Matt Damon on Sarah Palin

Yeah, yeah, I understand that Matt Damon has no more credibility than any other average person, and that his clout comes from having made some great movies rather than being a viable source for political commentary. However, given my growing disdain for Sarah Palin, I can’t help but post this video due to its valid insight, my agreement with him, and its humor.

Das Kapital: Vol. 1 – Karl Marx

Upon waking up this morning I was struck with a though, “What this world needs, especially in our present moment of political excitement, is a healthy dose of Karl Marx! People should be reading Capital vol. 1.” And what do you know, upon my morning wanderings the blogosphere, I stumbled across a series of video lectures by David Harvey ( David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) and author of various books, articles, and lectures, which can be found linked on his site. He has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital for nearly 40 years) exploring Vol. 1 of this very book. I know, I couldn’t believe it either! What a coincidence, or dare I say providential moment (actually I won’t dare, I’ll just stick with coincidence. There has been enough misguided melding of divine action and our daily events in the recent presidential campaigns to send half the country to hell in a hand-basket)?

In all honesty, I just happened to find this class through checking out blogs on people’s blogrolls. But regardless, taking up the challenge of reading vol. 1 should be good for everyone, and it can even be done at your own pace. I just got my copy today and am going to try and start lecture 1 tonight. I would encourage anyone else who might be interested to try and work their way through the class as well. While I can’t promise that it will be fun, it will certainly be informative and worth the time that it will require.

The lecture site is linked above, but it can also be found on my blog roll along with the blog of Laura Gonzalez, from whom I found out about the class.

John Caputo on the Religious Right

John D. Caputo, in his introduction to a newly published book on the intersection of religion and politics in America entitled The Sleeping Giant has Awoken: The New Politics of Religion in the United States, offers a perceptive observation on the contradictions of the political agenda of the religious right. I’ve chosen to include it here in its entirety, despite its length, because I believe its worth spending an extra min or so reading a couple of paragraphs to hear what he has to say.

“In his teaching, Jesus advised a life of uncompromising simplicity and nonacquisitiveness, like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, which is not bent on providing for oneself and building up a stock against the future, which trust God to provide. He said enough disturbing things about the coming of this kingdom, the rule of mercy, forgiveness, and nonviolence, to make the powers that be uneasy. Saying things like that in an occupied country brought him to an early grave and a cruel if not uncommon execution at the hands of an imperial power. But in death, he was no less forgiving and nonviolent. His earliest followers led lives of exemplary commonality, sharing all things in common, distributing to each what they needed. The first debate that broke out in what we today call Christianity was whether this complete commonality was being observed perfectly.

But the dominant form of American Christianity today, the Christian Right, has sat down at the table with virtually every power and domination that Jesus contested in his own lifetime, with the very powers of imperial rule, the rule of the world, which took his life. It stands for authoritarianism, nationalism, and militarism that contradict the letter and the spirit of Jesus’ words, who said to love one’s enemies, and if one is struck on the cheek, to turn the other cheek. It enthusiastically supports a war that cynically flaunts the classical conditions of just-war theory, “just war” itself being a strange turn of phrase to be found on the lips of a follower of the author of the Sermon on the Mount. It marches arm in arm with an unbridled capitalist greed that has recklessly permitted the rich to grow ever richer while grinding up the poor-flaunting the very ministry Jesus announced for himself. By lending its shoulder to laissez-faire capitalism, the Right undermines the everything it might have been believed to stand for. Unchecked capitalism wrecks family values by impoverishing families and leaving children homeless and parentless. As Lou Dobb-not exactly a member of the Left-has documented, the economics pursued by the Right constitutes an all-out attack upon the middle class, where family life is the mainstay. Unchecked capitalism turns sexuality into commodity; it seeds the fields of abortion, prostitution, drugs, and crime by holding its heel to the neck of the poorest and most defenseless people in society. Where Jesus found strength in the weakness of God, in forgiveness and nonviolence, the Christian Right openly lusts for a Christian Empire, even as it was an earlier Empire that took the life of Jesus.

The cruelest and most bitter irony is that the Christian Right does all this in the very name of Jesus, asking us, “What would Jesus do?”-as if Jesus were a capitalist out to make millions and a militarist with aspirations for imperial power, in search of a kingdom very decidedly of this world. What is this if not the will of humans in love with bare-knuckled power, with themselves and their own will, cloaking themselves in the name of the weakness of God and the nonviolence of Jesus?”

ed. Robbins, Jeffery W. and Neal Magee, The Sleeping Giant has Awoken: The New Politics of Religion in the United States, (New York: Continuum, 2008) pg. 4-5.

Zizek in Portland!

Anyone who lives in the broader Portland, OR area is sure to be familiar with Powell’s Books (the nation’s largest independently owned used book store) and the literary events they host, in which authors come and perform readings of a recent published work. By some lucky chance, Slavoj Zizek is going to be here in the NW presenting his new book, Violence, and reading several excerpts.

The book is part of Picador’s “Big Ideas, Little Books” series, a series designed to introduce key philosophical ideas and topics to a broader, lay audience. This little book is a fun read, and far more accessible than some of his other works (The Parallax View, Organs Without Bodies, take your pick), which can leave some readers, like myself, feeling defeated before completing the Introduction. True to form, Zizek addresses the topic of violence with his usual companions of Lacan, Marx, Hegel, and Nietsche, and offers insightful critiques and correctives. If anyone is in the Portland area tonight the event is being held at Powell’s Books on Burnside. Here is a link to the Powell’s page.

Race: A Theological Account – J. Kameron Carter

Yesterday, I finally picked up my copy of J. Kameron Carter’s new book, Race: A Theological Account, and while I may have shot myself in the foot in buying it during the semester, it is turning out to be well worth it. Having just begun the book, I don’t yet have a detailed commentary, but I can say with confidence that this book is one deserving such detailed engagement. His argument is as provocative as it is learned, and is sure to stand as a future benchmark for any serious theological engagement with the issues of racial identity, body politics, and the corresponding theological discourse that frames them. Skip a couple meals and go out and buy it! I highly recommend!

For now, if anyone is interested in an engagement with the book they can check out David Horstkoetter’s posts. Hopefully more engagement will continue to arise around the blogosphere in the following weeks as people wade through this substantial volume by Carter.

The Bonhoeffer Blog Conference

This is taken from Halden’s post over at Inhabitatio Dei:

The Bonhoeffer Blog Conference, though still a ways off is coming together nicely.  Here is a tentative list of participants with their paper titles:

• Day 1: Introduction by Halden
• Day 2: ‘Christ my Conscience’: Bonhoeffer on Identity, Moral Integrity, and Christian Community by Chris Green
• Day 3: ’Being Made in Human Likeness’: ‘Ethics as Formation’ and Von Balthasar’s Concrete Universal by Eric Meyer
• Day 4: Salvation as Humanification: Bonhoeffer’s Ethical Soteriology by Adam McInturf
• Day 5: Bonhoeffer and Levinas (Title TBA) by Eric Roorback
• Day 6: The Ethics of Justification: Bonhoeffer and Jüngel on the Implications of the Doctrine of Justification for Christian Ethics by D.W. Congdon
• Day 7: TBA

At this point we are now in need of respondents to the various plenary papers that are set to be presented.  Responses should be 500-750 words and offer constructive engagement with the plenary in question.  If you wish to write a response, please let Halden know by email at halden-at-wipfandstock-dot-com or leave a comment on his post.

John D. Caputo on Love

“Let us speak then of love. What does it mean to “love” something? If a man asks a woman…”do you love me?” and if, after a long and awkward pause and considerable deliberation, she replies with wrinkled brow, “well, up to a certain point, under certain conditions, and to a certain extent,” then we can be sure that whatever it is she feels for this poor fellow it is not love and this relationship is not going to work out. For if love is the measure, the only measure of love is love without measure (Augustine again). One of the ideas behind “love” is that it represents a giving without holding back, an “unconditional” commitment, which marks love with a certain excess…If a woman divorces a man because he turned out to be a failure in his profession and just did not measure up to the salary expectations she had for him when they married, if she complains that he did not live up to his end of the “bargain,” well, that is not the sort of till-death-us-do-part, unconditional commitment that is built into marital love and the marital vow. Love is not a bargain, but unconditional giving; it is not an investment, but a commitment come what may. Lovers are people who exceed their duty, who look around for ways to do more than is required of them. If you love your job, you don’t just do the minimum that is required of you; you do more. If you love your children, what would you not do for them? If a wife asks a husband to do her a favor, and he declines on the grounds that he is really not duty bound by the strict terms of the marriage contract to do it, that marriage is all over except for the paper work. Rather than rigorously defending their rights, lovers readily put themselves in the wrong and take the blame for the sake of preserving their love…A world without love is a world governed by rigid contracts and inexorable duties, a world in which – God forbid! – the lawyers run everything. The mark of really loving someone or something is unconditionality and excess, engagement and commitment, fire and passion. Its opposite is a mediocre fellow, neither hot nor cold, moderate to the point of mediocrity. Not worth saving. No salt.”

John D. Caputo, On Religion (New York: Routledge, 2001) pg. 4-5.

On the Christian Calender

My friend Halden over at Inhabitatio Dei just did a post yesterday entitled “On this day…”, and while his aim in the post was to discuss the Augsburg Confession it raised a question in my mind concerning the Christian calender: How is an event or person deemed valid for inclusion into the calender year?

While for some the idea of the Christian calender may be foreign, especially given the low-church tendencies of the N. American expression of Evangelicalism; however, for much of the Church scattered throughout the world, in centuries past, presently, and most likely in centuries to come (I’m thinking here specifically of the dominant presence of Christians in the world found in the “global south” which tend to ), the liturgical calender of the Church is a primary staple in Christian worship. As with most conceptions of time, framed in political schemes rather than philosophical ones, the Christian (or Liturgical) calender is centered around God’s drama of redemption, bearing witness through the Church’s celebration to God’s redemptive acts in human history. For those, like myself, who may not come from a high-church background or liturgical community, the idea of the Christian calender may seem new and novel. However, such political framing of time, despite what some may think, is nothing new to anyone. While people may not consciously realize it or directly acknowledge it, everyone participates in some political schema of time which ascribes value to certain persons and events, namely, those that have established or furthered the values of a particular people. Therefore, countries like America that value things like independence and freedom, democracy and civil rights, have certain days to commemorate and celebrate the events and people that have sought to see these values actualized (i.e the 4th of July – America’s Independence day, Martin Luther King, Jr. day, Presidents day, Presidential election day, etc.). Participation in such national “holy” days is an endorsement of the values underlying these celebrations. It acknowledges an allegiance, at whatever level, to a certain socio-political structuring of time that functions determinatively to ascribe value to people, days, and events (while some may object here to the language of allegiance, felling that it might be too strong, I would suggest that what goes on in the socio-political structuring of time is nothing short of baptizing certain people, places and events into the value system of the nation-state with the end of endorsing and furthering these values. It is not an arbitrary fact that in schools and other social gatherings people are called upon, not asked, to recite the pledge of allegiance: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands…” ; and to not do so is deemed subversive and rebellious).

Coming back to Christian calender, the People of God have consciously acknowledged this political laden reality of time and, therefore, operate according to a Theo-political conception of time – a schema that frames time in terms of God’s saving acts in his drama of redemption. This Theo-political understanding of time, in contrast to the socio-political conception of the nation-state, has its own allegiances (namely, to the Lordship of Christ), values, and holy people, places, and events. Among other things, the Church celebrates the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ, and to an obviously lesser extent the lives of saints throughout history.

With that said, I want to come by to my initial question that has prompted this post: By what criteria is an event or person deemed valid for inclusion into the calender year? Or maybe its better to ask the question this way, along similar lines of the biblical canon: How are certain events and people recognized as deserving to be included into the “canon” of the Christian calender? For certain, God’s great drama of redemption is not over; there is more to come, and God is continually act work in the our world. Along the lines of socio-political conception, is it those people and events that seek to embody and further the values and life of a particular community (in this case the People of God) that deserve inclusion? I’m interested to hear peoples thoughts and ideas on this issue; so tell me: who and what makes it into the calender and why?

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Accommodation

The Province of Quebec has recently headed up another report on the nature of our postmodern condition addressing specifically the issue of accommodation and integration with reference to the influx of diversity that Quebec has seen over the past several decades (the first was the now famous Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean Francois Lyotard). The council was commissioned to (a) take stock of harmonization practices in Quebec [that have taken place since the 70's], (b) analyze the issues [concerning accommodation practices related to cultural differences in Quebec] bearing in mind the experience of other societies, (c) conduct an extensive consultation, and (d) formulate recommendations to the government.

This report, co-chaired by Charles Taylor and Gerard Bouchard, is quite interesting in its assessment of pluralism in our postmodern (late-modern, whatever you want to call it…) setting. Essentially it seeks to address head-on the issue of the relation between the “I” and the “Other” at the level of the province of Quebec, recommending the appropriate action the government of Quebec should take concerning this issue. Currently, I’m only about halfway through the 100 pg abridged edition, and while I can’t endorse this as the standard for addressing the relation between the “I” and the “Other” at the level of political philosophy, I would recommend it a something worth reading, given that it is co-chaired by Charles Taylor- a philosophical giant who has written extensively in these areas and a native of Canada . Far anyone interested in the issues of ontology and otherness, like I am, I would encourage you to look into this report. I have included the link to the pdf abridged version here.

Mark C. Taylor on “Play” in Life

“In our sports-obsessed world, true play is rare. Ever eager to make a profit, crafty investors turn play into serious business. Customer recruitment begins when players are very young: children barely old enough to walk punch away on cell phones that carry video games; Nike runs sports camps to hook seventh-graders on expensive shoes; kids not yet in their teens compete for countless hours in massive multi-user-online games where they learn skills better suited for the trading floor than the playing field. When nothing escapes the logic of the market, losses become incalculable. These distortions of play have serious consequences – a society that has forgotten how to play has lost its way.

I have long thought the historic phases of economic development can be charted by the games people play: agrarian society loved baseball; industrial society, football; network society, basketball. It is not only the grass that makes baseball a field of dreams but also the leisurely pace of the game – nobody ever seems to be in a hurry. The long warm-ups, breaks between innings, walks to the mound, jumping in and out of the batter’s box seem designed to slow everything down. Baseball is not governed by the clock and often seems to go on forever.

And then there is the spitting – what is it about baseball and spitting? In no other sports do athletes spit like baseball players. They spit on the ground, in their hands, on their bats, in their gloves and, when they can get away with it, on the ball. It seems to be a ritual vestige of an earlier era when times were rough and edges had not yet been smoothed.

Football is all about strategy and timing and, as such, it is the ideal game for the military-industrial complex. Metaphors of war dominate discussions of football and violence is intrinsic to the game. More important, football is rigidly hierarchical – the command structure is strictly top-down. Plays are first diagrammed by coaches acting like generals and then executed by troops equipped with the latest high-tech body armor heading into battle against a hostile enemy. Carefully staged rituals make the point obvious: fighter jets flying low in tight formation over stadiums, military paratroopers landing on fields, color guards carrying the flag and high-soaring eagles released while fans belt out the national anthem. Warriors one and all.

Basketball is improvisational and spontaneously emergent rather than programmed and deliberately plotted. Like jazz, basketball is played best when it flows freely. Though some plays are planned, most are riffs that cannot be anticipated. The structure of the game is lateral rather than vertical, distributed and not hierarchical. Basketball does not conform to the logic of the industrial grid(iron) but follows the alternative logic of information networks. Though the court is circumscribed, the game is decentralized and the action is free-wheeling. If football players following commands recall movements on a chessboard, basketball players bumping into each other as they constantly adapt to the continuously changing flows surrounding them resemble packets darting across worldwide webs.”

Mark C. Taylor, “The Games We Play,” (http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/02/06/play/).