This is Your Brain on God

Two good pieces in Slate on neurotheology: an overview by George Johnson (http://www.slate.com/id/2165026/) and John Horgan's piece on being an experimental subject at Laurentian University (http://www.slate.com/id/2165004/). And, in another vein, The New York Times reports on the Noah's Ark children's museum at the Skirball Cultural Centre in Los Angeles; the article has an accompanying video and slide show:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/arts/design/29fink.html?ref=arts. And, finally, a Florida bar is the location for Sunday church services for bikers: http://www.cbc.ca/cp/Oddities/070427/K042702AU.html.

New Music

Listening to CBC Radio 3 lately (http://radio3.cbc.ca/) and getting the podcast of new Canadian music. And Feist has a new album - The Reminder - and she's profiled in The New York Times arts section (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/arts/music/15pare.html) with an interview audio track and the video for 1234.

Virtual Religion

William Saletan's column in Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2163775/) deals with churches in the virtual reality world of Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com/). It's worth reprinting in full - I sense a possible thesis topic:

Virtual churches are sprouting in Second Life. Many are online branches of real churches, with streaming video of live sermons. Rationales: 1) Cyberspace is another frontier for evangelism. 2) Where better to reach the unsaved? 3) It's no weirder than the current practice of broadcasting to real-life satellite churches where congregants watch services on screens. Secular critique: Second Life should be for fantasies like sex, not drudgeries like church. Religious critique: Church, like sex, is more exciting in the flesh. Social critique: Real religion consists of good works in this world, not pretending to worship in another. Half-cynical view: Conversations in Second Life churches are less fake than the "good-sermon-nice-weather exchanges" in real churches. Fully cynical view: Most churchgoing is fake, so why not let your avatar do it for you, like sending your kids to Sunday school.

Easter Eve

What am I reading today as I prepare for Easter?
A frightening piece on the chemical Bisphenol A, which is present in plastic bottles and other food packaging:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/
RTGAM.20070406.wbisphenolA0407/BNStory/Front/home.
Design for the other 90% - design that is not about tea kettles and chairs, but helping 90% of the world's people live:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/style/
tmagazine/04remix.cooperhewitt.t.html?ref=tmagazine.
And an article on the Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes de Rocha:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/style/
tmagazine/04well.mendes.t.html?ref=tmagazine.

Meek Mild As If

A few years ago the Church of England ran an advertising campaign to try to get people to attend Easter services, and used a poster of Jesus looking very much like Che Guevara. The poster slogan was "Meek. Mild. As If." - probably as provocative then as the current United Church of Canada Emerging Spirit magazine campaign with a bobble-head Jesus. I love the poster, though - particularly as Good Friday approaches and we need to be reminded that Jesus was executed by the authorities on the garbage dump of Jerusalem as a political criminal, just as the death squads brought their victims to the dumps of Managua and San Salvador and killed them. I saw some great Che murals in Nicaragua. There was a debate in our group about how appropriate Che is as a symbol of liberation, given that he spearheaded the more pro-Soviet, hardline faction in Cuba.

Chagall and Crosses

I haven't felt much like blogging since getting back from Central America - and I'm now on Facebook, where I feel loved as people are always wanting to be my friend:) But I was reading Helen McLean's review of Jonathan Wilson's biography of the painter Marc Chagall, published in The Globe & Mail book section today. She writes:
"Chagall had no wish to convert to Christianity, Wilson says. What he wanted was to reclaim Christ for the Jews, not as messiah but as a poet and prophet. He was obsessed with the concept of the crucified Christ as a universal symbol of martyrdom, painting it often and eventually even identifying with that tortured figure. In a late painting of the crucifixion, he wrote "Chagall" in Hebrew letters at the head of the cross."

Back From Managua

I'm back from 10 days in Managua and Nicaragua's northern Atlantic region. There is much to process: dire poverty co-existing with (or producing?) hope and faith.

There is an interview with former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the London Review of Books: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n04/hall02_.html. He speaks of his own experience with liberation theology.

From Algiers to Managua

Just watched The Battle of Algiers, the landmark 1966 Italian-Algerian film about FLN terror and French counter-terror; many lessons about liberation struggles, the limitations of counter-insurgency, and the present fiasco in Iraq. Innocents suffer on both sides.

On Wednesday morning I leave for Nicaragua for 10 days - and I'm not sure what I will be like when I return from my first exposure to pervasive poverty (in inner-city ministry I have had lots of experience with poverty, but nothing on the scale of Nicaragua, the second-poorest country in the Americas). How will I be transformed? Will I simply be angry? Will I be evangelized to be a power for justice? Check back in late February.

Candlemas

February 2 is Candlemas in the old Christian calendar, as well as Groundhog Day and Imbolg in Celtic spirituality. I haven't blogged for a while, but I've been thinking about the spectrum that has charity on one end and justice on the other, and how to invite people to move along the spectrum. It's like the story about a town on a river, and suddenly babies begin washing up on the banks of the river. The townspeople begin saving the babies. More babies wash up, and eventually institutions grow up, dedicated to saving, sheltering and raising the babies. But no one in the town ever asks where the babies are coming from.

Denying Denial

A group of over 100 Iranian intellectuals have condemned their government's sponsorship of a conference on Holocaust denial; see http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19831.

I watched John Ford's 1964 film Cheyenne Autumn. I thought it was ground-breaking for its time; it is sympathetic to the Cheyenne people (although few of the Native characters are played by aboriginal actors) and to Quakers, and depicts cowboy racism and the collusion of mining and railroad interests in destroying the First Nations of the Plains. It certainly shows the progression from the same director's The Searchers, which begins to show racism towards the First Nations, to Dances With Wolves.

Origins of Faith Traditions

Reading Tariq Islam's piece in the London Review of Books on Islamic history (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n03/ali_01_.html). He writes:
"Judaism, Christianity and Islam all began as versions of what we would today describe as political movements. They were credible belief-systems which aimed to make it easier to resist imperial oppression, to unite a disparate people, or both."

While the statement is simplistic, one can certainly make this argument for Islam, and in large part for Judaism (as the worship of the Lord played a role in inspiring a Canaanite peasant rebellion that eventually led to the nation of Israel). It is less easy to argue this for Christianity, but there was a major element of political liberation in both Jesus' teaching and the preaching of the early Jesus movement.

So, how then shall we live? Is faith all about political resistance to oppression? How do we act when we ourselves are both oppressors and oppressed (see the Solzhenitsyn quote below), calling ourselves people of faith while living in the rich West? Stay tuned for answers (if I have any).

Good and Evil

Just when I'm trying to lighten up the blog...Reading reviews of Martin Amis' new Gulag novel, House of Meetings (see http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/books/review/Schillinger2.t.html?ref=books, among others). The Times review includes a poignant quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

This Blog Needs Some Levity

I have been watching The Office, both the British and US versions. It's hilarious, but is even funnier because I have worked for similar bosses. In Thursday's broadcast episode of the US series, Michael emails a compromising picture of himself to the wrong recipient; at my political party job I would get calls from bigwigs asking how to get an email message back.

David Letterman says: NBC News is now under fire for referring to the Iraq War as a civil war. Today President Bush said, "No, no, no. It’s not a civil war until it’s made into a series of Time Life books.”

The Dawkins Delusion

More attention paid to Richard Dawkins' atheist manifesto The God Delusion: a good article by H. Allen Orr in the New York Review of Books, at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19775; and a scathing review by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html. Eagleton begins, "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."

No Noose

I have been ruminating on Saddam Hussein's execution, and read in Slate that Christopher Hitchens is opposed to the death sentence for the deposed dictator: http://www.slate.com/id/2156776/. Hitchens is a gung-ho proponent of the continuing war (read: fiasco) in Iraq, so I was surprised that he and I are of one mind on this issue, if not on the morality and efficacy of the war itself:
"The disgusting video of Saddam Hussein's last moments on the planet is more than a reminder of the inescapable barbarity of capital punishment and of the intelligible and conventional reasons why it should always be opposed...We (Americans) have helped to officiate at a human sacrifice. For shame."
Also on Iraq, there are two excellent pieces in the New York Review of Books; Christian Caryl's What About the Iraqis?, looking at the war (for once) from the viewpoint of ordinary Iraqis instead of the occupation forces or the elite (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19793); and Mark Danner's Iraq: The War of the Imagination, dissecting the Bush Administration's errors in managing the occupation, particularly the disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi military and the Baathist civil service, creating an instant Sunni insurgency (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19720). Recommended reading.

New Year's Day +1

U2 sang "all is quiet New Year's Day" and that was indeed the case - the freezing rain that coated roads with ice on New Year's Eve melted in the sun, so the only sound was melted icewater dripping from the roof. I watched Super Size Me and was thankful that I have not eaten at a McDonald's in years.

I met Amy-Jill Levine at a conference in October. Her book The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus is reviewed at
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/books/01gala.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. She criticizes liberation theologians who "invent a bad Judaism" so they can portray Jesus as a rebel against this system. I have struggled with this too; how can the liberation Jesus represents be proclaimed without making depictions of the Jewish political-religious authorities reflect on Judaism as a whole? I tend to concentrate on Jesus' opposition to the abuses of the Temple hierarchy and the wealthy aristocratic, land-holding class who collaborated with the Roman occupiers, and describe Jesus as thoroughly Jewish and preaching a purer Judaism (much like the prophets 500 to 700 years before). This is an issue which needs constant attention and reflection.

Feliz Navidad

Christmas Eve, and The New York Times' Sunday Magazine reports on the transformation of Catholicism in Los Angeles as worshipers become predominantly Spanish-speaking:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/magazine/24catholics.t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

The article notes tensions between Catholics and Spanish-speaking Pentecostal evangelists, Mexican and Central American Catholics over Mexican devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and affluent (largely Anglo) and poor (largely Hispanic) Catholics and between the church hierarchy and priests over liberation theology. I love the quote from a Jesuit priest in East L.A.:
“You don’t evangelize the poor; the poor evangelize you. I learned that as a young priest in Bolivia long ago, and it’s my ongoing experience. The simple truth is that here you’re called to something deeper, more radical, more credible...You’re always standing with the demonized, so that the demonization stops. You’re always with the people on the outer fringes of the circle of compassion, so the circle of compassion can expand. You’re always at the margins, so the margins once and for all disappear. And you’re always with the disposable, so the people stop being disposed of.”

Tomorrow we celebrate the birthday of Jesus, who stood with the marginalized, preached liberation in the coming of God's reign of justice, aroused the anger of the religious and political establishment, was arrested as an enemy of the state, was put to death - and rose again so that sin and evil can never win. A su nombre gloria. Amen.

Occupation

The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map is reviewed in The Globe & Mail today:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/
LAC.20061223.BKURSU23/TPStory/Entertainment/Books
(buy it at http://www.amazon.ca/Ursula-Franklin-Reader-Pacifism-Map/dp/
1897071183/sr=8-1/qid=1166931370/ref=pd_ka_1/
701-5129510-2346736?ie=UTF8&s=books).
She writes - and I will be thinking about this, knowing something about the politics of states occupied by the Axis powers:
"In my picture of what is going on, we are being occupied by the marketeers just as the French and Norwegians were occupied by the Germans. We have, as they did, puppet governments who run the country for the benefit of the occupiers. We have, as they did, collaborators. . . . We are, as they were, threatened by deliberate willfulness, by people who have only contempt for those they occupy and who see their mission to turn over our territory to their masters."

Christmas is A-Coming...

...and the goose is getting fat, or whatever. I'm busy working on the Christmas Eve sermon. Here is part of the draft, emphasizing how God broke into history in the birth of Jesus Christ in little Bethlehem, and God brings new life to birth in the most unexpected people and places. I got inspiration for this one from Herbert O'Driscoll's little book, A Certain Life.

"God’s work of salvation is surprising. The new life God brings is disturbing because it is unexpected. It refuses to conform. It upsets expectations about what is important, what is believable, what humans understand about power and justice. New birth never occurs in the predictable Jerusalems and Romes where we expect it; it sneaks into our world in the Bethlehems, in human situations where we presume nothing good and new can come. New life comes into everyday lives. God is hidden in the ordinary, God chooses to work powerfully through those who are powerless. And God shatters our confidence in human ways as the divine comes in a little baby who would grow up to die for love and rise again for love. God reverses human standards, and looks with favour on the humble, scatters the proud, pulls the mighty from their places of power, raises up the lowly, fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty.

"The message of Advent and Christmas is not dependent on whether or not a star appeared or a census was called in human history. The message is that God acts, and God’s salvation and liberation come, in wonderful, surprising, unexpected ways. And this is the message we called to believe, we are called to proclaim, and we are given gifts to proclaim."

A Mighty Wind

Watched A Mighty Wind, the latest (well, 2003 - I'm late) mock documentary from Christopher Guest, who made This is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, and Best in Show. The whole gang is back skewering 60s folk music as three folk acts reunite for a concert. It wasn't as funny as Guest's previous efforts (who can forget him as Spinal Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnell?), but I particularly enjoyed The New Main Street Singers' The Good Book Song. A Mighty Wind is a reference to Acts 2:2, by the way.