Month: November 2013

Alice Robb visited the church for atheists founded by Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, known as The Sunday Assembly, when it recently passed through Washington, DC:

British comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans … are hipper, gentler, and less intellectual than your typical secularist preachers. And they’re working from a very different premise—that non-theists are missing out on the benefits of being part of a spiritual community. By providing skeptics with a non-religious place to sing, socialize, and discuss values—they’ve described the assembly as “part foot-stomping show, part atheist church”—they want to reach people who may be turned off by more strident or academic streams of atheism.

“We don’t really use many labels to describe ourselves,” Jones told me. “We do this in a way that appeals to normal people.” Unlike activists like [Manual for Creating Atheists author Peter] Boghossian, Jones and Evans say they’re not out to convert anyone. “We want to make sure everyone is welcome,” said Jones.

Sounds nice, but Evans and Jones are so wary of giving offense or excluding anyone that it’s unclear what, if anything, they do believe.

Robb notes that the group’s “lack of boundaries makes for a muddled, or even nonexistent, message”:

We sang songs by Queen and Bon Jovi. We closed our eyes for a minute of silent reflection. Jones talked about gratitude. Upon command, we introduced ourselves to our neighbors and played an awkward clapping game. My partner, who found the event on meetup.com, told me he wouldn’t be coming back. A fan of Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, he said he’s looking for something more cerebral.

Jones told the assembled they were witnessing the birth of a local community, but I’m not so sure. Religious institutions breed communities because their members share a background or at least some core beliefs and values; they perform rituals together and define themselves in opposition to other groups. The only thing the people sitting around me agreed on was that they’re all human. They had diverse and sometimes incongruent beliefs. One woman identified herself to me as agnostic, while a middle-aged man called himself a “praying atheist”; a recovering food addict, he said he invented a female deity to help him through his 12-step program. It was all very inoffensive, but is a shared belief in being human enough of a foundation for a community? Why congregate if there’s nothing to bind the congregation but our membership of the same species?

Previous Dish on the Sunday Assembly here.

In an interview, Detroit pastor Christopher Brooks, author of the forthcoming Urban Apologetics, discusses how he tries to overcome the “disconnection” between typical arguments for Christianity and the realities faced by urban minorities:

Many people in our community are simply asking, “How do we make it in this country right now?” Unfortunately, traditional Protestant apologetics has rarely addressed questions of justice. Pick up a Catholic catechism, and you will find a section on social consciousness, social responsibility, and social justice. But in the average evangelical systematic theology, it’s not there. Sadly, in the black community, we have conceded these issues either to liberation theology or to black nationalist groups like the Nation of Islam. There needs to be a strong evangelical voice in our urban areas that says, “Here is what the gospel has to say about justice.”

White evangelicals typically are drawn to the righteousness of God—the importance of right doctrine and right practices—whereas African Americans and minorities are drawn more to the justice of God. Yet Psalm 89 says the foundations of God’s throne are righteousness and justice. We can’t bifurcate the ethics of God into categories of righteousness—issues like abortion and human sexuality—or justice—issues like educational and economic equality.

One way his congregation is living that message:

Our church has embraced adoption and foster care in a huge way. The foster-care system is disproportionately populated by minority children. There has been an antagonistic relationship with the state because of the perception that the state somehow profits from pulling our children out of our homes.

But as we were studying Scripture, talking about the Father God, we encountered the language of adoption in Ephesians 1 and the orphan and the widow in James 1:27. We had to ask, “What is our obligation to the orphans in our community?”

We have a goal that there would be no children in our community waiting for a home. There are about 2,000 children waiting, and our goal is to be able to find 2,000 homes for them. We have 3,000 churches in Detroit. So if each church can get just one family to adopt, we can eliminate the need for children to wait. That is a matter of praxis and apologetics: showing how the gospel makes a difference.

N.T. Wright, the Anglican clergyman and scholar, just published a 1700 page, groundbreaking exploration of St. Paul and the origins of Christianity, Paul and the Faithfulness of God. One point the book makes, and that Wright emphasizes in an interview about his book, is that Paul basically invented the notion of “Christian theology”:

For me, as for many people, ‘theology’ used to have a rather dry, abstract sound – arranging ideas in clever patterns but without much linkage to real life. With Paul all that is different. Paul was a man of action, believing that it was his God-given vocation to found and maintain communities loyal to Jesus right across a world owing allegiance to Caesar. But these communities were bound together by no social ties and indeed cut across normal social divisions. How could they be united and holy? Paul’s answer was: through prayerful, scriptural meditation on who God actually is, who God’s people are, and what God’s future is for the world. That is a kind of working definition (though I come at it in the book from several angles). These were essentially Jewish questions, but ‘theology’ in the new way Paul was doing it was something the Jewish people hadn’t needed to do – and something the non-Jewish world (for whom ‘theology’ was simply a branch of ‘physics’, the world of ‘nature’) hadn’t needed to do either. This kind of theology is a never-ending exploration – each generation has to do it afresh in its own context, and Paul gives us the tools for that rather than a set of pat ‘answers’ which mean that people don’t thereafter have to think.

Peter J. Leithart, who is making his way through the text, picks up on the same theme:

[O]ne of [Wright’s] most interesting suggestions … is that Paul gives a place to “theology” – to prayerful reflection on the nature of God and His works – that is unprecedented in either Judaism or paganism. The reason, he claims, is that Paul set about the redefine everything he inherited in terms of Jesus (this another theme from earlier work): He preached a Christological monotheism, retold Israel’s story in terms of its fulfillment in Jesus, redefined the people of God around Jesus and the Spirit, hoped for a future shaped by the death and resurrection of Jesus. In order to achieve this redefinition, he had to give a more thorough and “systematic” account of God than was common in the religions around him. Theology takes on a “symbolic role” in Paul that it never had before.

(Image of Raphael’s St. Paul Preaching in Athens, 1515, via Wikimedia Commons)

Kyle Cupp, author of the new book Living by Faith, Dwelling in Doubt, describes how he’s come to be thankful for his religious doubts, holding that they can “become the building blocks of faith, giving to faith its structure, shape, and power”:

I have my doubts about God, still, especially in stillness and in quietude. I probably wouldn’t make a good monk. There are times when I feel the close presence of a being I want to call God, but these experiences tend to come when I’m not looking for them, when I’ve forgotten myself: chasing my giggling children around the house, scouring one bathroom of mold and rotting caulk while my wife cleans the other, lying down with closed eyes listening to her read poetry. It’s in these simple moments that I sometimes feel as though the love I experience is bigger than I am, almost as though I’m bathed in a spirit that unites me to every love across the universe. Later I’ll make the mistake of getting all theological about God, a point at which God seems to vanish and I’m left with cold formulas that sound lofty but say almost nothing to me.

I’m not sure I’d have it any other way. God is described, ironically, with the term “ineffable,” a word that deconstructs every doctrine we formulate. It indicates the infinite distance between the words and formulas we use to describe God and whatever it is to which they refer. Between our finite words and an infinite God there’s a lot a room for uncertainty. A lot of room for doubts. An endless space for questions and conflicts of interpretation.

In a Q&A about his book, Cupp mentions that he learned early on to deal with religious ambiguity and uncertainty – he was the product of a mixed faith marriage, one parent Buddhist, the other Catholic:

If I were a character in a novel, talking a lot about the uncertainty at the heart of my faith life, the early childhood experiences of a mixed religion household and divorce would make a credible back story. The world of my home began as place of irreconcilable differences. I learned the behavior of trust from my parents, but this trust always meant believing in two people who didn’t agree on matters heavenly and earthly.  Trusting them meant living in tension. Looking back, I think I made peace with this tension. As an adult, when I’ve had my moments of doubting God’s existence or wondering whether any of the stuff said about God really corresponds to something out there, I haven’t felt an overwhelming need to get hold of final answers. You might say I’m at peace with my doubts—with the tension between belief and unbelief in my faith. It’s not that I don’t struggle, but that I feel at home in the struggle.

Jeanette Bicknell considers whether physical and moral revulsion are essentially the same:

According to [author of Don’t Look, Don’t Touch, Don’t Eat: The Science of Revulsion Valerie] Curtis, moral disgust evolved out of physical disgust and originally served the same purpose of infection avoidance. We need to interact with others, but we don’t want to risk contamination with their bodily fluids. So we work out a system of manners and rules so that we can interact without contamination. This is the beginning of morality, says Curtis. We are disgusted by social “parasites” just as we are by sources of (literal) disease and infection. Our disgust at immoral behavior makes us shun perpetrators, who in turn become ashamed and less likely to break moral rules in the future.

Psychologist Paul Rozin has defended a different view.

According to him, disgust is deeply connected with the ideas of contagion and contamination rather than with genuine sources of disease. For example, Rozin and his colleagues found that adults would not eat chocolate that had been formed into the shape of dog feces. The disgust aroused by poop was transferred onto the harmless (and delicious) chocolate. According to Rozin, the things that disgust us are not only those that might make us sick, but also those things that remind us of our animal nature. Humans eat, excrete, and copulate like other animals. Yet we are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that we are, in fact, animals, and like all other animals, we’re destined to die. Disgust functions as a “defense mechanism” to keep awareness of our animal nature and our mortality at bay. Once disgust is in place as a “guardian” of the physical body, it can be elicited not only by things that could make us ill, but by very different kinds of stimuli. Each human culture “co-opts” disgust, says Rozin, and projects the emotion onto people and behavior it considers immoral, even if they present no significant risk of disease.

Related Dish on the subject here.

Clancy Martin believes that Michael Clune has captured it in his “terrific memoir White Out“:

Any addict can give you a hundred reasons why he should quit, tell you dozens of stories that would make any other person quit. But the decision to quit and “what would make you stop” are two very different things for the addict. Here’s how Clune—now an associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, and “clean for over a decade”—describes one of his own attempts to kick heroin: “(a) I had made a promise to myself to quit dope, (b) it was bad for your heart to quit too abruptly, (c) my rear window was all smashed in, and (d) if I was ever going to get moving with quitting, I needed to get high right now. Right this very second.”

“Blackout” is a metaphor for the alcoholic’s relationship with alcohol; “white out,” in Clune’s memorable phrase, is the junkie’s analogous space of cognitive emptiness surrounding the question of heroin. “I sing the song because I love the man / I know that some of you don’t understand,” Neil Young sang about heroin addicts. What the non­addict doesn’t understand, perhaps cannot ever really believe, is that a sentence like “if I was ever going to get moving with quitting, I needed to get high right now” makes sense in addict-logic.

A blackout or a white out is the brain’s way of telling the drug: You win. You’ve got the wheel. Aristotle analyzed the philosophical problem of why anyone would willingly choose an action other than the good one (first posed by Plato in Protagoras) as akrasia, and we usually translate this as “weakness of will.” But what he actually argued is that akrasia is a failure in reasoning that comes from a kind of powerlessness in the brain. Clune identifies the failure more precisely: It’s a “memory disease.”

(Video: Neil Young performs “The Needle and the Damage Done”)