When you have become God's in the measure he desires, then he himself will bestow you upon others, unless, to your greater glory, he choose to keep you all to himself. —Saint Basil the Great
Please forgive me, dear readers. My email form has been borken for quite some time now, and I totally never knew it.
It’s fixed now.
Senator Al Franken, the junior senator from Minnesota and Saturday Night Live alumnus, recently introduced an amendment to the defense spending bill currently being debated in Congress.
Jamie Leigh Jones was drugged and gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working as a defense contractor in Iraq. She was drugged andWhen she reported the rape to her employer, she was locked in a storage container. Once she finally escaped and returned to the States, she was prevented from suing her employer, KBR, who was at the time a subsidiary of Halliburton, by a mandatory arbitration clause in her contract.
Franken’s amendment proposed to deny funds to defense contractors who required mandatory arbitration for “any claim under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or any tort related to or arising out of sexual assault or harassment, including assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false imprisonment, or negligent hiring, supervision, or retention.” (Text) As Jon Stewart said, in the video to your right: “Seems like a slam dunk.”
So, that it was not a slam dunk seems to me, on the face of it, absurd. Who would vote against a such a bill? It seems clear and obvious that this is for the common good, unequivocally. There’s no hidden agenda in this amendment. It’s all right there in black and white: If you are receiving government funds as a defense contractor, you have to make sure you prevent your employees from being raped or otherwise harmed for any reason.
Did I miss something? Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know why the thirty Republican senators sold their souls to Haliburton. It’s a rhetorical question.
And these are the people telling us that the poor don’t need health care. Somehow, I think this should not be a surprise.
In all, nine Republican senators “crossed the aisle” to vote for this amendment sponsored by Franken and nine other Democrats. Really, though, why would this not be a bipartisan, unanimous vote? Don’t answer that. It’s a rhetorical question.
In the video to the left, see Franken’s proposal of the amendment on the floor of the Senate.
A friend of mine from college posted a note on Facebook (which I will not repeat in its entirety) which wondered if there was an answer to the following dilemma, posed by Penn Gillette (of the comic magic act Penn & Teller): “‘If God, however you believe God, communicated to you that you were to kill your child, would you do it?’ And he says if your answer is no, then in his mind you are an atheist. If your answer is yes, in his mind you are dangerous and should stay away from him.”
The obvious allusion here is to Gn 22.1-18. My friend noted that we tend to interpret this text spiritually or typologically, seeing Abraham as a type of the Father and Isaac as a type of Jesus Christ, God the Son incarnate. “God did ask Abraham to do this with his son,” my friend writes. “And God the Father essentially did the same to his son.” But he also realized that, taken literally, anyone who tried this today would be incarcerated or institutionalized and his children would be taken away.
First of all, I don’t accept the image of God sacrificing his only son to satisfy his own hurt and bloodthirsty ego. God himself came down and sacrificed himself to free us from death. He subjected himself to this world of pain and want and misery and woe. There is a lot more to say there, but that is the short form. (More sophisticated treatments will, of course, invoke the holy Trinity, but let’s keep it simple for now.) Substitutionary atonement has precedents in Scripture and the fathers, but its formulation since Anselm of Canterbury and Martin Luther is deeply troubling to the theological tradition I work in.
Second, there is a lot going on in the story of Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son Isaac. I encourage you to read a wide variety of literature on the subject — not just devotional literature, either: Look at some scholarly treatments of this very difficult text. Gillette is not the first or only person — irreligious or pious — to question the morality of this story.
I’m neither a literalist nor an adherent of plenary-verbal inspiration; my thoughts may not resonate with you. To me, the most obvious thing going on is that the story is echoing some very disturbing practices in ancient Mesopotamia, or rather, some religious practices in ancient Mesopotamia (and Israel!) that we rightly find disturbing and difficult to fathom — in large part because of the Western ethical tradition formed by the Christian worldview. The Oxford Study Bible, in its note on Gn 22.2, says, “The earliest form of this story may have been directed against child sacrifice, proposing that the deity desires the substitution of animals.”
In its present form, of course, the play on child sacrifice is only a part of the story. As we have received it in Scripture, it has been recast as a morality play about absolute dependence upon God. The New Jerome Bible Commentary points out that, as with the story of Job, there is dramatic irony from the beginning: “The reader knows from the start what the protagonist does not: God is trying him.” It is the the final and ultimate test of Abraham’s fidelity. In this story, we see that Abraham at last has put aside all of his evading and bargaining. He is silently trusting in the will of God. This is no easy task: His own life is inextricably bound up with his son’s.
However, this story only truly makes sense in a world of sacrifice. And perhaps it only really made sense in a world of child sacrifice. Neither of those realities have any real punch for us today. It’s mystifying now, as literal fact. Which brings us to the other troubling notion: Did God literally ask Abraham to do this? I cannot bring myself to accept that God would ever ask such a thing. Poetically, it makes sense as dramatic irony, knowing that it is a test. But it’s a test I would fail — and I don’t even have kids.
I guess I’m an atheist by Penn’s adjudication. Hopefully his won’t be the final judgement on the matter.
No doubt, these reflections would be deeply unsatisfactory for Gillette — as they would be for most atheists. Gillette is absolutely right to question literal sacrifice of children in Scripture. We would do well to question more things in Scripture; maybe then we would collectively have a better understanding of what’s going on. There is no way to justify the murder of one’s own child — or any child, for that matter. We would do well to remember that we didn’t write Scripture — and God didn’t dictate it: He inspired it. Real men and women with real cultural biases which were very, very different from ours wrote Scripture. Our Scripture is not Koranic. And thank God for that.
A friend asked me to link to this site, entitled Orthodox Prayer. So, there you go. There are some very good resources there, though the design could use some aid.
Thanks to Wyn Morris, whose father died in the crash, for reminding me.
EARLY ON SUNDAY, AUG. 27, 2006, Comair Flight 5191 took off from the wrong runway at Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, crashing into trees and killing 49 of the 50 people on board. Many of the passengers were Central Kentuckians. Here you will find the Herald-Leader’s coverage of the crash and its aftermath, along with the stories of the victims and the lone survivor.
via the Lexington Herald-Leader.
The editors at the Chicago Manual of Style — the bible of choice for word nerds — have rapier sharp wits at times. For example:
Q. Is there a period after an abbreviation of a country if it is terminating a sentence? “I went to U.K..”
A. Seriously, have you ever seen two periods in a row like that in print? If we told you to put two periods, would you do it? Would you set your hair on fire if CMOS said you should?
Today, I received in the mail the notice that everyone in my house has been waiting for: I’ve been accepted at St Vladimir Seminary.
In my church on Easter we bring to church baskets overflowing with foods we forwent during Lent. The priest blesses these baskets full of meats and cheeses, butter and wine, and we exuberantly share the bounty with each other. It has become a personal tradition to include a pepperoni in my basket. One Easter a few years ago, I was enjoying slices of my pepperoni and offering chunks and slices to everyone in the parish hall. Then one of my dearest friends curled her nose at my offering. She squinted at me. “Basil,” she said, “how long have we been friends? What? Ten years? We’ve been friends for all that time, and you still don’t know that I hate pepperoni?” She may as well have told me she hates breathing. I mean, really: Who doesn’t like pepperoni?
My father is a retired Methodist minister. He and my mother now attend a rather large Baptist church in their rural Tennessee hamlet. To Catholics and Orthodox this is as surprising as learning that a delicatessen owner used to prefer pepperoni but, now that he is retired, he prefers salami. To evangelical Protestants, especially those from the rural South, this is akin to learning that the owner of a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise now hates chicken and spends all of his time with beef cattle farmers.
He has been asked by friends and colleagues why I am Orthodox. He tells them that I was always interested in liturgical expressions of faith, which to Baptists sounds like, “He’s always been interested in vegetarian expressions of meat.”
The food metaphor is apt, I think. By framing my faith as motivated by worship style, it becomes a question of taste. De gustibus non disputandum est. There is no disputing over taste, states an old medieval proverb. Like my friend who does not like pepperoni, there is no point in arguing whether you “like” something or not.
Because of the pluralism of our society, much of our discourse about our religious beliefs and practices is framed in the language of taste. If choosing between Jesus or the Dharma or the Tao is like deciding whether to have pizza, steak, or barbecued spare ribs this evening, then I am not hurt if you like Jesus and not the Tao, or even if you prefer your Dharma with a side of Yahweh and a light slice of Quran for desert.
If religion is a matter of the truth of things, that is, when believers act as if they are making statements about the way things really are, then people get hurt. No one likes it when people get hurt, right? And getting hurt reminds people about some very nasty things in the history of Western Christianity pursued under the name of religious truth: the Inquisition and the Crusades, for example.
People are especially likely to get hurt when they are told what to do. Pray this way. Do not eat that. Keep your sexuality pure and whole and simple. Despise not foreigners and weirdos. Give to the poor. Aid the lovelorn and the fatherless. Love unconditionally. The prescriptive nature of religion vexes the irreligious.
License is so much shinier than goodness. Who wants responsibility when you can do whatever you want? Well, teenagers, actually. An important effect of religion is just helping us to act like adults in the face of life’s nastiness. Keep religion no more important than a preference for pepperoni over salami, and no one gets hurt. But if it is not important, one wonders how religion gives meaning to anyone at all.
You can’t stop change, especially on the web. When GetReligion.org first added their Add to Any buttons, I thought it was a fad. Tonight, I added my own buttons. Absent new content, they probably won’t drive much more traffic to my site. Perhaps, though, I’ll create some new content.
Lists of paschal greetings are everywhere. Stéphane Bigham has paschal greetings with sound files! You know, just in case you wanted to actually say them, or something. Maybe I’m just weird.
In the history of the Roman Catholic Church, the Ultramontane party supported the power of the papacy. Their name means, “beyond the mountains,” that is, beyond the Alps in Italy. Ultramontanism ultimately ruled the day, in part because the Conciliarists were prevented from attending the Council of Florence and talking with the Eastern Orthodox bishops.
And this [unity] is something of the utmost importance, and it is something imminent. It is not something where we can wait and say “Oh maybe in my grandchildren’s time there will be Orthodox unity.†I’m talking about June. And, if you think I’m kidding, there is a conference being convened in the Phanar in June to discuss exactly this — (actually, it’s in Cypress) — to subject the Diaspora to the single, singular control, the so-called Diaspora, to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and thereby come into unity.
Well, that’s one model for unity. I would submit if we wanted a Pope we’d be under the real one. And I don’t think any of us want a Pope, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.
Metropolitan Jonah is in Dallas, Texas — the see city of our diocese — to facilitate transition between him as temporary administrator and our former archbishop, his eminence, Dmitri. Last Sunday, he gave a sermon on Orthodox unity in North America to a pan-Orthodox assembly at the cathedral. I was blown away at every moment as I watched.
Check out the video: Pan-Orthodox Sermon by His Beatitude Metropolitan Jonah. Watch the video first, because he’s a magnificent homilist, and this is one electrifying. However, if you would rather, there is also a transcript of the homily.
For background you may wish to read the lecture, “Challenges of Orthodoxy in America and the Role of the Ecumenical Patriarchate,” if you have not already. It was given at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology a few weeks ago by the Very Reverend Archimandrite Dr. Elpidophoros Lambriniadis, Chief Secretary of the Holy and Sacred Synod (of Constantinople).
Whether it is beyond the mountains or beyond the sea, if it is beyond the local church, it is alien to our tradition.
Note: This post was formerly titled, “Greek Ultramontanism.”
Permanent marker on a dry-erase board! Your [boss|child] grabs a random marker and starts [writing|scribbling]. Now it’s permanently stained! A quick Google rounded up several helpful pages. Some highlights from the most helpful page:
Also, keep in mind that window cleaner (like Windex®) is basically the same stuff as “dry erase board cleaner” and cheaper.
Chip Saltsman, chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, wanted to become the chairman of the Republican National Committee. In December, he circulated a CD of parodies which included a song entitled, “Barack the Magic Negro.” When first I read this, I was mortified. Who could be so callous?
Saltsman claimed that the media judged him by a double standard. He was vilified for distributing Paul Shanklin’s parody, which Saltsman says, “should be easily recognized as satire directed at the [Los Angeles] Times.” The Times in March 2007 ran an op-ed piece with the headline, “Obama the ‘Magic Negro’.” According to Saltsman, no one was outraged at the Times, and thus the double standard. But as the saying goes, context is everything.
Part of the context, as pointed out in a LA Times blog[1] , is that the piece is “op-ed.”
An op-ed, abbreviated from opposite the editorial page (though often believed to be abbreviated from opinion-editorial), is a newspaper article that expresses the opinions of a named writer who is usually unaffiliated with the newspaper’s editorial board. These are different from editorials, which are usually unsigned and written by editorial board members. Op-eds are so named because they are generally printed on the page opposite the editorial.[2]
In another LA Times op-ed piece, this one responding to Saltsman’s distribution of Shanklin’s parody, Tim Rutten makes an important point about the context of national politics:
The point is, when it comes to discussions of race in America — and particularly racial or ethnic humor — context is everything. In fact, racial and ethnic humor are probably the most contextually sensitive of all forms of satire. They work only when everyone is clear that the person making the joke regards the differences and foibles of another group affectionately and as something that makes everybody’s life more interesting. Lots of traditional Jewish and Irish humor falls into that category, though even there, it depends on who is telling the joke, and to whom.
The right contextual conditions, however, never exist in politics, which is why ethnic or racial references in that venue nearly always offend — or, at best, fall flat.[3]
It is entirely possible for ethnically different people to get along, poking fun at themselves and each other. Yet, as Rutten points out, there must be a context assuring the good-will — maybe even compassion and care — of every member of the community. Most importantly, politics are a combined context in which this can never be assured. As a communication context, politics always imply ambition and what Nietzsche called the “will to power.” Not exactly the heights of good-will, not to speak of care or compassion.
So, when a white man sings in a faux Al Sharpton voice, “Barack the Magic Negro, lives in D.C. / The L.A. Times, they called him that / ‘Cause he’s black, but not authentically. / Some say Barack’s “articulate†/ And bright and new and “clean.†/ The media sure loves this guy, / A white interloper’s dream!”[4] , it is entirely different from black director Spike Lee labelling the stock characters typically played by Morgan Freeman the “super duper magical negro.”[5] Why? Because context is everything.
(As an aside, when a white man imitating Al Sharpton discourages voting for a black man because he’s too white, it is the height of dramatic irony on so many levels.)
Which brings us back to the original op-ed article by David Ehrenstein.
The only mud that momentarily stuck was criticism (white and black alike) concerning Obama’s alleged “inauthenticty,” as compared to such sterling examples of “genuine” blackness as Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg. Speaking as an African American whose last name has led to his racial “credentials” being challenged — often several times a day — I know how pesky this sort of thing can be.[6]
A week ago, former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele was selected as the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Saltsman withdrew his name at the eleventh hour without explanation. Steele becomes the first African-American GOP chairman.[7] Perhaps Republicans selected Steele as a response to President Barack Obama’s victory in November. Or maybe, Republicans were responding to Saltsman’s tasteless self-advertising. Context, as they say, is everything.
Imagine this: You are a Native American living on a reservation. Because some members of your reservation have been agitating for change, your home has been blockaded by the National Guard for several years. You cannot get in or out, and basic living supplies are difficult to come by. Attacks by the American troops sometimes destroy power plants, and you survive without electricity or running water for days. The American people, many of whom are descendants of European colonists, first arrived a few centuries ago on the soil that your ancestors inhabited for thousands of years. In spite of this, the international community is deaf to your cries for help and relief. Now imagine that the United States has had enough of your agitators and is launching a full-scale assault on your people with all its military superiority, even though your people are barely armed with rifles and a few missiles. Your home looks to be a parking lot in a few years.
Sounds outlandish! Unreal. Even as fiction, no one would believe it. Now, stop imagining and see that this is the reality of the situation in the Gaza strip.
The current conflict has been marked by little or no restraint on the part of Israel. Israel Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said in an interview with the Washington Post, “I don’t like the term cease-fire since it looks like an agreement between two legitimate sides.” Elsewhere in the same interview she said, “Israel is not going to show restraint anymore. . . . it is not a missile against a missile. We are going to attack strongly if they continue.”[1] If we were to decode the political rhetoric, Livni’s statement might read:
“We have a far bigger stick than you, and we will level you to the dirt.”
Israel supports its overwhelming use of military force by saying it is a response to “terror.”[2] Many nations list Hamas as a terrorist organization.[3] Yet according to many sources, Israel originally supported Hamas secretly to destabilize support for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). “according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years. … Israel’s support for Hamas ‘was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,’ said a former senior CIA official.”[4] In a recent email letter to her supporters, Dr. Maria Khoury, a Palestinian Christian who lives in Taybeh, West Bank, relates a personal memory of this support for Hamas by the Israeli government. If this knowledge was widespread throughout Palestine, how demoralizing it must be for Palestinians to be used as pawns.
Far more demoralizing, though, is the human cost. Families seeking refuge from the destruction are killed while they try to escape.
“Movement [while fleeing] is complicated by the confusion over when it is safe to leave,” writes the New York Times. “When the Abu Hajaj family received a leaflet last weekend, they took it as a sign of safe passage. But Majad Abdel Karim Abu Hajaj, a teacher at a United Nations school, said his mother and sister were killed as they walked holding a white flag. Their bodies remain where they fell, he said, because ambulances cannot get to the area.”[5]
We have a far bigger stick than you, and we will level you to the dirt.
And what has been the cost for Israel? The Los Angeles Times reports that the death toll for Israel is thirteen. “Israel has suffered 13 dead: 10 soldiers, four of them by ‘friendly fire,’ and three civilians by Hamas rockets.” How does that compare to the cost suffered by Palestine?
The Palestinian Ministry of Health reported Monday that the death toll had risen from 884 to 910, according to an update from United Nations officials in Gaza. The dead include 292 children and 75 women, the officials said. The number of injured Palestinians stood at 4,250, of whom 1,497 are children and 626 are women….
More than 28,000 Palestinian civilians have been displaced, inundating makeshift refugee centers.[6]
We have a far bigger stick than you, and we will level you to the dirt.
We can do little to change the political situation. The nations of this world will continue their demonic use of military power until the end of the age. However, we must help sacrificially as we are able. Recently, Metropolitan Jonah (Paffhausen), the Primate of the Orthodox Church in America, released a public statement encouraging support of the International Orthodox Christian Charities (IOCC) and spoke directly about our obligation to Palestine:
The parishes and members of the Orthodox Church in America should urgently offer their financial support to IOCC, earmarking this support at this time for work in Gaza. As Orthodox Christians, members of the Orthodox Church in America are in deep solidarity with the suffering people in the Middle East — Christians, Muslims, and Jews. The many hundreds of dead and wounded civilians in Gaza and in the whole region bear witness in their suffering to the real meaning of military and political conflict: it is innocent people who suffer the most.[7]
We are mostly powerless to change the political situation, but I can express solidarity with the Palestinian people through sacrifice — giving of myself as an offering. Here are three things I will be doing:
Of course, there is so much more. Be creative. You can sacrifice your time, either by organizing a fundraiser or even by participating in one near you. The most daring among you can sacrifice your time by volunteering with an organization and traveling to Gaza in the flesh. This is ultimately the deepest sacrfice you can make. Do not let your fear put your motivation on the shelf: Do something.
When I attended a Greek parish in New Hampshire, I was always asked if I was Greek. That is, if I was spoken to at all. After all, it does not take an ethnological genius to determine that the 6′3″ gentleman with fair skin and blue eyes is probably not of Hellenic extraction. While looking for Orthodox news, I stumbled upon this editorial, and I thanked the holy Trinity that no one in the Orthodox Church in America talks about Russian culture like this.
The inevitable consequence of converting Christians and non-Christians who have no Greek heritage is that the more successful the outreach, the greater the erosion of Greek identity within the Church. The only counter-argument made to this observation by many who support the conversion strategy is that, given the demographic challenges at hand, a larger, more inclusive Church is the only realistic way to preserve the Greek cultural heritage in America.
Modern Greek is a certain loser in the conversion scenario. The historical structure of Orthodoxy has been to have a Church based on a national language/culture headed by a national hierarchy which stands on an equal basis with other Orthodox entities. In that sense, the idea of “Americanizing†Orthodoxy is to adhere to the major Orthodox tradition, rather than continue with Greek American exceptionalism.
At its core, however, Orthodox tradition is culturally Hellenic. If the emphasis of the Church turns to conversion efforts, there will surely be parishes that will seek affiliation with, or form an Orthodox organization which prioritizes, Greek identity. Simultaneously, especially in areas with a limited Greek population, other Christian denominations supported by American friends will become increasingly attractive.
At present, the Greek culture of the Church is ebbing away, and the conversions come in dribbles. Just talking about the need to revitalize Greek culture or just talking about an evangelical mandate is not useful. What is required is a dynamic commitment by the Church to what it wants to be and do in this new century.
The future, and perhaps even the existence, of a viable Greek America is at stake.
Read more: The Ethnic Church and the Hellenic Identity - The National Herald (via Orthodox News, an organ of Orthodox Christian Laity).
Allow me a postscript to add that I have also had very good experiences with many Greeks. Specifically, the people at Annunciation Cathedral in Norfolk, Virginia, have always been quite friendly to me, as was the priest at St Sophia parish in New London, Connecticut.
Copyright © 2001-2009 Kevin Robert “Basil” Fritts. All rights reserved.
