Writing for Christian Century, Paula Huston recounts her mid-life spiritual crisis, a period of awakening and conversion that derailed the writer and set her upon a new track. In the retelling, Huston shares some thoughts about the difficulty of coming to terms with a spiritual calling in a postmodern culture—where menopause, for example, at first seemed an easy explanation for the mounting disruption in her life. They’re keen observations worth checking out regardless of your spiritual or religious persuasion:

Many obstacles held me back, some of them mundane. One was simple embarrassment: I was nervous about what others thought, especially my university colleagues. It was bad enough that I’d become a Catholic after years of loyalty to secular liberalism. Most of them had forgiven me; with much eye-rolling they had accepted my wacky, medieval-sounding Christian pilgrimage. But could they handle whatever was coming next? I myself couldn’t imagine what this might be, only that it boded ill for my good name on campus.

I was also stymied by an overdeveloped sense of duty. I was a middle-aged adult, after all, a person with responsibilities. Who did I think I was, dreaming of solitude and silence and the clear blue air of Paul’s third heaven? I had students, classes, deadlines and wifely and parental obligations. In some ways, it felt sinful to even think about making the changes that I needed to make if I were going to respond to the calling I was hearing.

. . . Finally, I was impeded by a problem I never knew I had: my hidden but stubbornly entrenched skepticism about the existence of the spiritual realm. Like most postmodern Westerners, I grew up in a culture permeated with empiricist notions about reality. Philosopher Charles Taylor writes that often we consciously hold one set of values and assumptions but unconsciously live by another. . . .  My hidden skepticism provided me with a hundred handy doubts right when I most needed them. Maybe all this disruption could be blamed on menopause after all. Maybe it was strictly a psychological event—the ego overcompensating for an inferiority complex? People delude themselves all the time, don’t they?

Source: Christian Century

Image by alicepopkorn, licensed under Creative Commons.

This past September, the United Church of Canada (UCC) commissioned four established aerosol artists to paint their interpretations of faith on a wall donated by a Toronto church, reports Sojourners. The vivid mural looks to be the first of many: The UCC has already scheduled a second “Paint Your Faith” event in Vancouver during April.

Source: Sojourners

Priggish Bible-thumpers may use the Good Book to justify sexual conservatism, but the actual text of the Bible is anything but prudish. The book is filled with innuendo, bawdy behavior, and enough obscenities to make modern, HBO-inured adults blush. Religious scolds may never stop quoting scripture to call for sexual civility, but Tibor Krausz writes in a book review for Killing the Buddha, “sexual civility requires ignoring scripture.”

The bone taken from Adam to create Eve, for example, may not have been a rib bone, as is often taught in bible class. The word “bone” may have been a far more modern euphemism for male genitalia. And the word “testify” may have been pretty dirty, too:

In court we swear to tell the truth with a hand placed on the Bible. But in the book itself, Jacob, nearing death in Egypt, asks Joseph to swear an oath not to bury him there by “put[ting] your hand under my thigh” (Gen. 47:29). Earlier in Genesis, Jacob wrestles with God, who touches “the hollow of his [Jacob’s] thigh” (32:25). “Thigh” happens to be a biblical euphemism for male genitalia; it’s from Jacob’s “thigh” or “loins” that his numerous offspring sprang. The practice of swearing an oath while touching one’s or someone else’s testicles was common in the ancient Near East (Abraham also orders a servant to do just that in Genesis 24:2). Its linguistic memory survives in our word “testify”— testis being the Latin both for “witness” and the male generative gland.

(Thanks, Marginal Revolution.)

Source:  Killing the Buddha  

Social work for the affluent: It sounds like an oxymoron. Down in Chicago, however, licensed clinical social worker Jinnie English is carving out a valuable new specialty for her profession—and opening the door to talking about the challenges of life after poverty.

English, profiled in University of Chicago magazine, didn’t set out to practice what she refers to as nontraditional social work. Rather, the Chicago alumnus “stumbled across” a niche clientele in the early days of her practice. Her outwardly-successful clients, most of them people of color, “had a lot of psychodynamic issues, masked under a really nice suit, a great haircut, nice home in the suburbs,” she tells the magazine. “They were left with the internal struggle of being poor.”

English herself grew up at times on welfare and “I still feel that shame,” she tells University of Chicago. For those who come from a less-privileged background, success can be a severe culture shock. Many of her clients also grew up in dysfunctional families, and don’t know how to respond to having power, she explains.

Among her colleagues, English often runs into the attitude that helping privileged people “doesn’t count,” but she’s determined to push the conversation forward—pointing out that many of her clients are the “successful products” of traditional social work. Her resolve calls to mind two other conversation changers: Dean Spade and Tyrone Boucher, 2009 Utne visionaries and co-creators of Enough, a dynamic website where people write about and discuss wealth, class, and the personal politics of resisting capitalism.

Source: University of Chicago

Image by *sean, licensed under Creative Commons.

It is easy to dislike Pat Robertson. One of my favorite responses to his abhorrent remarks about the Haiti earthquake was a message that popped up on Twitter: “Text ‘666’ to donate $10 to buy a hand basket big enough for Pat Robertson.”

Over at Religion Dispatches, Mark Hulsether has assembled a list of the Top Five (Less Sensational But More Dangerous) Things to Remember About Pat Robertson. Among them:

Robertson plays his part in the Iran-Contra scandal.

During the Central American civil wars of the 1980s, Robertson helped fund “cities of refuge” in Guatemala (what were called “strategic hamlets” in Vietnam), and camps for Nicaraguan Contras. Though trivial in scale compared to the policies of Bush and Cheney, allies of Reagan, funded illegally through the Iran-Contra connection and related schemes, were carrying out sadistic massacres in parts of countries they considered to be too leftist. Congressional Democrats were trying to stop the violence; which is what led Reagan, Oliver North, and others to develop illegal channels. Robertson cheerfully presented his piece of this puzzle as an opportunity for Christian mission. He even appeared on camera, with no apparent shame, to pray with Contra troops.

Robertson publishes an anti-Semitic screed and neo-conservative allies yawn.

Robertson’s 1991 book, The New World Order, recycled anti-Semitic conspiracy theories reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and stated that George Bush Sr. was part of a conspiracy to institute “an occult-inspired world socialist dictatorship” (through his work with the United Nations in the first Gulf War). This caused few of Robertson’s neoconservative allies to break with him in any decisive way—although one former neocon, Michael Lind, denounced him in a major exposé in the New York Review of Books.

It goes on and on, just like Robertson himself. “Even if we discount Robertson’s extreme expressions… as harmless free speech, are these not remarkable simply at the level of imagination and hate speech?” Hulsether writes. “What if secular leftists or radical Muslims were to advocate similar scenarios of armed struggle or to use similar hate speech? What if they controlled television networks and were leading presidential candidates? Would federal prosecutors and mainstream news networks tolerate such behavior? Is it not remarkable that we take such things for granted from Robertson? As a wise media critic once said, ‘it’s a joke, but it’s not that funny.’”

Source: Religion Dispatches

Digital culture pioneer Kevin Kelly is bridging the gap between technology and spirituality. His “techno transcendentalist” philosophy, explained to Orion magazine, acknowledges that all creation and discovery, including the alphabet, the internet, and even the sun, can be seen on a cosmic level as technology. Humans are able to create technology, but our inventions have fundamentally changed the nature of humanity in ways that people cannot control. People are now more distracted, but we’re learning more, too. “You could say that humans are the sexual organs of technology,” according to Kelly, “that we are necessary for its survival. But it has its own inertia, urgency, tendencies, and bias.”

People tend to fear technology, in the same way that people fear all change. Change tends to breed discomfort. But Kelley believes people should not make blanket prohibitions on new inventions, no matter how frightening they may be. “I don’t think technology is neutral,” Kelly told Orion. “But I think the proper response to a bad technology is not to stop it—to stop thinking—but to have a better idea.”

Source: Orion 

Image by Dominic, licensed under Creative Commons.

Perhaps our cynical society should learn something from the bird-watchers among us, who have the (sadly) uncommon tendency to trust one another. Alice Morgan writes a lovely piece for the new issue of Bird Watcher’s Digest about the strength of the “unwritten code of honesty” that governs the birding world, which results not only in the truthful intentions of each birder, but also in the trust of his or her peers. (The article is not yet available online.)

Apart from bird-watching, “there are not many situations in which something that matters to the participants is based entirely on individual statements without external monitoring,” Morgan writes. “Even in a sphere that is highly competitive, as birding is for many people, it is rare to encounter skepticism about what individuals say.”

If the trip leader says he has seen 800 species in North America, we accept and admire that. If we hear that a knowledgeable birder has seen a rare bird but no other sightings are reported, our natural response is that this expert may have made a rare identification mistake, but that more likely the bird has simply moved on. We don’t jump to the conclusion that the sighting is a lie, just as we don’t believe that the birder with 800 species has padded his list.

If a reported sighting does seem highly unlikely, Morgan writes, “perhaps someone will believe you were mistaken—that the reported rarity was actually a common bird in a strange light, or a juvenal plumage—but not that you intentionally lied.”

I find this fidelity to the truth to be one of the most attractive aspects of bird-watching. We all like to brag about the birds we see and hear, but we are also united in our rueful admissions that this or that bird has escaped us this season, this year, or even all our lives so far. We look forward to the moment when we can truthfully lay claim to a particular bird, or to a higher tally of birds seen this month or this year, or in this place or that. And when we finally reach our goal, we will tell our friends and fellow bird-watchers, who will share our gratification, because they will have every reason to believe us.

Source: Bird Watcher’s Digest

Image by donjd2, licensed under Creative Commons.