Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Science and Orthodoxy - Lazar Puhalo

Reality at all levels and in every dimension is a mystery. I will not suggest that the world which we experience with our own senses is not reality; nevertheless, what we perceive is the surface of reality, which is penetrated only with great effort over time. The more deeply we penetrate into this perceived reality, the greater the mystery becomes.

Mystery is, in many ways, what reality consists in. It seems notable to me that, from the point of view of modern physics, Werner Heisenberg tells us that we have exceeded the capabilities of human language, and we resort to mathematical formalisms to express what is beyond the capacity of human concepts and normal language to express.

In the same manner St Gregory of Nyssa tells us that, in discussing the Trinity, we have exceeded the capacities of human language. He says that the language about the Trinity is only the best we can do with our limited human language to describe a relationship. Our explanation of the Trinity is not concrete; it is, in a manner of speaking, a metaphor about a Divine Relationship.

Thus, in both theology and modern science, we find ourselves treading in forbidden territory. It is somewhat as Pseudo-Dyonesios says: "As we plunge into that darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running out of words, but actually speechless and unknowing." (St Dionysios the Areopagite.)

Nils Bohr gives an link between our Orthodox approach to theology and quantum physics when he says: "The purpose of science is not to know the essence of nature, but to discover what can be known about nature." He reminded us that science is a method of exploration, not the final arbiter of reality. Science is not an alternative to revelation. 

This same dignified modesty is expressed in the Orthodox Christian concept of apophatic theology. Apophatic theology also acknowledges that doctrinal and poetic formulations are secondary worlds, our best models. They are more or less adequate in helping us give words to and have concepts for our encounter with ultimate reality. Since no one can know or comprehend the essence of God, even the dogma of the Trinity must be understood as a secondary world, a conceptual framework of enormous importance and clarity that is the best we can do in the framing of language for the experience of the ineffable, but it is, nevertheless, a model of reality.

When we assume that we have a concrete definition of the Divine, we step onto the path of those who built the Tower of Babel. We are not seeking to know the essence of the divine, but only to discern that which can be known about the Divine. We have a bit by revelation, and we have tried to placed that revelation into doctrinal formulations much as physicists have tried to express the quantum in mathematical formulations. In both one and the other, we have constructed the best models of reality that we can; we should not think that either they or us have understood, defined and explained reality in any concrete terms. We are, at least in this, on common ground.

In Christ, Vladika Lazar.

Imagining a Future for Israel / Palestine - with Jeff Halper

Israel at a Crossroad: Where To From Here? with Jeff Halper

David Cayley of CBC Ideas for over 30 years Presents… - by Wayne Northey

First posted HERE (Wayne Northey's home page).

Greetings all. 

About 25 years ago, I wrote to David Cayley in response to a CBC Ideas series broadcast on the program by that name. (CBC is Canada’s public broadcasting network). It was a series of interviews with noted Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie. I wrote to Cayley, expressing my appreciation. That began a friendship that has endured.

Cayley retired in 2012.

I amongst others (I’m sure) encouraged him to make his hundreds of hours of CBC Ideas programmes accessible to the world, since some but most were inaccessible on the CBC Ideas website. He has begun that project that may be found here: David Cayley

He has indicated a willingness to lecture out here this year, likely under the auspices of the University of the Fraser Valley. We’ll see.

He formed a close friendship with Ivan Illich many years ago. Two series of interviews are on his website already. But Cayley’s output has been wide-ranging and massive: 24 hours for instance on How To Think About Science, and 12 hours total on a series initially planned as a single unit, but divided into two: After Atheism and The Myth of the Secular.

Eventually, Cayley intends to make the entire corpus of his work over 30 years available. He is a generous person. There is no cost to sit back and enjoy. A friend called the website a (rare) “treasure trove.” I so heartily agree. For thinkers I have read, he takes their thought and while not “dumbing down” (well, maybe he really does for me!), makes it even clearer. That is a unique gift. Another so gifted comes to mind: C.S. Lewis.

Pleasant listening – and interacting.

Wayne
P.S. Here is a brief online profile by him: David Cayley

Politics and Religion in the Thought of Ivan Illich - David Cayley

This paper was prepared for a symposium held at the Oakland High School for the Arts under the auspices of California Governor Jerry Brown in the summer of 2013.  The occasion was the publication of Beyond Economics and Ecology, a collection of Illich's essays on these themes, edited and introduced  by Sajay Samuel.  The conference was called After the Crisis: The Thought of Ivan Illich Today...

POLITICS AND RELIGION IN THE THOUGHT OF IVAN ILLICH

The heading of today’s session is politics and religion, so I’d like to begin by reflecting on these terms, both of which can be extremely slippery. I know they have practical, everyday meanings –  we will usually agree in ordinary talk that what goes on in churches and mosques, synagogues and temples is religion, while what is discussed in legislatures and government offices, is politics – but if we inquire a little more deeply, they become quite difficult to distinguish.  One of the hallmarks of the modern age was the distinction between a private sphere in which one was free to cultivate one’s religion, and a public realm governed by the canons of secular reason.   This regime began to take shape at the beginning of the modern age, roughly the 16th century, and it’s arguable that before that time there was no such thing as religion in the sense in which the word is used today.  Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the great Canadian scholar of religion writing in the 1960’s says: “religion as a discrete category of human activity separable from culture, politics and other areas of life is an invention of the modern West.” Before the 16th century - at the earliest - the word can denote a virtue, a disposition, a habit – a practice let’s say - but not the adoption of a set of propositions or beliefs as “my religion.”  In fact Cantwell Smith goes on to say that “the rise of the concept of religion is in some ways correlated with a decline in the practice of religion itself.”   (Just as an aside here some of the slipperiness of the word religion can be seen in that quote, in which Smith, having just said that religion is not a transhistorical essence but a modern invention then goes on to speak of “religion itself” as if it were just such an essence. This shows, I think, the difficulty we still have in speaking of these matters.)  By the beginning of the eighteenth century, according to the historian of Christianity John Bossy, the idea of religion is well established.  “By 1700,” he writes, “the world was full of religions, objective social and moral entities characterized by system, principles and hard edges.”   And religion once distinguished from politics became in many ways its scapegoat:  the conflicts between the nascent national states of the 16th and 17th centuries, to take just one example, became known as the wars of religion, when they could just as plausibly – more plausibly - have been called the wars of state-making, and taken as illustrating the arbitrary and violent character of state power, rather than the violent and arbitrary character of religious belief.   

One could say a lot more about the segregation of the secular from the religious in the modern world, and about the fateful imperial reorganization of other civilizations and cultures along these lines during the colonial era, but the point that I want to make here is that this whole mythology has come undone in our time – undone to the extent that, in some circles at least, one hardly needs to argue the point any more. 

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Is Sacramentalism the Answer to Secularism? - D.L. Jones

The Eighth Day Institute recently held their annual symposium in Wichita, Kansas on the topic - Whatever Happened to Wonder? The Recovery of Mystery in Secular Age. Dr. James K.A. Smith and Rod Dreher were two of the invited speakers at this conference. It was a beautiful event, as all the Eight Day events are. I recommend everyone attend this event at least once in their lifetime and give their patronage as often as they can to Eighth Day Books. It is truly a pilgrimage experience. Refer to Rod Dreher's good posts here and here writing about his experiences at this event.

 

There is a growing chorus of scholars across the ecumenical boundaries (Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant) that are making the argument that sacramentalism, a sacramental worldview which recognizes the centrality of the liturgy, as the antidote that counteracts the effects of the poison or disease of secularism. Several ecumenical great minds, thinkers, and writers are making this argument in a variety of different ways who include at least the following intellectual cadre: Brad S. Gregory (Roman Catholic), David Bentley Hart (Eastern Orthodox), Hans Boersma (Protestant), and James K.A. Smith (Protestant).

 

A lot of good historical as well as philosophical and theological points feed into their argument that sacramentalism is the answer to secularism. Nominalism which is a reduction of reality, a flattening of categories, is no doubt one of the root causes of our secular Western viewpoint. Therefore it makes sense that a recognition of the sacred would seem to get at the root of this disease. I understand this point and largely agree with it. Allow me though to ask some questions and bring an important perspective into this dialog that desperately needs to be considered and judged by these men as well as by others good thinkers and folks who are intrigued by this conversation.

 

I find far too much sentimentality and naivety without critical judgment in their argument that sacramentalism is the answer to secularism. As a person who has lived in both the Catholic and Orthodox world over the last 20 years allow me to inject some reality. Please do not misunderstand my own position though, I agree with them as you will see below but some important arguments, nuances and considerations need to be made to get at this complex problem of how sacramentalism relates to and interacts with secularism.

Pure Act of Being - Hymn and Commentary by Martin Little

Hymn: Pure Act of Being

Pure act of Being: our Lord the Transcendent
Imagination spills forth from your hands
Pure act of working your joy to fulfilment:
Breathing your image in woman and man.

Celestial poetry of cosmos and cradle
Transposing eternity’s rhythm and rhyme
Distilling all hope to a cry in a stable:
A single bright essence in space and in time.

Jesus, your love is a draught for the thirsty
In fascination we sip your life-words
Renewing our vision with new eyes of mercy
Lifting our heads to consider the birds.

Abundant River, in ceaseless procession
Blessing, affirming: the Dove and the Voice
Jesus, self-emptying Servant of Heaven -
Sovereign, submits to humanity’s choice.

Holy Community, bliss undivided
Thrust wide your arms on our cruelty’s cross
All our black thoughts to your body confided
Die with our sin and rise new from the dross.

Pure act of following where Jesus beckons
Sweated with doubt and Gethsemane fear
Defeating with weakness what power misreckons
On to Eternity’s Jubilee year.

Commentary: Composing Theology

I’m a worship leader – it’s my job to help the church to praise God.  Debates about how best to do this are as old as the hills, but the current conversations around worship have become rather dull terrain.  In many lively churches - my own is fairly typical - ‘contemporary’ worship has largely won the day.  The urgency of ‘relevance’ in worship for the unchurched majority has usurped concerns for the tradition and a certain kind of artistry in both form and content.  In some ways, this has been a necessary corrective to a mothballed and complacent hymnody that no longer speaks to the man in the street; I have argued this case myself more than once.  However, in several corners there seems to be growing sense that the winning of the ‘worship wars’ by a genre of simple (sometimes simplistic) Scripture-toting soft-rock songs has been something of a hollow victory.

Why are we fighting about it? 

Who is the ‘man in the street’ really anyway? 

Have we even bothered to ask ‘him’ what he is capable of comprehending?

Review of Donald Gutstein's 'Harperism' - by Henry Smidstra

Harperism: How Stephen Harper and His Think Tank Colleagues Have Transformed Canada.  Donald Gutstein. (Toronto, James Lorimer & Company Ltd. Publishers, 2014.) A review by Henk Smidstra.

There is a saying that a frog sitting in a pot of water heating very slowly on the stove will not jump out, but get slowly cooked, incrementally.  Harper has taken the work of heavily funded political-economic think tanks, to made deep lasting changes to Canadian social-economic-political thought; incrementally he has changed the very nature of the state according to SFU professor Donald Gutstein. He writes that the utopian dream of this neo-liberal ideology, is, “…a state governed by market transactions and not by democratic practices” (p.12).  Gutstein has written a well-documented, readable, short book (249 pages); its purpose according to Gutstein is to reveal how Harper has earned his “ism” in that, Harpers “…program will outlast his years as prime minister” (p. 16).  The book is an expose of the ideation and strategy, quite disturbing to me, upon which Harperism is built.

Reviews of W.T. Cavanaugh's 'The Myth of Religious Violence' and 'Migrations of the Holy' - by Wayne Northey

Book Review of Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church, William T. Cavanaugh, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011, 200 pages.

My thanks to Oxford University Press for a review copy of the first book, and to Eerdmans for a review copy of the second.

I learned of the first publication and that reviewed below in following through on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s “After Atheism” Ideas five-part series by David Cayley. In After Atheism: New Perspectives on God & Religion, Part 3 - William Cavanaugh, the author interviewed mainly discusses his book Migrations of the Holy (2011), reviewed below. It in some ways follows through on the first book under review.

This book could have been discussed in the second related series of seven broadcasts by David Cayley entitled “The Myth of the Secular”. (By the way, David Cayley is in the process of uploading all his CBC broadcasts at David Cayley – something a friend called a (I’ll add “rare”) “treasure trove.”)

The book’s title is designedly provocative. In the West, everyone knows that “religion” (Christianity) historically, and in resurgent worldwide Islam, is indisputably violent. Cavanaugh asserts nonetheless that the claim that “religion is … essentially prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of the liberal nation-state (p. 4).”

Conventional wisdom implies that “religions” such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism over against “ideologies and institutions” such as nationalism, Marxism, capitalism, and liberalism, are “essentially more prone to violence – more absolutist, divisive, and irrational – than the latter.” In response, the author is blunt: “It is this claim that I find both unsustainable and dangerous (p. 6).”

“Violence” in relation to those cited in the book “generally means injurious or lethal harm and is almost always discussed in the context of physical violence, such as war and terrorism (p. 7).” Not only does the author use the term “myth” to indicate the claim is false, “but to give a sense of the power of the claim in Western societies (p. 6).” The claim seems a given and inevitable – and therefore difficult to refute.

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Who Would Jesus Shoot? Debate on Just War vs. Nonviolence

A respectful debate on Christian just war vs Christian pacifism. Thanks to Azariah France-Williams, who attended the debate.

https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/who-would-jesus-shoot

Prof. Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Christchurch College, Oxford, and author of 'In Defence of War'.

Prof. Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld, Mennonite theologian, Professor Emeritus at Conrad Grebel University College, and author of 'Jesus and the Subversion of Violence'.

 

Russell Brand, Fox News and Charlie Hebdo

I am not Charlie: a Christian response to the killings in Paris - Bob Ekblad

I was deeply troubled by news of this week’s killings of journalists at Charlie Hebdo, France’s beloved satirical newspaper, by two French Muslim brothers of Algerian descent, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi. I’ve been haunted by footage I saw of these gunmen’s shooting of a police officer in cold blood on a Parisian street where our good friends live and where we regularly stay. The killing of four hostages in the Jewish kosher grocery store by another jihadist activist, followed by the French police’s shooting of all three gunmen, has made this a traumatic week for France and the world.

Should we be surprised by these killings? Offense, resentment, and shame carried by many young Muslim men and others on the margins today incite rage. In this case, the rage is directed against the dishonoring gaze and mocking words of journalism that appears to consider nothing sacred, except free speech.

In the twenty years of my chaplaincy ministry in our local jail and in prisons around the world, I have witnessed the consequences of the exercise of free speech over and over. Exercising your freedom of speech to say whatever you want in a prison context (and many other places too) is possible, but it is not advised, especially if your words increase offense and lead to a sense of powerlessness and shame when the offended one may not have an effective way to respond. If you disrespect someone’s mother, girlfriend, or even fellow gang member, you will likely pay the consequences at some point. 

Cartoons of a naked Prophet Mohammed published by Charlie Hebdo, as well as images of the victims of Israel’s recent bombing of Gaza or America’s tortured detainees add to many Muslim people’s experience of being disrespected by the powerful status quo. Chérif and Saïd Kouachi sought to vindicate the honor of Mohammed (and his followers).

Mercy-Love - Eric H Janzen

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus begins with a list of blessings. Among these, we find a call to mercy coupled with a promise: Joyful are the merciful, for they shall be rejoicing daily in the mercy they receive. Mercy is important. Perhaps, more important than many realize. Mercy is at the core of the Gospel, grasping hands with love. Gospel mercy is the expression of God’s love revealed to us through Jesus. When we lose sight of mercy’s central place in our faith, we find ourselves in danger of no longer understanding Jesus, the cross, and the resurrection. Mercy is so powerful that within it is contained the power to change the world. It altered the course of human history as it was displayed in Christ’s ministry, death, and resurrection.

Jesus didn’t raise a new, unheard of theme when he pronounced the blessing in the Sermon on the Mount. Mercy is a theme running like a river through history. From the moment of the Fall right up to today, God has been on a mission of mercy. Throughout the Bible, we find God reaching out in compassion and kindness to a violent, unjust, and angry world. A world in decay because of Sin needs mercy to move it towards life and healing. Mercy is more than some benevolent concept…it is more than good, optional advice. For the follower of Jesus, mercy is a way of living, a way of being. Lest we be careless, let us also admit this: mercy is not easy.

Review of N.T. Wright's 'Simply Good News' - by Caleb Miller

NT Wright is one of those authors of whom I tell people “buy everything he writes”. Not necessarily because I agree with every assertion he makes, but the level of scholarship with which each topic he discusses is approached. Simply Good News is no different. Those familiar with Wright’s work in the Christian Origins series (Fortres press) who found him a little too verbose would do well to grab all his Harper One titles. Wright lays out simply and systematically why the Christian message-rightly presented- is in fact, good news. This short book took me less than a day to read, but will likely take me much longer to fully absorb. In summary, Wright’s got another masterful book under his belt with Simply Good News.

Thomas Merton: Wild Bird - Ron Dart

      Elias becomes his own wild bird, with God in the center,

      His own wide field which nobody owns,

      His own pattern, surrounding the Spirit

      By which he is himself surrounded:

      For the free man’s road has neither beginning nor end.

                               Elias--Variations on a Theme 

                              The Strange Islands (1952)

    non omnis moriar (I shall not altogether die)

I was, initially, drawn to the life and writings of Thomas Merton in the 1970s when I was given a copy of The Seven Story Mountain. I was less taken, at the time, by some of the reactionary content then by the energy, momentum and, obvious, honest searching spirit of the dramatic journey. I had grown weary at the time of a form of philosophy that was hyper-rationalist and left me dry as Ezekiel’s parched bones. I found in Merton’s search a kindred spirit, a pilgrim that reached out his hands, like Virgil, to the furthest shore. There was in Merton a questing and passionate soul who pointed to places I faintly saw yet longed to see in a fuller way.

I was so smitten by Merton that when I did a Master’s Degree in Christian Studies at Regent College (Vancouver, British Columbia), I wrote fifteen essays on Merton. It was Merton’s turn to contemplative theology that held me. I had studied Biblical, historic and systematic

theology, but the more meditative and contemplative approach that the Christian mystics heralded and held high was something that charmed and won me. Merton was, in many ways, my portal and guide into the fullness of the Christian contemplative tradition—I simply followed his many leads, pointers and time tried cairns.