Insights
The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary
SPRING 2024
Irizarry • Barnett • Nanko-Fernández Rodríguez • Medina • Hylen • Greenway
Insights
The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary
Spring 2024
Volume 139 Number 2
Editor: William Greenway
Editorial Board: Gregory L. Cuéllar, Crystal Silva-McCormick, Jeff Sanchez
The Faculty of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Sarah Allen
Margaret Aymer
Patricia Bonilla
Rodney A. Caruthers II
Gregory L. Cuéllar
Ángel J. Gallardo
William Greenway
Carolyn Browing Helsel
Philip Browning Helsel
José R. Irizarry
David H. Jensen
Donghyun Jeong
Bobbi Kaye Jones
Timothy D. Lincoln
Jennifer L. Lord
Ludwig B. Noya
Song-Mi Suzie Park
Cynthia L. Rigby
Crystal Silva-McCormick
Asante U. Todd
Eric Wall
Andrew Zirschky
Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary is published two times each year by Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, 100 East 27th Street, Austin, TX 78705-5797. e-mail: wgreenway@austinseminary.edu
Web site: austinseminary.edu
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Some previous issues of Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary, are available on microfilm through University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 (16 mm microfilm, 105 mm microfiche, and article copies are available). Insights is indexed in Religion Index One: Periodicals, Index to Book Reviews in Religion, Religion Indexes: RIO/RIT/IBRR 1975- on CD-ROM, Religious & Theological Abstracts, url:www.rtabstracts.org & email:admin@rtabstracts.org, and the ATA Religion Database on CD-ROM, published by the American Theological Library Association, 300 S. Wacker Dr., Suite 2100, Chicago, IL 60606-6701; telephone: 312-454-5100; e-mail: atla@atla.com; web site: www.atla.com; ISSN 1056-0548.
The views and opinions expressed in our published works are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary or its Editors.
COVER: “Virtually yours, Helmut” by Darién F. Irizarry: digital photograph ©2024.
Minerva Garza Carcaño, Yolanda M. Santiago Correa, John Harrison, Carlos L. Malave
Resacralizing the Other at the US-Mexico Border: A Borderland Hermeneutic, by Gregory L. Cuéllar, reviewed by Néstor Medina
Jeong, reviewed by Susan B. Hylen
INTRODUCTION
Seventy-five years ago, on a snowy January in 1949, Professor H. Richard Niebuhr delivered his “Christ and Culture” lectures at Austin Seminary. The book was published in 1951, and as President Robert Shelton wrote in his “Introduction” to the Fall 1999 Insights, which celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the lectures, many regard Christ and Culture as a classic not because “it demonstrates no shortcomings”—indeed Notre Dame Professor George Marsden’s commemoration in that Insights begins with serious criticism of Niebuhr’s categories—but “because it addresses…issues that have been critical from the beginning of Christianity.”
With such a critical but appreciative spirit, Austin Seminary President José Irizarry decided this issue of Insights should honor Niebuhr’s concern that Christians reflect carefully upon culture. Irizarry, concerned in particular about the many pastors he knows who have been hurt by the deleterious effects of cultural acceleration, explores ways churches might help counteract “hyper-culture.” In addition, St. Louis University’s Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, while wholly alive to John Calvin’s “rigid orthodoxy and authoritarian tendencies,” finds in Calvin rich resources for “transforming ‘human life in and to the glory of God.’” The Catholic Theological Union’s Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández explores baseball, with all its “joys, disappointments, dysfunctions, and ambiguities” as “more than a game.” Villanova’s Christopher B. Barnett offers a subtle reflection upon the potential for cinema to transcend “kitsch” and become “hierophanous—a manifestation of the divine.”
Our distinguished Pastors’ Panel includes reflections by United Methodist San Francisco Area Bishop Minerva Garza Carcaño; Yolanda M. Santiago Correa, Program Coordinator of the Hispanic House of Studies at Duke; Reverend John
Harrison, pastor of Nacoochee Presbyterian Church; and Reverend Carlos L. Malave, President of the Latino Christian National Network. This issue also includes celebratory reviews of new books from our Bible faculty, Gregory Cuéllar and Donghyun Jeong, by the University of Toronto’s Néstor Medina and Emory’s Susan E. Hylen. Finally, in our regular “Christianity and Culture” column, I follow President Irizarry’s counsel and, with an eye to the future, look to the past for wisdom from the Jewish and Christian traditions about state response to violence.
That 1999 issue of Insights, which includes eyewitness accounts of Niebuhr from APTS giants David Stitt, Ellis Nelson, and James Wharton, remains fascinating (it is available online). On the masthead of that Insights, for years previous and up to last Fall’s 2023 issue, one will find the name of our newly retired Director of Communications, Randal Whittington.
For more than a quarter century, Randal was the one constant in the Insights editorial room, participating in all aspects of crafting, editing, and producing each issue of Insights and taking the lead in selecting the cover art. On behalf of the faculty of Austin Seminary, it is my honor to express our profound gratitude to Randal for how she shaped and guided our faculty journal for more than a quarter century.
William Greenway Professor of Philosophical Theology Editor, Insights: The
Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary
Christ-endom and hyper-Culture
José R. Irizarry
In the severe winter of 1949, as H. Richard Niebuhr arrived in Austin to deliver a lecture on the relation between church and culture, the Freedom Train was arriving in Washington, DC after two years of traveling across the nation proclaiming a new American gospel in line with John Dewey’s famed secular assessment that being a prophet of the times consists of carrying out a message stressing the ‘religious’ meaning of democracy.1 In particular, building national confidence in post-war America demanded the affirmation of the ‘natural’ freedoms of each citizen, so the Freedom Train made stops in almost every state in the nation, showing the public original versions of The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other documents which told a story of the emergence and solidification of a distinctive American character, a character worth preserving with religious zeal. Among the Trustees of the American Heritage Foundation who made this project possible with both financial and intellectual support was a theologian, Richard’s brother Reinhold Niebuhr.
In Austin and Washington on January 22, 1949, the Niebuhr brothers encouraged a common idea: a picture of American culture as a totalizing body of ideas and
The Reverend Dr. José Ramon Irizarry became Austin Seminary’s tenth president in June 2022. Since 2016, Irizarry has served as Vice President of Education at the Board of Pensions of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). A scholar in the field of practical theology, Irizarry taught at Villanova University and has held teaching and administrative positions at various educational and theological institutions, including The University of Cambridge (Visiting Fellow), Lutheran School of Theology, the Pacific School of Religion, and McCormick Theological Seminary.
values. This concept of a unified culture is a product of the time that framed the Niebuhrs' view of Christian responsibility toward the forging of a liberal unified civilization, the American ideal of e pluribus unum. 2
The early twentieth-century ideal of a unified culture, as far as that unity traded upon the erasure of diverse identities, has come to be seen as problematic. Indeed, a common critique of Niebuhr’s work is his inability to see cultural diversity as a noteworthy variable when considering the subject of culture as a defining social construct. This objection to his work has emerged from a multicultural consciousness of the value of identity politics and the politics of representation that has become widely recognized in the wake of the successes of the Civil Rights movement. Even in 1949, however, Harvard anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn was already problematizing this monolithic ideal when he concluded:
The prime problem of the century is indeed whether the world order is to be achieved through the domination of a single nation that imposes its lifeways upon all others or through some other means that does not deprive the world of the richness of different cultures. World uniformity in culture will mean an aesthetic and moral monotony.3
I would also question, like others have before, Niebuhr’s use of a Christological title to reference an ecclesiological category. His conflation of Christ and church, making them coterminous, implies that it is Christ himself who, through the agency of the church, relates to culture. This prominence of the Christological title to imply the authority of the institutional church in devising its relation to culture runs the risk of promoting a message of Christian exceptionalism and even extreme forms of Christian nationalism. The conflation of Christ and church as categories of analysis affords the church some level of abstraction vis a vis the concreteness of culture.
In order to transcend an abstract view of the church and seek a cultural understanding of the church as a group of religious actors creating social discourse, symbols, and meaning, I opt to recover “christendom” as a unit of analysis, for it implies a pluralistic society that remains responsive to the Christian worldview and it is a predominant cultural model in the United States of America (civil religion) and Latin America (popular religion). I use the lowercase “c” when referring to the term “christendom” since I am not implying a dominant and determinative politicocultural establishment (Christendom), but an influential, yet at times concealed cultural model affecting social thought and behavior.
“Cultural models” are, according to Giovanni Bennardo and Victor De Munck, mental representations shared by members of a group that shape people’s interpretative stances and communicative behaviors. While the church relates to culture in nonnormative ways and Christianity is no longer an establishment religious tradition in America, the discourse, symbols, and meanings of a christendom cultural model continue to impinge on the ways we engage matters of politics, jurisprudence, health, communication, and even human relations, so “christendom” is a good model for explaining how people respond and address culture in the context of a
religiously diverse and institutionally adverse society.
Furthermore, while we might consider many aspects of culture when discussing the church’s relation to it, I will focus here on “hyper-culture,” in particular on the way our cultural experience of time is defined by unprecedented acceleration levels affecting the way people and institutions participate in forging social life. The foundational documents of American culture on board a “Freedom Train” intended to promulgate fixed and permanent values are emblematic, for the speed and power of that locomotive signified the beginning of a technologically driven acceleration of time which threatens to derail any tie to permanence.
Christendom and the challenges of acceleration
After several years of working with Puerto Rican migrants in New York City in the 1950s, a young Austrian priest who understood the church was a cultural form that necessitated the incorporation of various models of value and meaning, including language, ethnic background, and customs, moved to Puerto Rico to immerse himself in the culture of his parishioners. He came to understand much more than the character and personality of the Puerto Rican subject. He discovered how processes of colonization imposed structural changes in education, work patterns, habits of hygiene, and health conventions. Having experienced the frantic circulation of trains and cars in the bustling Big Apple, he may also have been impacted by a tranquil coastal town where few cars moved between bicycles and horse carriages. No doubt, the Puerto Rico experience gave this young man, the internationally famed scholar Ivan Illich, the perfect case study to challenge the ideas of schooling, healthcare, and transportation that permeated the discourse of progress and socio-economic development in American culture.
In his Energy and Equity, Illich worries an overindustrialized society will require more energy to achieve higher degrees of acceleration in production, shortening the time between people’s needs and the satisfaction of those needs.4 Illich prophesizes a future where communications, technology, and work habits will accelerate the pace of life to unprecedented levels. According to Illich, at risk is not only our personal well-being but also our social relations, community, and Christian witness.
In 1998, Stephen Bertman coined the term “hyper-culture” to define time contraction as the main feature of contemporary life and argues this contraction has resulted in a “subconscious acceptance of artificial flux as a natural part of reality,” a “hunger to experience the fleeting moment,” an “unnatural acceleration of our behavior and expectations,” and a “speed-driven metamorphosis of our outer and inner selves.”5 What is unique here is his depiction of the subjectification of the transformation so that we come to see change as a natural way of being in a world where mind, body, and human interactions are assimilated into an externally regulated pattern of time, turning us into fast-tracked individuals seeking forms of gratification that will constantly elude us.
In the hyper-culture, our very bodies are culturally shaped. This is a new insight since culture, according to traditional understandings, is what humans create,
separate from the organic evolution of the natural world. In the hyper-culture of contemporary life, the organism alters its ‘natural rhythms’ to align with cultural exigencies for rapid change and acceleration. In “Expose thyself: On the digitally revealed life,” Christine Rosen argues that “our bodies process different emotions at different speeds, while technology favors one velocity: now.”6 She warns that “if we spend most of our time mediating our emotions through technologies and platforms such as messaging and Twitter, we might lose the opportunities for reflecting on our feelings.”7
Rosen is concerned that the constant need to obtain satisfaction in the present places our bodies in a race to get immediate gratification. We need all information now; we need the affirmation of others with a quick ‘like’ now, we need the most advanced technological gadget now, and we need to be accessible to others now. In extreme cases, we need the appropriate cosmetic product or surgical procedure to preserve our bodies in the now, resisting the looks of naturally aging bodies. Keeping these culturally imposed needs unfulfilled causes the body to react adversely, the same way it responds when basic physiological needs like hunger and thirst are not properly satisfied, so now high stress, anxiety, exhaustion, sleeping disorders, and new immunodeficiencies are common parts of our contemporary therapeutic discourse.
In the hyper-culture our body is conditioned by temporal immediacy. This nowness accelerates our relationship to time and its use. Our bodies become dependent on objects of immediate gratification and orientation, whether cell phones, hand-held devices, virtual reality headsets, global positioning systems, or a smart speaker (Siri, Alexa)—appendages without which we now cannot imagine our existence. When the body adapts to these time-oriented needs and finds assistive technologies to satisfy them, we experience behavior that characterizes those who surrender direct contact with the world and other human beings. By 1974, Illich had acknowledged a culture where bodies started relinquishing their metabolic capacities as they became dependent upon cars.8 Moving us from one point to another expediently, the car too often becomes a capsule of isolation where both the external environment, which moves too fast to be perceived, and human relationships vanish.
In addition to the body and its behaviors, the hyper-culture alters our ways of thinking. Anthropologists in the early 1960’s suggested a direct correlation between cultural values, symbols, and the mind. Many scholars of culture have concluded that individuals carry some form of mind-structure that is molded by culture and, in turn, replicates culture. In a hyper-culture guided by temporal acceleration, the structure of the mind attempts to process information and construct knowledge in the least amount of time. The success of AI is predicated on its ability to recreate the structure of the mind and generate knowledge-content exponentially faster than humans. Since the modern mind is required to process information as fast as possible, humans are increasingly surrendering knowledge production to artificial intelligence. The faster we can attain knowledge through systems that instantly
organize and retrieve data for us, the less we must engage in the tedious task of “thinking.”
Let me illustrate a danger of hyper-culture to human relationships. Those who hurry through an airport trying to catch a connecting flight know that the time between flights is in direct proportion with our ability to see the faces of others. If there is plenty of time between our flights, we slow our pace, which allows us to look around and see individual faces. Perhaps it is their attire, a unique facial expression, or the fact that we are caught by what Emmanuel Levinas has called the compelling meanings that emerge from the human face of ‘the other.’ But if time is tight, we rush through crowds and lose our capacity to attend. All the faces are rendered invisible. This is the impact of hyper-culture on human relationships. This is why Bertman declares that the hyper-cultural “mind is a solipsistic mind: selfabsorbed, it knows only its own modifications and states.”9
In some work addressing the challenges of hyper-culture, the value of religious traditions, especially Christian faith, and spirituality, are presented as potential resources countering the impact of accelerated culture on the individual and her relationships. Illich suggested it is the task of the Church to teach the transcendent meaning of life and to “recognize the presence of Christ in the growing mutual relatedness which results from the complexity and specialization of development.” Moreover, he continued, the church “reveals to us the personal responsibilities for our sins: our growing dependence, solitude, and cravings which result from self-alienation in things and systems. [The church] challenges us to deeper poverty instead of security in achievements; personalization of love instead of depersonalization by idolatry; faith in the other rather than prediction.”10
Recent analysts of hyper-culture join Bertman in suggesting that religious traditions are incompatible with cultural acceleration. First, religious traditions rely on the relationship between memory and the past. Second, they promote an idea of permanence and preservation that easily disappear when life is transient and in flux.11 Both Bertman and Hartmut Rosa suggest that the decline in organized religion is one manifestation of the challenge to keep up with change while resisting accommodation to hyper-culture. This does not necessarily mean an open resistance to change. It describes the inability of religious communities to maintain their liturgical rhythms and spiritual practices under the pressures of cultural acceleration. Conversely, this means religious organizations who favor emotional immediacy and simplification of complex matters are better positioned to adapt to contemporary culture, for hyper-culture favors “relatively loose and fluid associational and doctrinal structures.”12
While Christianity has both theological elements and institutional forms that could counter the cultural prevalence of nowness, it has in many ways promoted acceleration, from the support of the ideology of social development to the technological transformation of ‘sacramental embodiment’ and worship life. This paradox can be analyzed from the perspective of fulfilling needs fomented in the
hyper-culture. David Cayley concludes that Western culture’s “vast architecture of institutions that care about people’s needs is a perverse extension of the Church’s attempt to institutionalize the Gospel.”13 In the hyper-culture, a new type of human experience is engendered, one of needy subjects whose way of organizing society and its technological tools is through institutions, including the Church, where the principal function is to satisfy human needs. Cayley argues that as a caring institution, the church attempts to fashion its mission according to people’s ideas of needs and fulfillment. It accepts the expectation that needs should be satisfied now at the accelerated pace of culture.
While human needs have always been the fundamental basis of physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being, hyper-culture manifests an almost exclusive transmutation of needs into commodities, so there is a strong interdependence between these needs and whatever the market produces for their satisfaction. The frequency with which new products come to the market quickens the formation of new needs and speeds up the life that seeks instant gratification. But because these needs are in continual flux, they can never be fully satisfied.
What christendom in the hyper-culture produces, then, is not a sense of security but a sense of vulnerability. When Illich considered the connections between the history of needs, the creation of systems and technological tools designed to expedite the fulfillment of those needs increasingly, and the Church’s institutionalization of those needs, he found few interlocutors in Christian circles to address these concerns. 14 His words are even more significant today. It is time for Christians to hear and heed his concerns.
From christendom to inter-kingdom: An ecclesiology of conviviality
Understanding modern culture means being keenly aware of the challenges posed to body, mind, and spirit by a change process happening at an unprecedented level of acceleration. Such acceleration, accepted as a natural outcome of social progress, continues to take hold of our lives even though it has proven inadequate for solving current problems or bringing the happiness expected with the satisfaction of immediate needs. The paradox is devastating: the more we attempt to obtain immediate gratification now, the more aware we become of our existential dissatisfaction and the more aggressively we strive to redress that dissatisfaction now.
A century ago, Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci intuited the coming of a society characterized by uncertainty, isolation, and disappointment. In Gramsci’s analysis, these are the result of living in what he termed the “interregnum,” the interval between the death of one monarch and the installation of the next.15 While for Gramsci, this interregnum is the result of masses being detached from traditional ideologies and having no substitute for them, an interpretation from the point of view of the hyper-culture suggests that the old becomes obsolete when we accept that all that is needed is instantaneous fulfillment with the new when the new can never hold up, for it loses its novelty at the precise moment of its appearance.
There is nothing certain and solid in the now, for it will surely change before we can be satisfied by it. This culture of accelerating, ubiquitous flux, futilely striving for spiritual footing in its novel productions, may be what Zygmunt Bauman had in mind when he referred to contemporary socio-cultural reality as ‘liquid.”16
Significantly, the inter-kingdom is fertile ground for political fragility and social polarization. With no centering principle in place, a void is created that can be filled by something or someone promising the benefits of the now. In the biblical tradition, the interregnum between Jesus’s establishment of God’s Kingdom and the expected return of the Messiah opened the possibility for the emergence of the figure of the Antichrist. According to the sociologist Carlo Bordoni, the anti-Christ appears not in the form of a person but in the form of individuals whose lives have no ultimate meaning and for whom all social responsibilities toward the other are surrendered.
Intense focus on the now in hyper-culture means that institutions like the church, custodians of traditions and messengers of an eschatological future, are diminished and lose authority. Today, Niebuhr’s Church has fewer chances of choosing how it will relate to culture, for the hyper-culture will mostly determine the form of that relationship. Still, a belief in Christ as Messiah poses resistance to the occupation of the inter-kingdom by anti-messianic elements because of its commitment to a “community with others, selflessness, individual sacrifice, solidarity and the value of human coexistence.”17 Because these approaches to social existence are not centered in the satisfaction of personal needs with immediate gratification, they resist the hyper-culture. That is why the language of community, considered by sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies to be obsolete amid accelerated industrialization,18 needs to be recovered in places where the metaphor has always been constitutive of institutional identity—expressly the Christian church.
Even when reformulated by accelerated needs and transformed by technology so that human proximity is no longer needed (‘virtual community’), some traditional aspects of the community remain: a common locus of interest and communicative relationships.19 The Christian church sustains a common locus of interest (faith in Christ’s message) and a network of relationships (sacramental formation of Christ’s body) at the center of its communication.
Perhaps this is the reason that among some social scientists, a revalorization of the role of the church in society is proposed. The church can invest the idea of society, the abstract conglomerate of individuals, with a sense of community, incentivizing a return to spatial configurations of belonging and common purpose—what I will call, echoing Ivan Illich, spaces of conviviality or a community formed by concrete forms of life-sharing. Carlos Bordoni suggests that emerging from the insecurities of the political chaos of an interregnum, the apostles stressed the uniqueness of their faith in the Messiah by the way they strove to form a community of coexistence with other believers.20 In the same manner, sociolinguist Stephen Berman states that religious organizations like the church can become communities of hope
and comfort in an accelerated society since religious beliefs, given their strong historical roots and preserving nature, are “incompatible with the tenor of the nowist culture.”21
In his recent book After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, political scientist Samuel Goldman argues that American culture lacks a discursive center where social agreements can be explored. He suggests that churches (living out their faith authentically) can serve as models of social coherence and solidarity among other community-centered institutions.22 These ideas are not new for theologians, who have addressed the erosion of religious and social community and have recovered metaphors of biblical and doctrinal traditions to highlight the value of authentic community. What is revealing is that in today’s culture, even secular scholars think vernacular forms of religious community and Christian engagement offer positive counterclaims to current trends in hyper-culture.
Illich also suggested the church should surrender its assumed authority and return to the vernacular forms where convivial experience defines its relation to culture. He suggests “conviviality” as the opposite of accelerated productivity.23 Conviviality is an intrinsic ethical value where people, committed to a shared life, engage in autonomous and creative relationships with one another and the earth without the constraints of accelerated time, reductive outcomes, and self-gratification. If we follow Niebuhr’s categorization, we may be enticed to recognize the importance of social acceleration in life and manifest the Christ who is willing to transform that culture. Yet, living in the inter-kingdom, the church may hold onto a more modest prospect—the need to transform the ways we live together in the culture we inhabit and the still conceivable ways we can faithfully respond to it. v
NOTES
1 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Free Press, 1997), and A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
2 In Christ and Culture, Richard Niebuhr attempted a neutral approach to his typology, avoiding straightforward claims about a unified story of civilization shaped by the West, and especially the American version of Christianity. In chapter one, where he discusses The Enduring Problem, he acknowledges the value and complexity of cultural pluralism and even makes clear that Christians should not be content with giving religious homage to “Democracy or America, or Germany or the Empire” (8). Nevertheless, he goes on to establish that “Just as for liberalism, God is the counterpart of human love.” In his concluding pages in Christ and Culture, the idea of cultural pluralism is surrendered when he declares that the existential problem, in the present time, is a not a question of individualism, but a collective response where the plural and diverse “I” becomes a unified “us” (p. 245). In many ways, Christ and Culture cannot be read as a radical departure from his idea of the spirit and character of American Christianity as a movement that finds its center in the idea of God’s Kingdom, as he established in his prior book The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper and Bros., 1937), ix.
3 Clyde Kluckhohn, Mirror for Man: The Relationship of Anthropology to Modern Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949), p.289.
4 Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
5 Stephen Bertman, Hyperculture: The Human Cost of Speed (Westport: Praeger, 1998), p.41.
6 Christine Rosen, in The Hedgehog Review, Spring 2018, Vol, 20 (1), p.42.
7 Ibid.
8 Illich, Ibid.
9 Stephen Bertman, Ibid.
10
Ivan Illich, The Church, Change, and Development (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970), p.19.
11 Bertman, Ibid., p.59.
12
Hermut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p.31.
13 David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1992), p. 53.
14 Ibid., p.279.
15 Antonio Gramsci, “Wave of materialism and crisis of authority,” in Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p.276.
16 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Books, 2000).
17 Carlos Bordoni, Interregnum: Beyond Liquid Modernity (Bielefeld: Transcript Publishing, 2016), p.21.
18 Ferdinand Tonnies, Community and Society (New York: Dover Publications, 2002). Reprint of originally printed Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887).
19 Carlos Bordoni, Ibid., p.95.
20 Ibid., p. 21.
21 Stephen Bertman, Ibid., p.59.
22 Samual Goldman, After Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
23 Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
Insights: The Podcast
Listen to Editor William Greenway’s full interview with Dr. José R. Irizarry at the link below or scan the QR code to the left.
Interview
President José R. Irizarry
Interview with Insights editor William Greenway
You propose a multicultural consciousness in opposition to a “melting pot.” Why?
The “melting pot” is founded in a framework of colonization that requires individuals to assimilate and integrate into the dominant society. What is unique and distinctive disappears. Such cultural assimilation is often experienced as violence, which can lead to sectarianism and polarization. Multicultural consciousness is a generator of openness to consider the value of other cultures so that it can protect us from sectarianism. But that’s not the practical goal. Once people are recognized and have their identity valued by others, the question is always, “What's next?”
“Multiculturalism” was the first phase of the conversation, and it was used because it emphasized the politics of identity and representation. But today, we're using the language of “interculturality,” where we ask ourselves, “How do we interact with each other in ways that recognize the other and where there's mutual influencing of people with different ideas, backgrounds, and perspectives?” When we relate to other people, we don't have to appropriate them; we don’t have to insist that they think and act like us to be accepted.
The “melting pot” is a powerful metaphor. Do you have a metaphor for “interculturality”?
Metaphors are always incomplete, which is especially risky if they are seen as prescriptive rather than suggestive. But I will take the risk and suggest the kaleidoscope, where every piece is recognized and retains its distinctive color and form. It allows itself to be moved around with other pieces, and with each interaction of the pieces, there are new combinations and new interactions. While each whole looks different, the distinctive color and form of each piece remain intact.
Are there pieces of the kaleidoscope—say, a piece that is sexist, racist, heterosexist—which one rejects?
That's an appropriate concern. But who determines standards for ethical discernment? When studying culture, you can see plasticity in how different people and peoples make ethical judgments. I think you also see that where there is more variety in understanding, including understanding other cultures and peoples’ values, it helps us make better ethical judgments. This does not mean every ethical
judgment is right. But when the community has more options to consider, they are in a better position to reach good ethical judgments. In particular, this keeps one controlling ideology from dictating that there's only one way of doing things right and tolerating no debate over what is right and wrong. I am not an ethical relativist, but I think that we can cautiously affirm that ethical universals are best developed within the context of a community with an intercultural consciousness.
You reference Puerto Rico. Are there ways Puerto Rico contributes to your insights?
We all love our countries of origin. We love the people we live with and always try to see ourselves as the best. But with all the pride that I have for my motherland, we have a history of colonialism tied to the United States, and in so many ways, we amplify rather than have alternatives to the cultural models of the United States. For example, the Puerto Rican society is highly consumerist. There is racism, always present and lately more analyzed in terms of colorism. However, we also have a unique history separate from that of the United States. Racial diversity has been recognized as essential to understanding cultural identity and unity. There's a phrase in Spanish, “el que no tiene dinga tiene mandinga,” which means every person who is a Puerto Rican accepts a hybrid identity. And racial diversity is a given not only in small groups and communities but also within single families. Such proximity does not allow segregation to be practiced. Even if there's a racist discourse in that society, that discourse does not surface in day-to-day interactions because people live together.
You criticize Niebuhr for using “Christ” instead of “church” ….
I'm making a distinction between Christ as a theological category and “Christ” as a metaphor for cultural analysis. If Niebuhr was writing about the church and the meaning of “Christ” in the church, then using “Christ” would be essential. But once the church is the subject of study, it must be engaged in relation to the ways in which its institutionalized traditions define its constitution and identity. The demarcation between Christ and the church as a functional component of society must be maintained when conducting cultural analysis. This allows one to look at the church not only as a theological category but as a sociological one, which you can critique deeply. On the other side, consider how many secular people are identifying the church with Christ and rejecting faith and Christ because of what they see in the church. That, too, is a reason to distinguish between the church and Christ.
How should Christians think about the relationship between their churches and Christendom?
By Christendom, I mean the discourse of Christianity and its influence on values, ideals, and organizational forms in Western cultures. I use “christendom” in the
lowercase because I’m not talking about an establishment but about a cultural consciousness informed by the long history of Christian discourse. What I challenge here is the secular idea that because we live in a pluralistic society, there is no religious outlook informing the way we make decisions about the body and health, politics, and law. Once we say that we make the influence of Christianity invisible, that influence does exist.
You also focus upon a hyper-culture…
“Hyper-culture” is shorthand for life acceleration, for the fact that culture is moving at a pace that challenges the traditional evolution of societies and individuals. We live harried, hectic lives, and this sort of life is highly valued in neoliberal economies and cultures. We are constantly moving, always progressing. I decided to focus on this because this acceleration affects so many people of every age. The acceleration was evident during the pandemic, when everyone had to catch up with technology in order to make a living, in order to study, in order to do many things necessary to survive. Acceleration shapes us in so many ways, and I was concerned by some of my close friends—pastors and church leaders— who suddenly showed increased levels of anxiety and burnout because they were trying to manage life and work at a different pace than we're used to.
What is the relationship between the hyper-culture and technology?
First, technology is here to stay. We must be intelligent users to maximize its potential to serve the common good. But the way we relate to technology requires major attention. My concern is with the now-ness prompted by technology, with the sense that everything has to be given to us now. The result is that we devalue the importance of two important components of temporality that humanize us. One is memory. The other is hope. Memory connects us to the past, to a history that needs to be recovered, and hope because it projects us into the future. Nowness detracts from our consciousness of the past and the future and concentrates all our attention on the now, that consumes all our time and energies. So, we need to use technology as a tool and avoid being used by the tool ourselves.
In the essay, you connect this to consumerism and a constant insatiability for the now…
Yes. Hyper-acceleration creates a dynamic wherein we are never fulfilled, always needing the next thing. And that dynamic provokes anxiety.
In what ways do you think churches are threatened by the hyper-culture?
Let me focus first on pastors and church leaders because they are a major concern of mine. They have been impacted by the pressures of time. I worked with the Board of Pensions and was in constant conversation with young pastors, trying to determine how they were doing. One of the things we wanted to incentivize was
the practice of the sabbath, to foster the setting aside of a time when memory and hope could be cultivated, where one could set aside the productive mentality that says I have to be just always doing something. And one typical response was, “Well, we don't have any time.” Even though this is a component of faith, like every other component of faith, it is a part of the sacramental life. But there was no time for Sabbath.
Leaders were impacted heavily because churches found value in worship and fulfilling the needs of those who are more vulnerable and in missions for others. But when those needs are never-ending and constantly changing, you always feel like you're behind and are not doing the work you're supposed to do, creating dissatisfaction.
Also, when referring to the church, we are talking about a voluntary association where the community is at the center. But many find it difficult to join this community because their time is occupied with incremental products of satisfaction, which also goes against community formation, because hyper-culture is constantly manufacturing new and improved products for us to consume. I'm not talking only about concrete things to buy but also ideas. It's consistently producing something new we have to grasp. TikTok springs to mind; one image generates the need for the next one. And I think the church is affected because the unique needs of people have also changed. When we speak about spiritual needs in religion, we speak about connection with something transcendent. But right now, I don't think this is the basis of the distinctive need religion needs to fill. It’s not that connection with the transcendent being but more about filling the gap left by disenchantment and dissatisfaction. And those are two different ways of looking at spiritual formation.
What exactly is sabbath?
Sabbath is creating a space of respite that mediates your relationship with time. You cannot plan it in such a way that it is more work. You have to be attentive to your daily patterns and then maximize those opportunities to be with yourself, to be with God, and to be in relationships that are intentional. So, it is not an “adding to,” it is an “awareness of.” In the article, I talk about driving at a certain speed that makes everything around us disappear. We stop paying attention, but things are happening. Sabbath is there if we pay attention. So, sabbath is not about an addition to our busy schedule. No, it's a moment already there that we miss because we are preoccupied with the now.
You suggest secular scholars see the church as incompatible with the hyper-culture, and this is good because it serves as a healthy bulwark against hyper-culture...
Ecclesiologists are continually trying to redefine the church. But with this, there are high levels of pessimism and a sense of the decline of churches. So, to see people who are not Christians making positive references to the church and other religious communities—it should grab your attention. These are sociologists and
cultural theorists. They are not doing theology. But they are trying to identify the few intentional communities in today's society where people volunteer to be part of a common mission. For Christians, it's a spiritual mission. So, there's some particularity to it, but it's a common mission from the sociological perspective, common in how people come together and pursue something in common even when they are a diverse community. These sociologists point to this potential of the church. Not every church manifests this potential, but they will if they are genuine communities, communities where we can explore the formation of an intentional space of belonging, acceptance, and participation.
Who is Ivan Illich, and why do you find him significant?
Illich was doing cultural analysis from the perspective of what I call “christendom” in the 1960s and 70s. He was a priest working with Puerto Rican migrants in New York City, and he thought it was important to spend time in Puerto Rico to gain cultural understanding because he thought it was imperative that new migrants not be assimilated. So, in some ways, he was against the melting pot idea, but in relation to the Catholic Church, which is interesting because “Catholic” implies integration, for it means “according to the whole.” But it does not have to be a fused whole. It can be made up of different groups bringing the gifts of their cultures and communities to the whole.
In his books, Illich tried to describe how the Christian message and the Christian tradition affected every single system in Western culture. From there, he moved into a critique of those systems, such as schooling or health, and in particular, he criticized the overall emphasis on progress, with the United States being at the center of that progress. He introduced the language of “conviviality,” which is used in a lot of post-colonial theory today and has influenced people studying “postgrowth,” which explores how we can continue to live in this world by decelerating production and consumption. He also discussed how technology will affect the body, which makes him a precursor of current debates about cybernetics and transhumanism. So, in some ways, he was prophetic, though, of course, a lot of what he said needs to be updated.
You call Illich’s “conviviality” an intrinsic ethical value that connects us apart from accelerated time, reductive outcomes, and self-gratification…
Post-colonial theorists have recaptured his concept of conviviality. We can contrast “conviviality” with “cosmopolitanism,” the idea that we can think of global unity in terms of a global economy or market. With conviviality, the focus is on particular groups that live together. That's why the work is so strong because it's not about general macro-politics where everyone moves toward a centering rule, but about specific communities which, because they share life together, have to find ways to organize themselves so they can, even in difference, come together and work and have a good life and enjoy well-being. I would call this “micro-politics”: creating unity in diversity from the bottom up rather than creating a theory of shared living
that is overarching.
He was a medievalist, and he utilizes “conviviality” to describe the living together of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in medieval Spain and how they formed a pluri-confessional society. Post-colonial study explores the ways people can create this form of togetherness. As an ethical construct, it considers the value of this underlying inter-connectedness and dependency between people who live together, share a life, and affect each other. The ethical values that inform such a community are the ethical values of equity of humans, the common good, reason and individuality, and respect for who others are and how they think.
You talk about Gramsci’s work on the interregnum…
I think “interregnum” expresses the idea that we live in the “in-between times” you hear about even from pulpits today. We don't know what will emerge, but we are hopeful about it. The crisis that we’re in is a crisis of authority. There is no longer a centering authority, whether it's the government, the church, a social organization, or schools. No institution can claim the authority to center society on a common purpose, so the main question we must ask ourselves is, “How do we live together, preserving society and stability amidst social fragility and polarization?” In this context, conviviality becomes both a principle and a strategy for building institutions and systems. Conviviality can help us build a community of proximity where people can negotiate ways of living together. That takes time, intention, and sustained effort—and that is something that cannot be afforded in the hyper-culture because we're moving too fast. You can see the challenge of the interregnum. Yes, we want to emerge as something different, but acceleration pushes us backward because it becomes obsolete once you find solutions.
The church can contribute here because we can deliberate about creating spaces of engagement in which we can redeem time as God’s time by encouraging remembrance of the past and imagining the future with hope. To do that, we need to allow people to feel that they belong to the conversation, where they have something to bring into the discussion, though that will need to be negotiated with others in the community. But all this happens within a convivial community, and it is important to be consciously aware that we are creating such spaces. Otherwise, for instance, we can engage in cynicism, even talk about a dying church. But the very proclamation of that idea is time-constricting because it is saying there is no eternity, no future, and so talk of a dying church makes us victims once again of the hyper-culture.
Theologically, our tradition has the resources to start building these convivial spaces because in the Christian tradition, we redeem time, we focus on memory, and we base our expectations of what the world can be, even within this interregnum, in an eschatological vision of a redeemed world that God is going to bring about. So, the church can bring a gift of temporality, peace, and convivial community to a world full of people consumed by acceleration, fragmentation, and the insatiable dynamics of the now.
“Can
Cinema Be
‘Religious’?
Heidegger, Technology, and the Transcendent”
Christopher B. Barnett
Between 1936 and 1939, German philosopher Martin Heidegger penned a number of “secret writings” that remained unpublished for decades. Both historically and philosophically, Heidegger was writing “from within an acute sense of crisis,” aiming to develop a new mode of expression and, with it, an incisive “criticism of contemporary National Socialist ideology and aesthetics.”1 A key work in this regard was Mindfulness (Besinnung).
The “crisis” facing Heidegger was the problem of mass technology. Years later, Heidegger would clarify the “essence” of technology and explain its dangers. Yet, in the late 1930s, his focus was narrower, more esoteric. In the eleventh section of Mindfulness, entitled “Art in the Epoch of Completion of Modernity,” Heidegger begins by noting that modern art is inseparable from technological “machination” and “disposability.”2 This observation is a logical extension of his existential phenomenology. The human way of being, which Heidegger famously terms “Dasein” in Being and Time (1927), lies in its temporality. Thus, art must evolve in accordance with Dasein’s temporal existence. As George Pattison explains:
1 Hans Ruin, “Contributions to Philosophy,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2017), 358.
2 Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (London: Bloosmbury Academic, 2016), 22.
Christopher B. Barnett is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University, where he continues to serve on the graduate faculty. He is the author of dozens of books, book chapters, and journal articles, including Historical Dictionary of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy: Second Edition (2022), Bob Dylan and the Spheres of Existence (2023), and his fiction debut Man of Pain: A Novel (2023). He also regularly writes and podcasts via his online platform Just FYI (cbarnett.substack.com).
[Heidegger] is not [making] a trivial statement of historical relativism. Since, in Heidegger’s view, the completion of modernity is also the completion of a trajectory that was initiated in Greek metaphysics and that climaxes in the advent of a globalized technological humanity, the destiny of art is necessarily interrelated with the destiny of metaphysics and with humanity’s relation to its technological transformation.3
The situation of art in modernity reflects and reproduces what French thinker Jacques Ellul would later call “the technical phenomenon.”4 Art is produced so as to be repeated and rendered useful, thereby satisfying the will to power implicit in modern technology. Pace Romanticism, modern art cannot serve as an egress from the rigid materialism of industrialized capitalism and positivistic science. As Heidegger puts it, “Every possibility of looking for a ‘meaning’ of this art that could still prevail ‘above’ or ‘behind’ its ‘creations’ fades.”5
Heidegger means that to be an artist in modernity is to produce “forms of organizing beings.”6 Poems are written about the public for the public; they are “means for structuring, stirring, rousing and assembling of masses.”7 Cinema is even worse precisely because it is a quintessentially modern art form and thus governed by the norm of organizing the “makability of beings.”8 As Heidegger goes on to explain:
“Motion picture” is the public installation of the “new” societal comportments, fashion, gestures, and “live-experience” of “actual” “lived-experiences.” It is not films that are trashy, but what they offer as the consequence of the machination of lived-experience and what they disseminate as worthy of live-experience. Stemming from imitating works of art and losing its prop through the machinationally necessitated disappearance of what is hitherto ownmost to the works of art, kitsch becomes autonomous and no longer experienceable as kitsch.9
In this reading, filmgoing terminates in a superficial yet popular sentimentality, that is to say, in kitsch. But this is only part of the problem. Since cinema is driven by the modern need to produce and gather, it has become all but impossible to recognize kitsch as kitsch. People do not even realize they are watching inferior art. In cinema, kitsch has become “autonomous,” and, even more concerning, this is the best human beings can muster in an era “devoted to what is empty and is not fundamental.”10
3 George Pattison, “In the Theater of Light: Toward a Heideggerian Poetics of Film,” in Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick, ed. Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston (London: Routledge, 2016), 31.
4 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964).
5 Heidegger, Mindfulness, 22.
6 Ibid., 23.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
Those familiar with Heidegger’s background may wonder if his characterization of modern art recapitulates his notorious dalliance with National Socialism. Yet, by the time Heidegger began writing Mindfulness, he was already alienated from the Nazi Party. That Heidegger, as Rektor of the University of Freiburg, “had many Jewish students”11 was not lost on Nazi leadership. His writings were dismissed as “Talmudic” and “hairsplitting.”12 Moreover, there was growing concern that Heidegger conspired with “Jesuits and the resistance” to undermine the Third Reich. Thus he “was watched, his classes were audited, and his writings screened.”13 This shift in Heidegger’s status sheds light on his critique of cinema: it is not a Nazi-driven rant against liberal society but an assertion that Nazism, no less than liberalism, is inextricable from modern technology. As Pattison points out, Heidegger’s understanding of film would seemingly characterize “the approach to filmmaking of a certain kind of Hollywood producer with his eye on the bottom line” in addition to “the film-loving Dr. Goebbels.”14 Either way, “cinema must surely be subject to the dynamics of factory and industrial productivity.”15
Heidegger’s analysis clarifies the fraught relationship between “religion and film.” Insofar as film is determined by concerns such as corporate finance, technical reproductivity, and global distribution, it remains far removed from religion, which would seem inseparable from an attempt to transcend the secular order. Cinema is business; religion is anything but. Is it possible to make religiously significant cinema under the conditions of modern technology?
Heidegger was hardly the only person broaching such questions. In his 1936 encyclical Vigilanti Cura, Pope Pius XI argues that, insofar as “the motion picture has become the most popular form of diversion which is offered for the leisure hours not only of the rich but of all classes of society,” it is crucial that Catholics pressure “the industry [to] produce motion pictures which conform entirely to our standards.”16 Only in this way can “the motion picture be no longer a school of corruption” but “be transformed into an effectual instrument for the education and the elevation of mankind.”17 With this in mind, Vigilanti Cura endorses the National Legion of Decency—a Catholic watchdog founded in 1934, whose mission was to identify morally dubious content in cinema and to pressure Christians to avoid blacklisted films. Such measures proved ineffectual, and by the mid-1960s, the Legion of Decency was irrelevant. The business of Hollywood was far too potent to be limited by sincere yet sanctimonious moral appeals. The medium, to draw on
11 Gregory Bruce Smith, Martin Heidegger: Paths Taken, Paths Opened (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 70.
12 Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 241, 257.
13 Smith, Heidegger, 72
14 Pattison, “In the Theater of Light,” 34.
15 Ibid.
16 Pope Pius XI, Vigilanti Cura: Encyclical Letter of Pope Piux XI on the Motion Picture, https:// www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_29061936_ vigilanti-cura.html, accessed September 29, 2023.
17 Ibid.
Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase,18 was stronger than the message.
If movies root us in the “machination of lived experience” and cannot be resisted by ethico-religious appeals to tradition, must we succumb to kitschy fashion and dubious morality, prisoners in a Swiftian (Taylor, not Jonathan) culture of mass-produced nihilism? What can be done? Perhaps a cinematic “genius” can save us—the sort of filmmaker whose depths awaken people to transcendence? Certain auteurs seem to fit this description—a Tarkovsky, Malick, or Nolan. But to peddle their films in the cinematic marketplace as “real art” or to market such auteurs as “real geniuses” would only reinforce what Heidegger calls the “culture-industry.”19 In this reading, cinema merely discloses the rich subjectivity of the artist rather than any truth conveyed by the work itself. The culture-industry extracts the film’s meaning by way of a GQ feature story or a debate on Reddit. Thus, cinema cannot provide any insight into Being, much less into God. Everything is already visible, clickable, for sale.
For Heidegger, the answer ultimately lies in “releasement” or “letting be.” “Letting be” is characteristic of poetry, which does not try to wrest determinate meaning from beings but perdures as “the letting happen of the advent of the truth of beings.”20 This “letting be” is not to be confused with “letting alone” or “indifference.”21 Rather, “To let be [is] to let beings be as the beings which they are.”22 The poet creates “openness” whereby beings “might reveal themselves.”23 What would it take for an auteur to make authentically poetic films? This question bears on the relationship between cinema and religion. If movies are to express the transcendent, they would have to escape “the immanent frame”24 of technological modernity. But how? One obvious answer would involve the content of films. Consider, for instance, Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016). In the story of Jesuit missionaries in Edo period Japan, Silence brings forth an encounter with that which surpasses human mastery (God’s forgiveness of sin) and plumbs the depths of human experience (the mystery of suffering). Still, such content alone does not ensure “transcendent art.” There is plenty of religious kitsch on the market, ranging from blockbuster biblical epics such as The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) to low-budget dramas such as God’s Not Dead (2014). When done poorly—see John Wayne’s cameo in The Greatest Story Ever Told—the thematization of Christian doctrine or dramatization of Christian conversion is most likely to elicit eye rolls and snickers.
18 See, i.e., Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
19 Heidegger, Mindfulness, 29-30.
20 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), 197.
21 Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), 125.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 539-93.
In truth, cinematic form also matters. Filmmakers must uncover the tensity between beings and Being, between the systematized habits of the human world and the raw primitivity of non-technological existence. Thereby, the mystery of being-in-theworld is manifested, and with it, the possibility of a truly poetic encounter with Being itself. Hence, even if art cannot represent the transcendent as such, it can nevertheless “show man’s struggle to discern the divine presence.”25 As writer/ director Paul Schrader argues, certain “camera angles, dialogue, [and] editing” can be used to manifest “the ineffable and invisible” or whatever “is beyond normal sense experience.”26 This “film form” is marked by three “steps”: (i) a methodical attention to the sober banality of daily life, (ii) a moment of decisive action in which a fundamental incongruity between human everydayness and the transcendent world is expressed, and (iii) an iconic rendering of this disparity—what Schrader calls “stasis” or a “still-life view which connotes Oneness.”27
Similarly, drawing on film theorists Siegfried Kracauer and Amédée Ayfre, Michael Bird argues that cinema’s “special affinity for reality” means that its “technical properties become the vehicle of meditation.”28 In “heighten[ing] our perception of things pointing beyond themselves,” cinematic realism advances from the material world to its spiritual depth.29 As in iconography, this “move” fosters an experience of reality. Thereby, the filmmaker “is invested with the power for the disclosure of that continual striving within culture toward the holy.”30 When this disclosure happens, cinema reveals a world “straining in its anguish, its void, its divisions, toward its boundary-situation.”31 These revelatory moments may not evince doctrinal theology. However, as Bird concludes, such cinema will be hierophanous—a manifestation of the divine.32
Is religious cinema, then, possible? Yes—but it requires extraordinary aesthetic commitment and discipline on the filmmaker’s part. Heidegger’s concerns about “machination” and “disposability” can be addressed, but, alas, they remain perpetual in our “epoch of the completion of modernity.”33
25 Michael Bird, “Film as Hierophany,” in Religion in Film, ed. John R. May and Michael Bird (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 4.
26 Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1972), 3-13.
27 Ibid., 49.
28 Bird, “Film as Hierophany,” 13-15.
29 Ibid., 16.
30 Ibid., 21.
31 Ibid., 22.
32 Ibid.
33 Heidegger, Mindfulness, 21
More Than Just a Game
Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández
My father taught me to play baseball, y en nuestra familia, we were traditioned into Yankees Universe as opposed to Houston’s ‘Stros Nation. Being born and raised in the Bronx made the Yankees my local home team, even in diaspora. As a fan, schoolyard player, and even as a scholar, baseball is my preferred sport, bound up inextricably to a sense of my cultural identity and memories of mi familia and home.
My theologizing on sport en espanglish is invested, embedded, and socially located en la vida cotidiana. In other words, my exploration of the stuff of life begins in lived daily experience, where there is a fluidity that defies demarcations like sacred and profane. En lo cotidiano, many Latin@ theologians encounter a dynamic matrix of sin, grace, and countless ambiguities. In Latin@ theologies, lo popular, popular religious practices, and popular culture are sources for theological investigation and reflection. These practices emerge in ordinary spaces—the street, the stadium, the home. They embrace los gritos arising from sorrow, struggle, or celebration, as well as expressions that navigate las luchas y tradition la fe. Attending to lo popular evokes creative, aesthetic, affective, sensuous, and kinetic responses to the divine presence in concrete circumstances and in daily rhythms de nuestras vidas. Taking lo popular seriously also means heeding prophetic critiques that call out sins and dysfunctions in our practices, traditions, and traditioning.
It is hard to doubt the place of sport in cultural and religious terms when you consider the social media commotion stirred up in August 2023 when Texas
Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández is Professor of Hispanic Theology and Ministry at the Catholic Theological Union, Chicago. A Latin@ theologian, her publications include Theologizing en Espanglish (Orbis), numerous chapters and articles on Latin@ theologies, lo popular, sport and theology—with particular focus on béisbol/baseball, and Pope Francis and sports. She is founder and co-editor of the multivolume series Disruptive Cartographers: Doing Theology Latinamente (Fordham University Press).
Rangers fans dared to mimic an almost three decades old idiosyncratic practice associated with Yankee Stadium. The “roll call” occurs at the beginning of every New York home game. The Bleacher Creatures, a group of fans in right field section 203, call out the names of the Yankee starters on the field, expecting each player to acknowledge their chant.1 The cultural misappropriation of this practice by Texas fans proved costly for the Rangers as they went on an 8-game losing streak. The jinx effect might be debated because they ultimately went on to win the World Series. From a fan’s perspective, Arunima Bhanot astutely captured the interwovenness of sport, culture, and religion: “Some traditions are sacred. Times bring with them the winds of change, but every era in baseball follows some hallowed rituals that remain untouched. It’s sacrilegious to see another copy of them, and as MLB knows, New York Yankees fans are unforgiving.”2
Sport straddles the realm of religious experience, from the ancient Greek games held at the Panhellenic sanctuary at Olympia to indigenous ceremonial ball playing at the Taino bateyes in Utuado, Puerto Rico. Play can be found in sacred texts that mark liturgical time, rituals, deities, and daily life. The fifteenth-century Codex Yoalli Ehēcatl, from the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley of Central Mexico, is one of the few manuscripts to survive the violence of the Spanish conquest. Its pictography includes players arrayed on an I-shaped ball court holding what appear to be small bats.3 The earliest depiction of a bat and ball game in the Iberian Peninsula occurs in the Cantigas de Santa María from the scriptorium of Alfonso X, King of Castile, León, y Galicia. This thirteenth-century manuscript contains four hundred and twenty poems of Marian devotion along with thousands of illustrations and musical annotations. In the second panel of six illustrating Cantiga 42, a pitcher tosses a ball to a batter while three fielders attempt to catch a ball in the air.4 A reproduction of this miniature hangs in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
In the history of Christianity, sports and games, including precursors of baseball and cricket, can even be found in the marginalia of medieval manuscripts. The role of play in these margins is ambiguous. Is it a reflection of daily life, a slice of local color? Does it function as a critique of frivolity or social class? Do game-playing creatures on the edges of sacred texts depict expressions of popular culture, inject humor, drip with sarcasm, or merely accessorize the page? Are they works of artists searching for any available canvas, or are they graffiti that functions as religious and social commentaries? Might they participate in a greater theological engagement offering counternarratives, imparting moral lessons, or even talking back to the text? Does it matter who among the simians are playing: humans, other apes, or monkeys? For example, non-human simians play ball on the edges of medieval texts. Their ludic antics mirroring human behavior can be interpreted across a spectrum of theological meaning. Do they represent humanity easily distracted or tempted by sinfulness? Do they point to a shared creatureliness humans are prone to deny? Such bat and ball playing simians, for example, adorn two different pages of a 14th-century Flemish Psalter, situating them in an encounter and dialogue
Nanko-Fernández
with the word, in one case Psalm 119 and in the other Psalm 97:5
From manuscripts to plazas to fields and courts, sport and religion are historically intertwined. While connections abound between sports and religious festivals, Christianity, in particular, deployed sport as a tool of evangelization. Cricket and baseball were key in Christian evangelization efforts associated with colonization by Britain and the United States of America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The bat accompanied the Bible, and a muscular Christianity was part of “civilizing” and racializing trends that, at times, considered Catholics in these “exotic” lands as being among the non-Christians.
For British evangelists, cricket was a way of indoctrinating the edges of empire into the acceptable behavior of proper gentlemen—as created in an English and Christian image. Participation in imperial games did not imply parity or inclusion, as demonstrated by the biases of prominent amateur sports clubs members who believed that they would be “contaminated if they played or competed against non-gentlemen, a category that initially included artisans and labourers, ‘coloured’ colonials, and ‘Indians.’”6 For Americans, baseball aided and abetted expansionist impulses symbolizing what Christopher Evans describes as “an American faith that the world could be subjugated by the superior values of the United States.”7 The success of what perhaps can be considered soft subjugation, for Evans, reinforced the impression of a nationalist divine sanction.
The theological question of the imago Dei is at stake when sport is used as an evangelizing tool, and evangelization is understood in civilizing terms. Attempts to use sport as part of “civilizing” projects displayed an inherent dismissal of Godgiven dignity reflected in the marginalized and colonized other. The goal was to recreate the other into a particular Christian image of a proper British gentleman or a rugged American individualist. Yet, they lacked access to the privileges and powers implicit in such images. Cricket and baseball crossed borders with partners in their colonization—the English language and Reformed Christianity.
Resistance served to protect and preserve dignity through the exercise of subversive agency.8 In his interpretation of cricket as text, Guyanese theologian Winston Persaud proposes that through this sport, West Indians found a means of resistance “by entering the masters’ domain of play and leisure and mastering it from within,” giving “the oppressed a vital reason for believing that they are not what they seem—marginalized, powerless, essentially inferior beings.”9 In terms of baseball, it literally “followed the flag,” as Albert Spalding put it in his attempt to establish the American provenance of the sport at the turn of the 20th century.10 But local talent, distinctive playing styles, and exploitation of game rules challenged Americanization with cultural particularities. These sources of ethnic, regional, or national pride were displayed when teams of colonized others defeated allegedly superior USA white players, especially military teams or traveling teams of professional All-Stars. The popularity of Negro League players, either stationed as soldiers in the Philippines or playing Winter League ball across Latin America,
attests to a solidarity across marginalizations. These players attracted fans across a diversity of peoples colonized by USA business and military interests. Sport is part of the weave of religion(s) and culture(s). Sports and play are rich and nuanced texts of daily life across time and space, deserving of study and theological reflection. In ministerial and catechetical contexts, there is a tendency to mine sports and sporting events for religious relevance, moral lessons, and theological metaphors. While such approaches recognize the power of sport to connect, they can gloss over the complexity of these texts. Perhaps the simians who play familiar games on the margins of medieval sacred texts challenge us to grapple with the messy baggage, contested narratives, and complicated stories of the games we inherit and the new ones we create. Perhaps the roll call chants of the Bleacher Creatures remind us that the rituals of sport bind those on the field and courts of play with those invested and those beyond—with all of its joys, disappointments, dysfunctions, and ambiguities—because sport is more than just a game. v
NOTES
1 Bryan Hoch, “‘Roll call’ is a Yankee Stadium exclusive,” October 11, 2023, https://www. mlb.com/news/bleacher-creatures-roll-call-a-yankee-stadium-tradition.
2 Arunima Bhanot, “‘Ramifications for Your Actions..’: Yankees Fans Enchant Rival Team With Crippling Losing Streak in Retaliation to Shameless Ballpark Tradition Mimicry,” EssentiallySports, August 30, 2023, https://www.essentiallysports.com/mlb-baseballnews-texas-rangers-philadelphia-phillies-ramifications-for-your-actions-yankees-fansenchant-rival-team-with-crippling-losing-streak-in-retaliation-to-shameless-ballparktradition-mimicry/.
3 Digitized image accessible at Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, https://digi.vatlib.it/view/ MSS_Borg.mess.1/0044. Known also as the Codex Borgia, it has resided at the Vatican Library since 1902 and a facsimile exists in the library holdings of the University of Texas at Arlington.
4 Digitized image accessible at Cantigas de Santa María, Códice rico, Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, fol-061V.jpg, https://rbme.patrimonionacional.es/s/rbme-expo/item/11337#?xywh=-2680%2C155%2C9102%2C4962&cv=130. See Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández, “Playing en los Márgenes: Lo Popular as Locus Theologicus,” in The Word Became Culture, Miguel H. Díaz, ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2024) 93-113 for a more extensive analysis.
5 Digitized images accessible at Flemish Psalter, 14th century, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Douce 6, fol. 034v-035r, fol. 096v, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ objects/4a0c575c-0cad-4dd2-8fd4-a6689c0ae1e8/surfaces/ff72309d-c7ac-4671-8756d88d0a56733a/.
6 Richard Gruneau, “Aesthetics and the Politics of Representation: The Making of Modern English Sport, AMODERN 3: Sport and Visual Culture, October 2014, http://amodern.net/article/aesthetics-politics-representation/.
7 Christopher H. Evans, “Baseball as Civil Religion: The Genesis of an American Creation Story,” in The Faith of Fifty Million: Baseball, Religion and American Culture, ed. Christopher H. Evans and William R. Herzog II (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 30-31.
8 For an in-depth exploration of resistance see Carmen M. Nanko, “¿Dios Bendiga Whose América? Resisting the Ritual Theologizing of Nation,” Journal of Hispanic/
Latino Theology, Vol. 22 no.1 (2020), https://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1087&context=jhlt.
9 Winston Persaud, “Hermeneutics of Bible and ‘Cricket as Text,’” in Interpreting Beyond Borders, Fernando F. Segovia, ed., (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 178.
10 Albert G. Spalding, America’s National Game: Historic Facts Concerning the Beginning, Evolution, Development and Popularity of Base Ball, with Personal Reminiscences of Its Vicissitudes, Its Victories and Its Votaries (New York: American Sports Pub. Co., 1911), 14, 371-375.
Coming in the Fall 2024 issue: Song-Mi Suzie Park, “‘Love’ of and in Scripture"
CHRIST TRANSFORMING CULTURE: A CASE STUDY
Ruben Rosario Rodríguez
H. R. Niebuhr, in his landmark book Christ and Culture (1951), offers five archetypes for examining and understanding the relationship of Christianity to the broader culture. Of these five theoretical models, the one identified as “Christ the transformer of culture” articulates the view that human cultures can become a locus for transforming “human life in and to the glory of God” through the grace of God.1 Unlike perspectives that seek to preserve the purity of the church by separating from culture into spiritual safe havens (“Christ against culture”), or the view that grace is outside of culture, therefore, Christianity can never be fully integrated into culture (“Christ above culture”), traditions that view Christ as transforming culture adopt a more positive and hopeful view on the premise that God in Christ has redeemed humanity, therefore culture as a human creation shares in this redemption.
Reformed theologian John Calvin falls squarely within Niebuhr’s “Christ the transformer of culture” camp. In fact, Niebuhr develops this typology by referring to Calvin’s theology and pastoral work in sixteenth-century Geneva and then embraces “Christ transforming culture” as his preferred model. Since Niebuhr elevates John Calvin as the paradigm for this type of Christian cultural engagement, it is worth diving into Calvin’s thought to understand better what Niebuhr means when he commends the “Christ transforming culture” approach.
1 H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 1951), 200.
Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, Ph.D., is Clarence Louis and Helen Steber Professor of Theological Studies and Director of the Mev Puleo Program in Latin American Politics, Theology, and Culture at Saint Louis University. His newest book, Calvin for the World: The Enduring Relevance of His Political, Social, and Economic Thought (Baker Academic) appears in August, 2024.
In the popular imagination, John Calvin (1509–64) is remembered as an authoritarian leader and dogmatic thinker whose legacy is tainted by his teaching on double predestination and his role in the execution by burning at the stake of Michael Servetus in 1553. Nevertheless, Calvin and Calvinism’s impact on U.S. culture, religion, and politics cannot be ignored. For example, the First Great Awakening (ca. 1730–1750) cannot be understood without referencing Calvin’s influence on Jonathan Edwards, and it is telling that twelve of the signers of the Declaration of Independence (1776) were Presbyterians. Calvin’s influence on the formation of this country is so prevalent that Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of the relationship between religion and political freedom in Democracy in America (1835) echoes many of the ideas and sentiments articulated in Book 4, Chapter 20 (“Civil Government”) of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559). My forthcoming book, Calvin for the World: The Enduring Relevance of His Political, Social, and Economic Thought (Baker Academic, August 2024), embraces H. R. Niebuhr’s assessment of Calvin as the model for “Christ transforming culture” to argue that Calvin’s theological, political, and social thought is still relevant for Christian churches and has value for the greater society. In other words, this book counterbalances many misconceptions about Calvin in the hopes that readers will discover what Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson describes as “the visionary quality of his theology.”2
Without question, John Calvin remains a troubling and controversial figure. His supporters praise his transformative influence on the ecclesial, political, and economic spheres of modern life, while his detractors paint him as a ruthless proponent of theocracy. Historian Carter Lindberg catalogs the many contradictory versions of Calvin: “both a narrow dogmatist and an ecumenical churchperson; a ruthless inquisitor and a sensitive, caring pastor; an ascetic, cold authoritarian and a compassionate humanist; . . . the tyrant of Geneva and a defender of freedom; a dictator and a revolutionary.”3 Yet this very controversy, giving rise to so many conflicting images, suggests there is more to Calvin than meets the eye and that his life and work warrant further investigation. In the spirit of Niebuhr’s typology of “Christ transforming culture,” my book reexamines widespread assumptions and reevaluates clichéd conclusions about Calvin to present the sixteenth-century reformer as an engaging interlocutor on contemporary matters of social, political, racial, and economic justice.
Whatever one’s final judgment on Calvin, responsible scholarship demands a deeper reading that transcends any one-dimensional idealization or demonization. This task is particularly difficult for people of color (like me) given how often John Calvin and Calvinism are represented by Eurocentric chauvinism and racially repressive regimes. The Reformed Calvinist tradition has contributed significantly to the
2 Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “Q&A: Marilynne Robinson on Guns, Gay Marriage, and Calvinism,” Christian Century, May 12, 2014. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2014-05/qampa-marilynne-robinson-guns-gay-marriage-and-calvinism.
3 Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 250.
oppression of people and communities of color, from the Dutch Reformed Church sanctioning the African slave trade in colonial America to the role of Afrikaner Calvinism in the founding of the apartheid state of South Africa in the twentieth century to the cooperation of Brazilian Presbyterians with the 1964 military coup d’état and subsequent military dictatorship in that country; the historical evidence seems incontrovertible. Still, as a Latino Reformed theologian I challenge readers to reevaluate the more emancipatory aspects of Calvin’s thought by highlighting traditions of resistance informed by Calvin’s theology.
In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin argues that God establishes civil government so that “humanity may be maintained among men,” and he views magistrates as the divinely appointed guardians of public well-being. Civil government is thus “a calling, not only lawful before God, but also the most sacred and by far the most honorable of all callings, in the whole life of mortal men.”4 Not surprisingly, Calvin’s ministry in Geneva—a French exile ministering to refugees from France, Poland, Spain, England, and Italy—resembles (and can inform) contemporary debates on issues like immigration and social welfare policies. John Calvin contends that theological voices belong in the public discourse if for no other reason than to ensure that the fundamental Christian obligation of compassion toward those in need is adequately carried out. For Calvin—and those churches influenced by Calvin—the establishment of a just social order is integral to the Christian life. The call to minister to the poor, the sick, the widow, the orphan, the refugee, and the prisoner (Matt. 25:34–40) is a matter of concern for both church and state because it is first and foremost a spiritual command for all Christians to “take as strong a stand against evil as we can. This command is given to everyone, not only to princes, magistrates, and officers of justice but to all private persons as well.”5
In apartheid South Africa, where Calvinism “[sowed] only the seeds of death” and came to embody White supremacy, Black South Africans still managed to scrutinize it to identify “those aspects of Calvin’s theology which [could] contribute to the Black liberation struggle.”6 Reformed theologian Allan Boesak, who became the moderator of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church in South Africa, played a prominent role in the church’s struggle against apartheid. Boesak was the main theological voice behind the Belhar Confession (1982), arguably the most important ecclesial statement to emerge from within the Reformed family of churches since
4 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960), 4.20.3, 4.20.6. While I am committed to using gender-inclusive language throughout this work, all quotations reflect the culturally and historically bound perspectives of the original authors.
5 John Calvin, Sermons on 2 Samuel: Chapters 1–13, trans. Douglas Kelly (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1992), 419.
6 Lebakeng Ramotshabi Lekula Ntoane, A Cry for Life: An Interpretation of “Calvinism” and Calvin (Kampen: Kok, 1983), 252. Quoted in Robert Vosloo, “Calvin and Anti-Apartheid Memory in the Dutch Reformed Family of Churches in South Africa,” in Sober, Strict, and Scriptural: Collective Memories of John Calvin, 1800–2000, ed. Johan de Niet, Herman Paul, and Bart Wallet (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 237.
the sixteenth-century Reformation.
The Belhar Confession is a crucial text for understanding John Calvin as an antiapartheid ally in the political struggle against injustice in South Africa. Reflecting on the goals of Belhar, Boesak describes his strategy to employ Calvin against proapartheid Calvinists by appealing to Calvin’s eucharistic theology, which emphasizes the unity of the church and thereby exposes the heretical nature of apartheid: “Belhar understood Calvin as he spoke of Holy Communion. ‘Christ has only one body of which he makes us all partakers.’”7 According to Calvin, we are united with Christ by grace, and it is the bond of that union that continually nourishes us as believers, but because, as believers, we are also trapped in a sinful, fallen state, God accommodates our human limitations by providing the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as a reminder of this union with Christ. While Boesak acknowledges that, at the time, Black South Africans had no desire to unite with White South Africans— who had exploited, tortured, and killed so many of them—they worked for union and reconciliation because Christ calls all believers to justice and reconciliation: “So against our self-absorbed instinct for self-absorbed victimhood, the black church confessed God as a God who wants to bring forth peace and justice in the world.”8 Much like John Calvin’s 1536 letter to Francis I of France, in which Calvin undermined kingly sovereignty by subjugating it to divine authority, the Belhar Confession challenges the church to follow Christ in all things, “even though the authorities and human laws might forbid them and punishment and suffering be the consequence.”9
John Calvin was arguably the most influential of the sixteenth-century reformers; his theological legacy transcended confessional cul-de-sacs to influence the formation of the modern secularized world, its outlook, and its social institutions. My primary goal is to affirm Calvin’s contemporary relevance while recognizing that, like all thinkers, he remains a product of his times. Calvin’s rigid orthodoxy and authoritarian tendencies do not negate all his teaching but merely demonstrate how he—like people in all times and places—got some things seriously wrong amid the many things he got right. Yet, despite reflecting many of the biases and prejudices of sixteenth-century Christian Europe, Calvin proves a surprisingly cosmopolitan thinker whose theological insights have contributed to the development of Western democratic liberalism and modern conceptions of self and society. My book advocates risking personal offense by undertaking a serious encounter with Calvin’s thoughts, for in seeing how Calvin sought to answer the pressing questions and attend to the social problems of his day and age, we just might find answers to the questions and problems we face today. v
7 Gregg Brekke, “Allan Boesak Commends Belhar Confession,” Presbyterian Church (USA), June 23, 2016. https://www.pcusa.org/news/2016/6/23/allan-boesak-commends-belhar-confession/.
8 Ibid.
9 “Confession of Belhar,” in Book of Confessions, Part 1 of The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (Louisville: Office of the General Assembly, 2016), 305.
Pastors’ Panel
Bishop Minerva Garza Carcaño is the Resident Bishop of the San Francisco Area, which includes the California-Nevada Conference in the Western Jurisdiction of The United Methodist Church.
Yolanda M. Santiago Correa is the Program Coordinator of the Hispanic House of Studies at Duke University, a creator and co-host of Majestad Prieta: A Podcast on Blackness in Latin America, the Caribbean, y la Diáspora, and a team member of the AfroLatiné Theology Project.
Rev. John Harrison (MDiv’15) is the pastor of Nacoochee Presbyterian Church in northeast Georgia. He previously served multiple congregations in St Louis, MO, and has been working with people in jail, prison, or newly released for the last ten years.
The Rev. Carlos L. Malave is the president of the Latino Christian National Network (LCNN), a broad Christian Latino network that includes Pentecostal, Evangelical, Catholic, and Mainline leaders.
How do you see the various iterations of Christianity in the U.S. interacting with culture?
Yolanda M. Santiago Correa
The answer to this question usually exists in two extremes. Some emphasize the need for culture to inspire and act as a lens for theological interpretation, affirming that the implications and branches of culture and the identities that form it –namely race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, politics, traditions, etc. – are a loci theologici, the source for our theological understanding. Others support a dualist perspective that seeks to separate Christianity from culture completely: God only saves our souls; the rest is not necessary. According to this perspective, Christians should detach completely from culture because, once we become part of the body of Christ, all else should be lost in favor of embracing ‘Christian’ as our sole identity.
In the United States, we see examples of both extremes. Historically, movements of thought such as liberation theology have embraced the former, advocating for a Christian faith that considers the daily existence of minoritized communities, identified as “the poor,” the source of a true understanding of God and our task as Christians in the world. Our daily lives, lo cotidiano, and our lives in communities, en conjunto, are the locations in which God is revealed. In the same way, movements like evangelicalism, in its connection to the prosperity gospel, affirm a faith that does the opposite. Christians are destined to be ‘washed,’ stripped of all their ‘worldly’ labels in favor of the one true identity: child of God.
Regardless of whether one falls in one of these two camps or the many gray areas between them, in the United States, the question of Christianity interacting with culture is intrinsically tied to the idea of race and class. There is not an iteration of Christianity in the United States that does not interact with culture because they have acted together to create this nation. From iconography that depicts Christ as a white man and echoes a history of white supremacy and the deification of
whiteness to protests in support of Palestinian liberation rooted in a direct rejection of coloniality departing from a Christian understanding of freedom and equality, Christianity and Christian thought are the point of departure from which the United States understands itself and, as a result, how its inhabitants are allowed –or not – to move day to day.
Rather than giving examples, our challenge is to understand that, whether we can perceive it or not, the interaction between Christianity and culture in the United States is pervasive and constant, and it is our responsibility to understand its influence and avoid falling into the thought that there is an iteration of Christianity where the opposite is possible.
Rev. Carlos Malavé
For many years, the church lived with suspicions of culture. Probably until the 1980s, most Christians considered culture to be opposed to the Christian faith. This was particularly so in the more conservative traditions. However, even historic Protestants and many Catholics were very careful about the influence of culture on their faith. The culture was hostile to faith for many boomers and late-boomer believers.
This perception of culture as evil has been changing with the arrival of Millennials and Generation Z. Older generations were alarmed by how Millennials and Generation Z were accommodating cultural practices in fashion, music, and entertainment. Resistance to the influence of culture on the part of older generations has decreased. One area of culture that is in front of our eyes is political culture. During the 70s and 80s, conservative religious movements strongly influenced our national politics. The “Moral Majority” movement was one of the most successful in influencing several presidents’ policies during those years. For the last ten years, the influence of believers has been less organized. Still, prominent national leaders, especially in the Republican party, have strongly influenced social policies. This level of influence is not equal in the Democratic party. The Democratic party has not engaged the church with the same intensity as the Republicans, maybe with the exception, to some extent, of the Black church. Party politics plays a significant role in the deep division we experience in culture today. There is no significant difference in how believers and non-believers engage in politics today.
Bishop Minerva G. Carcaño
Our prevalent Culture in the U.S. is that of racism, racial inequity, misogyny, homophobia, consumerism, and greed. How can it be otherwise when we consider the fact that this country was built upon the genocide of our Indigenous siblings and the enslavement of our Black brothers and sisters? Those who came to this country centuries ago were looking for land and labor at a costly price for those who were already here and those who were stolen from their homelands and forcibly
brought here. The U.S. works at preserving a democratic system, but today, it is crumbling because its foundation is corrupt.
This prevalent Culture interacts with the many cultures of those who live in this country. Our growing cultural diversity creates an opportunity for a richer and deeper life. Unfortunately, even with intentional efforts to help us become more culturally competent we resist the beckoning to a life of belonging with one another. I believe the resistance comes from being set in our ways, fear of the other, and the reality that our prevalent Culture continuously undermines God’s hope of a world where we are able to see the image and likeness of God within each one of us, that sacred imprint of the Divine upon us all that leads us to live in love with one another, and thus with compassion, justice, and peace.
I am grateful for the work of Christians across the country who dare to speak and act with courage and sacrifice to support migrants, the poor, and others who are marginalized. The voices and presence of Christians reaching out beyond the borders of this country calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, where children have been exterminated ruthlessly, building places of safety for women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who have been physically raped and left to die in the catastrophe of civil war, and who give generously whenever there is a disaster in the world, are a ray of hope that we can yet create a new foundation of integrity, truth and justice in the U.S.
Rev. John Harrison
I am reminded of a quote by the sociologist Matthew Desmond that came up in a Dmin. seminar last summer:1 “Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above.”2 I have seen these paradoxes to be true in ministry, and I am sober about the ways church and culture can both reform and deform each other. I helped our presbytery grapple with its history of supporting racially exclusive covenants in housing deeds in the 1948 US Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer.3 In an independent study during my MDiv., I traced the patterns and practices of Ferguson, MO’s police department back to a stated city goal of attracting “quality residents,” and I lamented the missing voice of the gospel in those conversations regarding the source of people’s value. In seven years of prison ministry in St. Louis, I felt the pain that kind of thinking inflicts on people not deemed “quality” by either the dominant culture or the church, and I saw people of faith go out of their way day after day to show people they are valuable and worth
1 Tony Lin, Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2020), 163.
2 Matthew Desmond, “Capitalism,” New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019.
3 Presbytery of Giddings-Lovejoy, “An Apology to Our African American Sisters and Brothers for the Sin of Slavery and Its Legacy,” https://glpby.org/wp-content/uploads/ DRAP-Apology-1.30.20.pdf, 5.
fighting for. As the organizer of a house church, we were horrified when Missouri threatened access to hormones for one of our members, who is trans. We offered our church as a space of support for a community actively under attack, and we were forced to make emergency plans to help members leave the state if needed.
From your context in ministry, where do you see Christ in culture?
Yolanda
M. Santiago Correa
Working with primarily Latine students and communities has made my understanding of Christ in culture one that echoes generations of Latina women who have understood God as a compañero del camino rather than as a distant deity. Although I am cautious of generalizations, we indeed see a faith deeply connected to our identity and the history of our lands in the large majority of Latine Christian communities. In my daily work, whether that is office work, teaching a course, or in conversation with students, Christ is in culture because the faith passed down by the generations of ancestors who came before us sees in Jesús the hope of the possibility of a different world. For many Latines, God is not distant or detached from culture because God cannot be. Jesús, through the incarnation, understood in his own body what it’s like to be Black, to be brown, to be poor, to be marginalized, to live in a body that is expected to stay silent, comply, and assimilate.
Working in an office that centers the Hispanic and Latine communities and their voices, I see this understanding of Christ daily. This understanding challenges theological education to reorient and question itself through the lens of the Christ we claim to follow: one that embedded himself in culture and became el hijo del carpintero. A Christ who, in the very identities he assumed, inverted the structures of power of his day— both political and religious—and proclaimed el año agradable del Señor, the year of the Lord’s favor, and through this proclamation made our theological task one that, through culture, affirms the inbreaking of God’s kin-dom and sees our daily lives as an expansion of the eschatological hope and vision of the multitude of Revelation 7.
Rev. Carlos Malavé
Culture reflects people’s consciousness. People’s spiritual, emotional, and psychological experiences shape cultural trends. The relationship between culture and faith has taken a 180-degree turn. Today, believers are expected to influence culture. This is very true in music. Singers like Lauren Daigle and Jesus Adrian Romero, among many others, have made their way into pop music.
Regarding fashion, there is not much difference between believers and the general public. The influence of practicing Christians on culture is present in all areas. We could say that the older generations maintained a solid barrier between culture and faith. On the other hand, the new generations have a very permeable barrier in which exchange and influence move naturally from one side to the other. Pope Francis has been very outspoken about Christians’ engagement with culture.
He has emphasized the importance of Christians’ engagement with culture and politics, promoting a culture of encounter and dialogue, and working for the common good. He has called for a “culture of encounter” in which people come together across differences in the spirit of mercy, solidarity, and hope. Our country has been enriched by the influx of cultures like no other on earth. Christ is present in the myriads of cultural expressions that have arrived on our nation’s shores. During the last forty years, Latinos, Africans, and Asians have infused our culture with their respective worldviews. Religion, especially Christianity, has highly influenced these peoples’ worldviews and cultures. According to Richard Rohr, Christ has been present in all cultures and civilizations, and culture has influenced the development of Christianity.
Christ’s presence in culture is real and pervasive. His influence is not limited to Christians or members of any particular religion. Christ’s presence and influence in culture are beyond our tribal religious expressions and worldviews.
Bishop Minerva G. Carcaño
While I definitely see Christ among us through the faithful already here, I have for some time been seeing Christ arriving at the shores and borders of this country in our immigrant sisters and brothers. They are re-evangelizing us through their witness. I have encountered migrants and refugees from all over the world and listened to their stories of migration, stories filled with horrific trauma, and asked them, “With all that you have faced, how is it possible that you are here today?” Their response is consistent: “God, the Lord, Jehovah, the Holy One, was with me.” Their witness penetrates my soul to the core! I find myself imagining God in the desert, the Lord on the boat in the middle of the sea, Jehovah extending his powerful arm of strength and protection in the climbing of a wall, the Holy One walking ahead of his people, guiding them along the way. When my life and my Christian witness become mundane, I remember the witness of brave migrants and refugees who come bearing the good news that the living God is with us, present in the world. They have seen God!
Rev. John Harrison
I have seen Jesus show up while reading Tupac’s “The Rose That Grew From Concrete” with people in prison for half their lives. I have seen Jesus in the pride and courage on a person’s face when he stopped me to say, “I wanted to let you know I talked to the man who shot me, and I forgave him.” I have sought out Galilee in our present day wherever there is a wrong side of the tracks, and I have seen the reality of redemption in the Lord who is present there. When I am a neighbor to people who suffer, I see the wounds of Jesus. When I walk with people seeking sobriety, I see the power of the resurrection. I see the cross all around, and I see
Jesus in the grit of life that continues to press on anyway. How can Christians speak to the cultures at large that are experiencing so much polarization?
Yolanda M. Santiago Correa
The Oxford English Dictionary defines polarization as a “division into two sharply contrasting groups or sets of beliefs or opinions.” I think the first step to speaking to the cultures at large that experience this phenomenon is to understand that there are never only two sides to the coin. As we speak of cultures plural, we need to understand that each of those cultures is different, that each person who identifies with them is different, and that we, as individuals, do not exist in a single culture or form. Before we can speak to the realities of the world, we must first acknowledge how ‘reality’ is subjective and understand ourselves as people whose opinions are subjective. Part of the issue of Christianity, for the longest time, has been presenting itself as the ultimate and only truth in existence. Regardless of whether or not, as Christians, we understand that to be the case, part of learning to speak to cultures is to accept that not all of humanity thinks the same and that we should not see disagreement as a threat to our existence. Granted, I am not talking about disagreement regarding issues of justice and equality; I believe we should never agree to disagree on that. However, we must approach the conversation with humility, recognizing that our positionality is a single way among the myriad ways we understand the world.
Rev. Carlos Malavé
Polarization happens when an individual or group of individuals sustain the position that their theological perspectives should be normative. Today’s sad reality is that the church is as polarized and divided as the culture in which it lives. This behavior of the church directly contradicts the teachings of the gospel and the apostles. Speaking to the Corinthian church, the apostle Paul said, “I have a serious concern to bring up with you, my friends, using the authority of Jesus, our Master. I’ll put it as urgently as I can: You must get along with each other. You must learn to be considerate of one another, cultivating a life in common.” (1 Corinthians 1:10, The Message) The way to address polarization is by promoting a culture of dialogue and mutual respect. The teachings of the church in this respect are consistent. The gospel declares, “We are the light of the world.” Today, very few church sectors emphasize the need for respectful dialogue. A faithful church will model grace, mutual understanding, and love.
The church cannot speak to the divisions in culture and society unless it recognizes her failure in living according to the teaching of the Scriptures. It must renounce tribalism and open her eyes to the truth that Christ’s influence in the world is not limited to the churches’ influence. The truth is that because of the narrowmindedness of the church and its incapacity to see Christ’s presence in culture, the
younger generations are leaving the church in droves. A valid question would be: Should the church focus on changing the mindset of the current older generations? Or should the church spend its little capital on walking with the younger generations and shepherding them in their quest for Christ and truth?
Bishop Minerva G. Carcaño
We must start by committing not to demonize one another. We are all children of God and thus family to one another, whatever faith we may profess. In the U.S., polarization has become so great that it will not be easy to overcome. As Christians, we could contribute to the necessary depolarization by together refocusing on the mission Christ has given us. There is no clearer mission statement for the body of Christ than Matthew 25:31-46. If we want to serve Jesus, we must feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, and visit the imprisoned. In other words, we must actively live in the reign of God here and now and not under the banners of partisan political parties or the influence of partisan theologies on either the extreme right or extreme left. We must remember that we are called to be the voice of Christ in culture and not for anything else. Not alone, but especially with those whom Jesus most sought to be with – the excluded, the oppressed, the forgotten. Those who suffer most among us have the clearest understanding of the cultural transformation that must occur for persons, families, communities, and nations to be made whole and for life to be abundant for everyone. When we walk among the least of these, we walk with Jesus, who, on the journey, reconciles us, tearing down the walls of separation, stirring love in our hearts for one another, and healing our brokenness. v
Rev. John Harrison
I am indebted in this answer to Toni Morrison’s epigraph in Beloved. When we are tempted to write one another off or break faith with another sibling in Jesus Christ, we would do well to remember the promise of Hosea, as quoted in Romans, before we say anything else:
“Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people,’
and her who was not beloved I will call ‘beloved.’ ”
“And in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ there they shall be called children of the living God” (Rom. 9:25-26, NRSVUE).
Faculty Books
Gregory L. Cuéllar.
Resacralizing the Other at the US-Mexico
Border: A Borderland Hermeneutic.
London; New York: Routledge, 2020. xii+160. ISBN 9781032083834, $42.36 Paperback, $136 Hardcover, 42.36 eBook.
This book concretely embodies what Gregory Cuéllar calls Borderland hermeneutics. Cuéllar exposes the ideological undercurrents that feed the sociopolitical scaffolding intended toward the eradication of Mexican American peoples, along with racialized (black and brown) bodies and minoritized migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. Through an intimate analysis of the U.S. colonial imagination and legacy, Cuéllar illustrates the invention of stereotypical perceptions designed to negatively portray the racialized and immigrant foreign other as libidinous, savage, dumb, infectious, inferior, deviant, ignorant, and like animals. This collection of attitudes, biased scientific studies, laws, and state-funded measures contribute to what Cuéllar calls the archive. Through this system, designed to eradicate these peoples and their communities, the bodies of racialized people cease to be their own and become objects of scientific study, social marginalization, and geographical displacement and removal. In other words, they are desacralized. While migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and brown and black bodies are rendered undesirable for inclusion in the body politic, they become great sources of profitability
in the private sector, as is the case in the growing system of privately run immigration family detention centers, and even among humanitarian organizations.
Cuéllar masterfully presents arguments from multiple perspectives, leading readers to recognize the progressing development of the colonial USA archive. Cuéllar drinks from his own “intellectual wells” by engaging and furthering Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderland proposal. At the same time, his notion of desacralization is unique. It should not be confused with Giorgio Agamben's analysis of the legal and political structures enacted by richer nations, which create the conditions for people to be killed at the border without having any legal means of accountability. Cuéllar’s proposal goes beyond the notion of a political border and into the borderlands. Since the Mexico-USA war of 1848, the region has been una rajada/ herida abierta (an opened crack/wound). Through his analysis, he cracks open the dominant White, heteronormative, Protestant, violent, and mythological imaginary that claims superiority. In doing so, Cuéllar challenges notions of Christianity that have forgotten the ethical imperatives of welcoming “another.”
Cuéllar’s volume is an excavation of the Euro-USA elite construction of knowledge, but he goes deeper by exposing how these structures of knowledge are officially funded by systems of profit-making and exploitation and simultaneously designed for social, cultural, and ethnic
Faculty Books
cleansing at the borderlands. In other words, the borderlands encompass the instrumentalization and weaponization of knowledge production against the unwanted yet exploitable and profitable migrant other. Indeed, writes Cuéllar, migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and racialized black and brown bodies exist in an in-between state of nonbelonging. His use of the borderlands would benefit from articulating the implications of the border as a fluiddynamic reality that moves into the nation’s territory, well beyond political borders, including within our church communities.
Cuéllar does not only focus on dismantling the ideological apparatus that de-sacralizes Mexican Americans and racialized others. This book is also a work of re-sacralization, a call to reclaim the sacred in “an-other.” Drawing on Anzaldúa’s notion of la facultad, he foregrounds the unique knowledge that only those who inhabit the spaces in the borderlands have access to by virtue of their experiences with structures of desacralization. Cuéllar’s proposal privileges concrete saberes (knowledges) from the Mexican American cultural and intellectual traditions in the way they interpret the biblical text, offering refreshing insights to regular Christians. Two other key features he identifies are the corridos (a traditional Mexican music genre that narrates the experiences of people) and the role of the curandera/o. The analysis of the corridos lifts oral forms of knowing and wisdom traditions. Meanwhile, la curandera literally, “the one who heals”—goes beyond Western European and AngloNorth Atlantic notions of health,
healing, and care. The deployment of la curandera in Cuéllar’s proposal evokes heretofore silenced and demonized traditions that accentuate the reality of cultural practices and ancestral wisdoms and spiritualities otherwise. Together, corridos and curanderismo operate as counter-narratives that expose the fissures and cracks in the implacable white colonial borderland structures of the USA. Cuéllar’s project of resacralization of the desacralized racialized black and brown bodies climaxes in a double moment: first, an uncovering of the mythologically invented nature of the superiority of the white cultural, epistemological, and social traditions. Second, it is a celebration of the wide array of other cultural traditions, knowledges, and wisdoms embodied by those in the borderlands. He gestures away from a reality dominated by reason and profit and invites us to become protagonists in constructing a church and society where the divine sacredness of all can be celebrated. v
Reviewed by Néstor Medina, Associate Professor of Religious Ethics and Culture at Emmanuel College, University of Toronto. He is the author of Christianity, Empire, and the Spirit (Brill, 2008).
Donghyun Jeong. Pauline Baptism among the Mysteries: Ritual Messages and the Promise of Initiation.
Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2023. https:// doi.org/10.1515/9783110791389
ToChristians today, baptism is a familiar rite. It marks a new stage in our relationship with God and our entrance into a particular community of faith. We may understand baptism as symbolic of dying and rising to new life with Christ, washing away sin, or being claimed as Christ’s people.
But where did baptism come from? What did baptism mean to the first Christians? New Testament scholars have often researched these questions. In his new book, Prof. Donghyun Jeong takes on a renewed exploration of what baptism was, what it meant, and how it came to be.
Although washing rites were common in antiquity, especially for purification, baptism as a rite of initiation into a religious group was an innovation of the early Christians. Some (though not all) other religious groups also had initiation rites. These cults are known to us collectively as “mystery religions” because their initiation rites were kept secret. Because some of these mystery cults also worshipped a god who was said to have died and lived again, scholars have often used these religions as a point of comparison.
Jeong takes a fresh approach to this topic and one that yields interesting results. Other scholars tried to trace a history of ideas, suggesting Paul’s
dependence upon the mystery cults for his theological interpretation of baptism. Such dependence is almost impossible to verify.
Instead, Jeong considers initiation rites as existing social practices that ancient people were already familiar with. Rituals—repeated, symbolic actions—send both explicit and implicit messages: for example, they may communicate something about the individual’s relationship to the god, the power that the deity has, and the benefits of the ritual itself. Jeong sets out to analyze these messages in two mystery cults (the cults devoted to Dionysus and Isis) and compares them to what Paul says about baptism.
Jeong’s comparison suggests that Christian baptism was a rite similar to mystery initiation. Entry into the cult of Dionysus or Isis promised similar benefits, including entry into the community of the faithful, the creation of a bond between the deity and the individual, and a blessed afterlife. Furthermore, some of the theological messages were similar. Mystery rites pointed to the suffering of the deity and his or her sympathy for devotees, for example. Through the ritual, the individual also became identified with the deity in some way (think of Paul’s language of being “clothed with Christ” [Galatians 3:27] or being “united in a death like his” [Romans 6:5]).
Paul and other Christians certainly also innovated a good deal—making baptism the central rite of initiation, for example, and interpreting the rite in novel ways to connect it with Scripture and to Christ’s death and resurrection. But their innovations drew on social
structures, patterns of association, and meaning-making that were already familiar to people of the time. Just as Paul drew on existing methods of interpretation to relate the Jewish Scriptures to Christ and to the issues facing his churches, early Christians who developed the rite of baptism as initiation created rites that were comprehensible to people because they were in some ways similar to other rites of initiation.
Jeong’s study also leads him to conclude that the practice of baptism and its meaning were central to Paul’s theology—perhaps more than we have previously recognized. Describing baptism as an initiation ritual leads Jeong to notice how meanings connected to baptism are embedded in much of Paul’s thought, even when he is not talking directly about baptism.
For example, one of the central results of baptism was to establish a trusting relationship between the believer and Christ. The importance of trust in Christ (or “belief” in Christ, as it is often translated) permeates Paul’s letters. Jesus’s death was possible because of his own trust in God’s promises, and in baptism, believers replicate this trust, becoming part of the story of Christ’s dying and rising. Paul understood baptism as a rite that enacted the individual’s trust in Christ and connected them in relationship, and that understanding shows up elsewhere in Paul’s language. Trusting Christ is a key moment for believers, and it makes possible the transformed life Paul calls them to inhabit.
Dr. Jeong’s careful historical research and close reading of Paul offers new insight into the early development of the now-familiar rite of baptism. It holds great potential for enriching our understanding of Paul’s letters and calls us to reconsider the importance of baptism to our own theologies. v
Reviewed by Susan E. Hylen, Shatford Professor of New Testament, Candler School of Theology, Emory University. Hylen is the author, most recently, of Finding Phoebe: What New Testament Women Were Really Like (Eerdmans 2023)
CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE
Through You All Peoples Shall Be Blessed Joshua 3:7–13 and Micah 3:5–12
William Greenway
In his acceptance speech to the prestigious Peruvian Academy of the Spanish Language, theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez offers a brilliant re-interpretation of the Tower of Babel and Pentecost narratives.1 God’s scattering of the people into different languages is often interpreted as a curse reversed at Pentecost when, through the Spirit, people of diverse tongues all speak the same language. Gutiérrez, with an eye to empire and the imposition of Spanish upon the indigenous peoples of Peru, re-reads the Tower narrative from the underside. He notes that the tower and city were being built so that people could make a name for themselves. He thinks of the dangerous, forced, hard labor of those who build ziggurats, pyramids, castles, and fortresses. He notes that at Pentecost, all peoples do not speak the same language: through the Spirit, all understand the same gospel—Jesus’ call to social, cultural, economic, and spiritual liberation—each in their own tongue. He concludes God’s scattering into different languages is not a curse but a blessing, for it liberates impoverished multitudes who are laboring for those striving after empire.
Pentecost, too, blossoms amidst the depths of empire. An impoverished pregnant girl on the verge of giving birth, one among multitudes across the Roman Empire forced to travel so an emperor can inventory his resources; a genocide of infants and toddlers; a babe on a desperate flight south into Egypt; a boy growing up
1 Gustavo Gutiérrez, "Theological Language: Fullness of Silence,” in Gustavo Gutiérrez: Essential Writings, James Nickoloff, ed., 65–73 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).
Dr. William Greenway, Professor of Philosophical Theology at Austin Seminary, delivered this sermon in Shelton Chapel on November 7, 2023. His newest book is, In the Light of Agape: Moral Realism and Its Consequences (Cascade, 2024).
among a colonized people in an age of crushing inequity; a man filled with the Spirit proclaiming love to empire—that is, proclaiming social, cultural, economic and spiritual liberation and forgiveness for all to empire—with such brilliance, passion, and effect that empire kills him with a brutal form of execution, one used for insurrectionists to terrify subjugated peoples into submission.
What is stunning is this: that what is here born from subjugation, exploitation, and genocide is not hatred, thirst for vengeance, or a fight for one’s own empire, but Pentecost, awakening to the Spirit of love for all.
This is the core realization of one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century, the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas, a French soldier captured by the Rommel’s forces in an early battle, was a Nazi labor camp prisoner for five years. He went into the war as a secular intellectual. Amidst the horror, suffering, and killing in the camps, he was awakened to the Spirit of love for all. He helps us understand how; paradoxically, we are never more awake to and certain of the reality of a love that seizes us for others than when we undergo its violation. Levinas realizes that contrary to modern secular philosophy, ultimate reality is not a brute flux. The primordial “state of nature” is not an individualistic war of all against all because agape, that by which we are taken hostage by passionate concern for every Face, God insofar as God is love, that moral reality is indeed real, a real force in our world, so that, insofar as we do not harden our hearts we are diverse peoples one before God, seized by agape, united in shalom, in koinonia. That is the primordial reality about which we are never more certain than when we are rendered speechless in horror over its violation.
Levinas realizes the reality of shalom anchored in agape is more primordial than any human divisions. In agape, he is seized by passionate concern even for the Faces of his captors. He is a twentieth-century Jew who, like a first-century Jew, calls us to love our enemies. This is not naïve love. Levinas is not a pacificist. He’s a soldier. Even as we love our enemies, insofar as they are enemies of the good and are striving to violate other Faces, we may need to act violently, even use deadly force, but only for the sake of preventing unjust violation of Faces, only to the degree necessary, never in vengeance, and always with heart-felt, named horror over being forced to violate beloved Faces.
Soldiers who have killed justifiably but are haunted by the Faces of those they have killed will understand what the war veteran, Levinas, means when he says that, of course, you can end a life, but “you cannot kill the Face.” This names moral reality and the moral injury we inflict upon ourselves whenever we harm others. It grounds rules of war not in modernity’s “enlightened self-interest,” which not only remains fundamentally a form of self-interest but is so easily trumped by nearterm interest or a thirst for vengeance, but in the reality of agape: violence only for the sake of preventing unjust violation of Faces, only to the degree necessary, never in vengeance, and always with heart-felt, named horror over being forced to violate beloved Faces.
We need not go from Babel to Pentecost to find the Spirit of love emerging from the experience of empire. The very next passage after Babel in Genesis, where we transition from the Primeval History to the story of God’s chosen people, is the call to someone from one of those peoples scattered from Babel, a Chaldean from Ur, Abram, who is chosen to leave his people—a guard against empire grounded in blood—to migrate to a distant land—a guard against empire grounded in land— with the promise that God will make him a great nation so that he will be a blessing so that through him all peoples on earth will be blessed.
This contrast between the tower builders and Abram provides a tight contrast between the apostate empire and the faithful nation. Where the tower builders strove to make themselves great over and against all others, God, agape, will make Abram into a nation great because it is for all peoples. Empire strives to secure itself against all others for its own benefit. God’s chosen will be a great nation insofar as they secure themselves for the good of all nations.
Truly great nations are rooted in agape. Empire is rooted in an existential, stateof-nature, war-of-all-against-all orientation. Desire for empire can lurk in the hearts of individuals or the dispossessed, so history is littered with examples of the oppressed of one age becoming oppressors of another. At the same time, great powers and people could be rooted in agape and understand that truly great powers and people strive for good for all peoples.
This is where our Micah text confronts our Joshua text, where the Jewish prophets repeatedly confront prophets who are false because they would make Israel not a blessing to all peoples but an empire. Joshua is written after the fact to lend unqualified divine sanction to the conquest of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, and Jebusites. Is this a faithful living out of Israel’s call to be agape’s chosen? To be a blessing to all peoples? No, says Micah. This is the way of empire, a dog-eat-dog war of all against all, and it will end in ruin.
Let’s not pretend Micah is not talking to us. Two hundred years ago the bluff Austin Seminary’s Shelton Chapel stands upon was on the eastern edge of the Comanche Empire. We in the United States need to think not of the Amorites, Hittites, and Jebusites but of the Apache, Cherokee, Comanche, Creek, Haudenosaunee, and Sioux, and today in our globalized setting, of China, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Malawi, Nigeria, the Philippines and Zambia, and we need to ask ourselves: are we striving to be a truly great nation, among agape’s chosen, a blessing to all peoples, using violence only for the sake of preventing unjust violation of Faces, only to the degree necessary, never in vengeance, always with heart-felt, named horror over being forced to violate beloved Faces? Or are we empire, fighting only for our own interests, a source of suffering, wailing, and lament?
Gustavo Gutiérrez was realistic. He did not romanticize. He was a reformer, not a revolutionary. He learned from the devastating failures of the Marxist revolutions. He knows no one spoke Spanish in Peru six hundred years ago, and now the colonial language and culture permeate Peru. But, he says, there is no turning back history,
and there are no pristine origins. Two hundred years before American soldiers defeated the Comanche Empire in the U.S. quest for a continental empire, the Comanche themselves emerged from the Wind River Shoshone and swept down through the southern plains, conquering other peoples in their quest after empire.2 This is the story since Homo Sapiens fought Neanderthals. We all live on blood. Gutiérrez affirms to the Peruvian Academy that the Spanish language and culture are here to stay, and they should be celebrated—as long as they are not imperialistic, as long as they embrace the Spirit of Micah, the Spirit of Pentecost.
Gutiérrez calls upon us to paint clear, beautiful, utopian visions of who we might be as diverse peoples united by love, specific visions of Peru and the United States, of all the Americas, of the Middle East, and the South China Sea, even of a global community. He calls upon us to strive to realize these utopian visions in our national and international laws and policies. At the same time, he rejects revolutionary violence and pace, for transforming societies takes time. The key is to ensure we are guided by utopian visions and are always moving urgently but cautiously in the right direction.3
Is all this naïve? Unrealistic? Dangerously clueless about the real world?
For years, I lived near New York City. My wife is from Long Island, and her father worked in the city. My sister and her family live there; my wife’s brothers live there. By 9/11, we lived in Austin. But watching the Towers fall, I remembered the last time I worked on my laptop in the Borders Books’ coffee shop on the ground floor. We couldn’t get through to our family members, two of whom were supposed to be exiting the Twin Towers subway station at the time of the attack. My wife’s dad and one brother were out of their office and apartment for months—but had missed their train into the city that day. Her other brother watched the second plane and the collapse from the roof of his building, but he was physically safe. The back deck and yard of my sister’s home were an inch deep with ash, but they, too, were safe.
9/11 was a heinous, unjustifiable attack upon civilian men, women, and children. It only deserved condemnation. It was personal. Yet in the weeks and months after 9/11, I was among the minority who spoke against vengeance, who marched against the U.S. going to war in Iraq, who opposed Guantanamo Bay, who wanted us to abide by the Geneva Conventions, who wanted to understand why a Saudi Arabian studying economics in Germany would lead an attack on famous symbols of global capitalism and the military/industrial complex. We were not pacifists. We supported carefully targeted attacks against the perpetrators. But we wanted to be guided by clearly articulated utopian visions, and we wanted to use violence only for the sake of preventing unjust violation of Faces, only to the degree necessary, never in vengeance, and always with heart-felt, named horror over being forced to
2 Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
3 Gustavo Gutiérrez, "Eschatology and Politics," in Gustavo Gutiérrez: Essential Writings, James Nickoloff, ed., 197–206 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).
violate beloved Faces. We were portrayed as naïve, unrealistic, clueless about the real world, unpatriotic.
What prevailed was a spirit of vengeance, a massively disproportionate response, more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of U.S. soldiers dead, thousands more physically or emotionally scarred for life, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, a generation of Iraqi children growing up in war zones, the rise of Isis, the fall and then return of the Taliban—all for what gain? Many who beat the drums of war had utopian, democratic ideals, but unlike Gutiérrez, they did not learn from the failures of the Marxist revolutions. They thought their ideals could be imposed rapidly through revolutionary violence. They mainly succeeded in creating devastation and chaos. It is infuriating to consider that that supposedly superior, we-understand-the-real-world, hardline response played right into those terrorists’ hands. Could they have imagined in their wildest dreams the massive destruction, destabilization, and loss they would succeed in provoking us to?
The so-called realists, with their neo-Darwinian/Hobbesian philosophy, were and are wrong philosophically, strategically, and politically. And all around the world— Russia, the South China Sea, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas (including the United States), and in neo-liberal, globalizing institutions—everywhere we look, the spirit of empire is ascendant. We are facing population crises, depletion and despoilation of nature, an epochal-level extinction event, climate change is rushing at us as a force multiplier, and everywhere empire is ascendant.
Micah says we are on a road to a “heap of ruins.”
Peoples of faith in fidelity to agape bring the hard-won wisdom of the prophets. But we are caricatured, marginalized, dismissed…voices crying in the wilderness…
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