Ecclesiastes-Based Real Estate Advice
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Thursday, November 12, 2009 God and Country I suspect there is limited value in analyzing the Fort Hood shooting from the standpoint of religious duty and doctrine. You can infer things about specific acts from the general categories to which they belong, but it's risky business going the other way, from the specific to the general. If you understand America well, it helps you understand George W. Bush. If, however, all you know is George W. Bush, you should not thereby consider yourself an expert on America (a point on which some of our friends around the world were not always clear). Major Hasan's alleged acts are his own; they are not data points for understanding Islam any more than Eric Rudolph's are for understanding Christianity. That said, it was interesting to read what Daniel Larison wrote about religious and civic duty, in response to Rod Dreher's contention that any faithful Christian, Muslim, or Jew must be willing to obey God first and country second (though Dreher rather confusingly says that an American Christian is most never faced with this dilemma). Here's Larison: Would these [Orthodox] Christians [in the U.S. Armed Forces, fighting against Serbia] have been in the right to turn on their comrades? Absolutely not. Even though the attack on Serbia was completely unjustifiable and morally wrong, Orthodox Christians pledged to U.S. and NATO military service would have been obliged at the very least to remain loyal to their governments. If there were a severe conflict between their obligations to their fellow Christians and their duty, they would either have to resign or at least refuse to engage in hostilities... Treason and mutiny, which are the actual crimes that Hasan committed in addition to murder, are not justified by one’s political views of what is being done to one’s co-religionists by the government. As I understand it, only if the government demanded apostasy and the abandonment of the faith would Christians be required to resist or disobey a legitimate government. There's plenty more, and it's a good post to read in full. Larison's take on this issue is in line with the state church tradition he confesses (Orthodoxy) and you would find variations on this same theme repeated by adherents to the other state church traditions--Lutherans, Roman Catholics, and Anglicans most notably. The state may compel anything but direct apostasy, and in that case the Christian's only recourse is to a kind of passive disobedience. But what constitutes apostasy? One of the major advances in Christian thought in the last century was the insistence that human laws like those enforcing segregation did, in fact, deny and reject the God of the Bible. It is hard to imagine a more perfectly godless act than employing a weapon that vaporizes a whole city in a moment, in that it exalts the power of human beings over life and death to a kind of Satanic perfection. Yet are all the faithful individually deputized to judge which acts the state may and may not lawfully require of us? That doesn't seem right, either. This is why Calvin, who was much more accepting of the possibility of civil disobedience and revolution than Luther and the Catholics, insisted that resistance to the governing authority could come only from duly-constituted magistrates, not from private citizens. An individual may protest peacefully and suffer the consequences, but she may not, on this understanding, act to subvert the governing authority unless her office requires it. All of this was on my mind as I watched the movie Valkyrie this week. It was a much better film than I expected, though it hardly dwells on the ethics of trying to overthrow one's own government by assassinating its head. As cultural symbols, Hitler and Nazism exist in part to suspend our usual moral categories, and this makes some sense. Despite the constant neocon refrain of "Munich," Hitler really was a figure unique in both his malice and his irrationality. At the time, however, especially for Germans, it was not necessarily so easy. The Valkyrie conspirators were not only taking grave personal risks, they were making an ethical calculation that most of us would find very, very difficult: to assassinate their own head of state and whomever else happened to be near him in order to seize control of the government and sue for peace with their country's military enemies. The Christian who gave this the most sustained thought (he had a lot of time to do so in prison) was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had reluctantly moved from a principled Christian pacifism to actually participating, in a minor way, in the conspiracy against Hitler. Bonhoeffer concluded that the responsible Christian's task in evil times was not to extricate himself from spiritual danger through passivity but to do what he could to ensure human survival. Violence and even treason may be required of us, he reluctantly surmised. This is more or less the conclusion that Von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators must have reached in order to do what all of their training, as patriots and officers, told them not to do. As Bonhoeffer's Ethics makes reasonably clear, this is not a problem that can be solved by some kind of fixed principle. It always involves terrible risk, not just to your life--which is assumed, for Bonhoeffer--but to your very soul. To be clear, none of this has anything to do with shooting up a room full of one's fellow soldiers. There is no justification for that, especially not when there are non-violent ways to protest available. That's why it's all the more important to be clear about what we celebrate and what we condemn when we encounter attempted acts of cathartic violence, whoever the perpetrator and targets may be. Labels: Bonhoeffer, Christianity, movies, world war ii posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 1:46 PMMonday, November 09, 2009 On the Stupak Amendment In the aftermath of Saturday night's House vote on health reform, progressive anger over the amendment to remove abortion coverage from both the public plan and private plans purchased with subsidies has really boiled over. And while I'm pretty moderate on this issue, I understand: this is an underhanded attack on the legal status quo by Representatives who can't and won't try to actually ban a legal procedure, and it certainly is indicative of a demograhic imbalance in our caucus, which was mostly elected by women--the large majority of whom do not think they need Bart Stupak's supervision to make medical decisions. That having been said, it seems like a legitimate point to me that the segregation of funds proposed in the bill's original language wasn't truly sufficient to maintaining the principle of the Hyde Amendment (and love it or hate it, this is a principle that has survived year in and year out). And perhaps more to the point, this is exactly the kind of problem that we liberals invite by trying to expand the role of government in this or any area. If you want federal subsidies for purchasing health insurance, you have to be ready to weather some votes on how those subsidies may and may not be used. It does little good to complain that most of the Stupak votes come, as they undoubtedly do, out of a desire to avoid thinking about uncomfortable issues than out of any genuine commitment to human life (as evidenced by the overwhelming opposition by Stupak supporters to actually expanding access to health insurance). Truly, these are heinous people. But they are our elected representatives. If we're not getting their votes, I guess it sucks to be us. On the other hand, it's clear that we got pretty well hosed by the Catholic bishops. They lobbied all-out for the Stupak Amendment, and once it passed they had nothing much to say about the fate of health reform over all. This is yet more evidence, were more needed, that the bishops invoke Catholic social ethics only when they dovetail with the right-wing agenda that has come to define their profile in American politics. They will never help us with anything, so we might as well ignore them entirely. Labels: abortion, catholicism posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 7:40 AMSaturday, November 07, 2009 In Memoriam Chicago Diarist The town of Kiel, Wisconsin, must be utterly devastated this week. Amy Krueger, age 29, a sergeant and daughter of this little town, was killed at Fort Hood. My maternal grandfather, of blessed memory, was born in Kiel, and after I moved to Chicago it was on my route up north on highway 57 to visit my grandmother (also now departed). It's a pleasant town, stretched out along the Sheboygan River--the kind of place where flag bunting can be seen all year round and where well-kept little churches still greet the visitor touring the length of the main drag. In a town that small--maybe 3,500 residents--a death like this touches most people in one way or another. Kiel and towns like it have long mourned their soldiers and even know about murder, despite what anyone might say about small-town life. But for a child of the town to go off to serve and then be murdered in such an ignoble, sordid fashion is an occasion for unfathomable anger and grief. Danger and heroism are supposed to be chanced in a war zone, not on base. We are very far from knowing the whole story of this crime. Anyone who claims to know that this was more like the London bombings than like Virginia Tech is making stuff up, as far as I can tell. Fortunately, the alleged attacker survived his own perverse suicide attempt, and our legal system (either military or civilian) will have that rare chance to examine the mind and motives of a person who sought to end his own life by taking the lives of many others. I suspect I am not alone in being relieved when a mass shooting perpetrator dies in the act, but it's a false relief: the mind of the criminal remains a locked vault, immune to explanation, and not much considered until the next horror happens. Moreover, while we might feel the world to be safer when a mass murderer dies in the act, it can hardly be called justice. The perpetrator is never forced to confront the aftermath of his actions, never faced with the humanity of those he sought to kill, never sentenced to a legitimate penalty under law. This afternoon I tagged along, in my clerical shirt, as my wife spoke at a press conference at our local mosque, flanked by the mosque's scholar and the local rabbi. Everyone was condemning the killing, promising prayer for the victims, and calling for peace and understanding. None of these religions condone murder, everyone agreed. True enough. I was heartened by the scholar's statement that he didn't expect threats or vandalism, which had happened in the past. My wife did a great job, and naturally I was proud of her willingness to do this. All the same, I felt torn. Would it seem like rushing to the defense of a whole group while individual victims are still numb with shock? Not that fairness and decency are ever out of season, or that a word of patience and compassion from the church, mosque, or shul is ever inappropriate. It's also practically a civic duty, in a country as diverse as ours, to do what one can to tamp down potential ethnic and religious conflict. But my mind wanders back to Kiel. How could I make them know that I share their grief in my own small way? That we all understand that their daughter was robbed not just of her life but even of the death she had freely chosen, on our behalf, to risk? National tragedies do not make us virtuous. They become opportunities for public figures to burnish their morals by weeping the hardest for the dead, bellowing loudest for the blood of the perpetrator, and pledging monumental acts of commemoration. We willingly hand over our truly humane emotions--which are, after all, painful--in exchange for something less awkward and more satisfying: a voice in a wounded, aggrieved chorus; a second-hand sheen of righteousness. What I would hope we experience some day, as Americans, is empathy. A few weeks back, Jane Mayer published an excellent and widely ignored report on the use of drone attacks in Pakistan. These are not the military drone attacks in Afghanistan (where military action is authorized by law), but the CIA drone program across the border, which is used to assassinate Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders in an area where we are not legally at war. Now an assassination is merely lawless, not necessarily immoral. However, the drones and their aptly-named Hellfire missiles do not discriminate between the target of the attack and the son, wife, servant, or driver who happens to be nearby. In a legitimate war, civilian casualties must be minimized but also accepted. In an assassination attempt, civilian casualties are murder victims--someone's daughter, someone's son, someone's husband who went off to forage for scrap metal and never came back. Someone's little town has its heart ripped out when one of our bombs hits a wedding banquet. Someone never outlives their grief and never overcomes their anger. Maybe these are the necessary costs of being the biggest power in a brutal world. But if so, we should understand that no one will ever be philosophical about it, and neither should we. The world is full of beautiful small towns that are proud of their brave, lovely daughters. We grieve for the ones we know, but we should try too to grieve for the ones that we will never know. Rest in peace, Amy Krueger, and all the victims. God bless and keep you, people of Kiel and all the towns and neighborhoods slashed with inconsolable grief. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 2:44 PM Friday, November 06, 2009 Another Reason I Love Chicago Driving into the city on Wednesday for my meeting at the synod office, I heard the following sequence on WXRT (93.1): 1) Clip from the George Burns film 'Oh God, You Devil' ("that's right--the Big G. God Almighty") 2) Regina Spektor's "Laughing With" 3) T.S. Eliot reading the opening lines of 'The Dry Salvages' ("I do not know much about gods, but I think that the river is a strong brown god") 4) Nirvana's "All Apologies." Awesome. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 11:22 AM Thursday, November 05, 2009 Last Season's Fruit is Eaten (and the Fullfed Beast Shall Kick the Empty Pail)* Yesterday my synod held an in-service day of sorts for new pastors. It was my first time at such an event, and though my half-time schedule chafes at work tasks that don't actually accomplish things, I appreciate that our leadership cares about our professional development. The topic was congregational renewal, and the presenters--a pastor and deacon couple who serve a church in Elgin that was about to close seven years ago--did a good job, offered good advice, and generally gave us reason to be hopeful in our work, however difficult it might seem. A major part of the presentation, however, was given over to rubbishing the mission models of decades past. Strategic plans, mission statements, treating people as targets and/or walking wallets--all of this, we were rightly told, is exhausted as a faithful way to do evangelism. The problem with junking one set of management techniques and jargon as outmoded and culturally contingent is that you almost inevitably end up substituting a new set and new jargon. It's easy enough to see how the conventional wisdom of a generation ago unwittingly mirrored the production models in economics and marketing textbooks. It's much harder to see which trends, metaphors, and ways of thinking we are even now absorbing and re-purposing for the church. Today's exciting new approach is tomorrow's discarded holdover. This isn't something to despair over. "For last year's words belong to last year's language / And next year's words await another voice," as Eliot says. The gritty work of gathering and regathering the faithful needs to be re-imagined constantly, and without any hope of producing the enduring monuments of poetry and theology. All the same, it goes to show that there is no substitute for faithful, well-trained, committed pastors who are deeply convinced of the world's dire condition and of the power of the Word to invade and heal it. Maybe there's no way for a church renewal approach to be anything but optimistic and forward-looking. That's all the more reason for a church leader to supply the brutal realism of Christianity him or herself. I found myself wondering, as I often do when I encounter skill-building for ministry, "where are the sinners? Where is the catastrophic human need? Where is the singular power of the Word?" These things need to take flesh over and over again, too. The church is never fixed, because if it were possible to fix it, we wouldn't need it. Labels: Christianity, Lutheranism posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 1:48 PMWednesday, November 04, 2009 Election Post-Mortem I remember well the New Jersey and Virginia elections of 2001. Democrats were still smarting from the Florida recount when the terrorist attacks threw the whole political landscape into turmoil. Insofar as we allowed ourselves partisan thoughts in those days, the gubernatorial races in 2001 were taken to be an encouraging sign, as McGreevey and Warner won in a strongly pro-Bush atmosphere. Well, anyone thinking that those state results boded well for the 2002 midterms had another think coming. And this makes sense when one considers one's own state's politics. I'm a pretty partisan Democrat at the federal level, but I vote for quite a few Republicans in Illinois. I suppose I'm well above-average when it comes to being informed about political issues, but I don't find it hard to distinguish between state and federal issues, and on some intuitive level I think that's true for a lot of voters. Anyway, I suppose I'd be disappointed if I lived in New Jersey or (especially) Virginia, but there doesn't seem to be much of a national message in those elections, any more than there was in 2001. Obama is reasonably popular in both states; Corzine was very unpopular; and incumbent parties do poorly during recessions. Ideologues of all stripes tend to think that everything is about them, but often times elections have much more going on than whatever any of us happens to be exercised about at the moment. The races that mattered on a federal level were the special elections in California and New York. In the former case, a liberal Democrat replaced a moderate one. In the latter, a conservative Democrat replaced a moderate Republican. So the House has shifted just a little to the left, giving Pelosi that much more of a margin to get strong bills passed. I'm very satisfied with this result, quite apart from the schadenfreude attendant on seeing an intra-right-wing battle turn out so badly for both factions.* Bloomberg winning by a chastening margin might be the best outcome for New York, speaking of the emotional satisfactions of election results. The Maine result was the only real disappointment of the night for me. All the same, Washington State took a big step in the right direction by passing an initiative recognizing civil unions. It's important to remember that ten years ago, such a development was close to unthinkable. * Whet has more: "Hoffman might have done better had Armey not dismissed upstate political issues as "parochial," and if Hoffman had seemed to have a clue about those issues; something to keep in mind when following national sources (be they pols or reporters) on local and state races is that they obviously have some bias, conscious or not, towards spinning national political stories out of local races." That's right. So please, Republicans, do whatever Sarah Palin recommends! MORE: I can't believe this: On the heels of the NY-23 special House election, in which Conservative Party insurgent Doug Hoffman overtook moderate GOP nominee Dede Scozzafava, only to lose to Democrat Bill Owens, NRSC chairman John Cornyn (R-TX) has announced that the GOP's national Senate committee will not be spending money in contested primaries. "There's no incentive for us to weigh in," Cornyn told ABC News. "We have to look at our resources." Lemme get this straight--a party that has lost 15 senate seats in two cycles has no incentive to try to promote the more electable candidate? A party that has been spanked repeatedly by the median voter is still more afraid of its base? Labels: nancy pelosi, Republicans, sarah palin, sexuality posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 2:10 PMTuesday, November 03, 2009 That Bwessed Awangement The only thing that really bothered me about the late administration's marriage promotion agenda was the transparent shoddiness of the science on which it was based. It took marriage to be a treatment, like Prozac or thirty minutes of daily exercise, and then spun all sorts of fanciful conclusions about the effects of this treatment. But as Yglesias points out today, marriage is a bit of a red herring in family policy. Family stability, and the emotional and material support for children implied therein, are the main things--regardless of whether the parents have gone to a courthouse, church, aboretum, or waterslide park to have their relationship formalized. Moreover, a society that is serious about attacking child poverty--as we once were and as the UK has been over the last twelve years--can make real gains in that area even without trying to re-engineer people's domestic lives. Consider it this way: what would happen if the government decided to declare every cohabiting couple with children to be legally married and sent them notice? Or more realistically, if the government decided to "promote marriage" by radically dropping the barriers to entry--say by making marriage licenses available wherever lottery tickets are sold and certifying clerks to sign them? It's pretty obvious that such moves would do nothing to foster family stability or lower child poverty. This is because marriage is not a treatment. Maybe your view of marriage is religious or sacramental (whether or not your tradition considers the rite itself a sacrament), maybe it's something else. Maybe you're reasonably compatible and possessed of the economic and familial resources needed to weather difficult times, maybe you're not. Maybe you're foolish and impulsive, under the sway of infatuation and sexual charisma, or maybe you're truly dedicated to the institution. Maybe you and your spouse have clear understandings of when and whether to have children and how your life together will work, or maybe you trust love to conquer all. Maybe you've learned good conflict resolution skills, maybe you're still immature. All such couples, once they leave the justice of the peace, are equally married. That's hardly to say that the success or failure of a marriage is inevitable before the vows are even said, but only that we have no consensus on what marriage means, no material or legal mechanism for enforcing a consensus we had one, and no groundswell for the kind of distributive economic policies that would help stabilize marriages, however the couples understand their relationships. So marriage, like so many other things we fight over and politicize, is much more a cultural than a legal or political issue. I've argued this both from the left and from the right. Talking to a group of colleagues recently, the question of how to handle requests to preside at same-sex blessing services in our churches (Illinois has no marriage equality or civil unions) came up. Most of us in this group were generally supportive of blessing these relationships, but I was the only one anxious for some guidance from the ELCA about how to do it. In our rush to stop excluding people, we gave a lot less thought to what the law and gospel proclamation for a same-sex union would be (not that there aren't plenty of proposed answers, but none that can remotely be called the voice of the church). At the same time, this gap between what we've decided to allow and what we're yet willing to say is part of a larger problem with wedding ceremonies becoming just another consumer experience. When a pastor--a real one, with a church and everything--is being asked to dress up as Elvis to preside at a wedding, would a thoughtful traditionalist be relieved to know that the couple is heterosexual? Protestants have typically de-emphasized the role of the church in making a marriage, rather than merely acknowledging and blessing it. That is to say, we think of marriage first as a natural and civil bond and second as one that displays the redemption of the world in Jesus Christ. So there's no need for us to be killjoys like the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, who want to keep people from being married outdoors and so forth. All the same, we clergy have a role to play in helping form what people understand marriage to be. As a pastor I am less interested in herding couples toward the altar than I am in preaching a Christian ideal of faithfulness that would, I hope, have some small voice in a couple's decision to wed. This is likewise how I understand the task of counseling, whether before a wedding or after it. What is the place of faith in your relationship? What will your life together express beyond the love you feel for each other? What about your wedding/marriage is really enduring and bigger than you? And no, I'm afraid I can't wear that Elvis costume. Labels: Christianity, Lutheranism, sexuality posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 10:20 AM |
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