially harmful? What is it telling us about the shape of belief, faith and religion today?  We will be dealing with it socratically, and we ask you to join us, add to the conversation and at times even point the way.