Month: July 2014

David Wheeler notes that seminary graduates are having trouble finding full-time jobs in the clergy:

Working multiple jobs is nothing new to pastors of small, rural congregations. But many of those pastors never went to seminary and never expected to have a full-time ministerial job in the first place. What’s new is the across-the-board increase in bi-vocational ministry in Protestant denominations both large and small, which has effectively shut down one pathway to a stable – if humble – middle-class career.

For example, the Episcopal Church has reported that the retirement rate of its clergy exceeds the ordination rate by 43 percent. And last year, an article from an official publication of the Presbyterian Church wondered if full-time pastors are becoming an “endangered species.” This trend prompted the Religion News Service to report that, in the future, clergy should expect to earn their livings from “secular” jobs. Pastors who don’t want to go that route might have to ask friends and relatives for money, or perhaps serve more than one congregation.

“[W]hatever the nature of a faith in a supernatural being, or beings, and whatever its unprovable postulates,” muses William Boyd, “I am convinced that what makes our species unique … is that we know we are trapped in time, caught briefly between these two eternities of darkness, the prenatal darkness and the posthumous one”:

“The prison of time is spherical and without exits,” Nabokov says. What to do in the face of this universal, inescapable penal servitude? My own feeling – and this again is what makes us human – is that we all yearn for one thing. Just as it’s hard-wired into our consciousness that we live between two eternities of darkness, so we search for some factor to alleviate and compensate for that brutal reality.

And the compensation we seek, I believe, is love. We want to love and we want to be loved, every single one of us. As the song says: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn/Is just to love and be loved in return.” That’s what makes our sojourn in the time-prison bearable – more than bearable: redemptive – life-enhancing, time-evading. If you’re lucky enough to experience that emotion then you’ll have savoured the best, the ultimate, that the human predicament can offer.

“[W]hen we are young and literary, we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now. I always placed a high value on friendship, but even I had no way of guessing back then that it was more fun to get drunk with a friend than with a lover. Love is a source of anxiety until it is a source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit. Love raises great expectations in us that it never satisfies; the hopes based on friendship are milder and in the present, and they exist only because they have already been rewarded. Love is a script about just a few repeated themes we have a hard time following, though we make every effort to conform to its tone. Friendship is a permis de sejour that enables us to go anywhere and do anything exactly as our whims dictate,” – Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and ’70s.

Kimberly Winston takes note of a growing movement to examine the Great War through the lens of religious history:

“You can’t understand the war fully without investigating the religious dimensions of the war,” said Jonathan Ebel, an associate professor of religion at the University of Illinois whose Faith in the Fight: The American Soldier in the Great War has just been issued in paperback. … Ebel draws a line from the “masculine Christianity” of the early 20th century (evangelist Billy Sunday‘s enormously popular revivals often included military recruiting tents) to the way combatants and support workers thought of the war. Soldiers scribbled lines of Scripture on their gas masks, marked their calendars with a cross for each day they survived combat, and opened the pages of the Stars and Stripes military newspaper to read poems comparing them to the heroes of the Old Testament. “The culture of pre-war America gave America images, ideas, and beliefs perfectly tailored to war,” he writes.

That is echoed on a global stage in The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade by Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and religion at Baylor University. The book pulls the lens back from individual Americans to highlight the religious imagery, rhetoric, and symbolism used by all sides in the war to further their goals. Several countries — especially Russia and Germany — saw the war as a fulfillment of their unique destinies as the kingdom of God. But Europe did not have room for so many countries with the same aspiration. “You can toss a coin as to which country to blame, but their two clashing visions made war inevitable,” Jenkins said. “If you do not understand the messianic and apocalyptic imagery used by all sides, and how wide-ranging those images were among all classes, all groups, all nations, you cannot hope to understand the war.”

(Photo of WWI Belgian solder’s crucifix by Flickr user Smabs Sputzer, who captions it: “It belonged to my Grandad and he wore it in the trenches during the First World War”)

In a review of Laurel Braitman’s Animal Madness, Joshua Rothman considers how human habits affect the minds of our pets:

When it comes to animals like [the “mad” elephant] Tip, “Animal Madness” has a straightforward message: Braitman will convince you that exotic animals shouldn’t be kept in zoos. … But what about pets? For them, it’s our busyness that’s the cage. Dogs and cats enjoy being around people—they’ve been bred to like us—but we’re spending less and less time at home. “Most urban and suburban dogs are only encouraged to be themselves for a small fraction of the day,” Braitman writes. Come sunset, “they flood the sidewalks around my house with their pent-up frustrations, pissing and smelling and dragging their people along behind them like water-skiers,” enjoying the human company that they crave. All is well, but then, after perhaps half an hour, “it’s back to the house for dinner, some petting, maybe some television with the humans, and then bed.”

Maybe, Braitman concludes, we should “stop leading the sorts of lives that cause large numbers of our pets to end up on psychopharmaceuticals.” We should spend less time on the Web and at work, and more time outside or at play with our animals. There is, in other words, a self-interested reason to care about their mental lives. In them, we can see “our own unhealthy habits reflected back at us.”

Previous Dish on the subject here and here.

(Photo by Christopher Michel)

Brandon Ambrosino interviews Nick Spencer, author of Atheists: The Origin of the Species, about how unbelief in the divine has changed from Nietzsche to Dawkins:

BA: Modern atheists seem of a very different variety than their forebears. For instance, Richard Dawkins, whom you critique, is very different than, say, Nietzsche. How did we get from one to the other?

NS: You’re right: Nietzsche and Richard Dawkins don’t have a great deal in common. I guess I’d say, we didn’t get from one to another, because there are different strands of atheisms. I talk about atheisms (plural) in the book. At one point, the statement “There is no God” is acceptable as it is in an academic seminar. But if you wanted to deny the existence of God in public — in the late 19th-century Europe, for example — you’d have to say, “There is no god and therefore … ” There’d have to be some implications of your nonbelief. Atheists over the years have differed according to what those implications are. And the result is that atheists, I argue, differ in their “doctrines,” if you like, of the nonexistence of God and its implications for human affairs.

Now Nietzsche had one particular, very abrasive, and, I think, painfully honest approach to that question which has spawned in the 20th-century certain nihilistic forms of atheism that are more usually associated with continental philosophy. Dawkins does it right within that tradition, and therefore, is a move on from Nietzsche. He occupies a very different atheistic position (arguably several atheistic traditions) and that’s why there is clear blue water between Nietzsche’s and his. But it wasn’t as if the former ever led to the latter. They were all, if you like, different branches of the same tree.

Recent Dish on Nietzsche here and here.

Michael Schulson considers why Evangelicals love Jews so much more than Jews love Evangelicals, arguing, “The real issue here is not that evangelicals don’t love Jews enough. It’s that certain evangelical communities sometimes love Jews way, way too much – or, more accurately, love an image of what they believe Jews to be”:

There’s a term for this flavor of affection: philo-Semitism, or the love of Jewishness and Jewish culture. For some, this kind of love may represent an unmitigated good – especially in contrast to the anti-Semitism that has haunted so much of Jewish history. More often than not, though, evangelical upwelling of philo-Semitism seems to have little to do with actual Jewish people, and more to do with Jewishness as an abstract theological concept.

A lot of evangelical support for Israel, for example, grows out of certain strains of dispensationalist theology, in which the Jews’ return to Israel is seen as a prerequisite for the Second Coming. Meanwhile, in a 2004 address, televangelist Pat Robertson didn’t even try to hide the degree to which his understanding of Jewish history served his own theological ends: “You are the living witnesses that the promises of the Sovereign Lord are true,” he told an Israeli audience, after suggesting that the last 2,500 years of Jewish survival served as “primary evidence” for the existence of God. … When evangelicals speak about Jews this way, they shouldn’t be surprised if their love goes unrequited. At its core, philo-Semitism has much in common with anti-Semitism. Both approaches view Jewishness as an abstract monolith, and both endow Jews with particular historical roles – roles, it seems, that are rarely of the Jews’ own choosing.