a short random personal observation

So today, as I sit down to finalize prep for a class at Calvary on Sunday on religion & science perspectives on the creation narrative, I realize once again the complete absurdity of my personal situation. Here I am, about to prep for an adult forum as a completely normal and routine part of my workday, because I was invited to teach a class on a subject I've spent years now acquiring a certain level of expertise on--after spending days in the rabbit-hole of arguing for the possibility, the ability and privilege of my doing such things. Sometimes--most of the time--it's really healthy for me to inhabit this whole other world where this debate doesn't exist. But today, stepping from one to the other is jarring.

haaaaaaaaappy anniversary, cy-boys and cyber-girls!

If you're into this sort of thing, you won't want to miss the celebratory 50 posts about cyborgs in honor of the cyborg's 50th anniversary (since its etymological debut in 1960, in the Clynes and Kline article on space exploration in the now defunct Astronautics journal).

vampires, cyborgs, Christians

So, Anne Rice quits, because people suck? What did she expect, anyway?

That was my first gut-check response to the statement she made this week on Facebook, subsequently picked up by Huffington Post: 'I Quit Being a Christian.'  Why? Well, like I said, people suck--and apparently Christian people are the suckiest: "It's simply impossible for me to 'belong' to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else. ...I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of …Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen."

Okay, granted: Christian people really are the suckiest, if only because they suck just as bad as everyone else and claim to be doing God's will or loving Jesus the whole time they suck. And I hate just as much as anyone the fact that goofy Ted Haggards and odious Fred Phelpses and you-name-hims are the media face of Christianity. In fact, I hate it so much I refuse to accept it. Which is exactly NOT what giving up and publicly quitting being a Christian does. I get that she wants to indict these sucky Christians for their suckiness. But in the meantime, she grants that this is what Christianity really is, and must be, and all right-minded people must quit it because it will only ever be a religion of haters and that's what Jesus would do.

Actually I think Jesus stuck around and got crucified for it, but hey, that's a theological quibble for another day, right.

On my own Facebook page I groused, "why sell out and let the haters define Christianity? all she's doing is legitimizing the perception that this is in fact what Xny has to be. Lame."

Maybe that was a bit harsh. Susan Campbell's reaction is better: "Come sit by me, Sis. Anne. One can be a Christian and cling to none of those antis, I believe." (Amen and amen and amen!) Usually, I'm much more level-headed; I stick it out in my little corner of Christendom, but I have said (so often now it's practically become a mantra) that we need some people to go and some people to stay, and everyone should do what they do loudly. Well, you can't beat an Anne Rice Facebook statement picked up by HuffPo as a megaphone, so it seems like I am actually pissed off at someone conforming to my own advice. Which puts me in a bind. Mea culpa. So why is it that I still feel like what she is doing is misguided in some fundamental way? Why am I still pissed about it?

What makes Susan's reaction better and different from mine is that, I got pissed off at the idea of quitting--because I have chosen to not quit, despite the fact that I too feel very much an outsider in my own Christian tradition. I've decided not to quit because I am an outsider. It's the outsiders--the vampires and the cyborgs if you will--within the church that have the prophetic potential for changing the antis into pros. It's not so much that I'm angry that Anne Rice wants to publicly indict Christians for the unforgiveable anti-stances that have been so publicly and politically taken up by a very vocal some. I agree. It's that her chosen response to it indicts my chosen response to it as wrong: useless, hopeless, and worse, complicit rather than prophetic. As she sees it, her conscience cannot allow association with the horrors she sees perpetrated by those claiming Christianity. But me--I'm just not that interested in preserving the purity of my conscience. I'd rather spend my time trying to preserve other things.

Susan seems to agree with me that it's hasty generalization to conclude that all of Christianity is defined by the haters, but instead of getting pissed off and calling Anne "lame," she says "come sit by me." That's ever so much better.

[So, pssst, Sis. Anne, have you heard of The Episcopal Church? It officially welcomes you. Also, should you ever find yourself in Brooklyn, why not check out this awesome pro-gay, pro-feminist, pro-birth control (well, except for that one couple that doesn't seem to bother, and yeah, you know who I'm talkin bout, but hey, you make great babies), pro-Democrat, pro-secular-humanist, pro-science, pro-life church, CCfB...]

But in the meantime, use your megaphone while you exit--because we need this witness too. But I hope you decide to stick around. And, sorry for calling you "lame."

sci4min public lecture: Ted Peters, "The Lab & The Pew"

Dr. Ted Peters, Professor of Systematic Theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, will deliver the Science for Ministry Institute's inaugural semi-annual lecture. His talk, "The Lab and the Pew: the Place of Science in Pastoral Ministry," will be held Wednesday, November 4, at 7:30 pm in Stuart 6, and is free and open to the public.

Ted Peters is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and a prolific author on topics in systematic theology, religion and science, the evolution controversy, and bioethics. The Science for Ministry Institute is sponsored by the Erdman Center for Continuing Education and funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. It is a unique program that brings together pastor-scientist pairs from churches and other ministry contexts for educational experiences designed to promote productive theological engagement with the sciences at the local level.

the Beatles on scientific epistemology

c'mon...tell me you see it too...

"Nowhere Man"

He's a real nowhere Man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.

Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
Isn't he a bit like you and me?

Nowhere Man, just listen,
You don't know what you're missin',
All the world's at your command.

He's as blind as he can be,
Just sees what he wants to see,
Nowhere Man can you see me at all?

Nowhere Man, don't worry,
Take your time, don't hurry,
Leave it all 'till somebody else
lends you a hand.

Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
Isn't he a bit like you and me?

Nowhere man please listen,
you don't know what you're missin'
Nowhere Man, the world is at your command

He's a real Nowhere Man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.

publications

Today I got my copy of volume 12 of Stone-Campbell Journal, which includes my pretentiously entitled article "How to Talk about Religion and Science...Rationally." It's probably unfortunately not apparent how ironic I conceived that title to be, but in its original form the paper was a presentation for a session on "Re-imagining Faith and Reason" at the 2007 Christian Scholar's Conference--hence the "rationally." It's probably even less evident that the "how to" is meant ironically, though I dare to hope that reading the article makes that at least somewhat clear.

Also included in the volume is a review of the one-volume commentary from ACU Press, The Transforming Word, which includes my little essay on religion & science. The review singles out my essay, which would be a good thing, if the reviewer had in fact said something positive about it. Instead the essay is criticized for being too general to be helpful, which I personally find to be quite fair--that's pretty much exactly how I feel about it. Sigh.

And now to click over to the ol' CV and change the "forthcoming" to "12.1 (2009): 31-38."

how NOT to do it

Those of you interested in the religion and science stuff, don't miss this article from the New York Times (thanks to Brent who always leaves up the interesting articles in our browser for me to read).

So, this dude writes a dissertation that's "good science, great science" in paleontology, a dissertation that accepts completely and works within the current paradigm of millions of years of evolution in the fossil record...and yet personally is a young-earth creationist who sees no problem with juggling two completely incompatible paradigms in his academic and personal life.

Or should I say lives? Because, in the end, whatever this guy has, it's not a life. To be completely honest, perhaps he should have adopted a pseudonym for the dissertation and all academic work; then no one would have to deal with the utter confusion I feel when trying to apply the same nominal designation to the two lives this one bifurcated person is attempting to lead. What kind of intellectual integrity can you have, when you've only avoided lying to yourself and others by a strategy of self-induced religio-academic schizophrenia? How can what he produces be "good science," and how can what he professes be real faith?

See, people, this is just not how to do science and religion. I don't know what this guy is afraid of, but this non-solution he's adopted and trying to live with can, in my opinion, only be the result of fear. Maybe he's afraid of going to hell. Maybe he's afraid of his father and of disappointing his family. Maybe he's afraid there is no hell, and no God, and a fossil record millions of years old is a poor substitute for the security blanket of his faith, and he's not ready to give it up. Maybe he's afraid to realize that what he's got, in the end, is no kind of faith at all, really. Because if dead stuff in the ground can poof your faith away...well...what exactly is it that you think you're holding on to anyhow?

All these concerned professors interviewed in the article, with their varying opinions of this dude Marcus Ross, and their investment in "academic integrity" and institutional reputations, even the ones who know him and seem to like him and granted him a degree--none of these people see the real problem and underlying tragedy in this situation, and that is, someday this piss-poor strategy of living with contradiction is going to fail Marcus Ross, and he will be shattered, and someone is going to need to help him pick up the pieces. And what help with all these people be then? Even if they care enough about this guy to be around, none of them seem to have thought through the real issue of how religious belief intersects with science; the only ones who even address the issue seem to endorse the separatist strategy that's doomed to fail, because their only concern is that he produce "good science," despite his kooky religious convictions, regardless of the personal cost. He's gone further than I would have thought possible with this lamentable coping strategy--all the way to a Ph.D.--and the further he goes, the harder he'll fall.

May I ever so humbly recommend something for Marcus Ross' reading list? Give this a try: The Shaping of Rationality by J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, and follow it up with Alone in the World: Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology. Not that I'm partial or anything, but there's a guy who gets it right. And takes paleontology a hell of a lot more seriously than does Marcus Ross.