Facing Death at the Center of Life
6/14/2010 2:13:41 PM

I have placed on the website a couple articles about William Stringfellow. He was a significant figure for me in my intellectual development. When an undergraduate at St. Olaf College someone there believed it was important enough to provide a bus to another midwest Lutheran college to hear a lecture by Stringfellow. He talked about evil, with an example of Marilyn Monroe, not as a person but as a bodily image, how her image was used in the media to represent the perfection of beauty, and how when other women viewed that image they internalized it as a standard of beauty against which they imaged their own bodies negatively, thus rejecting themselves and their own bodies. Evil is that which leads us to reject ourselves, to think of ourselves lesser than we are able to think of ourselves as creatures made in the image of God. We let evil into our minds when we let the standards of this world negate us as unworthy.

Then, later, Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota, invited Stringfellow to speak at its commencement ceremony. A group of us who were going into the seminary went to hear him talk. He spoke to the graduates of death. I thought it was a strange topic for an occasion oriented to the future, facing death at the center of life seemed strange. Lutherans were somehow interested in this Episcopal layperson and lawyer speaking about death.

Part of the reason for this was probably that Stringfellow had gone to set up a legal practice in the midst of the black community of Harlem. He was speaking about death from the center of the city, where he saw the results of modern institutions in their total failure to deliver on peace and justice for all in the city in the 1960s. It was from Stringfellow that I received the sense that to really do the work of the gospel one needed to go into the midst of the city, as I later did during an internship on the west of Chicago at Community Lutheran Church. That was in 1965 just as Martin Luther King had decided to come to Chicago to begin his movement to end slums in which I was involved.

While still in college a group of us participated in a field trip to Washington D.C. to study politics and government there. After the conference we drove our car to New York City and one of us remembered that Stringfellow lived there, so we stopped and called him up and asked if we could visit. He invited us to his apartment where we spent a couple hours talking about death. He connected even sex with death. Through sex comes new life but for Stringfellow one could not understand sex without facing death.

Later after I got married it did seem that within the sex act one is spent, one gives up one's self and one's powers entirely to the other. I read Stringfellow's books and it was there that I came to see the radical nature of the affirmative word of God over against the false promises of the principalities and powers of this world, powers such as carried in the images such as Marilyn Monroe. Not that she is evil, not that her body is evil, but the way her image is used for evil which causes death of the human spirit.

It is only recently that I have become aware that Stringfellow was homosexual. We now live in a time, thankfully, when that fact is not something to hold against him. I can now also better understand his experience as one who was rejected and isolated and made to live as if dead. But it is even more amazing for me to recognize in this man the strength of faith which comes from a real hearing of the Word of God at the center of life.


See This Blog

Send Money to ACORN Now!
9/19/2009 4:52:44 PM

If you were walking down the street and you saw a friend of yours being viciously attacked you would do whatever you could to stop the attack and give aid to your friend. That is happening right now to an organization which is a friend and active participant in the movement for social justice in this country. Fox News is on the attack, it has picked up swords and is slashing away at ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Glenn Beck of Fox News has been successful in getting rid of Van Jones, was the key instigator of the right wing mob which marched in Washington D.C. last weekend, and is now continuing to attack ACORN. Republican leaders in Congress are now joining in the attack. It seems as if the Republican Party has become the party of hate. It has no real arguments for governmental policy, it now relies on generating hatred based on explicit racism. ACORN is a black-dominated group which has been very effective in working for such goals as affordable housing in the country. Karl Rove hated ACORN and tried to force state federal prosecutors to investigate their successful voter registration drives which brought the poor and minorities to the voting booth. Never has it been so clear that the Republican Party has become a party of the white South determined to make the hate and hostility of racism a central force in the politics of the country.

One way to support ACORN right now is to give your money, read about the Fox attack and then click on Donate in the upper menu to support this friend of social and economic justice. Only if people who reject racism in politics act strongly to support our friends will it be possible to overcome the forces of hate as now being expressed by Fox News.
See This Blog

Another Big Book on Justice
3/17/2009 4:10:50 PM

John Rawls was the last well known philosopher to write big books on justice and political liberalism, now Nicholas Wolterstorff has written another one, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, which is being urgently debated at The Immanent Frame, a discussion site sponsored by the Social Science Research Council. While Rawls grounds his conception of justice in liberal contract theory, Wolterstorff grounds his on a theory of basic rights which he believes can be drawn from the bible and theistic faith. The article accessed with the above link talks about the Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations and says it is based on some of the language of Catholic theology. And goes on to say:

Wolterstorff argues that the “conception of justice as inherent rights was not born in the fourteenth century or the seventeenth century.” Debunking the notion that natural rights are the outgrowth of philosophical nominalism and the European Enlightenment, he pronounces this narrative “indisputably false.”

Along the way, Wolterstorff critiques the notion that rights talk is an offshoot of modern individualism. Questioning Stanley Hauerwas’ claim that the language of rights “underwrites a view of human relations as exchanges,” he presents an account of justice that is irreducibly communal. Wolterstorff also takes on those philosophers who would ground their accounts of justice in the classical Greek and Roman descriptions of the well-lived life. In his judgment, such approaches fail to take into account the inherent worth of human beings.

Rather than treating rights as a modern invention, Wolterstorff traces them back to the early church fathers and the Bible itself. Noting the prominence of the “quartet of the vulnerable” throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, he sees the protection of “widows, orphans, resident aliens, and the poor” as central to the biblical text. Criticizing those who would “de-justicize” the New Testament, he contends it “is all about justice.” Citing the focus of the Gospels on “lifting up those at the bottom,” Wolterstorff celebrates Jesus of Nazareth’s “expanded vision of the downtrodden.”

My first reaction to this is "wow". This kind of talk turns a lot of stuff upside down, including the evangelicals or the religious right who like to pit their version of Christianity against rights talk, which they view as an invention by the secular humanists. And they don't much like the United Nations since they tend to believe that the United States has been uniquely given a divine mission.

Though Stanley Hauerwas has many followers, and there is something to be admired in his thought, he and the so-called "radical orthodoxy" movement, or the "emerging church" movement, have tended to see themselves as creating a separate space for themselves away from modernity rather than provide an interpretation which exposes it and still makes it possible to live fully within it and claim responsibility for it, as finally must be done if one is to be faithful to the breadth of the gospel. The Reformation taught us the church is not a cloister.

So, Wolterstorff says rights are based on the "worth of human beings." Hmmm, sounds sort of, well, logical. Who is it that doesn't believe that today? Maybe those folks who engaged in financial speculations not caring who it would hurt or neoconservatives who feel it is just fine to torture others. The whole economics profession does not have a very high regard for human beings, at least in stated theories. And too many business folks believe the "free market" should be free of any moral considerations as if the economy functions autonomously in its own space apart from society and any public responsibility. The business ethic seems to be: "If you can get by with it and it makes money just do it." At least that's what comes to mind right now in these times when we are becoming more and more aware of gross violations of public trust by those running the largest financial institutions in the country.

So, alas, here is another book to read. If you yourself read the book let me know. I would like to see some discussion about it here.
See This Blog