Advent time: what time is this?

This is the second Sunday of the four week version of the Christian season of Advent, the season of waiting in joyful hope for more light and for Light Incarnate. 

As always, I wonder how this feels if one lives in the southern hemisphere; when we worked in South Africa, our friends described this as a time to go the beach ...

For this day, in the North American bit of the world, I'll share this musing from historian, Jemar Tisby, who cannot resist preaching alongside teaching the story of this country.

How Can We Talk of Hope?

In the context of the news going from bad to worse, speaking of hope seems foolish.

Hope has become another 4-letter word—something forbidden and distasteful.

Hope seems out of style, hokey, detached from reality, blindly optimistic, historically uninformed, naive. 

But what if we have misunderstood hope? 

Hope is not a feeling. 

Hope is action. 

Hope is a choice. 

Hope is a conviction. 

As Ta-Nehisi Coates recently said,

“So I don’t think it requires you to feel that you’ll eventually lose. On the contrary, I think it requires you to feel that even if you do lose, you have this steadfastness to keep going.” 

Hope is the steadfastness to keep going. 

We don't know what is around the corner; the future has not happened yet. 

Something is coming. But what? Might our actions or inactions effect what is to come? We can't know. Hope is the steadfastness to keep going. 

Black patriotism should not be mistaken for Christian nationalism

A recent PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute)/Brookings study of the Threat of Christian Nationalism in the United States has been getting a good amount of mainstream media coverage. There probably are as many as thirty percent of us who proclaim their adherence to Christianity (usually of the white evangelical Protestant variety and its offspring) and combine that belief/culture with aggressive nationalism. These folks are a menace to their neighbors and to our democracy.

But I felt drawn to dig a little into the methodology of the study. Researchers used the answers to a battery of five questions to identify "adherents" and "sympathizers" with Christian nationalism. Did respondents agree or disagree with the following questions?

• The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.
• U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.
• If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
• Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
• God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

I have to admit that I have some sympathy with the second of these statements. I believe U.S. laws should be based on Christian values -- and Jewish values, and Muslim values, and Hindu values, and Buddhist values, and Wiccan values, and all other historic sources of morals -- because I think all religious traditions lead to reverence for humanity and the earth, whatever culture they derive from.

But obviously, I'm not a Christian nationalist sympathizer. I'm not a nationalist at all. But I'm not ready to deny that religions have some good ideas that might inform how we structure our lives together. 

I find it easy to imagine that a goodly lot of people who might have some sympathy for these statements might be far more nationalist than Christian. Researchers have documented that plenty of Trump and Republican supporters who loudly proclaim their Christianity aren't regularly to be found in churches.

Washington Post data journalist Philip Bump asks what seem to me a relevant question about the PRRI study:

What isn’t clear from the research is the extent to which these religious views are the motivator for political or cultural views. Are these Americans centering their beliefs on religion, or do their views broadly lead them to agree with questions centered on the primacy of Christianity? To put it another way, if Christian nationalism is the chicken and right-wing politics the egg, which comes first?

PRRI and Brookings may simply be measuring the same right-wing group in another way. Of course, this doesn’t diminish how unsettling the findings might be in the least.

One of the oddities of these PRRI findings is that, on this survey's metrics, Black Americans are no less likely to be Christian nationalist "adherents" or "sympathizers" with Christian nationalism than white evangelicals. That simply seems wrong. 

To PRRI's credit, they addressed this discordant finding with a short talk at the study's public launch event by Jemar Tisby, president of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, where he writes about race, religion, and culture.  This is preaching to be savored ...

"White Christian nationalism is the greatest threat to democracy and the witness of the Church in the United States today.

"I define Christian nationalism as an ethnographic-cultural ideology that uses Christian symbolism to create a permission structure for the acquisition of political power and social control.

"Black Americans as a group are a highly religious group. Ninety-seven percent of Black Americans believe in God or a higher power. And the vast majority of those folks are Christians, Protestant at that. ... it wouldn't surprise us that this language of God and Country resonates with Black people. ..

"The difference is, what do we mean? ... I contrast white Christian nationalism with Black Christian patriotism. ... When you are talking about white Christian nationalism it tends toward a rigid, narrow, authoritarian politics. When you are talking bout Black Christian patriotism, you are talking about an expansive, flexible, inclusive politics ... White Christian nationalism is the greatest threat to a multiracial inclusive democracy."

Allah's version

Jack Mills writes books about Scripture that are unlike anything else I know of. He treats the divine person as revealed in what believers hold as sacred writings as a literary character, a Someone with personality, temperament, virtues, and idiosyncrasies. In 1996, Miles applied his technique to the Lord God of the Hebrew bible in God: a biography, which was both an unlikely best seller and a Pulitzer Prize winner. His subsequent epilogue, Christ: a Crisis in the Life of God, seems to have been more controversial, no huge shock. I appreciated its resolute departure from the more vengeful strains of Christian atonement theology.

Last year Miles published his third volume of literary interpretation of the Abrahamic scriptures: God in the Qur'an (God in Three Classic Scriptures).

Miles certainly has the academic chops for his tripartite endeavor in scriptural exploration. He started out as a Jesuit seminarian attending Xavier University in the U.S., moved on to the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Hebrew University in Jerusalem and, finally, Harvard. He's been been an editor at the Doubleday publishing house, the executive editor at the University of California Press, and literary book review editor at the Los Angeles Times. Of late he's taught at UC Irvine and edited the Norton Anthology of World Religions. I should add that aside from the Norton volume, I've read them all in audiobook and highly recommend the medium for these exercises in imaginative erudition. You won't get every nuance by ear, but their breadth and audacity come through wonderfully.

I also have to warn readers of this blog post that I'm going to be quoting a lot; it will read more easily on a laptop screen than a phone.

Writing about Allah in the Qur'an, Miles confronts the difficult stumbling block that non-Muslim readers always meet: this scripture admits of no human author, narrator, or intermediary, being the direct speech of Allah via the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad. According to Islamic understanding, it cannot be translated from Arabic. He offers a work-around:

Over the centuries, the view most often taken of the Qur'an by Jews and Christians alike has been the view classically taken by Jews of the New Testament -- namely, "What's true is not new, and what's new is not true." Non-Muslims have disbelieved and dismissed what Muslims believe of the Qur'an -- namely, that it is God's last word to mankind, the crown of revelation, restoring what Jews and Christians had lost from or suppressed in their scriptures by oblivion or corruption.

My invitation here to Jews and Christians and the many others who disbelieve the bold Muslim claim is that, as a modest exercise in literary appreciation, they temporarily suspend their disbelief while together we attempt engagement with God as the central character of the Qur'an, and with the Qur'an as an elusively powerful work of literature.

My invitation to Muslims is that just as they might pray in a mosque on Friday but study its dome as students of architecture on a Tuesday, so they too might play along with this "Tuesday exercise," this literary engagement with just a few selections from the Qur'an read in conjunction with marching passages from the Bible.

As Miles tells it, what Allah is doing through the Qur'an is correcting known stories. Consequently, Allah has no need of linear narratives of episodes in creation history or of stimulating any narrative suspense or uncertainty.

In the Qur'an, when Allah instructs Muhammed about what His Prophet is to say about these biblical subjects, He is clearly speaking to someone who knows this subject matter already in a general way and needs only to have his understanding refreshed, corrected, or completed. ...

What Allah requires of mankind in the Qur'an is, above all, that they should acknowledge His divinity, submitting to him as the one and only God. The Arabic word ’islam means “submission”; the Arabic word muslim ... means one who has submitted. ... As the Qur’an understands religious history, Adam was a muslim in his time; Abraham was another muslim; Joseph a third; and so forth down past the muslim Christ to Muhammad. But a key part of the message of the Qur’an is that the never-changing message of ’islam has been lost or corrupted over the intervening aeons.

... Where the Qur’an coincides with the Bible, then, it unfolds not as a full retelling of the Bible story, as if that story had never been told before, but rather as a set of selective corrections and expansions of an already received account. Where more corrections is called for, Allah has more to say in the Qur’an.

Miles discusses at length the qur'anic account of Adam and Eve and then of humanity's expulsion from the garden of paradise. In Allah's telling, this behavior is not about humanity's permanent fall from a state of innocent grace, but simply the first instance of human disobedience to Allah which has teaches its own remedy.

... True, Adam and his wife [not named] must “descend” from the heavenly garden, but because they have promptly and plainly admitted and repented of their sin, merciful Allah does not condemn them to eternal punishment in hell. In the Qur’an, Adams does not blame his wife the way he does in Genesis. The two of them confess together, neither blaming the other, and neither attempts to blame Satan. Accepting their repentance as sincere, Allah simply precipitates them into earthly existence where, after living a normal human lifetime and dying at its end, they will await His Last Judgment as indeed will all their descendants. They have every prospect, in other words, of eventually ascending to the heavenly garden from which he has sent them down. In effect, he has forgiven them this first sin. True, they must pay a price, but as they begin the life that awaits them down on earth, He has given them a pardon and an immediate second chance.

.... we have all the power we need to resist [Satan’s] deceptions and stay on the “straight path.” If we do succumb, we know that just as Allah gave Adam and Eve their second chance, He will give us ours. Allah is like that: He can be counted on. He is not colorfully or dramatically unpredictable. He is not like you or me nor even, quite, like Yahweh. Agony awaits us if we defy Him, but He is on our side if we let Him be. ...

No wonder Allah is described as "the merciful, the compassionate" in Islamic usage.

This book concludes with a list of how Allah corrects and amends the Jewish and Christian scriptures:

that when God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise, He warned them that Satan would tempt them. (In the Bible, no such warning is given.)

that when they succumbed to temptation but then quickly repented, He forgave them and explained that after a lifetime on Earth, bearing only the trials and tribulations that ordinary human life entails, they could return to Paradise. (No such forgiveness or distant hope is proffered in the Bible.)

that when one of Adam’s sons slew the other, God condemned the murderer but coached him toward compassion by sending a raven whose scratching on the ground prompted the remorseful killer to bury his dead brother. (No such solicitous counsel is offered in the Bible.)

that when God sent a destructive flood, he warned those in its path beforehand and provided an ark on which, had they accepted Prophet Noah’s warning, they could all have floated to safety. (No such warning is given in the Bible.)

that when God chose Abraham as His prophet, he instructed him in monotheism before sending him against Abraham’s idolatrous father and his tribe. (In the Bible, God’s command to Abraham is peremptory and linked to fertility rather than to monotheism.)

that when God sent Moses to Pharaoh with the same prophetic message that He later conveyed to Muhammad, Pharaoh initially scoffed but in the end converted and accepted God as the only god. (In the Bible, God takes control of Pharaoh’s mind and bars the gate against any such conversion.)

that when God send Jesus as a prophet to the Jews and they sought to kill him, God rescued him and took him to Himself. (In the Bible, Jesus dies saying, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?")

Far be it for me to bash the Bible. The Bible is my scripture. The Qur’an is theirs. In writing this little italicized meditation, I hope only that by exercising your imagination this much, you may find it a little easier to trust the Muslim next door ...

That last remark demonstrates Miles' hope in this mind-stretching book. He's clearly appalled by contemporary European/American ignorance and distortions about the beliefs and civilization of our Muslim neighbors. Some of this volume comes off as a slightly heavy-handed apologia, for example in an exhaustive demonstration that Jewish and Christian sacred writings are no less blighted by celebrations of holy carnage as is the Islamic scripture.

Fortunately in this country we enjoy increasing resources for discovering that Islamophobia is unnecessary and just false. Our Muslim neighbors turn out to be quite ordinary humans, like the rest of us. Miles has made his contribution toward our evolution here; we can all do our part.

Called to choose a side

Bishop Gene Robinson (retired bishop of New Hampshire and the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion) preached at our little San Francisco parish of St. John the Evangelist yesterday. This photo of the Bishop giving communion to two of our current crop of little girls is cribbed from my friend Susan Hansen. What a wise, brave man the Bishop is!

After the service, Robinson answered questions from quite a crowd of parishioners. He admonished those of us LGBT people living in the protected environment of this city to remember that in 29 states we queers may have a constitutional right to get married -- but we can be fired the next day for our sexual orientation. Here's a current map showing the state of employment discrimination law:

In all those gray states we have no protection at all; only the deep purple states offer wide protection to queers of (most?) flavors. From Fortuynist at Wikipedia.

He was asked where is the Church in these dire times. Like so many of us, he's mighty unhappy with attacks on poor and marginalized people from the President and the Republican Congress.

But he hastened to add gently that he was sure there were Republicans among us ... I'm not so sure about that in this congregation. We're a pretty radical bunch even in a radical city.

And I do wonder about how people claiming to be followers of Jesus can also be followers of Trump, Pence, Ryan and McConnell. There is little about which the Bible is more clear than this: "... do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another." Zechariah 7:10.

Denouncing oppression is not something to be carefully polite about.

I think that wonderful escaped evangelical the Slacktivist has it right about how faithful people and churches must orient themselves toward our current regime; he takes direction from the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in calling out blasphemy.

“Blasphemy” is not hyperbole there. It is a term of acute theological precision. It is the correct and apt and necessary term. It is the word we need to be using now, today, to describe the blasphemous champions of oppressors with their so-called piety ...

... Many white churches support white nationalism and Trumpism.

Other white churches allow the option of not supporting it. But it is only that — an option, one that is permitted and tolerated, but never demanded.

This, too, is blasphemy.

All Souls Day

In the Anglican Christian tradition, November 2 is All Souls Days, a signal to remember those who have died while trusting that death has been trampled down and has no permanent dominion (whatever that may mean.)

This year I'm remembering two of my first cousins, Stefanie Stevens who left this world in September and James Kent Averill Jr. who died over a decade ago. Here they are as a couple of attractive babies in 1937. So young, so innocent. I look at this picture and realize the Second World War had not yet begun. James' father, a Navy officer, was killed in the Pacific in that war.

I didn't really know either of them -- I was ten or more years younger and so out of sync with their lives. Thinking about them reminds me that we are all part of a procession of sparks, some flaming longer than others, none burning forever unless in some sense beyond our grasp.

Christian whiplash: an "ecumenism of hate" and Republicans meet the nuns

Checking in at the National Catholic Reporter, I was fascinated to see that my Roman Catholic comrades in progressive Christianity were buzzing about an extremely plain spoken article in an Italian Jesuit magazine denouncing an "ecumenism of hate." The practitioners of this hate are U.S. evangelical fundamentalists and extreme conservative Catholics united in our domestic right-wing. Such characters as Steve Bannon are named offenders.

Discerning the significance of this article requires a little Vaticanology (that's like Kreminology or Trump-White-Houseology -- the study of the powers behind particular instituional pronouncements.) NCR commentators insist the authors, editor-in-chief Jesuit Fr. Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa, an Argentine Presbyterian pastor who leads his country's edition of Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, are close to Pope Francis.

They mince no words; right-wing evangelicals and Catholic "theoconservatives" are leading the Christian faithful in a terrible direction:

The panorama of threats to their understanding of the American way of life have included modernist spirits, the black civil rights movement, the hippy movement, communism, feminist movements and so on. And now in our day there are the migrants and the Muslims. To maintain conflict levels, their biblical exegeses have evolved toward a decontextualized reading of the Old Testament texts about the conquering and defense of the “promised land,” rather than be guided by the incisive look, full of love, of Jesus in the Gospels.

Within this narrative, whatever pushes toward conflict is not off limits. It does not take into account the bond between capital and profits and arms sales. Quite the opposite, often war itself is assimilated to the heroic conquests of the “Lord of Hosts” of Gideon and David. In this Manichaean vision, belligerence can acquire a theological justification and there are pastors who seek a biblical foundation for it, using the scriptural texts out of context. ... There is a sort of “anesthetic” with regard to ecological disasters and problems generated by climate change. They profess “dominionism” and consider ecologists as people who are against the Christian faith. They place their own roots in a literalist understanding of the creation narratives of the book of Genesis that put humanity in a position of “dominion” over creation, while creation remains subject to human will in biblical submission.

... Theirs is a prophetic formula: fight the threats to American Christian values and prepare for the imminent justice of an Armageddon, a final showdown between Good and Evil, between God and Satan. In this sense, every process (be it of peace, dialogue, etc.) collapses before the needs of the end, the final battle against the enemy. And the community of believers (faith) becomes a community of combatants (fight). Such a unidirectional reading of the biblical texts can anesthetize consciences or actively support the most atrocious and dramatic portrayals of a world that is living beyond the frontiers of its own “promised land.”

... Both Evangelical and Catholic Integralists condemn traditional ecumenism and yet promote an ecumenism of conflict that unites them in the nostalgic dream of a theocratic type of state. However, the most dangerous prospect for this strange ecumenism is attributable to its xenophobic and Islamophobic vision that wants walls and purifying deportations.

The piece goes on to combat the preposterous theological edifice that is the Prosperity Gospel whose promise that seeking riches is godly harmonizes the Christian message so comfortably with our capitalist system. These writers insist:

The theopolitical plan that is truly Christian would be eschatological, that is it applies to the future and orients current history toward the Kingdom of God, a kingdom of justice and peace. This vision generates a process of integration that unfolds with a diplomacy that crowns no one as a “man of Providence.”

... [Pope] Francis radically rejects the idea of activating a Kingdom of God on earth as was at the basis of the Holy Roman Empire and similar political and institutional forms, including at the level of a “party.” ...

This is not the sort of pronouncement we expected from the Vatican before Pope Francis -- there's much here to ponder for all American Christians.***And yet, reading the excited commentary on this article, I was reminded of another approach to the meaning of varieties of Christian belief in U.S. life. This one comes from another segment of the theological spectrum. Fred Clark, the Slactivist, grew up in an evangelical home and worked for years at Evangelicals for Social Action. In the linked post, he explains how his community moved from a (narrow, but historically recognizable) Biblical perspective on the purpose of human activity to believing that their sole imperative most be to accumulate enough power to end legal abortion.

Sixty years ago and 30 years ago, white evangelicals instinctively evaluated every cause or “issue” by weighing it against the paramount concern of proclamation evangelism. Today they seem to demonstrate that same instinct, but it’s no longer proclamation evangelism that they worry may be undermined — it’s opposition to legal abortion. ...

... white evangelicals may be permitted, conditionally, to consider some other, tangential causes — “creation care,” or “racial reconciliation,” or “human trafficking,” or whatever you like — but only to the extent that these things do not distract from the absolute, paramount duty white evangelicals have to support the election of Republicans to every branch and every level of government in the hopes that they will eventually pack the Supreme Court with enough anti-abortion justices to overturn Roe v. Wade.

That’s a starkly blunt way of putting it ... All those other causes, you see, may be laudable and commendable in and of themselves, but they’re all also vaguely liberal-seeming. And it’s dangerous to permit ourselves to have too much sympathy for liberal-ish causes because that might undermine our resolve to vote for the kind of anti-liberals we need to support in order to fulfill our paramount obligation of criminalizing abortion. ...

Clark locates the "ecumenism" involved in alliances between fundies and right-wing Catholics in their shared determination to limit women's control of our bodies. My NCR comrades can't go there, but I can.***

In the midst of all this criticism I'm passing on about the political antics of conservative religious groups, I should also celebrate the Roman Catholic religious women who are putting themselves on the line for health care and economic justice. The other night I had the privilege of hearing Sr. Simone Campbell (pictured above with friend Miguel Bustos) speak about the work of the Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice. Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne reports on the protest these nuns issued against the Republican attempt to kill Obamacare. He rightly admonishes secular progressives not to forget the nuns!

Their plea was a reminder, particularly to more secular liberals, that religious witness in politics is not confined to the political right, that Christianity has long had a lot to say about economic and social inequities, and that pushing prophets inspired by faith out of the public square would be harmful to progressives as well as conservatives.

In speaking out as they did, the socially minded nuns — who do the work of justice and mercy every day in hospitals, clinics, homeless shelters and schools — made clear that depriving millions of Americans of health coverage truly is a moral outrage.

Wherever we come from, we need to make peaceful moral outrage effectual.

Easter eve

During much of the year, the Gospel stories through which Christians make metaphor for the Great "I AM" can feel a little frayed. At least they do for me. What do I know of vineyards and sheep? Not much.

But then the great festival of Easter comes along and it becomes all too easy to enter into the metaphor. Perfect love comes into the world; empires and authorities do what they always do: torture love unto death.

It only takes looking around to see that.

This Jesus of the Maize (of the Corn, the Indio peasants) resides at a side altar in the Cathedral on the Zocalo in Mexico City.

Change of seasons: Advent comes round again

The ancient Christian liturgical year began yesterday as we entered Advent, the four weeks in which Christians annually live in expectation both of the birth of the human child who is also truly God, and of God's promise to somehow, someday, be with us in God's fullness. Both are mysteries, beyond our intellectual capacity. Liturgy -- communal ceremony -- is how we annually enact and recapitulate the many realities we sense/know, but cannot understand. I find this annual cycle profoundly grounding. Without such reminders of what I cannot grasp, wouldn't I think I knew it all?

We did not pray the traditional collect (prayer) for the season of Advent in my little parish yesterday. We offered a modern substitute. I was sorry about that. I understand that some might find the old petition outmoded and a little scary. It seems to arise out of a consciousness of life lived within a cosmic struggle between good and evil, not the usual stuff of sophisticated "modern" thought.

The prayer from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer reads:

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness,
and put on the armor of light,....

Or, as the Rev. Scott Gunn once explained the season:

Advent is a time to remember that we followers of Jesus are meant not only to be bearers of the light, but also to vanquish evil in this life, in our world and in our own lives.

This seems particularly apt in these sad days when our country has chosen to drive further off the rails. We find ourselves fearing freefall into rapacious greed and oppression of the vulnerable and weak. The works of darkness are all around, and we're going to need all the "armor of light" we can find, wherever we find it. It's long been conveniently forgotten that the oldest Christian self-consciousness was formed in tension with the most powerful, most brutal, empire of its day. For those of us for whom this tradition is a source of meaning, there's a lot there.

Another Advent theme also seems appropriate to our current moment. "Keep awake ... you also must be ready ..." say the ancient admonitions in the Gospel passage from the book of Matthew. Or, if we want to be more contemporary, #Stay Woke in every meaning of that catch phrase. Nothin' else to do ...

Was Dorothy Day a saint?

As the Roman Catholic Church's process for designating Dorothy Day a saint grinds on, Patrick Jordan has offered a contribution to what will likely be a burgeoning literature about this challenging woman. Dorothy Day: Love in Action from People of God Series from Liturgical Press is a short, thematic survey of her life, the Catholic Worker movement, and her animating beliefs. I think it would serve as an accessible introduction for anyone who might want to know who was this woman who Pope Francis name-checked when addressing the U.S. Congress last year.

In 12 pages of what Jordan calls "A Chronology," he recounts Dorothy's life story in economic detail; I expected to know most of this, having both known her and read most of her writings, but I was wrong. This is far more complete than what I knew and quite fascinating; she lived hard, often bravely, and always vigorously.

From that factual platform, Jordan moves on to elucidate the intellectual and moral themes of Dorothy's life and vocation, nodding along the way to her warm but complex humanity. She sought to live a Christian response to poverty and to demonstrate a way to enflesh justice. She believed that living in and with poverty was simply the only truthful response to our neighbors whom we must love as we love ourselves. But she wasn't sentimental about it:

"In what does our poverty consist?" Dorothy asked herself in 1961. "In toilets out of commission ..., dish washers who wipe their noses on the dishtowels, people who are mental cases."

... When asked one Lent how she could see Christ in other people, Dorothy responded, "It is an act of faith, constantly repeated. It is an act of love, resulting from an act of faith. It is an act of hope, that we can awaken these same acts in their hearts, too."

... she quoted Gregory the Great: "When we attend to the needs of those in want, we give them what is theirs, not ours. More than performing works of mercy, we are paying a debt of justice."

This uncompromising credo, joined with absolute pacifism and faithfulness to the Church as the vehicle through which Christ erupts in the world, made her a quirky, formidable force. Jordan recounts the episode in 1972 when she faced down the I.R.S., refusing to apply for charitable status for the Catholic Worker house. Why should we need a license from the government to feed the hungry and share with the needy? When the New York Times and the Washington Post editorialized in support of her integrity, the Nixon administration knew it had to back off and nothing more was heard of that.

Dorothy's own writings in the Catholic Worker newspaper and many books are still good reading; Jordan reports that

I.F. Stone, the muckraking Washington journalist, remarked after Dorothy's death that "of all the journalists of our generation, she wrote the best."

He also captures a facet of her presence that may not enthrall the sainthood assessors but which was terribly important to the young people who came to her movement in her later life: she was wonderfully well read in classic literature as that was understood in her day. Thanks to her, we read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Undset and Austin, Dickens and Greene, Buber and Arendt, and many more.

The U.S. bishops have forwarded Dorothy's cause to Rome for possible sainthood. Some Catholic Workers find the idea of such institutional blessing grating. For others, the idea that Dorothy embodied sainthood seems self-evident. Jordan offers his own conclusion about the question:

"... she is a prophet, an American prophet, who called not only individuals, but the church, the state, and American society itself to account. There must be a closing of the gap between private and public morality, Dorothy taught, and [she] questioned both our materialism and our militarism. ... Further, in this land where happiness is viewed as a constitutional right, there must be a new willingness to encounter Christ in others and on the cross."

Full disclosure: I worked with Patrick Jordan at the Catholic Worker for several years, though we haven't crossed paths in over 3 decades.

What is justice?

When I spent a year working to end the death penalty in California -- sadly unsuccessfully -- I was exposed to some deep lessons. One stands out: when we held telephone sessions into which people could phone to ask questions, repeatedly some perverse fate made me the individual who picked up the call from a person whose loved one had been murdered. Somewhat to my surprise, not all these trauma survivors wanted to see the victimizer executed. But all of them wanted "justice," whatever they meant by that. We ended up having long, usually inconclusive though amicable, discussions of where is justice might be found. I'd argue that the death penalty would not deliver it; sometimes they agreed, often they did not.

I was reminded of this when reading The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord's Prayer by that prolific chronicler of the historical Jesus, author John Dominic Crossan. I found this little book a challenging delight. It is neither history nor textual Biblical exegesis, but rather a wide-ranging meditation on the familiar prayer, drawing on Crossan's broad scholarship and faithfilled imagination.

Those discussions from the death penalty campaign came back to me when I read his effort to explain how the western Christian world has trapped itself in a theology written out of a very particular feudal metaphor, a worldview that met the needs of Norman overlords imposing themselves on a conquered Saxon and Celtic Britain. The doctrine of vicarious satisfaction or substitutionary atonement entraps us in a picture of God as a rather nasty father who expressed his "love" for humanity by requiring the torture and murder of his only son. If that's what "Jesus died for our sins" means -- and that is pretty much what Anselm, who became archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, argued in his influential Cur Deus Homo? -- no wonder we struggle to envision justice. Crossan explains what this hyper-rational medieval prince of the church was driving at:

Philosopher and theologian, monk and bishop, mystic and saint, Anselm preferred nonviolent debate to violent crusade. His idea was to defend the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus by confronting those he called "infidels" -- that is, Jews and Muslims -- with reason and logic alone. ... His purpose, as he tells us in the book's prologue, was to argue against "infidels, who despise the Christian faith because they deem it contrary to reason."

... Anselm is quite clear on why God must "will" the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus and why God cannot simply forgive everyone without punishment at all. That would mean, he says, that God is indifferent to evil, that God does not care about sin one way or another. But that would be impossible, he concludes, for a just God. ... His major argument was that God had to punish evil or else he was not a just God. ...

Without punishment, the order imposed by the feudal overlord on a rebellious society would be impossible. There's enough obvious experiential truth in this that it can still appeal. When people do bad things, somebody has to suffer -- or so we feel and a millennium of Christian tradition has encouraged us to feel, especially because in this form of shaping the story, Jesus's undeserved pain and death let the "good" ones (us?) off the hook.

Crossan wants to get across that we don't need to constrain our understanding of justice in this narrow frame. We can understand Jesus' life and death as pointing us toward another way of seeking "justice."

I take very, very seriously that the Bible's first mention of "sin" is not just fratricidal murder, but escalatory violence itself. Escalatory violence means that we have never invented a weapon we did not use, never invented one that was not surpassed by the next one, and never slowed down the speed of that replacement. We got, for example, from the first iron sword to the first hydrogen bomb in less than three thousand years.

The death of the nonviolent Jesus as the revelation of God's nonviolent character is a sacrifice (a making sacred) that atones for our sin of escalatory violence. ... Not just the Romans, but every government our world has ever known would have removed or silenced Jesus one way or another. ... God did not "will" the death of Jesus as a vicarious punishment for the human sin of escalatory violence. But did God "will" it as a consequence for that sin? The execution of Jesus was certainly a consequence of normal imperial violence and a witness against it on behalf of God. ...

If we decide to use anthropomorphic, or human-just-like-us, language for God, we should at least allow the same distinctions for God that we make for ourselves. Parents or householders, for example, may will something directly, deliberately, or emphatically for their children. They may also will some other things reluctantly. They may tolerate them, accept them, allow them,but positively not want them for those same children. There are, in other words, consequences of freedom that must be accepted even if never willed. So also with what God "wills." Every martyr needs a murderer and God's will allows such events as the positive and negative results of human freedom. God "wills" our human freedom. All else is consequence.

I find this a fruitful exposition of central Christian mysteries. Anselm's exposition may have worked for his time and place but it is repulsive -- leads away from truth and justice -- in mine.***As a I sat in church this morning, I realized I hadn't said the most important understanding which I brought away from all this plowing through Christian history: there is no necessity for us to believe that just because one very bad thing has happened that something else bad has to follow. We can come closer to "justice" by breaking the cycle than by extending it. Or so I am sure.

A meditation on "religion" and "the rules"

A friend, a Chinese American whose family has been in the United States for many generations, once proposed to me that the Chinese just don't have any religion. This seemed like a very broad generalization from a less than unimpeachable source -- there are an awful lot of Chinese and he'd barely visited the place.

Still I think he meant something like what Brent Nongbri writes about in Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept.

My father grew up in the Khasi Hills of northeastern India. The Khasi language is today spoken by roughly one million people, mostly in the state of Meghalaya. When I was in college and just becoming aware of the complexity of studying religion, it occurred to me one day that I had no idea what the Khasi word for "religion" was. I owned a small Khasi-English dictionary, but it did not provide English-to-Khasi definitions. … a few years later, the topic came up in a conversation with my father, and I asked him about the Khasi term for "religion." He replied that it was ka niam. By this time I was a graduate student in religious studies, and I was curious to learn more about this word. I dug out my little dictionary and looked it up. I found it could also simply mean "customs," that is to say, not necessarily anything particularly or especially religious. More intriguing, though, was the asterisk beside the word that directed me to a short note at the bottom of the page. It turned out that niam was in fact not an indigenous Khasi term at all but a loan-word from the Bengali niyama, meaning "rules" or "duties." My father's language, it seems, had no native word for "religion."

Nongbri sets out to show that the way we commonly use "religion" is an artifact of European adjustments to the splintering of medieval Christendom into a multiplicity of warring nation-state Christianities; the most effective way to stop the bloodshed between rival sects was to confine "religion" to a personal, private sphere. What mattered was not what individuals thought was "true," but what made for law-abiding citizens in the public realm under a regime of law. That is, "religion" ceased to be synonymous with society's core operating principles, "the rules." Because this occurred concurrent with European discovery of and colonial domination around the world, we overlaid our concept of "religion" on peoples and their social structures where it is not necessarily a good fit.

…This projection provided the basis for the framework of World Religions that currently dominates both academic and popular discussions of religion: the world is divided among people of different and often competing beliefs about how to obtain salvation, and these beliefs should ideally, according to influential figures like Locke, be privately held, spiritual, and nonpolitical. It was only with this particular set of circumstances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the concept of religion as we know it began to coalesce.

… Because of the pervasive use of the word "religion" in the cultures of the modern Western world (the "we" here), we already intuitively know what "religion" is before we even try to define it: religion is anything that sufficiently resembles modern Protestant Christianity. Such a definition might be seen as crass, simplistic, ethnocentric, Christianocentric, and even a bit flippant; it is all these things, but it is also highly accurate in reflecting the uses of the term in modern languages. Every attempted definition of "religion" that I have seen has implicitly had this criterion at its base. Most of the debates about whether this or that "-ism" (Confucianism, Marxism, etc.) is "really a religion" boil down to the question of whether or not they are sufficiently similar to modern Protestant Christianity. This situation should not be surprising given the history of the category of religion.

*** These acute observations came to mind as I listened to a devastating account by Mobeen Azhar on the BBC of the religious "cleansing" being suffered by the half million Pakistani Hazara Shias Muslims at the hands of some Pakistani Sunni Muslims. A series of a devastating bombings have killed hundreds , robbing this long established Central Asian segment of the population of Pakistan's Balochistan state of any security. Children ask their parents "will we be martyrs?" Young people attempt to emigrate and often die in the process.

Azhar interviewed Sunni politicians campaigning in the May 11 elections about what should be done about the atrocities against the Hazara.

Salafi-inspired groups such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and its sister organisation Sipah-e-Sahaba have terrorised Pakistan's Shia community for years.These groups have been banned by the Pakistani government but the organisation has re-branded itself as Ahle Sunnah Wal Jamaat. The party is now fielding candidates in general elections due this month on a specifically anti-Shia platform.

Senior party member and National Assembly candidate Mohamed Fayyaz denies that the organisation is involved in attacks on Hazara Shias. "Just because someone said they are from Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, what proof is there that it was someone from our group? We don't want to murder Shias. We want them to be declared non-Muslim in the National Assembly. That is what we're working towards."

Clearly for Mr. Fayyaz, the Hazara's "religion" is a vital threat to "the rules." And Mr. Fayyaz' attitude is a threat to the life and limb of the Hazaras. This sort of "religion" is a threat to the peace of communities. It will require leadership from within the affected communities to come to some sort of agreement to co-exist to end the bloodshed; this may, or may not, come from the same sort of accommodation that led to the invention of the European idea of "religion."