Religion in Culture

On religion in the news, the Republican debate, and reading ‘Fun Home’ at Duke

Posted on by Fig Tree / 1 Comment

I will write about religion in the news. There are two good reasons to do this:

  1. The way some religious people make news misrepresents what it looks like to do something with one’s religion. In America, this often takes the form of conservative Christians weaponizing this-or-that aspect of their faith to gain political leverage, at the expense of some marginalized group. It is worth responding to this approach on religious grounds, not just with claims of the separation of Church and State or the irrationality of religion in general. This can be achieved by responding from the Christian Left, or by responding as an interested and knowledgeable non-Christian. Either way, I don’t like letting hateful speech pass as religious.
  2. The way some nonreligious people react to religion in the news misunderstands the rightful place of religion in politics. Again, in America I think of this response coming from the liberal intellectual class, of which I am a member. This reaction takes for granted that religion in the public sphere looks like #1, and it’s default stance is to reject the religious narrative out of hand, backed by a reference to the nonestablishment of religion in this country, or the separation of Church and State, etc. I will continue to argue that the relationship between our secular state and our popular religiosity cannot be categorically dismissed by an appeal to separation of Church and State. As long as there are Americans whose primary language of value includes religion, Christian or otherwise, religious language and assertions will be a part of political discourse. Engaging them as such, rather than ruling them out a priori, opens up a new space in the dialogue.

Sometimes #1 is more applicable, and sometimes #2 is more applicable.

When I became aware of the fact that a Christian Left, in fact, exists — that is to say, there is another way to respond to religion in the public sphere, not just by fussing about the place of religion in American politics, but perhaps with a “your reading of that Biblical passage is not the only one” — did I recognize the power of #1. Of course, plenty of people have been doing this for centuries (from abolitionists to Civil Rights leaders to the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina over the past few years — notably many of these impressive and memorable religiously-based actions comes from African-American or Black communities). I will add my voice to that chorus to the extent that I am able.

I think #2 was framed rather nicely in the news not so long ago: when the question arose at the Republican debate a few weeks back, if any of the candidates had received a word form God on what they should address first in office.

Now I admit there was a time that my response to this would have involved a lot of dismissive blanket statements about how this was, “an obnoxious example of the fact that theistic superstition infects the nation and is taken for granted by many, including, apparently, the entire Republican party as well as Fox News,” and that, “in a reasonable world, such a question would not be asked of serious candidates.”

I don’t feel that way anymore. If I were a Christian, this would be an interesting and serious question — a lot of sincere, religious people who also happen to be American citizens believe that a personal relationship with God is central to one’s capacity to navigate the world — and I would be disappointed to hear the often incoherent, answering-their-own-question responses of the various candidates. Ted Cruz talks about his dad? Why? Marco Rubio makes a laundry list of blessings, John Kasich asserts that miracles are a thing, and Scott Walker — what are you doing? Reciting the catechism to us? What the hell?

But they have plenty good reason not to actually answer it. This question means: “Do you have some relationship with the ultimate in your day-to-day life? Does it hold you accountable? Does something more than contingency guide your actions? Or have you been bought already? Have you ceded your capacity to freely act for the good? Or do you just make it all up based on what certain people think? Are you a person, or a machine?” These are important and challenging questions, which I think every person should consider whether they’re running for president or not. They are also succinctly evoked in the question, “have you received a word from God?”

My bottom line here: the mention of a religious symbol or value is not a mortal sin in American politics. Sometimes you have to know the tree by its fruit and not whether you don’t like that its a tree. (See what I did there?)

I didn’t have a chance to write about the Republican debate when the topic was hot a few weeks ago, and I sat there thinking, “Man, I missed a good chance to talk about religion in the news!”

I did not have to wait long for another thing to come along. This time, it belongs to #1.

So, Brian Grasso, an incoming Duke first-year has publicly — on a Duke Facebook page and then in that Washington Post article above — refused to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home for Duke’s first-year summer reading program. He makes a religious argument to justify his refusal.

The response in the media seems overwhelmingly (in my completely non-scientific scanning of Google Search results) to focus on the fact that Fun Home has “gay themes” or is an “LGBT graphic novel”. This is not argument that Mr. Grasso puts forward, and though the coincidence is striking, I find it fruitful enough to stick to the text.

Mr. Grasso states that he morally objects to depiction of sexual acts. Viewing any depiction of a sexual act will “conflict with the inherent sacredness of sex,” no matter who it is that is depicted in the sexual act. He categorically separates image and written word — the same story presented only as text would not have presented him with a problem. He would extend this to “pop culture and Renaissance art”. Because he finds the material morally objectionable and not “offensive or discomforting”, he thinks his professors should warn him if coursework will include any “titillating” content, so he can avoid it. He demonstrates how his public statement has lead to several private affirmations and fruitful cross-cultural conversations, and he goes on to reassert the value of “genuine” cultural diversity, as opposed to losing one’s identity “in the name of secularism, open-mindedness, or liberalism,” as one of his private correspondents puts it. He then wraps everything up by describing his interaction with “a new friend, who considers herself bisexual and a Buddhist.” They leave their open encounter with “a deeper understanding and compassion for each other.” And so our author present us with the ideal of a collegiate encounter.

Before I work through this a little more closely, let me say that this young man knows how to write simply and succinctly, especially given his age. He anticipates objections, prepares evidence, presents positive consequences, and does so in a straightforward, sincere tone. I doubt that I could write with such clarity at his age, or even now (see above, below, etc.). I have no doubt of his commitment to the Bible, and its clear from his “passion” for economic development in sub-Saharan Africa that he has a strong vision for how to proceed with his career and life, and to act with compassion.

That being said, clarity and conviction are not all that college is about — and neither is claiming your own “deeper understanding” of a peer whom you insist on seeing through your own tinted lens — if you can even recognize the tint. Mr. Grasso is clever to anticipate objections, but his own clarity gives away a few hints that form a basis for our response to him on religious grounds. Here are some quotes that raised my eyebrows:

  • His first line: As a Christian, I knew that my beliefs and identity would be challenged at a progressive university like Duke. For his authenticity, he reveals his savvy right at the beginning. Surely he knows that there are progressive Christians — indeed, that Christianity is one of the most effective launch pads into progressive politics. But he tells us that a progressive institution will only challenge his beliefs and identity, and he doesn’t mean the good kind of challenge. Scene: set.
  • The biblical evidence he marshals in opposition to pornography: …Jesus forbids his followers from exposing themselves to anything pornographic. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” he says in Matthew 5:28-29. “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.” He offers a curiously narrow interpretation of this well-known text. Jesus is telling us here that the Law of Moses is not being abolished with his ministry, but being fulfilled. He references the commandment to not commit adultery, and makes it substantially stricter, stating that any gaze that is rooted in lust disobeys the commandment — it is considered adultery. His advice? The grasping eye should be cast out, just as in the next line he recommends the grasping hand be cut off. No one, not even literalists, take that instruction literally, so what can it mean? How can anyone be expected to fulfill this impossible standard? It seems to me that the answer is: they’re not. They can try but will inevitably fail. For Christians this is where Jesus comes in to do what humans can’t (remember, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak?). I could go on, but suffice to say that Mr. Grasso will likely defy this commandment anytime he walks across campus, let alone if he reads Fun Home. His argument is weaker than his Biblical citation would suggest.
  • The distinction between words and images: If the book explored the same themes without sexual images or erotic language, I would have read it. Is it not possible for text to “titillate,” or be pornographic? Experience suggests otherwise, but he is young. It seems like he uses this to shore up a claim he makes earlier in his argument: My choice had nothing to do with the ideas presented. I’m not opposed to reading memoirs written by LGBTQ individuals or stories containing suicide. Pushing this further, could a textual description of a lesbian sex scene categorically not excite? Once again, a curiously narrow reading of Matthew 5 — Jesus uses the eye and the hand as human parts that grasp. Can the mind not grasp as well?
  • Morality versus comfort: And I believe professors should warn me about such material, not because I might consider them offensive or discomforting, but because I consider it immoral. Oh boy. It might be more a philosophical question to parse exactly what the difference is between ‘recognizing immorality’ and ‘experiencing offensive discomfort’. It’s clear from above that he could use a little space around how he understands his relationship to media, and its affect on him. I assume he’s trying to sidestep every think-piece that’s come out this year lamenting a (sparsely-evidenced) trend of overly-sensitive undergrads. Now would be a fine time to recognize that in this piece we find a white Christian American male claiming his right to not engage certain offensive material, but distancing himself from the trigger warnings that marginalized communities use to avoid revisiting trauma by surprise and in an unsafe space. He fits all that into his distinction here.
  • The true source of dialogue and growth: Without genuine diversity, intellectual dialogue and growth are stifled. I’m all for ‘genuine’ diversity, though he defines it only negatively as NOT giving away one’s “identity in college in the name of secularism, open-mindedness, or liberalism.” (Again, attributed to someone who wrote to him.) If I were to define it positively, I’d probably start by being willing to meet people as they are, and allowing them define who they are, with as little interference of my own prior views as possible. That’s what makes this next line so frustrating…
  • …because here it turns out we’re just dealing with a very clever and savvy but still quite conservative, judgy-wudgy Christian: Over the past couple of days, I have received many encouraging messages from a new friend, who considers herself bisexual and a Buddhist. The cheat word here is “considers”. I wonder if it refers to his new friend’s bisexuality, Buddhism, or both. As with his before-the-fact assessment of Fun Home and whatever insight might be gained from a sexual act depicted, I suspect that when he talks about having a deeper understanding and compassion of his new friend, he means he has a deeper understanding and compassion for what he sees as her misguided self-descriptions. That is — he understands her better than she does herself, she who considers herself such things. Does he consider himself Christian, or is he a Christian?

To be sure, he knows his Bible, so no doubt he knows Jesus’ mission instructions at Matthew 10:16: “See, I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” Mr. Grasso has taken this teaching to heart. It’s worth noting that the assignment of Fun Home was not for a class and did not come yoked to a graded assignment. It’s intention is to give the incoming Duke first-years a common experience to build upon for orientation. Mr. Grasso is destined to be an organizer, so publicly did he utilize this opportunity to create his own common experience to build on, with a community that was (thanks to his efforts) ready to meet him when he arrives on campus. We shall hear from him again.

Which is all the more reason to be ready to respond to religion with religion, and to “always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks your reason for the hope that you cherish,” even (especially) if you are a Christian-trained Zen Buddhist.

Zen

Dharma Combat with Augustine

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On the meaning of the teaching of St. Augustine of Hippo, addressing God in the first paragraph of his Confessions:

You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

The restless river and the vast ocean
are different just in how they’re held.

Still, rapids are rapids
And rocks, sharp.

“Honkadori” is a Japanese Zen form of poetry, which means “heart of the poem”. In the 11th and 12th century, after the Buddhist Japanese canon of poems and sutras had been assembled in the Kokinshu, this style of poem arose as a kind of commentary to the revered texts, a way of engaging with the original while redirecting its energy to lift up its deeper meaning — with a lightness of touch and a poignancy often found in haiku and other Japanese forms. A line or scene from the original is referenced, and from that bit the author of the honkadori will choose the mood, or the idea, or the setting, or the season, or even a phrase or a word, and use that as the basis for the new poem, and a way of getting at its meaning, removing a bit of the dross that comes with reverence.

When I first encountered this form from Roshi Enkyo O’Hara on retreat with the Village Zendo, I was excited about playing with holy text and religious teaching, coming as I do from a context of Western religion and Western relationship to text. We understand scripture and its ancient interpreters as literally true, complete, and inflexible. ‘Tradition’ is a noun, the canon is etched in stone, and its word is law. It’s meaning is clear. There is no interpreting — it says what it says. This way of thinking applies equally to the adherents to and detractors from scripture: to fundamentalists who take the King James Bible (a translation created a millennium and a half after the source material disseminated in many versions across the Mediterranean world) as the unfiltered Word of God, and to the atheist skeptic who accepts this assumption implicitly when cataloging all of the ridiculous, impossible, contradictory, and offensive things that happen in the Bible. For both of these readers, the text is dense, full, and final.

But it needn’t be that way. The Bible is written evidence of many communities in conversation with themselves, over a span of hundreds of years. Its manifold self-references and self-contradictions are evidence of that, as are the obvious historical-political perspectives that it implicitly supports. These communities are often not just in conversation with themselves, they are arguing with themselves. Thus the Christian Gospels can’t quite get together on many essential about Jesus’ life and death and life — all four can’t even agree on the day of Jesus’ death, let alone what he did and where he did it and why he did it. Luke begins his text by stating that he desires to put forward an ‘orderly account’ of the Gospel story. I wonder how Mark felt about that?

I also wonder why we feel so limited in telling this same story for ourselves. What is the magical time past which the Western Christian community was no longer in communication with itself about what it was about?

This is of course not limited to Christians, or the Abrahamic traditions, or even the West. A casual reading of the Mahayana Buddhist Lotus Sutra reveals intragroup conflict over the interpretation of right practice. The recorder of what was heard on Holy Eagle Peak is quite clear, again and again, that the ‘lesser vehicle’ of Buddhism (read: old school or Theravadan Buddhism) is simply a sub-form of the ‘greater vehicle’ of Buddhism (which is literally what ‘Mahayana’ means — of which Japanese Zen is a descendant). This political axe-grinding and gauntlet-throwing is so heavy-handed that at times the Lotus Sutra is hard to take seriously. But it’s no different when you read Jesus arguing over and over again with the Pharisees, because we’re not so accustomed to ask, ‘who else would a 1st-century second-temple reformer argue with, but other 1st-century second-temple reformers?’. Nor is it much more elegant than the inexplicable repetition of the Creation story in the first chapters of Genesis. (Once this was pointed out to me, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before, so glaring is the disconnect).

But all of these observations are not warnings against taking holy text seriously. They are invitations to engage them meaningfully. Tradition is not primarily a noun, but a verb — in Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, it is the the word “paradosis” which literally means ‘delivering something’ or ‘handing down’. We are not receivers of tradition, we are always traditioning (Morse, Not Every Spirit, 47). This is an attitude toward scripture and teaching that is more fruitful and relevant than, ‘it says what it says’. And no matter our tradition, it allows us to connect.

What honkadori brings to this is that light touch. It maintains the spirit of play, and allows us to bring sacred teaching of any tradition into our context while gently redirecting its flow. Rather than trying to fight fire with fire, you write a poem about the fire instead. There is a danger in all theology of over-intellectualizing, replacing the experience you are describing with your description of it. Japanese Zen poetry is a fitting antidote to this trend. It doesn’t distance itself from what it describes. Dew on the grass is not a symbol for impermanence, it is actually impermanent.

So I wrote the honkadori above. I wanted to start with Augustine in particular, because he did so much to determine how Western European Christians would read Scripture forever after — not metaphorically or (God forbid) allegorically, as was prominent among Eastern Christian theologians, but “simply and morally”. Augustine did not found or endorse our modern literalist movement, but he laid the foundation for it with his hermeneutic (his way of reading). He himself is often read with a kind of iron commitment to the written word that ignores that his writing is a process and not itself the final judgment on the matter. Realizing this, we can speak with him as a one who is traditioning to us as we are traditioning. We can even have fun with him. And if we’re Buddhist, we get to open his extraordinary insight to our posture when we are meditating, to the desires and aversions that cloud our originally clear mind, and in my case, to the restless rivers and deep oceans in which we swim.

I hope to write more of these, to Augustine and to other writers in the Christian tradition, to honor their wisdom and play with their interpretations, as an act of faithful doubt and interreligious dialogue as well.

And to write love poems to the heart of the matter.

 

Religion in Culture/Theology

On a secular theology

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Much of what I write on this blog will be notes toward a secular theology.

The fact that I write as a “Theological Engineer” might already suggest that my theology will be grounded with a scientific and therefore secular worldview.

I don’t see it that way. From engineering and the STEM worldview I gather intellectual tools: systems, heuristics, design, and a focus on efficiency, usefulness, and human need. These I lend to the intention and process of theological work: describing and clarifying the dynamics of ultimate concern, getting “ready to give an account of the hope that is in you”.

Of course, by writing a theology oriented toward humans, I fall squarely within the liberal Protestant Christian theological tradition. (That’s no surprise — I’m a white, politically liberal intellectual, educated at liberal nexus Union Theological Seminary.) Liberal theology was a humanist, intellectual movement within the European Enlightenment. It often spoke of God, religion, theology, faith, and the like through the application of tools from the humanities. To the authority of Scripture and tradition, it applied historical method and literary critique; to the human relationship with God, it applied psychology and modern categories of reason.

Engineering is a human form of creativity, and by applying it to theology I’m performing a fundamentally liberal theological endeavor.

That does not make my theology secular. Its makes my theology theology. What makes it secular is my audience. It is directed to the secular world I have made my home, and I have found its method inadequate to answer all the questions I needed to ask.

These questions are questions of meaning but they are not separate from our lives in a secular world. I think my Zen practice is an expression of this desire to bring the theological into the realm of everyday life. By ceding the ground of the ultimate to “religionists,” to those who use explicitly religious language and seem to inhabit an otherworldly religious arena, we lose a source of energy, a common way of discussing meaning and value, and an image of what human freedom and flourishing can be. To reclaim that ground, a secular theology would be a powerful tool — a “skillful means,” as Buddhism calls it. This theology would be liberal, interreligious, and draw on non-religious traditions as well.

But for its liberality, it would still be a theology — orienting us toward the ultimate, finding the ultimate in others, and recognizing how the ultimate confronts us and charges us to compassionate action.

Justice/Theology

On systems

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Systems are scientific constructs, but I’ll often be talking about them in terms of social justice and theology. I’ll connect them here.

A system is a collection of parts that make up some recognizable whole. That whole can be isolated from its surroundings and considered as its own thing, its parts interacting with one another according to certain rules that you trust are working, and the whole interacting with the system’s environment in a predictable and simplified way. Everything outside can be ignored, everything inside can be ignored — once you have a system, you have the thing in which you have some vested interest, about which you can say something.

In the sciences, some systems seem self-evident. A plant cell, for instance: it has a well defined boundary, a number of working components that have certain rules of interaction, and we can reduce the complexity in its environment to things coming in, things going out. Sunlight and carbon dioxide come in (by natural processes or Divine Providence we know and care not); then an elaborate dance is performed among parts of the cell (that we appreciate but with which don’t really concern ourselves); and then oxygen and energy go out (to a fate we can only dream of, but probably won’t).

Other systems are less obvious, but the observer makes a choice to mush certain elements together as a system in order to simplify things sufficiently and apply convenient rules. This is often the pivot of many a frustrating physics problem. For instance, two blocks are connected by a rope and being pulled up an inclined plane, and given this frictional constant and that force, you’re tasked with determining other forces, acceleration, etc.. You can consider each block and the rope individually, and beat your head against a wall mathematically — or you can consider all three together, and determine more about the system with less effort.

All you do is draw a little dotted-line box around what you want to know about, whether on the page or in your mind’s eye, and you have a system. Whatever’s outside works predictably, whatever’s inside works predictably — our little box is now in hand and knowable.

Science is often perceived as such an objective endeavor that its students are surprised to find that their choice affects what they can find out about a system. I once tutored a student in physics, and drew that little dotted-line box around to create the two-blocks-and-a-rope system that I described above. As I proceeded to do math at this New-Thing-in-the-World, she asked:

“Wait…you can just do that?”
“Yup.”
“…Oh.”

Thus she saw the worldview of science at work for the first time. Much learning happens with a reorientation that is marked only by, “oh.” A single bubble rises to the surface. Continents are shifting in the depths.

On one level, it is completely obvious that a system is determined by a choice. If you’re interested in DNA, choosing the system of the whole cell is not helpful. Likewise if you’re interested in psychology, you likely need to investigate a system much larger than a single cell, or even a group of cells in the brain.

On another level, this reveals an important dependency of scientific exploration on the observer, and can be (glibly) summarized as, you only see what you’re looking for. What you call evidence is not evaluated neutrally, but in a preexisting collection of other evidence. I think many assume that science is just the study of what’s there, but scientific knowledge can only be developed once you’ve made broad assumptions that boil down to the selection of appropriate systems.

That’s why a plant cell only “seems” self-evident. There is nothing a priori self-evident about looking at a plant cell as a plant cell and making that The Thing that described a plant most sufficiently. This has happened, not because of pure Reason, but because of reasons. That optics improved sufficiently at about the same time in European intellectual history that natural systems were viewed as machine-like; that that way of looking at things happened to bear the kind of fruit that the patrons of early-modern empirical investigation found useful; that a scientific worldview and its analytical frame subsequently became the dominant paradigm in the West — these are all accidents of history. It doesn’t make observations about that chosen system less accurate or useful, but it’s not self-evident, either — it’s only evident in a context that seeks exactly that kind of evidence.

Choosing a system is intimately related to understanding the context of a situation, and deciding which elements of the context is relevant, and which can be ignored. It is also fundamentally determined by the observer’s attitude and worldview. Also, as my nod above to the patrons of empiricism suggests, it has a lot to do with self-interest. And money. And power.

So we come to racism.

There are…many things to say through this lens about racism. (Class and other social justice struggles as well, but let’s stick to race for the moment, since we seem to be in a moment for race.) I’ll spend a lot of time talking about them, both as a theologian and educator, but also as a white man living in this country, at this time. But for now, let’s consider this.

What system do we choose when we talk about racism? What context is appropriate when we want to explore the pernicious, persistent influence of race in this country?

Attack dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham. Police cavalry(!) driving black religious leaders and laypeople into a desperate retreat in Selma. The husk of a firebombed church, a sign that says “Whites Only” with a lunch counter in the background, Freedom Riders evacuating a burning bus. Etc.

Images are powerful, but we can see the context at play in how we choose these images. Confrontations from the Civil Rights Era, between peaceful protesters and overt racists, the latter supporting segregation with violence.

Obviously this is one vignette that I’m choosing intentionally to make a point (J’accuse!), but it is not a hard sell to say that that conversations about race in America, particularly among white people and particularly in primary and secondary education, starts with the common ground of “racism was a thing that started with slavery and then Jim Crow and then the Civil Rights Movement happened and racism is not a problem like that anymore.”

Which is true. Racism is not quite a problem “like that” anymore. But that frame represents a choice. Why MLK, and not Malcolm X? Why the dream, and not the ballot or the bullet (or even the letter from a Birmingham jail)?

What’s the system we’ve chosen there? We’re paying attention to the enforcement of racially motivated public policy, backed by white agents who hold a view of race that compromises the dignity of blacks. We’re focusing on a group of people who “are racist” and their actions that come from their orientation toward nonwhites. These racist people are often conveniently located in the South, with a few notable exceptions. Because racial utterances have also become universally prohibited in civil society in the last half-century (which is a good thing), racist people also mostly exist remote in time, as well as space. The occasional offhand, derogatory comment by your Grandma, maybe some state assemblyman from somewhere. That’s it.

So we’ve drawn the little dotted-line box around racist people and decided that the way this system interacts with its environment represents all of racism.

Which perhaps leads you to a conclusion that racism is no longer a problem, since the activity of that little system is not nearly what it used to be.

Now — there seems to be enough noise around racism today, in the news and on social media, and in every major and minor municipality with a police force, or a school, or a college, or a prison — that our conclusion doesn’t quite match the evidence. What should we ask of our racist people system?

For whom would such a system be convenient? What larger system of evidence does it fit into? What preexisting system of knowledge does it reinforce? Here we could talk about whiteness.

Is it possible to describe the activity of racism without racist people? For instance, might there be racist actions, instead of racist people? Would those racist actions be overt, or would they be subtle, likely unnoticed by the perpetrator? Here we could talk about microagressions.

And if the law of the land no longer abides institutions and laws that discriminate and separate on the basis of race, how might those racist tendencies, now underground and unspoken of in civil society, find outlet or expression? Push it underground, where does it go? Does it find its way into education somehow, through testing and still-trenchant segregation of communities? And then, does it find its way (or continues to operate as it always has) in the decisions made around housing policy, and real estate? Does our capitalist system somehow maintain racism, because it lends objectivity (i.e. “the market”) to people’s subjective and biased preferences? Maybe there’s something happening in the criminal justice system, from the way laws are enforced to how people are processed to incarceration rates to recidivism, and then beyond to drug use to mental health to health care to poverty to the media to public perception to…

When we find that the previous, racist people system is no longer sufficient to describe relevant evidence, we need the system that talks about all the systems. Here we could talk about systemic racism.

Because persons, real living individuals, live their lives in all of the systems.

And it is in that lived context, with all of the systems, that theology must be rooted. It makes theology powerful that it can take the individual seriously, and the overlapping contexts seriously. This is why theology is also dangerous — it is a voice for the powerless, who trust in faith that they are wholly valued, but know in this world that the little dotted-line box either ignores them inside of it, or leaves them out of it entirely.

A theological engineer cannot help but be interested in systems.

Theology

About the Theological Engineer

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I’m a math-teacher theologian Zen-Buddhist New-Yorker.

I have studied and practiced engineering, education, theology, depth psychology, and all of the above applied to the struggle for social justice.

I call myself a “theological engineer.” I hope to take the wisdom of religious traditions and the structures of western theology, and apply these to pressing matters of human need with efficiency and creativity.

I want to talk about transcendence, reality, spiritual practice and spirituality, mindfulness, meditation, and meaning; but also education, racism, psychology, poverty, math and science, and the news. Ultimate concern is not separate from daily concern — the ultimate is found among and within the daily, right here and now.

This blog is primarily interested in:

  1. education and the work of teachers as a spiritual effort, worthy of a theological perspective,
  2. the lessons of depth psychology and the knowledge of the unconscious applied to both theology and education,
  3. the liberating power and the limits of math, science, and engineering and their worldview
  4. marginalization and oppression in its many forms — but in These United States, that will mostly mean race and class — and what education, theology, and psychology can and should do to shut it all down.

…and more. If any of those are important to you, you’re my audience. I want to hear from you.

Thanks for coming by — let’s get to it.