A priest and a prophet

 When I was in junior high, I got into a war of wills with my mother. She was a hardcore Episcopalian, and was hellbent, no pun intended, on me getting confirmed in the church.

At the time, I had just emerged (mostly) from my nihilistic juvenile delinquent phase but had no interest whatsoever in religion

We butted heads but eventually struck a deal: I’d go to confirmation classes with Father Bill Kirkland, the new priest at St. Timothy’s in Hurricane, and then make my own decision.

Kirkland was one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever known, although I was slow in recognizing it. He was raised in rural Georgia as a severe fundamentalist, attending a very strict Baptist college with the original John Birch, for whom the hardcore rightwing conspiracy theory-believing John Birch Society was named.

Kirkland eventually moved on theologically but didn’t give up on religion. After serving in WW2, he studied theology at Edinburgh and at the famous Union Theological Seminary in New York. He taught philosophy at what would become the University of Charleston.

After a few classes, I began to conclude that this whole thing might not be as dumb as I thought. It apparently stuck, despite my best efforts to escape.

Kirkland was active and unafraid to speak out for social justice, but mostly he attended to priestly duties, celebrating sacraments, visiting congregants, comforting the sick, putting the dead to rest. After he retired, his ministry consisted of walking the dogs at the local animal shelter. 

The course of my life would probably have been very different without his influence. He reminds me of a cryptic line from Psalm 110 about a mysterious holy man who blessed Abraham in Genesis: “Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.”

I didn’t realize for years that he was a direct student of one of the greatest and most influential theologians of the 20th century, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), who left his mark in the halls of congress and on the picket lines of the labor and Civil Rights Movement.  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Niebuhr’s “unswerving devotion to the ideals of freedom and justice”

I’d heard about Niebuhr for years, but my interest peaked years ago after reading Parting the Waters, the first volume of Taylor Branch’s powerful study of America in the King years. By then, I’d been working for the American Friends Service Committee for a few years, an organization that had close ties to Dr. King and others in the movement. I learned from Branch that Niebuhr was a major influence on King and many others. He has been claimed by people across the political spectrum—even people who weren’t religious.

Naturally, Kirkland was glad to share his memories of Niebuhr. I also took a l deep dive into his writings.

Niebuhr took the concept of sin seriously, but not the way we often use the term. He thought of it less as this or that misdeed but rather the all-too-human tendency to put ourselves and especially the groups we identify with (ethnic, racial, religious, national, political, etc.) at the center of the universe. If we all have this tendency as individuals, it is multiplied when we come to group behavior and social systems. Most individuals have consciences, but often the closest thing to the conscience of a group is its persecuted and despised minority. 

He was fond of quoting St. Augustine (354-430) as saying that “Without justice what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers? And what is a band of robbers but such a kingdom in miniature?”

He also reminded us that we are often most dangerous when we think we’re the most righteous. You can call it human weakness, original sin, or evolutionary baggage, but ignore it at your peril. Many of the worst atrocities in history have been committed by true believers of one stripe or another who were sure they were right.

In Niebuhr’s view, there is no such thing as absolute purity. Human motivations are always ambiguous, and the conflicts of the world are between sinners, not between the totally evil and the totally righteous. That view may seem grim, but it’s a pretty good antidote for self-righteousness.

But if all are sinners, all haven’t done the same amount of damage. He called this “the equality of sin and the inequality of guilt.” There is a huge difference between the Roosevelts and the Hitlers of the world, one that matters.

This assessment of human nature challenges the ideas of inevitable progress or utopias, but the news about human nature wasn’t all bad. In addition to original sin, we’re also gifted with “original justice.” These views have profound political implications: to paraphrase a famous Niebuhr quote, our capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but our capacity for injustice makes it necessary.

For Dr. King, his theology was an antidote to “the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism” and “a persistent reminder of the reality of sin on every level of man’s [sic] existence.” According to Branch, King “came to describe Niebuhr as a prime influence on his life, and sometimes referred to Gandhian nonviolence as “a Niebuhrian stratagem of power.’”

In 1965, King invited Niebuhr, then 73, to participate in the famous march on Selma. He replied with regret that “Only a severe stroke prevents me from accepting … I hope there will be a massive demonstration of all the citizens with conscience in favor of the elemental human rights of voting and freedom of assembly.”

I’m grateful that, thanks to Kirkland, Niebuhr is part of my lineage. I learned this from him: a good society or group is one that is structured in such a way as to limit the amount of damage we can do to each other.

(This appeared as a column in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Anywhere but here and now

I just finished listening to the Pensees or Thoughts on Religion by the French thinker and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). Among other things, he designed a calculating machine, arguably a distant forerunner of the computer. 

He also apparently had a mystical experience of which he wrote 

"From about half-past ten in the evening until about half-past twelve … FIRE … God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not of the philosophers and savants. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace."

For those of us out of the math world, he's best known for nuggets from the Pensees, such as "the heart has reasons which reason knows nothing of."

This time around, I found his insights on the human condition to be brilliant and his theological musings a bit dogmatic, which is probably what he was going for.

He was a devout Catholic, although one accused of being a Jansenist heretic, (Jansenism was an almost Calvinistic tendency in the Church), but sometimes he sounds downright Buddhist. Example: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

Here's a great passage from the Pensees about our chronic tendency to be anywhere but where and when we are that could have come out of an old school dharma talk:

“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

Ouch. That hit close to home. 

 

Faith, hope, love, foregiveness

I feel lucky to have been a second generation student, sort of, of Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the 20th century's greatest theologians. To be more specific,the Rev. William Kirkland,  an Episcopal priest who studied under Niebuhr, was a major influence on my life. He even taught my reluctantly agreed to confirmation classes when I was in junior high.

Here's a little sample from the vast treasury of Niebuhr's thought:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. 

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. 

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. 

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

A slow theological slog

Swiss theologian Karl Barth, 1886-1968.

Finishing a large, difficult book is a kind of marathon, although generally it is one mercifully broken up over an extended period of time rather than a few hours. Last night I finally finished reading the signature work of Karl Barth, one of the 20th century's premier theologians.

The book in question was The Epistle to the Romans, first published around 1918. It was 537 dense pages of text, many of which went right over my head. I borrowed it from a friend and sometime reader of this blog back around Thanksgiving. It went into my morning pile of books that I try to turn a couple of pages of over coffee most mornings.

Barth is probably best known for his work in organizing Christian opposition to the Nazi movement in Europe,and especially its efforts to Nazify Christianity, by establishing the Confessing Church. Some if its members, such as Martin Niemoller, wound up in concentration camps. Others, like Dietrich Bonheoffer, were executed by the regime.

If I had to sum up Barth's theology, I couldn't, but maybe one could start like this: the main thing you need to know about God is that you ain't. Barth rejected liberal and rationalist theology and instead emphasized that God is absolutely unknowable by humans--except as He (Barth was pre-feminist but would probably be cool with it today) freely chose to reveal himself in the Gospel proclamation.

I think I like Barth because I do believe in the absolute distinction between God and humanity. I even believe in that on the days I doubt God. Nothing seems loopier or more self-evidently false than the assertion that humans are somehow divine. The Quakers may be right that there is "that of God" in every person. But if so, I'd say that "that" is what Bob Dylan called a "broken mirror of innocence," i.e. something that might reflect light but not originate it.

Somedays I'm orthodox in spite of myself.

THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES. This story about real estate highlights our growing issues of inequality.

THANKS, GUYS. NOT. Here's a look at the fun loving guys who gave us West Virginia's 2014 chemical spill.

HOW BOUT WE FEED SOME KIDS? Here's my latest op-ed on school meals, the Feed to Achieve Act and Community Eligibility.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Canine theology

The medieval theologian and philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas famously came up with five proofs of the existence of God and any number of arguments regarding the divine attributes. Arpad, our Great Pyrenees dog and security chief of Goat Rope Farm, is something of a theologian himself. He came up with on proof of the existence and benevolence of the Deity, which goes something like this:

*This time of year, all kinds of deer carcasses appear in the woods.

*Deer carcasses are awesome.

*Therefore, God exists and is good.

Sweet reason

As far back as Plato, a cherished idea among philosophers and reformers is that people only do wrong out of ignorance. If we really got it, presumably, we wouldn't act badly.

The European Enlightenment was based on the idea that the spread of education and knowledge would eliminate most social evils. To be fair, that has happened, sort of. We don't literally burn as many witches and heretics as they used to anyhow.

But reason isn't a cure all, as Reinhold Niebuhr argues in Moral Man and Immoral Society. While acknowledging its very real contributions to social betterment, Niebuhr points out that

Men will not cease to be dishonest, merely because their dishonesties have been revealed or because they have discovered their own deceptions. Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will use whatever means are most convenient to that end and will seek to justify them by the most plausible arguments they are able to devise...

...Men will never be wholly reasonable, and the proportion of reason to impulse becomes increasingly negative when we proceed from the life of individuals to that of social groups...

Those are some reasons why we shouldn't have unreasonable expectations about reason.

ALL GONE. Many jobs lost in the recession won't be coming back.

COLLEGE GRADUATES are facing higher unemployment rates.

FIZZLING OUT. The drying up of Recovery Act aid to states could worsen the recession and harm state budgets and education. Meanwhile, WV has been slow in spending its share.

APPLES AND ORANGES. Here's Paul Krugman on the difference between the situation in Greece and the US.

THE WORLD'S STRONGEST ANIMAL (FOR ITS SIZE) is the copepod.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Seriously but not literally

I guess one mark of a great theologian is that they have something to say even to people outside of their religious tradition. Several names come to mind in this context: Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich. And Reinhold Niebuhr would certainly be on many people's short list.

Niebuhr was born in Missouri in 1892, the son of a pastor in the German Evangelical tradition. He followed in his father's footsteps and served as a pastor in industrial Detroit for several years, where he criticized the brutality of the factory system.

From 1928 until 1960 he taught theology at Union Theological Seminary and for most of those years was very active in political life. In the 1930s he supported the Socialist Party but later became something of a New Deal pragmatist and political realist. He has been claimed by people across the political spectrum, from progressives to neo-cons.

His theology is sometimes described as neo-orthodox, which takes the Biblical and Christian theological tradition seriously if not literally. Above all, Niebuhr takes the idea of sin very seriously indeed and applies it broadly to human social life.

I think one reason I like him so much is that this is one of the few areas in which El Cabrero is in the orthodox camp.

One of his most famous books is the 1932 Moral Man and Immoral Society, parts of which holds up remarkably well. More on that tomorrow.

GOING LOCAL. This item looks at the importance of local economies.

HARD SCIENCE. Here's some research on marital felicity.

ARCHAEOLOGY MADE EASY. New technology makes it possible to map ancient civilizations in a fraction of the time required by traditional methods.

IT PASSED. NOW WHAT? Now that health care reform is the law of the land, it will take a lot of education and outreach to help people understand what it is and isn't. Here's what local groups in WV are planning to do.

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One that stuck

El Cabrero has a theologian in common with President Obama, his 2008 opponent John McCain and quite a few people across the political spectrum. That would be Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), a professor at Union Theological Seminary who was very influential in the US in secular as well as religious circles.

I guess I can claim to be a second generation student of Niebuhr. When I was in junior high, a new priest came to the Episcopal Church I was brought up in. At the time, I didn't have much use for religion in general, a periodically recurring condition with me.

I'd been involved in a civil war over this with the Maternal Unit until we agreed to a ceasefire on the following terms: I'd complete confirmation classes and go through the ceremony and after that I was on my own.

The priest taught the confirmation classes, during which I came to realize that the whole thing might not have been as stupid as I thought. The priest in question, Fr. William Kirkland, had studied at Edinburgh and later with Niebuhr himself at Union, although I didn't realize that at the time.

It was much much later, when I had begun working for the American Friends Service Committee that I really began to study his thought. I made it a habit to study social movements of the past to look at what worked and what didn't and became aware of Niebuhr's profound influence on Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.

It stuck with me. Lately, I've revisited his writings, which will probably show up here for the next little stretch.

OIL SLICK. Paul Krugman opines on the Gulf oil disaster and the role of government in his latest column.

MEDIA AND MORE. Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree. Jim appears to be going through some static with the Episcopal bishop of WV.

EAT LOCAL. This item looks at the economics of organic gardening and local food production.

GETTING INVOLVED can make you happier.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A DAUNTING JOURNEY

Circe, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the Odyssey of Homer, but you will also find links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

After many ordeals, Odysseus and his men have it pretty good on the island of Circe. As he put it:

...there we sat at ease,
day in, day out, till a year had run its course,
feasting on sides of meat and drafts of heady wine...
But then, when the year was through and the seasons wheeled by
and the months waned and the long days came round again,
my loyal comrades took me aside and prodded,
'Captain, this is madness!
High time you thought of your own home at last,
if it really is your fate to make it back alive
and reach your well-build house and native land.'

Circe is cool with all that (unlike the other nymph Calypso in a similar situation). She promises to help but warns him that he must undertake yet another journey if he is ever to make it home:

'Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, old campaigner,
stay no more in my house against your will.
But first another journey calls. You must travel down
to the House of Death and the awesome one, Persephone,
there to consult the ghost of Tiresias, seer of Thebes,
the great blind prophet whose mind remains unshaken.
Even in death--Persephone has given him wisdom,
everlasting vision to him and him alone..
the rest of the dead are empty, flitty shades.'

It will be a dangerous trip, beyond the confines of the know world. It sounds like the dead "lived" underground beyond the Mediterranean somewhere in the Atlantic, which the ancient Greeks considered to be the river Oceanus. Neither he nor his men are glad to hear the news. She gives him final instructions for his task and helps him on his way.

The way you know you've really arrived as a mythological hero, by the way, is to take a trip to the land of the dead. Odysseus will join the company of Orpheus, Heracles, and Theseus. In future years, Aeneas and Dante will make the trip as well.

Come to think of it, I guess we all will, one way or another.

AMERICAN HUNGER. Here's an item from AARP on the growing problem of hunger and food insecurity in the US.

OCCUPATIONS have their problems, as economist Joseph Stiglitz discusses in this op-ed on Iraq and Afghanistan.

THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT in helping the economy grow is discussed here.

PUT MONEY IN THY PURSE. Financial compatibility may be the key to a good marriage.

RELIGION ON THE BRAIN, literally.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, if you feel like a theological workout, here's an interesting paper on the history of Christian views of warfare.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MYSTERY, WEIRDNESS AND AWE

Caption: Anyone for a leap of faith?

The theme at Goat Rope lately has been some non-sectarian reflections on the nature of faith, with special attention to the ideas of the late great theologian Paul Tillich. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

One of the all time classics of the philosophy of religion and the nature of religious experience is Rudolph Otto's 1917 book The Idea of the Holy. I wrote about it a while back here.

According to Otto, people of all times and places have had experiences of the strange, the awesome, the weird and the Totally Other. He called these experiences the mysterium fascinans et tremendum, meaning both fascinating and terrifying, as in something that really rocks the world of those who experience it. This is the source of the idea of the holy.

Tillich says of such experiences that

They can be found in all religions because they are the way in which man always encounters the representations of his ultimate concern...The human heart seeks the infinite because that is where the finite wants to rest. In the infinite it seeks its own fulfillment. This is the reason for the ecstatic attraction and fascination of everything in which ultimacy is manifest.

People are attracted to the infinite, but also often experience their great distance from it as a kind of judgement of any human attempts to reach it:

The feeling of being consumed in the presence of the divine is a profound expression of man's relation to the holy. It is implied in every genuine act of faith, in every state of ultimate concern.

According to Tillich, in many religions, people experience the sacred in two ways, as ontological faith and as moral faith.

Ontological faith can be described as the holiness of what is, the experience of the holy as present. It doesn't really matter by what means the holy is experience as present--it could be nature, a sacred ritual, image or music, etc. It is "the state of being grasped by the holy through a special medium."

Moral faith can be described as the holiness of what ought to be. This can take many forms as well, but in general the holy is experienced as issuing laws or moral precepts and commandments. One of its greatest forms is that experienced by the Hebrew prophets who experienced God as demanding righteousness and justice.

Either form by itself can lead to extremes. Moral faith taken to excess leads to legalism or fanaticism. Ontological faith alone can lead to isolation and self-absorption. Tillich argues for the unity of both types. A vital, living faith is one that integrates the mystical with the rational and ethical...which is easier said than done.

A final word on Tillich's view of faith. He was anything but dogmatic, but he believed that the great truth of Christianity, however expressed in terms of myths and symbols, was that the gap between the human and the ultimate that we cannot overcome has been overcome for us from the other side.

He taught that faith in the Ground of Being, which some people call God--always accompanied by doubt--can enable us to affirm ourselves in the face of everything that threatens to negate us and allow us to accept ourselves even though we are unacceptable because we have been accepted by something greater than ourselves.

STIMULATE THIS. Here's a good item on the state of the economy, the growing economic divides, and approaches to a stimulus by Nomi Prins of Demos. And, as of yesterday, it looks like the US House leadership made a deal with/caved in to President Bush on a stimulus package that leaves out an expansion of unemployment benefits and food stamps and fiscal relief to the states.

The American Friends Service Committee and allies are urging people to call senators and congressional representatives and urge them to include these in the mix. Here's a toll free number: 1-800-965-4298.

WHO'S COUNTING? Yesterday's post mentioned a study that showed Bush administration officials made many misleading statements leading up to the war in Iraq. Official count: at least 935.

THIS WILL SURPRISE NO WOMEN. A British researcher suggests that men are not as smart as they think they are.

FATHER OF THE NEOCONS? Here's an interesting article from Harper's about Leo Strauss, considered to be the a founder of the neo-conservative movement which has brought us so much...whatever.

WV COURT TO REHEAR MASSEY CASE. The court voted 5-0 to reconsider a case that previously favored Massey Energy. This was due to the discovery that Chief Justice Spike Maynard spent time with Massey CEO Don Blankenship on vacation in Monaco after the court agreed to hear the case.

WORKER FREEDOM BILL INTRODUCED. A bill that would prohibit employers, with appropriate exemptions, from requiring workers to attend meetings in which management discusses its views politics, religion and unions has been introduced in the WV Senate.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SYMBOLS AND MYTHS

The theme of this week's Goat Rope is the nature of faith, which is an interesting subject whether you have any at the moment or not. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Yesterday's post was about symbols, which are always a part of faith. A friend emailed me to point out that the most recognized symbol in the world today is McDonald's golden arches. Holy fetishism of commodities, Batman! That point goes to Marx...

According to the influential 20th century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, faith is about whatever concerns us ultimately and is always symbolic. This is true of traditional religion as well as of things like nationalism or the goal of "success":

everything which is a matter of unconditional concern is made into a god. If the nation is some one's ultimate concern, the name of the nation becomes a sacred name and the nation receives divine qualities which far surpass the reality of the being and functioning of the nation. The nation then stands for and symbolizes the true ultimate, but in an idolatrous way.

Success as ultimate concern is not the natural desire of actualizing potentialities, but is readiness to sacrifice all other values of life for the sake of a position of power and social predominance. The anxiety about not being a success is an idolatrous form of the anxiety about divine condemnation. Success is grace; lack of success, ultimate judgment. In this way concepts designating ordinary realities become idolatrous symbols of ultimate concern.

Symbols are united with myths. Unfortunately, the term myth is sadly abused in current speech, where it means something that just isn't true. Myths are stories often of God or the gods that convey meaning to human life. We can't do without them:

Myths are always present in every act of faith, because the language of faith is the symbol.

Most great religious traditions eventually criticize their mythic elements, such as stories that depict God or the gods acting like humans. Most religions eventually recognize that many of their sacred stories have meanings that are true but metaphorical rather than factual and literal. Tillich calls a myth that is recognized as such a "broken myth." Still you can't get rid of them:

All the mythological elements in the Bible, and doctrine and liturgy should be recognized as mythological, but they should be maintained in their symbolic form and not be replaced by scientific substitutes. For there is no substitute for the use of symbols and myths: they are the language of faith...

Symbols of faith cannot be replaced by other symbols, such as artistic ones, and they cannot be removed by scientific criticism. They have a genuine standing in the human mind, just as science and art have. Their symbolic character is their truth and their power. Nothing less than symbols and myths can express our ultimate concerns.

LIES AND LIES. A study by two nonprofit investigative groups found that the road to the Iraq war was paved by hundreds of "false statements."

DEBT CRISIS. Here's Chalmers Johnson on how excessive war spending and national debt is damaging the country and economy.

REBUILD USA. Here's an op-ed from the Huntington WV Herald Dispatch by Tim Millne about the wealth squandered in Iraq and the need to reinvest in our own infrastructure.

RECESSION. Here's Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz on how we should respond to a slowing economy.

OLD BEN. Here's a fun New Yorker article about Benjamin Franklin and his famous almanac.

JAH LIVE. Here's one about a new Smithsonian exhibit on Rastafarianism.

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER. WV Supreme Court Justice Larry Starcher is calling for an investigation of recent conduct there in the wake of the case involving Massey Energy and CEO Don Blankenship. Here's his memo and here are more links from WV Uberblog Lincoln Walks at Midnight..

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

I FELT SO SYMBOLIC YESTERDAY

Lately El Cabrero has been thinking about the nature of faith, which is an aspect of life for anyone even if one doesn't profess any religion. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

As mentioned before, the great 20th century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich has some interesting things to say about it in his 1957 book The Dynamics of Faith. To recap, here are some things he says faith is not: dogmas subscribed to, intellectual assent, an act of will, something that happens when emotions are manipulated.

Instead, faith is about the things that ultimately concern a person, whatever that may be. It can be positive or destructive. When things like money, power, nation, creed, ideology, etc. are ultimate concerns, the results are idolatrous and demonic.

Even a good religion or worldview can become idolatrous and destructive when it is regarded as the ultimate itself rather than as pointing to the ultimate. Another way of putting that would be to say that when we treat a symbol of a thing as the thing itself, there are problems.

For Tillich, faith is mediated by symbols:

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.

Symbols are like and unlike signs. Both point beyond themselves to some kind of meaning. Signs can include anything from traffic lights to letters and numbers which have a conventional meaning. Symbols have several unique characteristics according to Tillich:

*A symbol participates in that to which it points. He uses the example of a nation's flag, which is more than cloth for people who honor it.

*Symbols open up "levels of reality which otherwise are closed for us." For example, pictures or poetry can reveal more about a given subject than any amount of statistics.

*Symbols can open up elements of ourselves that we wouldn't otherwise realize. If we really encounter Dante's Divine Comedy or Hamlet, it can open up aspects of ourselves:

There are within us dimensions of which we cannot become aware except through symbols, as melodies and rhythms in music.

*Symbols can't be manufactured to order. They have to grow out of the conscious and unconscious depths of our being.

*Symbols grow and sometimes die:

They grow when the situation is ripe for them, and they die when the situation changes. The symbol of the "king" grew in a special period of history,and it died in most parts of the world in our period. Symbols do not grow because people are longing for them, and they do not die because of scientific or practical criticism. They die because they can no longer produce response in the group where they originally found expression.

Next time: religious symbols and myths.

A NEW SHORT COST OF WAR VIDEO from AFSC is now at YouTube. Check it out and pass it on.

HEALTH CARE. Here's an interesting item about what's being left out of the health care debate.

IT'S ABOUT JOBS. Here's an interesting item on the need for a job creation policy by historian Frank Stricker, author of Why America Lost the War on Poverty and How to Win It.

MORE ON SOCIAL CAPITAL from Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam is here.

IN LIEU OF SOCIAL CAPITAL, is your pet smart or are you just lonely? According to Nicholas Epley, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business

When people lack a sense of connection with other people, they are more likely to see their pets, gadgets or gods as human-like.

WV MAKES THE TIMES AGAIN. Click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS...

Caption: Cats have little need for faith. They're already there.

El Cabrero is musing on the (nonsectarian) nature of faith this week. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post.

Faith is something I have trouble with, although I'm a fairly religious person by temperament. I'm kind of like a car with an old AM radio driving on a curvy mountain road. Sometimes I pick up a signal and sometimes I don't.

Faith is a pretty complicated ball of twine to unwind. Philosophers such as William James (an official Goat Rope patron saint) pointed out that faith can create facts, at least in the sense that believing something is possible can make it so. Psychologists like Erik Erikson have argued that attitudes toward faith are shaped in early infancy, when a baby does or does not learn to develop as sense of "basic trust" in the world around him or her. Faith is even a part of non theistic teachings such as Buddhism, although here it means something like trusting in those who have gone down the path before.

One of the most interesting and compelling non-sectarian treatments of faith I've come across were developed by the great theologian Paul Tillich in his little 1957 book, The Dynamics of Faith.

For Tillich, faith is a state of being "ultimately concerned." We all have relative concerns, like food, human relationships, work, etc. But the deepest concern that abides when all others have been met or foregone is the ultimate concern.

Another way of putting it might be to say that regardless of the things one professes to believe or not believe, one's real faith is the core value around which one's life is built. As Jesus is quoted as saying in Matthew and Luke, "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

Faith for Tillich is the centered act of the whole person. It's not a purely intellectual thing such as subscribing to the truth of the tenets of some creed, Nicene or otherwise. Nor is just an act of will or an emotional state, although it gets confused with those quite a bit these days too. It can't be coerced by external or unconscious forces. If either of those is the case, the result is despotism or obsession/compulsion, not faith:

For faith is a matter of freedom. Freedom is nothing more than the possibility of personally centered acts.

Faith also implies risk and even doubt. It is always possible that the foundation on which one builds a life is a false one. When something of relative importance is elevated to an absolute status--such as one's own sect, race, a political creed, nation, money, or anything else--faith is idolatrous or, in Tillich's own term, demonic. By "demonic," he didn't mean little supernatural bad critters with horns but rather what happens anytime something relative is treated as an absolute.

Even the highest religious traditions and the most exalted human ideas can become demonic and idolatrous when they are regarded as absolute rather than limited and conditioned. To use an expression from the Buddhist tradition, all teachings are a finger pointed at the moon, not the moon itself.

Alas, there's an awful lot of finger worship in human history...

SPEAKING OF IDOLATRY, as Paul Krugman noted yesterday, the Reagan-as-God hypothesis is weighed in the balance and found wanting. (GR trivia question: to what book of the Bible does that allusion refer?)

IN KEEPING WITH YESTERDAY'S observation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day observations, here's his famous Riverside address. The more things change, the more they stay the same...

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. It tolls for thee and for tens of thousands of Iraqis.

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. Here's an item on what could have been done with the wealth squandered on the unnecessary war in Iraq.

TO SLEEP, PERCHANCE TO DREAM. Here's something from Science on the functions of sleep.

ZOON POLITIKON. Check out this item on animal politics. Hint: some of them may be better at it than we are.

TWO COOL WEBSITES that will show up here in the future are bookforum.com and History News Network.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GRACEFULLY STRUCK, PLUS MINE SAFETY AND WORKERS' RIGHTS

El Cabrero has been on a theological jag this week, with a special focus on the work of the great 20th century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

To recap briefly, Tillich had a way of bringing new meaning to old religious terms that have accumulated a lot of baggage over the centuries (without sacrificing the old meanings). Yesterday's post looked at his ideas of sin and grace as discussed in his sermon "You are accepted" from the book The Shaking of the Foundations.

For him, sin is a state before it is an act. Specifically, it is a state of separation which is the fate of all people. It is something that inevitably happens to us but also something to which we contribute by our own actions. By separation, he meant our alienation or estrangement from other people, from nature, from ourselves, and from the Ground of Being (which many folks call "God").

This would also apply to

the attitude of social groups within nations towards each other,and the attitude of nations themselves towards other nations. The walls of distance, in time and space, have been removed by technical progress; but the walls of estrangement between heart and heart have been incredibly strengthened.

But if sin or separation is a pervasive reality, it isn't the only one. There is also the reality that can sometimes be experienced when separation is overcome. His word for that is grace:

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!" If that happens to us, we experience grace After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.

In the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relation to others and to ourselves. We experience the grace of being able to look frankly into the eyes of another, the miraculous grace of reunion of life with life. We experience the grace of understanding each other's words. We understand not merely the literal meaning of the words, but also that which lies behind them, even when they are harsh or angry. For even then there is a longing to break through the walls of separation. We experience the grace of being able to accept the life of another, even if it be hostile and harmful to us, for, through grace, we know that it belongs to the same Ground to which we belong, and by which we have been accepted. We experience the grace which is able to overcome the tragic separation of the sexes, of the generations, of the nations, of the races, and even the utter strangeness between man and nature. Sometimes grace appears in all these separations to reunite us with those to whom we belong. For life belong to life.

And in the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relation to ourselves. We experience moments in which we accept ourselves, because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we. If only more such moments were given to us! For it is such moments that make us love our life, that make us accept ourselves, not in our goodness and self- complacency, but in our certainty of the eternal meaning of our life. We cannot force ourselves to accept ourselves. We cannot compel anyone to accept himself. But sometimes it happens that we receive the power to say "yes" to ourselves, that peace enters into us and makes us whole, that self-hate and self-contempt disappear, and that our self is reunited with itself. Then we can say that grace has come upon us.

Official Goat Rope verdict on Tillich: dude was pretty good. Too bad he didn't know how to break up his paragraphs...

WAY TO GO, JOE! Thanks and congratulations to WV Governor Joe Manchin for signing on to a letter to the U.S. Senate in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. This bill, which passed the House this spring, would allow workers to join unions by signing cards authorizing representation. It would also increase penalties for employers who illegally attempt to punish or intimidate workers trying to organize. The letter is here.

A LITTLE WIN FOR MINE SAFETY. From today's Gazette,

A Boone County man won a $2 million jury verdict in a wrongful termination lawsuit against a Massey Energy Co. subsidiary Thursday.

Rocky Allen Burns, 55, of Madison, sued Independence Coal Co. in May 2006, alleging that his firing in October 2005 was the result of his reporting safety problems at the Justice No. 1 mine to the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

There's more here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SIN AND GRACE, FIRE, COAL, AND CATS

Caption: This man suffers from the sin of vanity. He's not very graceful either.

Welcome to Goat Rope. El Cabrero is on a theological tear this week, with a special focus on the great 20th century theologian Paul Tillich. You will also find items about current events here as well. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

Hamlet has still got to be my favorite Shakespeare play. There are so many nuggets to mine in that rich seam. One of my favorites has to do with the theme of sin and grace.

When the troupe of players arrive at Elsinore, Hamlet asks Polonius, who is kind of a dork, to see to their hospitality. Here's the clip:

LORD POLONIUS My lord, I will use them according to their desert.

HAMLET God's bodykins, man, much better: use every man
after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?

In other words, if we all got what we deserved, we'd be in deep doo-doo (that would be the consequence of sin). Grace involves the hope that we might get off a little easier.

The ideas of both sin and grace have built up a lot of baggage over the years and have often been trivialized. Tillich had some interesting ideas about them. This is from his sermon "You are accepted":

There are few words more strange to most of us than "sin" and "grace". They are strange, just because they are so well-known. During the centuries they have received distorting connotations, and have lost so much of their genuine power that we must seriously ask ourselves whether we should use them at all, or whether we should discard them as useless tools. But there is a mysterious fact about the great words of our religious tradition: they cannot be replaced... But there is a way of rediscovering their meaning, the same way that leads us down into the depth of our human existence...

I should like to suggest another word to you, not as a substitute for the word "sin", but as a useful clue in the interpretation of the word "sin", "separation" . Separation is an aspect of the experience of everyone. Perhaps the word "sin" has the same root as the word "asunder". In any case, sin is separation.... And separation is threefold: there is separation among individual lives, separation of a man from himself, and separation of all men from the Ground of Being.... We know that the fate of separation is not merely a natural event like a flash of sudden lightning, but that it is an experience in which we actively participate, in which our whole personality is involved, and that, as fate, it is also guilt.... It is this which is the state of our entire existence, from its very beginning to its very end.... Existence is separation! Before sin is an act, it is a state.

We can say the same things about grace. For sin and grace are bound to each other. We do not even have a knowledge of sin unless we have already experienced the unity of life, which is grace. And conversely, we could not grasp the meaning of grace without having experienced the separation of life, which is sin. Grace is just as difficult to describe as sin... In grace something is overcome; grace occurs in spite of something; grace occurs in spite of separation and estrangement. Grace is the reunion of life with life, the reconciliation of the self with itself. Grace is the acceptance of that which is rejected. Grace transforms fate into a meaningful destiny; it changes guilt into confidence and courage. There is something triumphant in the word grace : in spite of the abounding of sin grace abounds much more.

(Note: if you think those paragraphs were long, you should have seen them before I cut them. Good thing he didn't write plays, huh? That would have been a sin.)

FIGHTING FIRE. Here's to the memory of nine South Carolina IAFF union firefighters who died in the line of duty this week.

ON A CHEERIER NOTE, here's a priceless WV cat rescue item fresh from the headlines:

PARKERSBURG, West Virginia (AP) - It took two fire trucks, five firefighters, several animal rescuers and about 250 gallons of water to rescue a kitten that refused to come out of a West Virginia storm sewer drain.

COAL. The Natural Resource Council has recommended increasing funding for coal research and devoting more of it to studying its environmental impact and worker safety, according to this Gazette item by Ken Ward.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

REMEMBERING PAUL TILLICH (AND OTHER STUFF)

Caption: Daddy Rabbit should reflect on theological matters--the cat is after him.

Welcome to Goat Rope. El Cabrero is on a theological jag this week. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's entry.

Paul Tillich (1886-1965) was one of the 20th century's greatest theologians. He grew up in eastern Germany and studied and taught at several universities there. When the Nazis came to power, he was fired from his job and emigrated to America, where he spent the rest of his life, becoming a citizen in 1940.

He was a deep (his favorite spatial metaphors went down) and systematic thinker (hence the title of his 3 volume Systematic Theology wasn't just a clever name). Tillich wrote big dense books, little dense books and the occasional accessible little and middle-sized books. His books of sermons, however, such as The Shaking of the Foundations, The New Being, and The Eternal Now are his most accessible works.

Tillich believed that

Theology must be "answering theology"; it must adapt the Christian message to the modern mind while maintaining its essential truth and unique character.

While essentially Christian and Lutheran in perspective, he was also keenly interested in the perspectives of other world religions and Christian traditions and believed that the truths of revelation transcended the trappings of conventional religion.

For him, God was not an anthropomorphic "gaseous vertebrate" (to quote the German biologist Haeckel)or even a being among other beings but rather being-itself or the ground of being:

God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.

Religion for him was less about supernatural beliefs than about the subject of our "ultimate concern," which remains when all our finite concerns about daily living have been addressed.

Jesus for Tillich embodied "the New Being," in which all the tragic limitations of the human condition were overcome.

The demonic for him wasn't about little imps with pitchforks but rather with the bad consequences of trying to elevate any finite thing to an ultimate level. For example, nationalism in itself isn't necessarily harmful, but it becomes evil when the nation idolizes itself, and so on. Religion becomes demonic when its concrete form matters more than the realities towards which it points.

Sin represented separation: the separation we experience when we are alienated from others, from creation, from ourselves and from the ground of all being.

Grace was the overcoming of that separation, which is real even though we don't deserve it and could never earn it.

About which more later...

INTERESTING ANTIQUITIES ITEM. OK, so the ancient north African kingdom of Kush doesn't have all that much to do with economic justice issues...still this Times item is pretty cool.

MORE ON TASK, this report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggests how tax credit reforms could make higher education more affordable to low and moderate income families.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WHERE HAVE ALL THE (GOOD) THEOLOGIANS GONE?

Caption: Seamus McGoogle is still working on his theological masterpiece.

Say all the bad stuff you want to about the 20th century, but it did produce some good theologians. They were thoughtful people of faith who spoke to a large public audience of believers and non believers and had a significant positive impact.

Three in particular were big ones for El Cabrero. In no particular order, they included Reinhold Niebuhr, the Jewish theologian and philosopher Martin Buber, and German emigre Paul Tillich. Each came from a specific tradition (Calvinist, Hasidic, and Lutheran, respectively) but had something to say to people from widely different traditions.

I'm not sure we have anybody of their caliber today, but maybe I'm missing something.

Niebuhr (1892-1971) put sin back on the map. Here's a good profile of him by the late Arthur Schlesinger from 2005. I've had the privilege of learning from some people who were taught by him and consider myself a second-generation student. Niebuhr is an excellent antidote for personal and national self-righteousness and we need him now.

Martin Buber (1878-1965) is best known for his work I and Thou, which deals with human relationships with other people, nature and the spiritual world. I had to hit it three times (once with a commentary) before anything sank in but it was well worth the effort. His other biblical and philosophical writings are worthwhile as well.

And then there was Tillich (1886-1965), a German theologian from the Lutheran tradition who came to the U.S. as a refugee from Nazi Germany. But he'll keep till tomorrow...

CARING FOR VETERANS. Many veterans have been and will be returning from Iraq with serious mental health issues. According to this item from the Washington Post, the outlook isn't good that they'll get the timely help they need.

LONG STRANGE TRIP. Here is an op-ed by yours truly recapping the 10 year fight to raise the minimum wage. And here is a good editorial from the Saturday Gazette about inequality.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED