It's been awhile . . . A Rant

I guess sabbatical has officially "begun" -- the faculty from the School of Theology is meeting as I write this and I'm not there. I have an article to write on "Salvation" for an upcoming Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics today; I have books on seers in Greece and the Oxford Handbook of Papyrology in front of me and my thoughts are turning to Chronicles. We are going through transitions at church, trying to firm up our organizational structure. I will now take time at least twice a week to blog. I have a massive backblogging to do. Life continues its tremendous intensity.

So what better way to begin a sabbatical than with a rant . . .

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Posted by johnwright at 8:37 AM | Comments (0)

White Phosphorous: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

Perhaps nothing could represent my attempt to return to regular blogging than including a
(w)rant. Rants are my specialty, a response to the stupidity and the hyperreality of the world around us. Rants, if they weren't about things that really mattered, can amuse.

I've gotten away from ranting. I thought, however, when I read the Israeli official response to the accusation that they used white phosphorous against a UN secure station in Gaza that it deserved a rant.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:41 PM | Comments (0)

How about Semi-Occasional Rant?

In my book I adopt Steve Fowl's designation of "professional biblical scholarship" as a phrase to designate the reading of the biblical text within the American academy. I am a "professional biblical scholar" in many senses, and I love the work that I do as "one of those."

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Posted by johnwright at 1:47 PM | Comments (0)

God at the Ritz

It's been a long time since I've posted a rant. So here goes. . .

I still have stacks of papers to grade, end of the year church material, as well as a million little and big projects to pursue. But I have been missing my blog, the strange and often invisible cyber-conversations that take place. As usual, I'm reading many different sorts of things, with my mind a swirl. As many, I find myself caught in this horrible United States culture that is itself caught between a secularism that excludes God from the world (possibly allowing God to take up residence within individual spirituality) in order to protect humans beings from exploitation and death and a type of Protestant cultural Christian religiosity that seeks to keep God in the world by making God the patron God of a certain nostalgic Protestant evangelical hegemonic culture.

I am convinced that these are merely mirror images of each other. Certain socio-economic and political forces legitimate themselves by making themselves "other than" the "other" side, thus perpetuating the atrocities through the dialectic that they set up that goes no where. It is this refusal of the "right" and "left", this refusal to take sides, to take both sides and the same time as as rejecting both sides, that I think that we have to be about. We cannot succumb to the temptation of a Jim Wallis, to baptize a United States left in response to the Southern Baptist baptizing of a United States right. We have to think, not as members of a temporary, failing polity of the United States or any other contemporary nation-state, but as a part of the great cloud of witnesses of the saints who gather around us as we travel onward today.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:56 AM | Comments (2)

Nuclear Material

It is Holy Week, but I have to alert readers to continued distortion of news material in the US press -- or at least inform you of contradictory reports. Given the distortions of material that led to selling the Iraq War, similar material is now being sown. I don't know all the data, but poll today suggests that 64% of Americans support an air attack on Iran to prevent their "development of nuclear weapons." Previous comments from the week before suggest that the Bush regime is strongly considering using nuclear weapons in the attack. God forgive us all.

But today a report is making it out to the news through the State Department. If one reads closely, one sees how the state department spins in an alarmist manner -- and how the press mindlessly repeats the State Department line -- by extracting in a distorting way what the Iranian press conference actually said. The US news report makes it sound like the nuclear centrifuges are already built -- and thus gets the 16 day number; in fact, the Al-jazeera report, quoting from the press conference, makes it clear that the centrifuge facility is not built, but will be completed in a year -- a little more than 16 days. And rather than 50,000 centrifuges, they state publicly 3000 -- not reported in the real press conference.

It seems like the press just doesn't get it. The news then becomes massive alarmist headlines in the drudgereport.com. The Bush administration again is trying to successfully scare the US citizenship, perhaps to take the headlines away from the distortions of the controversy concerning the smearing of the truth from Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame and build a consensus based on "spin" like they did in Iraq. After I first wrote this post, I did discover that the NY Times actually has done some real reporting and has an excellent article on the real dynamics. It does not, however, address the State department's panic raising spinning.

In the extended entry is an except from this account, and then a little different account from Al-Jazeera. Finally, I want to add a piece from Dr. Juan Cole, an excellent commentator who is a Near Eastern Modern Historian, a professor at the University of Michigan.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:15 PM | Comments (0)

The Creed of MTD and the Apostle's Creed

As I've continued thinking about the way that the liberal political commitments shape institutional life in the United Staes with their own ideas of what the true, good, and beautiful entail, I recognize that it becomes very difficult to resist the temptation to be defined as against these currents in order to sustain the faithful witness of the church. If Christian Smith is correct in his analysis, an analysis consistent with scholars like Bill Cavanaugh in his essay in Radical Orthodoxy, liberalism exists in the formation of the nation-state as a parody of the church. Parodies only work if there is sufficient commonality with the "real thing" that one can see the humor in the parodic performance. What happens when no one can see that a parody is a parody? Yet when one is engaged in the performance of the real thing, how does one reject the parody without rejecting the truthfulness that the parody entails, and even, instructs?

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Posted by johnwright at 8:15 AM | Comments (2)

MTD and Ontology: Picking up the (W)rant Again

Alongside my (w)ranting, I've been reading from Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics, 1.1. I'm reading him with several questions in mind, but always amazed at his insight. He is very sophisticated in his rants -- you'd almost not know that he was ranting because of the acuity of his arguments. But as a specialist in (w)ranting, I can detect where he engages in such ranting. Behind his rants are exactly the type of convictions that drive what Smith has called Moral Therapeutic Deism. Whereas Barth doesn't quite see the anchorage of theological modernism and liberalism in political liberalism right up front, he does recognize that the church functions on a different ontology, a understanding about what really is, than that of the modernist world around. In other words, Kevin Timpe is (w)right, underneath the particular moralism (the Good) and the therapeutic (the Beautiful) of Moral Therapeutic Deism, is a particular Ontology -- an misunderstanding of God and Creation. MTD is based upon a Christian heresy.

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Posted by johnwright at 7:34 AM | Comments (2)

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism: (W)ranting Day 2

The second term in Smith's analysis of the American cultural form of "religosity" or "spirituality" is "therapeutic." The term in some ways goes back to philosophical schools of late antiquity. It was used often to describe salvation by the early Christians -- God's grace included a healing from sin. Yet I just violated what the term means in American discourse. We will speak of brokenness, but not sin. To mention sin is not nice; it is not therapeutic. It assumes a moral judgment that the moralism of niceness does not allow.

Within the shaping done by the institutions within American culture, we have learned a completely different moral discourse that determines what "therapy" is. Of course, the term has moved to the psychologist's couch rather than the pulpit, except where the pulpit provides a cheap psychological couch for a congregation.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:29 AM | Comments (2)

Beginning of Extended (W)rant -- with the help of Christian Smith

The last few days have been very full. My roommate from college, Joe Kennell, came by. We've only seen each other a few times over the past 20 some years. We watched the Ohio State/Texas football game and regressed to behaviors of 25 years ago! It was a good time. Also, "The Return of the Tropical Lawnmowers", the girl's rec soccer team, started the season with a 3-1 victory -- using some borrowed players . . . but hey, a win is a win, exceeding our victory total from two years ago.

But as I've thought, I haven't really had a good (w)rant -- not being able to keep up with focalized weekly wrants. SO I thought I'd begin my week grumpily. I thought that I'd start an extended (w)rant of my favorite kind -- the way that contemporary social, political, and economic institutions have (mal)formed the life of the church and individual believers within our contemporary liberal democratic society.

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Posted by johnwright at 8:29 AM | Comments (17)

Post-Modern Nihilism and the Bodies of the Poor in Death: The Church as a Burial Society

I woke very early this morning, praying for Mike Patterson. The funeral approaches tomorrow, and I feel that it is an important time for myself and the congregation -- and Mike's friends from the beach. The depth of Mike's witness, embedded in the life of the congregation, came to me from a scene on Sunday. Charlee, Mike's friend who opened her apartment to Mike to allow him to die in it, and allowed us in to suffer with him, attended our worship service on Sunday. Unbeknownst to me, it was the first time that she had ever been in a Christian worship service.

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Posted by johnwright at 7:50 AM | Comments (2)

Why Does It Take the non-mainstream Media?

When I watch television news, the only news I watch is the Daily Show. Fake news is more truthful than real news, so it seems these days.

Kathy is afraid that I am "obsessed" by war. Maybe I am. I try not to spend too much time, but my friend, Simon Harak, SJ, has deeply involved me in his efforts to save the people of Iraq for over fifteen years now. If nothing else, it is out of loyalty to him and friendship and admiration that I watch. Simon, whom I met in Greek class at Notre Dame, has given of himself heroically to stop the slaughter of innocents in Iraq. It is a shame that we live in a world where such activity is seen as being "against war", rather than for peaceableness. It shows that we live in a world where violence is seen as the real, from which peace is an aberration.

Of course, Christians believe otherwise, though it is often hard to tell from our history. Christians believe that God IS peace, in the mutual love of the Father, Son, and Spirit, that is God. For Christians it is not "against" anything to speak truthfully, for truthful speech is what we are called to in order to reflect the Peaceableness that is God.

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Posted by johnwright at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)

Dangerous Weekend

I haven't been very good about regularly ranting -- on my blog at least. Yet this weekend provides an excellent chance to get caught up. This is one of the most dangerous weekends of the year for Christians in the United States -- not merely because of the increased rate of traffic fatalities. It is a weekend when the full parody of the church that is the United States exerts its moral-shaping power to turn us into citizens of a particular nation-state through participation in its consumerist, capitalist economic system, thus coopting our bodies from our places within our local congregations and coopting our congregations from their place within the church catholic to supportive civil societies within the United States.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:35 AM | Comments (3)

What you didn't hear on CNN

Okay, I don't have much time -- for some reason the papers are not grading themselves. But the corporate news in the US has been so irresponsible this last week, that I have to share a memo published in Great Britain over the weekend. It is a secret memo, from a "Matthew Rycroft" from 23 July 2002 concerning "Iraq: Prime Minister's Meeting, 23 July". It has gotten Tony Blair additionally disgraced, but has not been picked up by the US media.

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Posted by johnwright at 3:10 PM | Comments (1)

Mini-rant on the American Media (so-called leftist version)

Today the San Diego Union-Tribune published an essay from the Roll Call's Executive Editori, Morton Kondrake. The editorial compares Pope Benedict XVI and Tom DeLay as similar phenomena. To compare the morally corrupt political extortionist, Tom Delay, with Benedict XVI shows his utter ignorance and understanding of the life of the church.

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Posted by johnwright at 9:22 AM | Comments (2)

Wright's Weekly Wrant

I have been instructed by Tony, my youngest son, to include a weekly feature -- a rant, most likely because I am so practiced at them. So hopefully every Saturday morning I can share the joy of ranting with you. This week, the rant is under the "why don't folk get it?" category. On this, the second anniversary of the unjust invasion of Iraq in which many continue to die (see www.antiwar.com for yesterday's reported casualties), I'd like to share an article that I received from my friend, Father Simon Harak, of the War Resister's League. It is a moving piece, a subtle rant, the type that I just do not do very well. So I'll share others in the fine art of "subtle rant".

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Posted by johnwright at 8:16 AM | Comments (1)