Theology 7372, Fall 2009

“If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” – Voltaire

About a decade ago, Richard Sterns left his prestigious CEO position at Lennox and became the CEO of World Vision, U.S.A. Clearly, this required a bit of a worldview shift and a new prerogative on life. He chronicles his journey in The Hole In Our Gospel: The Answer That Changed My Life and Might Just Change the World.

Besides personal experiences and his own theology woven throughout the book, Sterns provides mature and accurate analysis about the state of the world and how the institutional Church refuses to interact with those realities. After spending the first half of the book explaining the crippling problems facing most of the world – poverty, hunger, disease and all the trappings that go with those – he launches into a scathing but gracious (believe me, it’s possible) attack of the Western Church’s behavior towards those things thus far. He eventually concludes that the problem stems from a lack of attention: the hole in our gospel is that we don’t expect it to interact with others. We’ve construed it as an entirely personal faith instead of a deeply communal one and that has allowed us to ignore 2/3 of the world.

Providing tangible steps towards involvement – both corporate and individual – this book is FANTASTIC for people looking to engage their faith with the world. Informative without being overwhelming, it’s a great place to start. Clearly, World Vision is a fairly evangelistic organization and Thomas Nelson is a conservative publishing house, so take both of those things into account – but if you swim in those waters, this book is excellent.

*Disclaimer: Sometimes, I read books for Thomas Nelson publishers. They don’t care how I review the book, they just ask that I read and review it and post it for all the world to see. They don’t pay me to do it, but they do provide the book. If you think you’d like to do the same – check out their website and sign up.

Sometimes, I review books for Thomas Nelson Publishers. This is one of those times. They don’t pay me to review, but they do provide me with the book free of charge. If you’d like to review books as well, head over to their website for more info.

I have a deep respect for mothers. I have a deep respect for people who manage to live successful lives despite the universe’s best efforts. I have deep respect for people who achieve graduate degrees while holding down jobs and raising families. Lucille O’Neal – mother to Shaquille – is all of those things. Therefore, she garners my respect.

Her book, however, doesn’t.

I recognize I am not her target audience. I don’t have the same view of scripture she does, I have not had the same trials she has had, I am not of the same spiritual heritage. So maybe people who are of those persuasion would have an easier time swallowing some of her preaching and paradigms.

Her story is truth and it should be heeded. Born in Newark, NJ – choices were made for her which precipitated bad choices. She found herself the victim of a very typical mental construct that prohibited her from living her best life possible. Through hard work and the financial support of her son, she was able to leave her abusive husband and construct a life for herself. She finds that strength in a very African-American spiritual paradigm and her culture. This is to be lauded as exemplary. She eventually receives her Master’s Degree in Organizational Management and runs several non-profits today.

I want to reiterate that her story is valuable and there is wisdom to glean from it. However, the book is poorly written and poorly constructed. I would rather learn from Ms. O’Neal over a meal than have to read her words.

In Martha Minnow’s book, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence, the author brings her law background into the discussion of reconciliation and restoration of societies destroyed by mass violence. Spending much of her time exploring the Truth Commissions of South Africa and the slave trade of the southern United States, Minnow explains the power of memory in societal restoration.

In honest review, this book is poorly written for anyone outside the law profession. The book is an examination of legal precedents that have little application to those not looking to work at The Hague or with the ICC. If those represent one’s chosen direction, I would measure this book invaluable and demand purchase and serious consideration. For the purposes of integration into the class structure and my work in other classes, the gleanable information was surrounding the power of memory.

Minnow makes the claim that ‘the past continues to torment because it is not the past’. For most societies and peoples in the midst of reconstruction, they are required to live and work among the persons who perpetrated the crimes. Even worse, they are not permitted to enter into their distinct and restorative society. One thinks here of both the Israelites of the exilic period and current internally displaced persons around the globe. As ministers and members of the Kingdom, we would do well to investigate the concept of reconciliation outside of a theoretical context. For instance, we are often unafraid to toss around the words ‘reconciliation’ and ‘forgiveness’ when speaking to abused persons. If the past is truly not the past and in fact continues to haunt every moment of the present, how can we ask persons to dwell among their abusers and behave as though nothing is wrong? The phrase “to forgive and forget” is horribly damaging and must be stricken from our pastoral counseling vocabulary, especially in light of psychological and cultural experts like Minnow that remind us memory is a powerful and driving reality.

As stated above, there are valuable propositions Minnow makes within her text which pastoral personnel and other persons who work with the souls and emotions within humanity. One simply wishes she had packaged the concepts differently. I plan to follow some of her resources within the bibliography to further explore this concept of memory and it’s interrelationship with exile and restoration.

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CAVEAT: One of my petpeeves with Christian fiction is that the people who write it tend to belong to one definition of Christian living in the United States. They tend to be conservative – politically, morally and theologically. Clearly, I find friction with many of their viewpoints and often find myself frustrated by the ways they speak as though their view is normative. While I understand that many persons of Christian faith ascribe to these beliefs, I am not one of them.

There are several story lines within this book that I find serious fault with. Courting, for instance, is a thought process I find often damaging and not realistic or leading to healthy, holistic relationships. I hate that the main character, a woman with her LAW DEGREE, still calls her parents for all of her decisions – like whether or not she can date someone. While I value my parents’ council, I am an adult. I can decide who to go on a date with. Our paradigms are completely different. Her life choices and how she expresses her faith are so completely opposite of mine; there were passages of this book and decisions she makes that were hard for me to swallow.

HOWEVER. IF you or someone you love finds no fault with the author’s faith paradigm and subscribe to it yourself – ignore the above.

Greater Love is the third story in a trilogy about a young lawyer, Tami Taylor (unfortunately, not the Tami Taylor from Friday Night Lights and this Tami could learn a thing or two from that one) who is seeking to live the best life she can within her perception of God’s will for her life. Upon completing her degree and passing the bar, Tami takes a position at a new, all-female, law practice in Savannah. Her first case as a new lawyer deals with a young runaway named Jessie who is caught up in a world that’s over her head. In a beautiful example of hospitality that should be more normative to our faith than it is, Jessie is welcomed into Tami’s life and the cycle of her friends as they seek freedom and justice for her. It’s hard to offer up a summary of the story without spoiling the story, so let me just note that the story of Tami and how she interacts with her world is compelling and well done.

It should also offer some questions for persons of faith as they seek to apply some of the lessons from Tami life to theirs. How do we approach the other? How do we fight for justice for those who can’t fight for themselves? How do we offer hospitality? What does it look like to open up our lives and allow others to walk around inside them?

All in all – with the caveat – I offer Greater Love 3.5 out of 5 stars. Ignoring the caveat, 4.5 out of 5.

As stated in a previous review, this is an excerpt of a review that was turned in for my Scriptures 2 class. The theme of the book is one that has begun to drive the questions of my life.

The “myth of religious violence” is the assumption there is a marked difference between what is classified as religion – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – and what is classified as secular systems – Marxism, capitalism, humanism – and the former is inherently more violent than the latter.

The problem with the myth of religious violence is not that it condemns certain kinds of violence, but that it diverts moral scrutiny from other kinds of violence. Violence labeled religious is always reprehensible; violence labeled secular is often necessary and sometimes praiseworthy. (page 121)

Thus is the crux of William Cavanaugh’s newest work, The Myth of Religious Violence. Spending the first chapters reviewing existing literature regarding the myth and tracing the development of the phenomena known as “religion”, Cavanaugh painstakingly demonstrates the idea of religion being inherently a violent entity is false and destructive to the community of humanity. By propagating the myth of religious violence, nation-states serve themselves excellently. The myth runs on the assumption society can separate government and religion into two completely separate entities. This assumption is false, but allows nation-states to continue to require complete allegiance from citizens, even unto their death, while reminding them violence in the name of the nation is necessary and honorable and worthy of special medals and funerals, while violence in the name of religion is something to be feared and labeled as “fanaticism”.

One could never make the argument Cavanaugh is a colloquial writer. Deeply academic, the work spends as much time dismantling the theories of others as it does proposing its own. Accessibility, however, is clearly not Cavanaugh’s goal. He is writing to people who propagate the myth and takes aim at specific voices within the conversation, such as Kimball and Hitchens. By successfully creating holes in their argument, Cavanaugh demands his theories be taken seriously.

It is certainly a book to be wrestled with, both internally and in exterior conversation. Cavanaugh’s commentary demands response from the Church. We must decide how we interact with violence in the state and how we discuss the violence that is attributed to modern religion. If we buy his arguments that each Christian should see violence as morally reprehensible and it is the duty of the citizen to question demanded violence, how are we to interact with persons of faith in the American military? How do we balance being responsible citizens of a country that is at war?

It also demands a re-evaluation of the “us vs. them” paradigm. We in the West are, especially in recent times, fairly comfortable with saying that “we’re peaceful and they’re violent” as we discuss Muslim/Christian relations both in the U.S. and in the Middle East. However, while our declared “religion” does not demand violence, our nation-state certainly does. This separation, which is essentially false, is not even a legitimate concept within the Muslim paradigm. Therefore, while there are fundamentalists in each religion, each religion is generally peaceful. Each nation-state, however, is violent and must maintain the acceptance of that violence in order to propagate its agenda of domination and ethnocentrism.

This semester, as you know, I’m reading an obnoxious amount of books. Some are for papers as research and some are simply to read and review. I’ve now read two books by William Cavanaugh and truly and deeply enjoyed both. I post my review of the first one – Torture and Eucharist – here. To be fair, this is an excerpt of the review – but it covers the most pertinent points.

As a committed Catholic, Cavanaugh writes as a person who is not fearful of calling his beloved to be the best version of itself and speaks with the force and criticism of an insider of the Church. He spends much time making clear the point religion and state are not concepts which can be separated as easily as many Westerners would like it to be. By inventing religion, he claims, society removed the mess of war and violence in the sense society can now condemn instances of violence done in the name of “religion” as fanaticism, but continue to permit violence done in the name of the nation-state as necessary and desirable. Once this false separation has been incurred in people’s minds, torture is the next logical step. Cavanaugh points out that the question to be asked when discussing allegiance is regarding what people do with their bodies.

Torture may be considered some kind of perverse liturgy for in torture the body of the victim is the ritual site where the state’s power is manifested in its most awesome form. Torture is liturgy – or perhaps better said, “anti-liturgy” – because it involves bodies and bodily movements in an enacted drama which both makes real the power of the state and constitutes and act of worship of that mysterious power. It is essential to this ritual enactment that it not be done in public. (page 30)

Casting this in tension with the idea of public worship and the community, Cavanaugh feels that the actual Eucharist is the only true enemy of torture. To participate in torture is to participate in the false imagination of the nation-state, but to participate in Eucharist is participate in the true imagination of God’s realized Kingdom (the Church) and the future and permanent Kingdom which will only be realized in the eschaton. Since the torture performed by the nation-state is about submission and control and secrecy and pain, Cavanaugh points out the Eucharist and the community that forms around it is the greatest enemy of the nation-state. The Eucharistic community demands vulnerability and the sharing of pain and suffering. Simply by the acknowledgment of the Eucharist that states Christians share in the suffering of Christ and share in the sufferings of others, pain is not a thing to be done in secret or one which much be shouldered alone, they are defeating the very crux of the torture mechanism of the nation-state.

Clearly, these concepts of shared pain and functioning community as a combatant of torture are ones that we all must take seriously. It also raises many questions, especially since Cavanaugh’s Catholicism allows for beliefs regarding the Eucharist which many Protestants would find uncomfortable at best. However, if we are to take his thesis at face value, we must deeply examine if our Eucharistic community would be a combatant for torture. Are we a place that shares deeply in the pain of others and encourages transparency in grace? Are we safe places for people to unload their baggage and rest for a while? Are we prophetic voices into nation-states which seek to control our bodies and souls? As one looks throughout the OT, one can see the God of Israel is one concerned with community and justice and it is clear that many of those ideas were carried into the Church. However, both of those concepts often seem buried in Western faith expressions. The question that reverberated through my soul as I read this book was “How”? How can I be a voice against secrecy in an individualistic and privacy-obsessed society? How can I speak against the nation-state in productive ways?

Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist is a must-read for anyone who seeks to engage the current world situation with the maxims of the faith.