No, that’s not entirely true. Let me try again.  I understand both phenomena partially, but the contradictions that arise when I think about either one baffle me.

In one case, I somewhat get the big picture but have no idea why such a tactical error isn’t being blasted, and in the other, I can say perfectly well what’s going on tactically, but I have a hard time saying what the big picture could possibly be.

Neither Bullying nor Nationalism

Thinking about Savage first, I can see why he’s the guest speaker to invite when the topic is bullying: whether it’s people who self-identify as gay or people perceived as “acting gay,” the school actually got that part right.  Not just anyone gets bullied, and facing the actual social contours of bullying is a good move.  On the other hand, perhaps this is just my teenage-in-the-Clinton-years sense of propriety coming out, but there are better and worse ways to counter a culture that ostracizes one group of people.  One way that resonates more with me, and this is coming from someone who came of age before Richard Dawkins became a gigantic celebrity, is to find common ground and try to build on it.  When I try to imagine ways to bring larger, socially dominant groups around to welcoming smaller, socially put-upon groups into the larger picture, I imagine various Cosby-Show and Will-and-Grace scenarios in which storytelling convinces people that, after all, there’s not all that much dividing us after all.

Then there are moves that are, at the least, tactically stupid.  One such move is for the put-upon group to find some other scapegoat, preferably another numerically small group, and make them the focus of one’s own mockery.  That seems to be what Dan Savage picked.

I wouldn’t call his outburst “bullying,” largely because I think that category means something, and not every insult is the same as bullying.  I also wouldn’t deny that there are historical precedents: after all, much of Malcolm X’s pre-conversion rhetoric involved mocking the honkies, getting his audience to see themselves as genuinely superior to the dominant social group.  But in the case of Dan Savage, I don’t see a Malcolm-X-style big picture behind his move; I just see tactical stupidity, the sort of Rush-Limbaugh-style bluster that gets people-who-already-agree to raise a drink but which does so at the expense of potential movement-together, socially speaking.  Neither Rush Limbaugh nor Dan Savage is a bully, because one could skip Savage’s talks or turn off the radio to get rid of Limbaugh.  But to say that either figure is doing good things to help people live peaceably together is an assertion that, to me, given my inability to resolve this contradiction, just ain’t true.

This Is what Democracy Looks Like.  And I Don’t Like it.

The North Carolina situation bears out a contradiction that rises out of the intersection of sexual-identity-politics and political procedure.  Perhaps my own lack of agitation about Amendment 1 is a function of my own naive confidence in actual legislative deliberation, I’ll acknowledge that.  But when I look at the vote that NC voters took on May 8, I see a state’s population asserting that, for the time being, questions of legally-recognized marriage should remain the business of elected legislators rather than judicial fiat.  After all, if the populace of a state can amend a constitutional document in 2012, presumably the same population could pressure lawmakers to call for another vote on another amendment whenever the next cycle of state elections happens.  Thus the proper reaction, I would surmise, would be some sort of educational mobilization, a concerted effort to convince the actual citizens of North Carolina that they should vote differently the next time said cycle cycles.

Instead, for the past several days, I’ve seen hand-wringing, regional Chauvinism, and all the sorts of things that make me think people would rather lose actual legislative battles but strike impressive lament-poses for their digital friends.  (I’ll go ahead and note that, so far, I’ve seen nobody post any material praising the legislation, but that could just indicate that people are more inclined to post online complaints than they are to post online celebrations, politically speaking.)  I’ve seen graphics calling for the repeal of Amendment 1, but I’ve seen little to indicate that anyone has any concrete plans, or even plans to have concrete plans, to articulate some sort of argument to convince the reluctant citizens of North Carolina (or Georgia, for that matter–our amendment happened a few years ago) that such a repeal might happen.

Another admission: I’m basing this off of Facebook chatter that I’ve seen between paper-grading sessions and year-end-assessment-meetings, so there’s no pretense of a representative sample here.  But I do wonder whether all of this really is the jaded partisan hay-making that I fear it might be, or whether there might be something genuinely political on the horizon.

In both of these cases, the reactions I’ve seen, mainly from the right wing in Savage’s case and mainly from the liberals in the case of North Carolina, confirm a fear that I have about online discourse, namely that it’s a pressure-release valve that actually makes people less likely to commit to actual political engagement.  I’d like to think I’m wrong, that there’s a quiet, locally-based network of anti-Joe-Kony people still making plans to travel to the Central African Republic and help in the effort to bring him in (if that’s where he still is).  I’d like to think that there might be a movement afoot among evangelicals to organize anti-bullying events that acknowledge genuine difference in conviction without engaging in the AM-Radio nonsense of a Dan Savage, just to show folks that it can be done.  I’d like to think that there are people in public libraries and coffee shops and public parks and other places where actual North Carolina voters go, getting ready to talk with the folks there, human being to human being, convincing them that political toleration and religious conviction might live harmoniously together.  I’d like to think all of these things, and perhaps I just can’t see them happening because I’ve been so busy.  But I’m not hopeful.

Give me hope, friends.

I’ve now seen photos in which Jack is holding this book, so I can announce it without ruining the surprise.  Since the Table of Contents is not available on amazon.com yet, I figured I’d reproduce it here.  Readers of the Christian Humanist should find at least one name familiar, and those who have ties to east Tennessee might just find several familiar names:

Faith in Writing: Essays in Honor of Jack L. Knowles

Introduction

“The Dream of the Rood”: A Model for Christian Meditation

Patricia Magness

Dante and Desire, or What an Evangelical Youth Group Kid Stands to Learn from a Walk
through Purgatory

Nathan Gilmour

Dancing for Joy

Jeffrey J. Knowles

“Like the Ooze of Oil/ Crushed”: A Christological Clue in Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur”

Lee Magness

Journey of the Magi: A Personal Meditation

E. LeRoy Lawson

I Loved My Children’s Bodies

C. Robert Wetzel

Friendship and Beauty in the Midst of the Mundane: Reflections on Crossing to Safety

Philip D. Kenneson

Faith in Writing/Writing in Faith

J. E. Knowles

Alright, I’ll stop being coy: those of you who didn’t go to school at Milligan College or Emmanuel School of Religion (now Emmanuel Christian Seminary) should know that I’m by far the least among these: the other contributors are veteran professors, folks who teach and who have retired as named chairs of theology and humanities, current and former seminary presidents, published novelists, and otherwise very distinguished company.  How I got invited to this party is beyond me.

But listeners to the podcast know that I’m Forrest Gumping it through my academic career, so no surprise there.

Jack Knowles, in whose honor we all wrote, taught the first college class that I ever attended.  (Yes, it was also the first class on my schedule.)  He taught me Virgil and Dante, and he also introduced me to Herodotus and Thucydides and Plato and Aristotle and Calvin.  He was also the first to teach me King Lear and Othello, though certainly he wasn’t the last to teach me better to read those plays.  Knowles remains, in my imagination, the picture of even-handed, responsible learning, and he was one of those who most influenced my own desire to be a specifically Christian intellectual.  I’ve only read my own essay in this collection (I wrote it too), but I have to think that those who taught alongside him likewise value his career.

• Below Par: The Biblical tragedy comes to an American golf course.
• Confessions of a Teenage Drama King: A high-school-drama spin on the Job story.

Acts 8:26-40  • Psalm 22:25-31  • 1 John 4:7-21  • John 15:1-8

First things first: I apologize for missing several Bible posts in a row.  A streak of busy weekends and bad luck has knocked that part of my week out of whack in the month of April, and all I can say going forward is that I hope I can do better.

Alright.  On with the lectionary reflection.

Folks make much of Jesus’s “I am” statements in John, and rightly so: of the four gospels, John has Jesus talking about himself far more than the other three, and the Greek ego eimi is indeed a customary translation of the “I am” that YHWH speaks in Exodus 3.  What folks sometimes underplay, I think, is the rest of the Old Testament echoes in these famous sayings.  “I am the good shepherd” means a good deal on its own and becomes even more significant in conversation with Psalm 23.  “I am the resurrection” is certainly a doctrinal cornerstone, and it’s also the fulfillment of the grand apocalyptic vision of Daniel 12.  And this week’s reading, “I am the vine,” is a fine viticultural metaphor on its own, but when it comes into relationship with Isaiah 5, the call to abide in the Son becomes even more striking than before.

What Isaiah most readily lends to John is the metaphoric of the fruit.  After all, unlike Paul’s letter to the Galatians, John does not say with any clarity what sorts of fruit a branch attached to his vine might bear.  Isaiah 5:1-7 tells the tale nicely:

    [7] For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
and he looked for justice,
but behold, bloodshed;
for righteousness,
but behold, an outcry!
(Isaiah 5:7 ESV)

Here the most strident calls of the liberal Protestant (or progressive, if one prefers to call it that) and the most insistent doctrine of the conservative Evangelical come together in one grand prophetic oracle.  (Of course, the Catholics and Orthodox have done a fair job of keeping both in sight these twenty centuries.)  What the LORD requires of mortals and our cities are righteousness and justice, domestic and political shalom.  And the way that Jesus calls us to such things is none other than to abide in the Son.

What’s more, Jesus’s words in this part of his Sermon at the Table (I think I just coined that, and I like it) bring together the faithfulness of the most pious “prayer warrior” with the word-piety of the most fervent Lutheran: whatever we ask of the LORD, we shall receive, so long as we ask while abiding in the word.  In other words, so long as our own desires stand disciplined by the proclamation of the Son, shaping the desires of our hearts to conform to the desires of the Son, in other words if we learn to ask for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in Heaven, we will genuinely see our truest desires playing out in the world.

Now please don’t misunderstand: I would be the last to assert the stupid optimism that frames genuine doctrinal disputes in terms of “misplaced emphasis” or reduces deep-seated historical schism to “religion, not relationship.”  But in the Sermon at the Table, and in the prophetic oracles that it echoes, at the very least we Christians can affirm that the best parts of all of our theologies find their roots in the same Scriptures, which in turn find their authority in the call of God.  That does not finish discussions of historical difference and theological error, but I would hope it could be a starting point.

May our God-talk always strive for true utterance, for the enlivening of the imagination, for charity above all things.

General Introduction

Historicize!
- 9/11
- Bush vs. Gore
- The rise of Fox News
- The origin of red and blue states

The Division
- Haves and also-haves
- City and country
- Religious divides
- Humility and egotism

Ten Years On
- The spread of NASCAR
- When partisanship gets dangerous
- High-spending Republicans
- Who’s driving the party?
- Regional differences

Good and Bad Partisanship
- Stuff can’t get done
- Why gridlock is good

Blue Islands in Red Oceans
- Students and professors
- Where professors live
- Who else votes democrat?
- The UGA suburb machine
- Why don’t college students vote?

The Upcoming Election
- Blurgh
- Nathan’s endorsement
- Who will win in November?

How the Conversation Happened
That last one came into play recently as a really good discussion of seminary education broke out among three of us who were in seminary together about ten years ago.  (One of our professors chimed in as well.)  As often happens when good conversations erupt on FB (it don’t happen often), I was sorry that only the relative handful of people who are on my homies list (I refuse to use FB’s term for Internet contacts) would ever see it, so with the permission of those involved, I brought the conversation over here.

The whole thing started when Wes Jamison, an old and a good friend of mine from the Milligan days, one with whom I fight online as a cat and a dog might fight online, noted that an ethicist was going to be present at an adult-education event and that anybody who didn’t read his book in seminary should ask for a refund.  Now I’ve read my share of books on ethics, and probably a couple other people’s shares as well (I’m that way with mashed potatoes at most family gatherings, too), but I’d never heard of the ethicist, and I had to ask Wes for a brief introduction.

Not long after that, another good friend from the late Clinton era, Rich Voelz, chimed in and noted that he’d never heard of the ethicist either, but his follow-up was more interesting than mine: he wished that our seminary, Emmanuel School of Religion (now Emmanuel Christian Seminary), had required an ethics course for M.Div students.  Wes took that opportunity to start listing all of the classes that he wished were required for M.Div students, courses in preaching and worship-planning and such that were occasionally-offered and sparsely-taken electives at Emmanuel when we were students.  At that point I made the bad joke that in Wes Jamison’s ideal seminary, there would be NO ELECTIVES FOR YOU!  (I’ve never actually seen the Soup-Nazi episode of Seinfeld, but enough people repeat the riff that it occurred to me easily.)

Wes quickly asserted that, structured properly, a curriculum heavy in required pastoral courses would not have to be too bulky to leave room for electives.  His proposal for a core theological education takes its shape from his own experience in lay pastor training:

I think part of my frustration comes from having worked with two regional committees on education for licensed/commissioned lay pastors. In designing a program for folks without access to seminary, it was imperative that we figure out what were the essential tools to put in their hands. We decided in both settings that basic introductions to the Bible, Church History, denominational history/polity, Theology, Ethics, Pastoral Care (another course requirement lacking at ESR), Christian Education, Worship, Preaching, Leadership, and World Reigions, plus more in depth survey courses on First Testament and Second Testament were the absolutely essential tools necessary to equip someone to serve as a pastor. At three hours were course, this whole list would only equal 36 credit hours. An M.Div. is 90 credit hours (at least at ESR), thus leaving 54 open hours for electives. How is that a massive list?

Before I move on from the narratio, I should note that while Wes is far more liberal than I am on questions of federal politics and far more conservative than I am on questions of church politics (most notably our divergent understandings of apostolic succession), he’s a dear brother and someone who will receive the respect due to one’s intellectual friends.  (Sorry–I’m gearing up for end-of-semester project presentations at Emmanuel College, and I’ve got my teacher hat on.)

No Answers but Some Questions for our Readers

I set out at first to articulate a strong systematic response to Wes’s post, but the end of the semester is kicking the systematic responses right out of me.   So in lieu of an essay, I have some questions for our readers:

1. Given recent speculations about the shaky future of Protestant congregations, both evangelical and mainline, should seminaries gear their required core curricula towards traditional, located ordination, or do Phil Clayton’s thoughts on the future of seminary ring truer?
2. Wes’s suggestion involved one semester of general Bible survey plus one or two (I got lost in the arithmetic) courses on Old Testament and New Testament.  (Sorry, Wes.  I can’t call ‘em what you call ‘em.  Just doesn’t ring.)  Are two or three semesters enough to prepare one for a life of interpreting these texts?
3. Would a seminarian’s semesters be better spent digging into really high-level intellectual questions, with the guidance of top-notch academic thinkers?  Or would a seminarian’s semesters be better spent musing on the practical workings of parish ministry with experienced and intellectual practitioners?  I know some of you have already stopped reading to post “Seminary should do both” in the comments, but for the rest of you: what sorts of deliberative/dialectical processes should govern the big-picture priorities of a seminary education?  Or, to put it another way, should the seminary’s big-picture telos be first and foremost the training of a professional class of clergymen, first and foremost the formation of intellects to practice that crazy little thing called theology, or first and foremost something else?
4. To what extent should Biblical languages figure into the required core requirements, and to what extent should Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic and Latin (yes, those are all Biblical languages in their own ways) remain on the menu of electives?
5. Thinking of electives more generally, to what extent should seminary-degree requirements bulk up a core of courses that every M.Div will have taken upon graduation, and to what extent should seminaries allow students to take over the strategy end of things and gear course selection towards the efforts that the student imagines ahead?
6. Which areas of theological study, practical and speculative and historical and whatever else, should a seminary insist upon while a student is in residence, and which areas could a seminary reasonably entrust to the graduates and to their own non-formal study?
7. In what ways and to what extent do these questions translate into the education that Christian liberal arts colleges (like the ones where the three CHP hosts teach) structure their undergraduate degree requirements?

So those are the questions that I’d like some help from our readers to answer.  Dig in, and do try to remain constructive and dialectical rather than eristic and otherwise trollish.

General Introduction

Historicize!
- Dostoevsky’s last novel
- Biographical information
- Connections to previous work

The Brothers
- Alyosha: The Christian
- Ivan: The Intellectual
- Dmitri: The Walking Urge
- Smerdyakov: The Lackey

The Grand Inquisitor vs. Father Zosima
- Rebellion
- Ivan’s maltheism
- Jesus comes back to 16^th-century Spain
- Love and power
- Response to Utilitarianism
- Father Zosima lives and speaks

The Children
- Baby Ivan
- Dmitri’s trail of carnage
- Our dog argument
- The cruelty and wonder of children

Miracles and Knowability
- Competing ideologies
- What a narrator
- Central ambiguity
- Can you believe Ivan believing Smerdyakov?

What You Need to Understand It
- A basic understanding of Orthodoxy
- Knowledge of Utilitarianism
- Robin Feuer Miller

Cultural Echoes
- Religious rebels
- Tyler Durden
- American Psycho

General Introduction

What’s So Outrageous?
- Empirical verifiability
- The problems with this model
- A rabbit trail about rhetoric
- Everyone else’s assumptions
- Scientism in the 21^st century
- Self-policing, not persecution

How Viable Is Postmodernism?
- Depends on your discipline
- Poststructuralists’ aging out
- Interdisciplinary cultural studies
- Critical theory vs. poststructuralism
- Internalization

The Golden Rule of Scholarly Discourse
- Cut the slack to others you would want cut for yourself
- Decrying atomism
- Potshots galore!
- Gilmourism vs. atomism
- Nothing buttery on either side

Methodological Secularization
- Methodological naturalism
- Specialization
- Chicks dig the long ball
- Historicize! Historicize!
- The abuse of subjectivity

What We’d Add
- The role of Christian colleges
- The role of scholarship in the Christian college

Prognostication and Evaluation
- Christian networks in secular schools
- But how will the Academy change?
- The state university in decline
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

—. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007.

—. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 2000.

Marsden, George. The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.