Rethinking Religion

Eagleton! Fish! Wow!

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Stanley Fish gives a beautiful appreciation of Terry Eagleton’s book explaining why science and rationality can not replace religion. He quotes Eagleton:
… we are where we always were, confronted with a choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a progress that has no content but, like the capitalism it reflects and extends, just makes its valueless way into every nook and cranny. Eagleton doesn’t reveal his own religious preference. A seminary student said to me this weekend that he thought any intellectual person today has to be in some way agnostic.

Christianity

Let's have some more of that Middle Class Emotion

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Why did the Quakers stopped quaking, the Shakers stop shaking and the holy rollers stop rolling? Why did the vibrant tent meetings of the early Methodists become the sober respectable Methodists churches my grandfather went to? The main theory I picked up in my postgrad studies was that it’s about class. Any number of emotionally expressive lower class sects became more middle class. As they did so, became more emotionally restrained and theologically centered on this world.

Culture

Deep in my heart, I do believe…

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Thank goodness for Pete Seeger. He’s 90 today. The popularity of “We Shall Overcome” owes as much to Seeger as anyone: I’d forgotten that until going to a moving service full of Seeger’s songs at the Oakland UU Church today. “No one can prove a damn thing, but I think that singing together gives people some kind of holy feeling. And it can happen whether they’re atheists or whoever.

Inter-Culturalism

Nice work in Liverpool

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My friend Howard Grace, a gentle, innovative Christian, wrote to me about his recent work in high schools in Liverpool, UK, with two Muslim colleagues (at right). Musa led the sessions and started by asking why two young African Muslims and a relatively old English Christian would want to work together to visit schools like this. It was to build trust across what is often perceived to be the divide of Muslim/Christian/Western relations. Amina Khalid, who arrived in England at 13 as a refugee from Somalia, told about the racial abuse and bullying she had endured at her English school, and asked what she should have done. Some of the bigger boys said “Fight back.”

Politics & Society

'34 General Strike laid base for counterculture

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This is a nice idea: the radical efforts of the working class–led in this case by San Francisco longshoremen (port workers)–made possible the 1960s Haight Ashbury counterculture. I don’t know that he makes the case adequately in this article. But I like it. The first thing anyone said to me in San Francisco in 1980 when I got down off a greyhound bus–he was a very large middle-aged blue collar guy and I had long hair, a beard, rucksack and cowboy hat–was “ferkin’ hippie.” It didn’t strike me then that the unions and the counterculture had much love for each other.

Politics & Society

Specter haunting Democrats

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Of course Democrats are delighted at Specter’s defection to join them and gain a possible filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for the first time since Jimmy Carter’s presidency. But does that mean Pennsylvania Democrats have to vote in 2010 for a man who opposes universal health care, the Employee Free Choice Act and other progressive legislation? Open Left today is asking its readers to pony up $25 or more to oppose Specter in the Democratic primaries. Interesting to see if any kind of movement to oust him gets going. If not, his defection just strengthens the conservative Democrats in Congress.

Environment

This is Terrifying

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ALLIGATORS basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 degrees C.
Clearly this is a vision of the future that no one wants, but it might happen. That’s the start of an article in New Scientist that I read two months ago that has haunted me most days since (see the map better here, but you have to subscribe). I have read a fair amount about global warming, in a lay person’s sort of way, but when I read that James Lovelock, the Gaia Hypothesis guy, said that most of humanity would be gone by the end of the century I thought he was just an old man going a bit off his rocker. I was also so deeply affected by doom scenarios in my twenties, none of which turned out to materialize, that I had become skeptical of new ones.

Politics & Society

33% prefer socialism?

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Here’s a stunning fact I had missed: According to a Rasmussen poll released last week, 37 percent of Americans under age 30 prefer capitalism, 33 percent prefer socialism and 30 percent are undecided. This is unprecedented in American history. See Harold Meyerson’s column on it in the WaPo. Meyerson argues that twenty-somethings’ view of socialism is no longer poisoned by the Soviet Union, old history of which they know little. To them it either means European social democracy, which they see as positive, or it’s something the Rush Limbaugh Republicans are foaming at the mouth over, accusing Obama of promoting, which must mean it’s good.

Christianity

All Shall Be Well

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For some months this winter I was feeling more emotionally and spiritually depleted than I think at any time since my early twenties. To explain why I’d probably have to write a book-length memoir, which I’ll spare you. But I do think it is an occupational hazard of trying to dream big to change the world. As Michael Lerner writes in Tikkun’s Core Vision, “We are trying to create something which doesn’t have an exact analogue in contemporary life. The truth of the matter is, many of us are wary of any organization — they remain human institutions, susceptible to the ever-present reality of human frailty.

Culture

What is Sacredness?

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“What is true is sacred. What has been suffered. What is beautiful.” You can rely on Ursula le Guin. Her work ties the personal with the political as engagingly as any I know and way better than most.