Every now and again, you get a reminder:

“I’ll tell you a terrible secret — Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know — listen to me, now — don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”--JD Salinger, Franny and Zooey

I think this is perhaps the best paraphrase of Matthew 25:40, and the heart of Christian Ethics.

Some mournful dream
Left out in the cold

a child never born

a life always hoped for
never quite lived?

Rewound and Re-wounded
tossed back
but never quite swept up.

What is the sadness
in this place–
a gift still warm,
wrapped in tinfoil,
or
a memory boiling over,
on a set table
left empty?

Ushered out
welcomed in

without thinking,

“Take
a seat.“

So….Publisher’s Weekly posted a great review of Split Ticket:

Split Ticket: Independent Faith in a Time of Partisan Politics
Edited by Amy Gopp, Christian Piatt, Brandon Gilvin, Chalice (Ingram, dist.), $16.99 paper (224p) ISBN 978-0-8272-3474-1
At a time when partisan politics involves backbiting and cynicism, here is a collection of essays about politics aimed at unity and hope. In the spirit of a friendly roundtable, the essay writers, mostly 20- and 30-something pastors, each discuss the importance of Christians’ involvement in political activism. The writers represent areas from Los Angeles to Bosnia and take up a variety of causes both systemic and personal, including genocide and affordable housing. Their diversity proves that Christians “are not a monolith” and must wade through what are characterized as competing truths in discerning whether to advocate. Some urge Christians to fight the power of empire, citing the way Jesus challenged the status quo to effect change. Others retreat from activism, citing Jesus’s pacifism. Yet the authors all agree that Christians should work against injustice in some way and should employ peaceful debate to work toward unity. Using their own tales of injustice in a post-9/11 world, they force Christians to wake up and take a stand–even if they themselves cannot agree on exactly what that should be. (Aug.)

Copies of the book are now shipping.  If you haven’t ordered yours yet, check out this link.

I just heard the news that David Dick, longtime CBS Correspondent and KY writer, passed away after a prolonged struggle with prostate cancer.

I have a lot of memories of David, as my Grandfather managed his farm for years, and our families were somewhat intertwined.  There is, in fact, a nice little anecdote about the year he helped work in the tobacco fields on my folks’ farm in one of his books–he talked about the roast my mom cooked for lunch in a way that I’ll always remember.

I’ll always be haunted by what I’ve read of his time at Jonestown (here’s a sample), and it’s a good lesson in the excesses of religious devotion, power, and control.  I had a nice chat with him about Nicaragua right before I took my first trip there in 2001, although he said that he didn’t have much to help illuminate what the context would be like, as he was there when the Sandinistas were first coming to power, so he mainly covered arm conflict, or “Bang-Bang,” as he called it.

I always appreciated how he would say, “Oh, you’re the writer,” when I would re-introduce myself to him, even before I had a single word published.  But most important to me, he gave a great eulogy at my Grandfather’s funeral, a service made all the more beautiful by the fact that his niece-in-law Carolyn Richart was the minister who performed it.  My mom always said he was at his best when he wrote about people, and when it came to Granddaddy, he nailed it.

Thanks for so many good words, David, and send us a dispatch when you can.

Hey Everyone.  Again, it’s been too long since I’ve written, and I’m only writing this shameless plug.  Anyway, here’s the YouTube trailer for the second book in the WTF? Series, Split Ticket, which I co-edited with Amy Gopp and Christian Piatt.  It is made up of essays on Faith and Politics, and includes contributions on Same-sex marriage, immigration, health care reform, as well as contributions from “Christian Anarchists,” Community Organizers, and other young adults engaged in a life of faith and purpose.  It’s available for pre-order now and will be available in August.  Pick up a copy today!

So–If you keep up with me on Facebook, you might remember that at the beginning of the year, I challenged myself to read 12 Books in 12 Months.

In a couple of days, we will be a third of the way through 2010, and I’m on track.  Constantine’s Sword was quite long, and took me longer than a month to finish, so I switched around the order of my reading list in order to get caught up.

My progress report:

Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life by Carol Sklenicka (completed)
Constantine’s Sword by James Carrol (Completed)
Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheyl WuDunn (Completed)
Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race, and American Politics by Peter Hetzel (Completed)
Ray Carver: Collected Stories (Ready to Begin!)
The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch
Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston
City Boy by Jean Thompson
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter
Jesus For President by Shane Claiborne/Chris Haw
Who Do You Love? by Jean Thompson
The Nature and Destiny of Man (Vols 1 and 2) by Reinhold Niebuhr.

Unfortunately, though I’ve kept on schedule, I had hoped to write reviews of each book I completed.  With my schedule, however, that has proven more difficult than I expected.  I wrote a review of the Carver Biography a couple of posts ago, but that’s it.

I can, however, report, that Constantine’s Sword helped inform a sermon I preached at Central Christian Church in Lexington, KY, and I read Half the Sky, a book about the role of women in global development while visiting Foods Resource Bank projects based in Guatemala and Nicaragua Bank as part of my work with Week of Compassion.  As I discovered that approximately 2/3 of the project participants were women and that there were many complicated gender issues interwoven into the project’s implementation, I found Kristoff and WuDunn’s book an interesting companion:  Very helpful analysis at times, though I do think they are not always on the mark (their views on sweatshop labor, for example, struck me as problematic, especially given their “all-or-nothing” view on other types of exploitation.

I really enjoyed Hetzel’s book (as a disclaimer, I should note that I know Peter; he even wrote a very nice note when he signed my copy), and found not only his major thesis on two strains of American Evangelicalism (Martin Luther King and Carl Henry) helpful in thinking through the identity crisis in the mainline Church, the so-called “emergent Church,” and re-claiming an understanding of the term “Evangelical” in progressive Circles.  Hetzel not only positions King within the Evangelical tradition, something many white scholars of King’s life and work have been reluctant to do, but also begins a chapter on American Evangelicalism with a scene from the Cane Ridge revival, raising the issue of the Evangelical DNA of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).  For members of a denomination that worked until the 1960s to gain its Mainline Bona Fides, that may raise some eyebrows.  However, Hetzel’s analysis rightly argues for a more nuanced view of the term “Evangelical.”  Central to this argument is an understanding that any portrait of 19th and 20th Century America must take seriously Race, Racism and “cultural hybridity.”  He’s critical and sympathetic at the same time–which makes for good analysis, particularly when diving into organizations such as Sojourners and Focus on the Family.

So…..there you go.  I am keeping up with the reading, but haven’t kept up with my assignments.  Grading myself generously, I’ve probably earned a C+.  At least I have the rest of the year to bring my grade up…and hopefully kept myself off of FailBlog.

I really dig this song, especially as I think about the potential of Christianity as a movement for positive transformation, social action, and peacebuilding in the world.  Glen Hansard riffs a fun little exegesis of Luke.

Movement-building is good.  But it can be messed up.

The last few months of 2009 marked a small renaissance in the literary career of Raymond Carver. Ray Carver: The Collected Stories was released by the American Library Collection and Carol Sklenicka published her biography Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life
.
I received both books for Christmas, which was a delight. As part of my effort to read more this year, I’ve put them both on my fast track “reading curriculum” for 2010. I’m hoping to write reviews of each of the books I read this year, but….well, it’s taken me a month to get to this one about Sklenicka’s biography.

I’m a big fan of Carver, but my knowledge of his life was fairly limited.  I knew that his fiction drew upon a lot of life experience, and I read a great article in The New Yorker a couple of years ago about the complicated relationship between Carver and Gordon Lish, his editor.  Undoubtedly, there’s a lot of love out there for Carver among fiction lovers.  His work–described as everything from “minimalist” to “dirty realism,” helped usher in a new era in fiction writing, and his short stories remain influential, and while I’m certainly not a reader who sees every piece of fiction as a platform for psychological analysis of a writer, a working knowledge of Carver’s life, with its ups and downs, struggles with addiction, and blue collar roots, seems essential for getting his work.  It’s a tough balancing act, however.  I am a firm believer that writers are in a symbiotic relationship with their context and life circumstances–but as I alluded, it’s misguided to read literary texts as if they are simply psychological profiles of their authors.

That being said, I think Sklenicka’s book is strongest when she gathers interviews with students and colleagues of Carver (it was particularly fun to see Mary Swander and Mark Jarman’s names, as I attended a workshop with Swander at Hiram College, and I’ve been a big fan of Jarman since I discovered his work while I was at Vanderbilt), strings together events from court and other documents (of heartbreaking bankruptcies and fraud charges, for example), and relies on other research to give life to Carver’s story.

I found myself becoming annoyed at times, however; whenever Sklenicka used his fiction to draw conclusions about Carver’s state of mind, detailing an event in a short story and trying to connect how the often chaotic events in Carver’s life might have bled through his writing, it seemed presumptuous, and like a deviation from what drove her to so meticulously research the biography (whoops!  is that me doing a little armchair analysis?)

Three relationships dominated the book: Carver and Lish, Carver and his first wife Maryann, and Carver and his second wife, poet Tess Gallager.  They’re all complicated, and there are plenty of interpretations of the complications. Lish–often taking credit himself for “making Carver,” is taken to task by Sklenicka, albeit in an even-handed way.  His heavy editing of Carver’s work is evident in many of Carver’s published collections, and Carver eventually tired of Lish’s taste for harsh, staccato writing.  One can debate whether Lish’s influence helped make, solidify, or impede Carver’s career, but what Sklenicka contributes to the conversation is a careful retracing of their relationship and Carver’s declaration of independence.

While Carver’s marriages play a major role in the biography, Sklenicka is oddly detached, perhaps trying to offer a fair assesment to both Maryann Carver and Tess Gallagher.  Clearly, there are plenty of readers who will see Maryann’s financial and emotional support of Carver in the early days and subsequent lack of reciprocal financial support as Carver’s career took off as a betrayal, and there are those who regard Gallagher as the only family member with the ability and will to maintain Carver’s legacy and would justify her distrust of Ray’s children.  For Sklenicka, the presentation of the details of these details are so matter-of-fact  and dispassionate that I was left feeling that the destructive behavior–of Ray, Maryann, Tess, and other assorted family and friends–was as normal as any other interaction.  Of course, maybe when we’re talking about families in the throes of dysfunction, that’s the whole point.

Nonetheless, the recounting of events–of Ray’s life, career, and death, was enough to break my heart.  Just like his stories do.  Every time.

(Stephen King wrote a great review that goes into more depth concerning the relationship between Carver and Lish. You can read it here)

How did I not know about this band?  Amazing.

Last week, I posted a somewhat provocative status profile on Facebook:

“Brandon Gilvin is all for a variety of theological viewpoints.   I draw the line at fundamentalism and literalism, however, and it saddens me when our structures enable both.”

I wrote this because I came across the website of newly founded Disciple Church that included a statement that read “The Holy Bible, and only the Bible, is the authoritative Word of God. It alone is the final authority in determining all truths. In its original writing, it is inspired, infallible, and inerrant.” and also included a plug for Focus on the Family’s “The Truth Project,” which purports to demonstrate a Christian Worldview–the “truth” about anthropology, science, American History, ethics, etc.

My cousin and colleague in ministry, Nancy, asked me to explain my status a little more fully.  After spending a couple of days thinking about it, I’ve decided to write it as a blog entry, rather than just a quick comment response.  I was responding to a couple of issues and I had multiple thoughts going on in my response.  Therefore, it will be a little easier to lay them out in a longer format.

First up, my direct concerns with fundamentalism and literalism.  I define literalism as a way of reading the Bible that assumes every historical and supernatural incident recorded in the bible happened literally, word-for-word, as it is presented in the text.  I define (Christian) fundamentalism as a theological/philosophical stance which is not only literalist, but which contends that a literalist reading of the Bible is the only legitimate reading of the Bible and the only legitimate interpretive lens for viewing the world.

As an ordained minister, I take the Bible seriously.  Very seriously.  I view it as the sacred text of Christianity, the sacred text of my religious community, and I’ve spent a good bit of my adult life studying it.  It is my study of the Bible and its historical context that makes me very concerned about any statement such as “It alone is the final authority in determining all truths.”

A Literalist, creationist reading of Genesis–that God made the world in six 24 hour days–is from my vantage point, problematic.  For one, the priestly account of creation is dependent on the belief in a flat earth with a sky dome protecting us from cosmic waters.  For the most part, literalist readings don’t take that into consideration.  To give this story “final authority in determining all truths” and eschew science–especially issues pertaining to evolutionary biology, geology, etc.–not only disregards anything scientific disciplines have to say, but it ignores the context in which the story was written.

Other fundamentalist readings have led to a number of problems–the conquest in Judges has been used to justify the destruction of indigenous cultures in North America and South Africa, for example.  The Passion account in the Gospels has been sadly used to justify pogroms.

It is my contention that taking the Bible seriously means putting it in conversation with wider discussions about ethics, science, history, archeology, economics, and other disciplines, holding what Christians proclaim about the Bible–that God creates the world out of love, is in covenant with all of humanity, and invites us all to work for a Kingdom of peace, reconciliation, and renewal–in tension with empirical evidence and insight from other traditions, disciplines, etc.

Second, my particular denominational concerns.  The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is a non-creedal tradition.  The Apostle’s Creed was abandoned as a litmus test for one’s faith, and there’s been a long tradition of individual liberty in Biblical interpretation.  Though not original to DoC, “In essentials unity, in opinions liberty,and in all things charity,” was an oft-repeated slogan among the 19th century frontier movement that still resonates with Disciples today.  Of course, in the 21st Century, we have to deal with what the “essential” elements of our faith are.  That’s tricky.

Most of those who are held up as founders of the CC (DOC) were influenced by the intellectual trends of the day, and were hardly what we would call fundamentalists.  Barton Stone was repeatedly accused of being a Unitarian for his questions about the trinity, Alexander Campbell developed a method of interpretation that relied heavily on contextualization, and Walter Scott was  influenced by Bacon and Locke.  Even though a good but of energy around the early days of the movement was spent on “restoring” the model of the first century Church, it was so buttressed by influence from the Enlightenment, that I wouldn’t call it fundamentalist.  Granted, I don’t see a need to subscribe to every belief that Campbell, Scott, and Stone had. There are obvious limits, problems that emerge when you put the 19th Century in conversation with the 21st, just as there are when you put the first century (or previous centuries) in conversation with the here and now.  To be responsible stewards of the faith, Christians have to wrestle with that.

While it is not my place to determine who gets to fly the flag of our denomination (I TRY to take the whole charity part seriously, too), it does concern me that Disciple churches that espouse this belief are being planted.  I don’t think literalism and fundamentalism are helpful.   I would like to say that an exercise of charity involves “agreeing to disagree” on these issues, but the very foundation of fundamentalism denies the validity of my approach to the text, naming a literalist reading as definitive truth–no discussion needed.

Of course, there are plenty of folks with whom I disagree with on issues of theology.  Though I am not an evangelical, I think there are plenty of evangelicals who approach Biblical interpretation with respect, humility, and the honesty to say that they are engaging in interpretation.  They find truth in the Bible.  I have no beef with that.  I do, too.  The problems start to emerge when one limits the places where wisdom can be found, and presumes that a particular interpretation of the bible (and despite what fundamentalists may say, they ARE interpreting) is the end of the argument.

What concerns me the most has to do with the use of “The Truth Project.”  Again, if it were possible to have a live and let live attitude about this, I have little problem with letting people believe how they like.  Unfortunately, the Truth Project argues not only for a fundamentalist understanding of scripture, but intertwines a particular understanding of American history that not only relies on Fundamentalism, but intertwines an understanding of  American exceptionalism with that fundamentalism, and presents it as absolute truth.   It makes an argument for America as a fundamentally Christian Nation–not in terms of population, not in terms of its historical and cultural roots, but in a theological sense. America was meant to be a Christian nation in a very specific (and absolute!) way, the logic goes, and any thing that contradicts that theological position is a corruption of history.

Interestingly enough, a fantastic article appeared this weekend in the New York Times Magazine, laying out the controversy playing out in Texas over the way we teach the role of Christianity in American History.  It’s a long read, but a good, fair assessment of the issue.  It also picks apart the arguments set forth by folks like Focus on the Family much better than I could.   The most important point it makes is that the Founding Fathers were not of one mind when it came to religious issues–there were pietistic Christians and committed Deists among them–they were highly influenced by the Enlightenment–they used language in many of our founding documents that was highly theological (Creator, for example) but NOT Specifically Christian.

While they likely could not have imagined a United States with Mosques, Buddhist meditation centers, and Hindu Temples, whether or not they would dig that is beside the point.  The Bill of Rights guarantees all of us free exercise of religion and prevents any attempt to establish an official state religion.  The argument that this is a Christian nation founded under divine providence not only distorts history, but it ultimately undermines that First Amendment right.

I blogged about Church and State issues when I was working at Saint Andrew.  I’m pretty passionate about what it means for people of faith to be engaged in advocacy and the political process, but I’m just as passionate about theological and civic education that has scholarly integrity.   It’s important that we be clear that history is a complicated discipline, that answers are rarely as simple as they seem, and that any lesson that argues uncritically for the supremacy of one’s own Nation, divinely-inspired or not, is not history, but propaganda.

The Church, founded by someone who was killed at the hand of an Empire, should know better.