Meme in Bits and Pieces

I've been tagged by Liam, which means, I suppose, that I've caught the latest Meme going around. Since I'm still finishing up my work for the semester, I thought I'd wait a little bit before posting my contribution to this splendid piece of Internet nonsense, but I couldn't help myself. So, here is part of my promised participation in the 8 Meme:

8 Songs That Mean Something to Me:

"Regret," composed by Dave Brubeck, performed by Dave Brubeck and the London Symphony Orchestra, from the album Classical Brubeck. One of the most haunting pieces of music you'll ever hear.

"Fight the Fight," by Living Colour, from the album Time's Up, though I like the version on Live From CBGB even more.

"Sliding Down," composed by Edgar Meyer, performed by Edgar Meyer, Bela Fleck, and Mike Marshall, from the album Uncommon Ritual. The fusion of classical and folk genres has always produced interesting music, perhaps none more than this, another haunting piece of music.

"Easy/Lucky/Free," by Bright Eyes, from the album Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. A stand-in for that whole album, really.

"Intervention," by the Arcade Fire, from the album Neon Bible. "Workin' for the church while your family dies," a little too close to home for me.

"Goodnight Elizabeth," by the Counting Crows, from the album Recovering the Satellites. Another psalm of lament. I'm seeing a theme here.

"Was," by Mose Allison, from the album My Backyard. Sometime his wit is vicious, as in the classic "Your Mind is On Vacation." But, sometimes instead of the mean Mose, we get the philosophic Mose. Here he employs his sharp rhetorical skills in a reflection on mortality. A sample: "When am turns to was and now is back when/ Will someone have moments like this/ Moments of unspoken bliss/ And will there be any heros or saints/ Or just a dark new age of complaints."

"Straight, No Chaser," by Thelonious Monk, from the album Straight, No Chaser. Monk could say more in a note than most cats could in their whole lives. 'Nuff said.

_________________

Since I'm not done I ain't taggin' no one, but...

I'd love to hear what Tom, Chappy (who introduced me to like half the stuff on this list, and a whole host of maybe even better stuff that somehow didn't make the cut), Brian, Troy, and anyone else might have to say about some of their favorite tunes.

Bad Santa! Bad, Bad, Bad!

Tom meticulously documents Santa's evil nature!

IQ Takes a Knock

While my wife is the professional in psychology in our family, I've long had a keen interest in the intersections between psychology, philosophy, and theology. My fondness of such intersections probably accounts for my love of William James - who while known for his philosophic Pragmatism and for famous study of religious experiences, was trained in psychology and saw himself as first and foremost a scientist. But it has not yet steered me wrong.

As a nineteen year-old college flunk out, frustrated by the distance between my supposedly high IQ and my dismal academic record, I started looking for new ways to think about intelligence. The first two books I encountered did not disappoint. In Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goleman wrestled with the same issue that drove my teenage self crazy: why some conventionally intelligent people - many of whom are quite brilliant - can't seem to navigate life with much success. To put his finding crudely, he posited a new kind of intelligence, which he called (as you might guess from the title of the book in question) "emotional intelligence." This intelligence, EQ, exists alongside IQ, and can be an even better predictor of outcomes.

Reading his book I thought, That's what I'm missing! My cognitive skills were useless given my apparent deficiency in emotional intelligence and maturity. Whether or not it is in fact the case that there is a thing we can call "emotional intelligence," Goleman's work helped me see that this thing we call intellect, smarts, is not so simple as being able to perform well on a few academic tests. Rationality is quite useful, but it is by no means the only driving force of the mind.

The other book I picked up in my teenage quest to refine my understanding of intelligence in a way that would figure out what the hell was wrong with me was neurologist Antonio Damasio's Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. In it Damasio used neurology to combat the mind-body dualism of Western philosophy. He was also especially critical of the distinction we often make between reason on the one hand, and emotion on the other. While such a distinction can be quite useful - Goleman talks about "emotional highjackings," something I think we can all relate to - it is not so hard and fast as we would have it be. There is an intimate and physiological connection, Damasio notes, between what we call "emotion" and what we call "reason."

To highlight his point Damasio starts with the famous example of Phineus P. Gage, who as a twenty-five year old construction foreman in 1848, had a dramatic accident that fundamentally altered both his personality and his ability to think. An explosion shot an iron rod through his head. As Damasio notes, the rod "landed more than a hundred feet away, covered in blood and brains." But Gage lived. This fact made him a kind of modern marvel of his time, and so there was a great deal of research done on him.

While Gage was declared cured of all injuries less than two months after his accident, he was never the same man. And not just in terms of physical abilities. His fundamental personality was altered. Where before he had been ambitious and successful, after his accident Gage was rude and angry, apparently unable to regulate his behavior. Most distressingly, Damasio notes, Gage - who before had been an extraordinarily efficient worker, characterized by his excellent decision-making - simply could not make good decisions. Damasio writes:

Gage had once known all he needed to know about making choices conducive to his betterment. He had a sense of personal and social responsibility, reflected in the way he had secured advancement in his job, cared for the quality of his work, and attracted the admiration of employers and colleagues. He was well adapted in terms of social convention and appears to have been ethical in his dealings. After the accident, he no longer showed respect for social convention; ethics in the broad sense of the term were violated; the decisions he made did not take into account his best interest, and he was given to invent tales... There was no evidence of concern about his future, no sign of forethought.

Damasio uses the tale of Phineus Gage as an entry point for a study on the relationship between emotion, reason, and the physiology of our brains. He is especially concerned with what people like Gage, who have sustained injuries to specific parts of their brains, tell us about how those parts of the brain function - especially in terms of the relationship between emotion and reason. To sum up his arguments, he notes that both what we mean by reason and what we mean by emotion can be located in our brains, and that when parts of our brain are injured, or fail to function properly, that affects both our reasoning and our emotional life.

Perhaps the most powerful and informative case study in Descartes' Error is the case of "Elliot," a thirty-something who developed a brain tumor which required the removal of his frontal lobe. From that point on, Elliot had much in common with Phineus Gage. Most interestingly, while Elliot's basic cognitive functioning remained the same - he would have, for instance, not noticed a change in his IQ - he simply could not function as a human. He lacked any semblance of social skills, and often could not make the most basic decisions.

After building a cumulative case on the basis of stories like those of Phineus Gage and "Elliot," Damasio makes a profound claim about the way in which we reason: In most of the decisions that we make, both what we mean by "reason" and what we mean by "emotion" are engage. We navigate our daily lives not by reason or emotion, as though the two were opposed, but by the two of them working simultaneously, in concert. This challenges the way that most of us think about thinking. We (especially we pseudo-intellectual types in the Western world) often think of proper thinking as reason unclouded by emotion. But Damasio argues that such an image describes not a properly functioning thought-process, but rather total paralysis.

In seminary I encountered another way of thinking about intelligence, when I was forced to apply Howard Gardner's famous theory of Multiple Intelligences to teaching in a church setting. In a nutshell, Gardner - a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education and at the Boston University School of Medicine - argues that there is no single thing called "intelligence." Rather, there are several different kinds of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical (those two are what we general mean by intelligence), musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spacial, inter-personal, intra-personal, etc. (He is forever modifying his theory to account for new kinds of intelligence, as well as new ways of thinking about previously identified intelligences.)

In Gardner's thinking - and boy can I relate to this - a gifted mechanic is no less intelligent than, say a mathematician; they simply each are gifted in different ways. Lest you think this is some way of saying "everyone is special, so let's not hurt anyone's feelings by implying some may be more or less intelligent than others," Gardner does believe that we can to a certain extent quantify intelligence within these various categories. He just doesn't think that these modes of intelligence can reasonably be pitted against each other.

All of these positions, taken together with the thousand or so other new(ish) theories of intelligence, amount to a veritable assault on our assumed notion that there is a single quantifiable thing called "intelligence," which is the basic assumption behind the IQ. This matters in part because of the disturbing phenomena of scientific racism. For as long as there have been theories of race, there have been "scientists" who would use the tools of their day to demonstrate the innate genetic superiority of their kind of people, while reducing others to various kinds of brutes. IQ has been intimately involved in this effort to scientifically codify the intellectual superiority of some expressions of humanity, and the inferiority of others. But new research into the nature of IQ has shown that cultural differences on IQ tests are just that: cultural rathe than genetic.

I just read this article by Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorker. A review of James Flynn's What Is Intelligence?, Gladwell explores Flynn's observations on the change in IQ scores across generations.He argues that IQ tests measure not how smart one is, but rather how modern. Here is a most interesting passage that amplifies what is at stake with that distinction:

The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?

The Most Trivial Reader Contest Ever!

With a title like that you might be expecting some sort of witty trivia contest, but I'm not quite that clever. Instead I'd like to offer you a chance to do something that has been amusing me most of the day, distracting me from studying for finals and writing my last papers of the semester. It started with two words:

Projectile Dysfunction

Somehow those two words, put together, have been an endless source of inane amusement for me. Perhaps they will be for you, too.

The contest is this:

Either

a.) Come up with a picture that would best make use of the caption "Projectile Dysfunction," and either email me the picture or leave a comment here describing it, or

b.) Write a brief story or joke featuring "projectile dysfunction" and either email it to me or leave it in the comments section.

The winner gets...

well... hopefully not projectile dysfunction.

The winner gets...

the mythic Dave Chapman award for creative use of the Internet!

An Open Letter to Sen. Hillary Clinton

Sen. Clinton,

First, please allow me to tell you how uplifting it is to see a woman mounting a serious campaign for the presidency less than a century after the ratification of the 19th Amendment. While the playing field is by no means level - especially in light of recent studies of attitudes concerning women in leadership - you are showing us all that women can accumulate the political, social, and economic power to seriously challenge the male-dominated nature of the political arena.

I think that you have been unfairly attacked in the past, made a target by an often misogynistic right wing for your refusal to act within the constraints generally placed on women in our country. Too often you have been derisively dismissed as "Billary," a product of your husband's undeniable political skills, as though you were not as much involved in shaping him as he has been in shaping you. The double-standards of our culture weigh heavily on you, as when you exhibit traits, such as cunning and ambition, that are often considered virtuous in men, you are condemned as a "bitch" by the gender police. That b-word, incidentally, should when applied to women jar our ears as much as a certain n-word does when applied to blacks. Both are verbal slaps that socially communicate not only hatred and derision, but, most importantly Get back in your place!

All of that said, I must confess that I have some serious concerns about you and your campaign for president.

First, while we both agree on the necessity of universal health care, I fear your plan to achieve it comes complete with corporate sponsorship. I know that you were burned the last time you expressed any sort of prophetic leadership on health care before, but that doesn't excuse your coming up with a plan that does more to line the pockets of an already-too-well-fed industry. I've never understood our irrational fear of socialized medicine.

While I think a great many goods emerge from a free (or, at least, relatively free) economic marketplace, that doesn't mean that all goods should be made subject to our insatiable desire for greater and greater profits. Further, I don't think that most Americans really believe this either. Despite the neo-conservative drive to privatize everything, we are still, by and large, willing to grant that our security should be provided by the public sector. We are still, by and large, willing to grant that our children should be educated in the public sector (though I'll grant that is contentious). And we are overwhelmingly inclined to let the public sector keep on handling our Social Security.

These are goods that most Americans agree have nothing to do with dispersing profits to shareholders. And, when it is placed this bluntly, I firmly believe that most Americans would also be willing to grant that their health would be best served by those whose only goal is to care for it, rather than by corporations that are first and foremost interested in profits. And, despite vast lobbying campaigns to the contrary, this is precisely what health insurance corporations are principally concerned with.

I don't need to cite statistics to you; you've been at this a lot longer than I have. [For such, readers of my blog should see this post.] You and I both know that universal single-payer health care would be considerably more efficient than the plan you're suggesting, in which private insurance is secured for each and every American (the health insurance industries most fantastic wet dream). You've seen the same numbers that I have, showing that while 4% of Medicare's costs are administrative, less than 2% of Canada's single-payer system are administrative, a whopping 30% of the average HMO's costs are administrative in nature. You just - like so many of your political peers - lack faith in the American people to come on board.

I am similarly concerned about your shifting position on Iraq. I won't mention your husband's ridiculous claim that he always opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. While opposing requires of one a great deal more than just private disagreement, you can't be blamed for your husband any more than my wife can be blamed for me. I certainly wouldn't want her held accountable for every ridiculous thing I've said. No, even though I suspect he said that to lend you some credibility in the anti-war crowd, I'll let him stand alone on that one.

What concerns me isn't that your position on Iraq seems to have shifted. That, to me, is the sign of a health, evolving person, who adapts their stances when confronted with new data that makes the previous stance no longer tenable. Would that our current president demonstrate that trait from time to time. No, my concern is more in your unwillingness to admit that your authorization of this quagmire was a mistake.

I know that your first few years in the Senate were dark and difficult years. We were living under a cloud of fear. While the threat of terrorism did not begin with 9-11, the public's awareness of that threat by and large did. And that public awareness, coupled with the drums of war, cultivated a climate of fear, a climate in which it was difficult to give anything less than full-throated support of any military plan. We had been attacked, and public sentiment demanded that someone must pay. And, with the Bush administration's conflation of Iraq and the "War on Terror," it is easy to see how you could have justified voting with the overwhelming majority.

But, Senator, you were wrong. Your current stance says as much. But your mouth won't admit it, and that concerns me. I know that women are held to a different standard, especially on national defense. I know that your political enemies would have painted you with the broad brush of "weakness" if you hadn't voted for the war, and with that same brush if you now admitted the obvious, that your vote was an understandable mistake, and that you regret it. But your inability or unwillingness to admit this obvious mistake, even as you now attempt to court the anti-war vote, concerns me. Perhaps it reminds me too much of the current president, who as best as I can tell has never recognized a mistake.

Alas, in a culture in which the cosmetic trumps the substantive every time, the real reason why I'm writing you today has nothing to do with health care policy or war. It is regrettably cosmetic, more of a "process" concern than a "policy" one. As fired up as I am over health care and the war, I wouldn't have taken the time this morning to write you (even if you'll never see this) if I hadn't seen this, an apparently trivial thing which, in our culture of trivializing the monumental (and especially vice versa) somehow stands for me as a symbolic act, the significance of which I reserve the right to unpack later.

I saw that you attacked Sen. Barack Obama for claiming to have not planned to run for president. I'll admit that Obama's claim, while trivial, seems disingenuous. In our culture everyone is planning to run for president, aren't they? Some of the evidence you present is even a little bit compelling, though it is offered in support of the trivial (What, after all, is at stake in Sen. Obama's claim, or in your rebuttal to it?). But what has me concerned is the last piece of evidence you offer: that in Kindergarten he wrote an essay titled "I Want to Become President."

Please pardon me, as I'm new at this whole political thing, but what the hell does that have to do with anything?!? I think I wrote that same essay, though I can now honestly say that I have no intention of ever running for city council, much less president. The spotlight shines too brightly on you politicians. I'm sure under such a bright light I'd make more than a few public blunders. But, dragging up what someone's Kindergarten teacher remembers about their political ambition?!? This is what passes for a presidential campaign?!?

No wonder as a country we are getting turned off by politics. I hate to make you a post child for everything that's wrong with the political process right now, as there are many equally compelling candidates for that. But I'm concerned about you. Try to get some sleep. Quit sweating the small stuff, and all that. One day you may have a country to run. And, if you think this is stressful...

Speaking of politics and religion...

I saw this Washington Post editorial cartoon by Tom Toles linked to at Drinking Liberally:

"Do You Believe Every Word of This Book?"

"Do you believe every word of this book?" the questioner asked, holding up a Bible. There are few venues appropriate for such a question, in my mind. As far as religious questions go, it is both divisive and misleading. Divisive, in that the question is used most often not as an honest appeal for information, but rather as a loaded test of one's orthodoxy. Misleading, because what exactly constitutes believing every word (and, in which translation/edition) is left undefined.

I do not recall ever having been asked this question, though I've served in churches who might not have minded asking me it if they had any idea the answer I would offer would be anything but an unqualified "yes." I don't know how I would answer it. The most honest answer would be a simple "Of course not, and neither do you." But such an answer might not sufficiently challenge any assumptions that underlie the question.

But, as unhelpful as that question is in most of the contexts I could place it, it is infinitely less helpful in the place where I actually heard it.

I didn't watch the GOP presidential debate the other night. I didn't watch it for at least two reasons:

1. I'm not a Republican, and so my opinion on any candidate attempting to win the Republican nomination for president of the United States couldn't matter less. They won't let me vote in the primary.

2. American political "debates" aren't really debates at all, and that makes me mad. Debates involve persons interacting with ideas, answering questions, challenging others and responding to challenges. But these made-for-TV events are more successions of stump speeches offered in response to generally staged questions.

The recent GOP on CNN debate, however, is, like the Democratic debate before it, evidently part of a new trend. Questions came from a variety of sources, from political cartoonists (have they ever been invited to the table before?!?) to the general public. And it is from that broad category "general public" that the question at the top of this post came. I first saw the video of it here.

"Do you believe every word of this book?" I don't know how all of the candidates responded to this question. The CNN clip that I linked to had only part of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's answer. I imagine that, if the question were asked sincerely, it was probably aimed at candidates like Romney, a Mormon, and presumptive frontrunner Rudy Giuliani, whose religious credentials have been called into question.

That this question was asked bothers me. But what bothers me more is my conviction - and I should state again that I don't know how the candidates answered, nor how their answers were taken - that the answers to it matter to many as much as any other issue. Of course in a democratic society in which religious people vote - and, given the prevalence of religion, that is every democratic society - there will always be some mixing of religion and politics. As a religious person whose politics are shaped in large part by my religious convictions and commitments, I don't think this is an entirely bad thing, either. But I still have serious problems with question like "Do you believe every word in the Bible?" shaping political discourse in this or any country.

One of those problems stem from the very nature of our democracy. The First Amendment to our Constitution is clear: there is to be no establishment of religion, nor any inhibiting the free exercise of religion. Part of this means that there is, in our nation, no religious test for office. To tie one's ability to hold office to one's religious faith would, it seems clear, violate both the Establishment clause (by favoring a particular religious expression over others, or by favoring being religious over being irreligious) and the Free Exercise clause (by placing such an incentive to be religious or to be religious in a particular way that one's liberty of conscience is placed at odds with one's political ambition).

This question, of course is not being asked by some powerful political agency, and so fails to rise to the level of a First Amendment violation. But in a culture in which one might be effectively disqualified by a sizable chunk of the electorate on the basis of one's answer to such a question on national television, this isn't exactly the case of a private citizen asking an honest religious question in private, either.

While many of our nation's presidents have had religious beliefs at odds with the majority opinion of their day, America has never had a self-proclaimed atheist as president. America has never had a Muslim, nor a Jew, nor a Hindu, nor a Buddhist, nor a Sikh, nor a Shinto, nor (as is becoming timely) a Mormon president, either. By and large, whatever their private religious beliefs, America's presidents have matched the nation's public Protestantism. This is not accidental. Religion in American politics matters. But the strong correlation between religiosity and political power calls into question our commitment to the First Amendment. It also, I would argue, calls into question the wisdom of the concerns that many religious people bring to political candidates.

The second concern that I have with asking GOP presidential candidates, on national television, whether or not they believe every word of the Bible, is a religious one. It does not stem from my conviction that in fact no one currently living, Christian, Jew, or otherwise, really believes every word in the Bible. It also does not, as far as I am aware, stem from the fact that my own views on Biblical authority are anything but orthodox. Rather, it stems from my concern that such questions promote a false religiosity, an uncritical religiosity, and a religiosity more interested in articulating agreement with propositional statements than in a commitment to the kinds of social change that I see as the essence of the Kingdom/Reign of God, one of the dominant metaphors of Jesus' ministry.

Our current president would be right at home answering the question in question. He would no doubt offer an unqualified "YES!" before giving testimony to the power of scripture and the God represented in it in his own life. He is at his rhetorical best telling of how the God of scripture saved him, rescuing him from the meaninglessness and sinfulness of his youth. The language of faith is second nature for him.

But under the veneer of public faith, as we have all, I suspect, learned, lurks something sinisterly anti-Christian, if the witness of Jesus has anything to do with Christianity. The prevalence of such wonderful bumper stickers as "Who Would Jesus Bomb?" and "Who Would Jesus Torture?" speak to the innate contradiction between the reckless militarism of this administration and the witness of the one our president claims is his Christ. Beyond that, I wonder how the apostle Paul [correction: the anonymous author of I John], who coined the wonderful phrase "perfect love drives out fear," would think of one who claims to be Christian while leading a reign of terror, cultivating a sense of perpetual fear in the American population.

The Biblical witness is infinitely more concerned with social and economic justice than with the trappings of religion, and yet our current president seems always more concerned with "faith-based initiatives" than with the plight of the poor and the vulnerable, those on the margins of our society. While he could no doubt articulate his belief in the Biblical text, there are quite a few Biblical texts he is not living by.

Asking candidates whether or not they believe every word in the Bible is not a very efficient way to discover their religious commitments. Further, while, like me, their religious commitments may shape their politics, and thus provide us with some useful information about them, being religious is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for being a good president. To place even an informal religious test on the office of the president serves neither America (who has a great many devout but decidedly bad presidents) nor religion (which has been misused by far too many ambitious persons).

"Sean Taylor's Death Wasn't Random"

"Sean Taylor's death wasn't random."

That is how ESPN.com's Jemele Hill opens her commentary on the murder of Washington Redskins' safety Sean Taylor, who died this morning at the tender age of 24. In her column, Hill makes several salient points on "American problem" (as opposed to simply a "racial" problem) represented by the violent death of yet another young black man.

After noting that murder is the leading cause of death for black males aged 15-24 (Sean Taylor's demographic), she calls this "an epidemic more lethal and closer than any war overseas, or any boogeyman terrorist we can unearth or create."

I have not yet been able to process this most recent death in the stream of carnage that characterizes life in the land of guns. I have not yet been able to weave it neatly into a narrative. Nor have I yet been able (or, perhaps, willing) to wrestle with the fact that Taylor's death seems somehow so much more tragic than the countless deaths of more anonymous young black men.

But, in a country where black men are 6 times more likely to be murdered than white men, I have to agree with Hill that this, yet another killing of a young black man, wasn't random.

Do yourself a favor and check out Hill's column.

_____________________

Edited to add: 12-7-07:

I just read this column by Kevin Blackistone, which is perhaps even more worthwhile than Hill's reflections. Here is a sample quote:

According to most recent disseminated data by the Center for Disease Control, Taylor and Spicer will be two of roughly 4,000 black homicide victims in the country this year killed by guns. Most, of course, won't be a pro athlete like Taylor but an everyman like Spicer.

It didn't matter if they were rich or working-class, went to college or dropped out of high school, lived in a near million dollar home with a remote control gate or in mom's apartment in a tough quarter of town. It didn’t matter if one was strapping, strong and fast as the wind and the other was more like everyone else.

It didn't matter if they were famous or known to only a few. It didn't matter if they were living their dreams or still chasing them. They didn't escape the pathology.

Sandalstraps Cinema

As the semester winds down (and the workload winds up) I've been day dreaming about what I'm going to do with all my soon-to-be-rediscovered free time. And, since doing something worthwhile has long been ruled out, I think I might spend more of my time blogging. At least until something more pressing (like J-term classes followed by the Spring semester) pops up.

But, if I do resume more regular blogging, what, o what should I blog about?

This morning I blew the time I should have been working on the two papers I have due this week finally watching a movie that I simply loved, but don't have time to comment in depth on yet: V for Vendetta, the Wachowwski brothers' worthy follow-up to the Matrix trilogy (first take: better than the second and third Matrix films, not quite as good as the first). Strangely enough, that film explores many of the same issues as my emerging idea for my Masters thesis (or am I just seeing a thesis topic in everything?), but more on that when I take the time to blog for real.

In the meantime, I've decided that until I change my mind (which could well be before any actual posts) I'm going to do more in depth looks at the theological, philosophical, and ethical content in movies, much like I did in these posts, two of my all-time favorites to write:

Contact

RENT

Or, for less depth, consider these:

Ever Since the World Ended (juxtaposing the film Donnie Darko with a Mose Alison song)

An Unnatural Evil (a look at Augustine's theodicy of natural evil after watching An Inconvenient Truth, but I swear, its not that heavy)

Bobby (paging Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards)

Initial Response to Play the Ball Where the Monkey Drops It

For my "Evil, Suffering, and Death in the New Testament" class we are required to keep a reading journal. Last week's book was Gregory Knox Jones' Play the Ball Where the Monkey Drops It: Why We Suffer and How We Can Hope. It is essentially a primer in Process Theology's response to the problem of evil, though it is not written as a work of academic theology, and never actually mentions "Process Theology." It is a very pastoral book, written not by a theologian but by a Presbyterian minister responding not to the concerns of the academy but the concerns of the congregation. What follows is my reading journal entry for last week, after reading the book. The entry reads more like a book review than a journal entry, reinforcing perhaps a point that my pastor made last week after hearing me preach in our chapel communion service, when she noticed that for great theological treatises I don't even need notes, but when I'm talking about myself I read verbatum from a manuscript. Be that as it may, here is what I wrote in response to Gregory Knox Jones' Play the Ball Where the Monkey Drops It:

My first response to Gregory Knox Jones’ Play the Ball Where the Monkey Drops It is that it was a delightful read. His stories are lively and engaging, and his concerns are refreshingly pastoral. I also appreciated that he takes the philosophic problem of evil seriously. By that I mean this: he recognizes that there is a fundamental logical contradiction between God’s omnipotence and benevolence and the reality of evil and suffering.

While his book is not as rigorously argued as my favorite work on evil from the perspective of Process Theology, Kenneth Cauthen’s The Many Faces of Evil, and while he does not engage the nature of evil in the way that Cauthen does, it serves as an interesting primer on the way that Process Theology meditates on the nature of divine power in the face of the reality of evil and suffering.

The experience of suffering is a legitimate starting point for theology. It is one of the givens of existence, every bit as much as the experience of the holy, the sacred, the other, that which we call “God.” As such, it is valid, I think, to demand that our concepts of God and our reflections of God be accountable to our experience of suffering. This, at a basic level, is what Process Theology does.

In Chapter Five of his book, titled “Persuasive Power,” Jones reflects on the nature of God’s power in the face of the given-ness of suffering. After laying out the basic problem of evil he says this:

If God is all-powerful and loving, then evil should not exist. Yet evil does exist. And not just a little evil here and there, but widespread evil that causes tremendous suffering throughout the planet.

It is from here, the logical impossibility of reconciling God’s unlimited love and power with the brute fact of evil, that Jones argues for the need to understand God’s power in a new way. He could here follow in the footsteps of Christian philosophers like Richard Swinburne, who cling to the language of divine omnipotence while places some logical boundaries around God’s power. But instead he chooses to boldly and honestly assert what I take to be the most responsible theological response to the reality of evil and suffering: “There are some things that God cannot do.”

This statement is troubling to many Christians – nay, to many theists, not just limited to Christian theists – because it radically denies one of our “givens” (see Jones’ reference to Burton Cooper on p. 56) concerning God. Omnipotence is, in fact, such a given that many are incapable of thinking about the word “God” without also thinking about “omnipotence.” I remember taking a philosophy class at a state university, taught by a professor with no personal religious commitments, in which it was categorically stated that “omnipotence” is an essential part of the definition of “God.”

This is also somewhat pastorally challenging. It can rightly be asked how a limited God, a God who allows suffering to happen not for some mysterious reason that humans can never discern, nor for our own good or for any of the other reasons offered up in our formal and informal theodicies, but because God cannot do all things; it can rightly be asked how such a God who lacks the power to initially prevent suffering, to forcibly restrain the forces that cause suffering, can effectively respond to suffering.

It has been suggested to me (by a former minister turned atheist) that we must choose between an omnipotent God who refuses to prevent suffering and an impotent God who is powerless to act in the face of suffering. This, I suggest, is a false dichotomy, and the sort of false dichotomy at work in the minds of many Christians who feel threatened by the statement that there are some things that God can’t do.

We don’t feel the need to impose on anything in the created order the standard we place on God. Of course, this could be because many of us assert that God is radically different from the created order, wholly other, and so it is impossible to make any analogy between God and something created. While I find that sort of thinking about God quite appealing, I also think we should consider this: we would never consider saying that because there are limits on the power of the president, he is essentially impotent. Such a statement would be absurd. Of course there are limits on presidential power – even if some presidents act as though they are unaware of such limits. And, of course the president, despite such limits, is by no means impotent. Both the person and the office contain a great deal of power.

Jones uses his own examples of this sort of argument, saying:

Some seem to think that if God cannot do everything, then God is a weakling. I disagree. We would never say, “If the professor cannot answer every question, he is a useless professor.” Or, “If the physician cannot diagnose every illness, she is a worthless physician.” Such statements are nonsense. Indeed, the professor may open wonderful new worlds to us through brilliant insights, and the physician may save numerous lives through her expertise. Admittedly these are crude analogies, but I trust they make the point.

That is in fact the case for every power we can conceive of in the natural world. Why can’t it be the case for God? Why must God be either omnipotent (as most theists assert) or impotent? I for one can’t come up with a reason.

Jones asserts that not only is God’s power limited, but that power which God does have is quite unlike we often suppose it to be. Jones is wont to wax poetic on the power of God, saying in one of my favorite lines in the whole book, “God is the most powerful force in the universe, brining order out of chaos and making life possible.” But this power is not the brute power to override other wills and impose particular outcomes on situations. Rather, it is what he calls “the power of persuasion."

Jones sees God at work in the world trying to influence situations and bring about the best outcomes, not trying to override the respective wills of each actor. This view of God’s power is quite compelling, in part because it makes sense of things that many of use experience. Many of us have felt the presence of God in our lives. Many of us have “heard” without hearing the “still small voice” of God. Many of us have felt an inexplicable sense of calling, a calling that often takes us far from where we thought we would go in life. In these Jones sees the power of God working to bring about the best in the created order.

This is also compelling because it preserves human freedom (and, I would argue that this freedom extends beyond the bounds of humanity to include all animals, not just the so-called “rational” ones). In fact, Jones takes freedom as, along with the existence of God and the brute fact of suffering, as one of the givens in the created order. I won’t argue with Jones on the given-ness of freedom, as I too experience freedom (or, the determinist would argue, the illusion of freedom) as a given. But, in light of his offering up freedom as a good in a book meditating on the nature of God in the face of evil and suffering, perhaps a few words on the “goodness” of freedom are in order.

Many theodicies hinge on an appeal to free will, arguing variations on this theme: freedom is a good such that its existence offsets the various evils and sufferings that are produced by its creation. That is, God is justified in creating a world that has suffering, because suffering is inevitable in an order that contains authentic freedom, and freedom is so good that it outweighs the collected sufferings that result from it.

When both freedom and suffering are givens – that is, when the experience of both are basic and essential parts of life – the absurdity of this sort of argument is not obvious. As such, we rarely ask ourselves whether or not we would be willing to exchange our freedom for an existence without suffering. If freedom were such an obviously manifest good that it outweighs all concerns about evil and suffering, then it seems to me obvious that all or at least most reasonable people would be categorically unwilling to exchange freedom for anything, as it is a good so precious and so valuable that it makes up for each instance of suffering.

But in times of crisis we learn that, in fact, the opposite is true. When faced with the threat of suffering, the fear of crisis and death, humans are surprisingly willing to exchange a great many individual freedoms (which participate in freedom itself) for even the tiniest illusion of security.

Any book that makes so much of freedom in the face of suffering – even if it does not attempt to offer up a traditional free-will theodicy – should, I think, wrestle more with our willingness to so readily exchange our individual freedoms for some protection from evil, suffering, and death.