Christianity

Homosexuality and the Anglican debate

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The New York Times reported last week, in response to the Episcopal convention in Anaheim earlier this month, and in light of “profound rifts over sexual issues within Anglicanism,” that Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, has released a statement addressing the issues of gay clergy and same-sex unions. The Archbishop here signals support for the human dignity and civil liberties of LGBT people. While suggesting that the Anglican Communion recognize “two styles of being Anglican,” however, he also argues that “a certain choice of lifestyle has certain consequences.” The Church, he writes, will only change its stance on the blessing of same-sex unions after they have been justified by “painstaking biblical exegesis” and subsequently widely accepted within the Communion. Until that point, a member of a homosexual couple will continue to be treated just as “a heterosexual person living in a sexual relationship outside the marriage bond.”

Gender and Sexuality

Religious and sexual freedoms are interdependent

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Today at The Immanent Frame, Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini argue that one of the few beliefs shared by opponents and supporters of gay rights is the notion that religious and sexual freedoms are opposed, and that this has significant policy implications. An excerpt from their piece is below:
In our 2003 book, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Freedom, we offer an extensive argument that religious freedom and sexual freedom are actually interdependent rather than oppositional. Unfortunately, the impact of “religious exemptions” like those included in the New Hampshire law is to codify a narrow version of religious freedom in which religious liberty and sexual freedom can only be seen as mutually exclusive. This is not just a loss for sexual freedom; it also significantly narrows the parameters of religious freedom offered by the US Constitution. If there is a “religion problem” posed by gay marriage, it is not that some religious organizations might be “forced” to provide secular benefits to same-sex couples, such as healthcare or equal access to residential housing; it is rather the entanglement of the state with the business of any couple’s religious marriage.

Inter-Culturalism

Still the two Americas

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At The Immanent Frame, Nikhil Pal Singh reflects on racism and violence, their past and their presence, noting that “the 2008 election season at times appeared to turn on exorcising the ghosts and demons of a still unfinished civil war.” An excerpt from the piece is below:
Exorcism and reparation: but at what price? As unmistakable as these subtexts are, in my view, Obama’s winning strategy was to accentuate the value of his campaign’s egalitarian racial appeal through disciplined and calculated non-reference. Invisible protective glass in this sense may be a suitable metaphor for the reigning orthodoxy of color-blindness cum post-racialism, whose architecture in politics and law becomes more durable and less assailable with every U.S. Supreme Court decision: a state sanctioned enclosure increasingly hard to perceive or identify between those who are protected from racially differentiated vulnerability and those who continue to bear its marks and suffer its consequences. Obama’s call to “choose our better history” might be read productively in this light.

Culture

Humanists as cultural agents

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“Aesthetic education… is a necessary part of civic development,” writes Doris Sommer today at The Immanent Frame. Drawing on lessons from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s WPA program to Bogotá, Colombia, she makes a case for how culture ought to be conceived as a powerful vehicle for social change and for how humanists can play a leading role as “cultural agents”:
Without art, Victor Shklovsky writes in “Art as Technique,” “life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war….And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life.” In this spirit of freedom from anaesthetizing habit we can, and urgently should, take up the torn threads that tie humanism up with civic education.

Politics & Society

This song is old. But is it true?

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At The Immanent Frame, Romand Coles asks of President Obama’s rhetoric, “What are the implications of framing the virtues for progress as a ‘quiet force’? What is gained and lost by imagining progress singularly as upward movement?” In the following excerpt from Coles’ essay, he proposes a change in our understanding of progress:
Perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson for the need for this change in our understanding of progress was James Baldwin, when he wrote:
One cannot afford to lose status on this peculiar ladder, for the prevailing notion of American life seems to involve rung-by-rung ascension to some hideously desirable state. If this is one’s concept of life, obviously one cannot afford to slip back one rung. When one slips, one slips back not a rung but back into chaos and no longer knows who he is….The Negro tells us where the bottom is: because he is there…where…we must not fall.