Education Woes in Texas

The Texas State Board of Education is in need of a new chairperson since the Texas Senate refused to confirm the conservative creationist Don McLeroy for the position. That seemed great until it was revealed that on his short list for the position is Cynthia Dunbar - a choice that makes McLeroy look almost moderate. Yikes, indeed. Like McLeroy, Dunbar is an ardent creationist and has made many controversial statements about public education in Texas, such as suggesting that Texas’ schools “undermine parents’ authority to teach children scriptural interpretations.” She has called public education a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion.” Is Perry reckless enough to appoint her? Really? Possibly!

One problem is that the Texas legislature meets only once every two years. Yes, for those of you not from Texas, that is not a typo – once every TWO YEARS. So… Since they are just out of session if Perry appoints Ms. Dunbar the Senate won’t be able to refuse to confirm her until she has already been in the position for two years. Lovely.

Dunbar is not only a creationist but a particularly paranoid and delusional one. She has come under fire for some ridiculous things she has written about Obama (which even other republicans have distanced themselves from) and if he chooses her it will be a very unpopular decision among the moderates and liberals of Texas, but Perry doesn’t care. He is facing a challenge for the Govenor’s position in a few years from comparatively moderate Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and folks think he may appoint Dunbar to prove his conservative credentials to extreme right wing Christian conservatives.

I have a son entering the public school system in the fall and this is just plain depressing. Having Ms. Dunbar in this position would be like hiring a Tobacco executive to the presidency of the American Lung Association. We will be holding our breath to see if our texas public educational is, as a Discover Magazine blogger put it "careening toward doom."

A Few More Thoughts on Unitarian-Universalism

A while back I did a couple of posts on my chosen religion (Unitarian-Universalism) talking about what I liked and disliked about it. The gist of the “dislikes” was the feeling I had that Unitarian-Universalism is so vague and in opposition to discussion of any Ultimate (whether the symbol “God” is used for it or not), that it can never develop a “theology” unique to itself, but would rather always be a collection of multiple groups that shared a building and some values, but nothing else. I am starting to rethink that.

It was encouraging to read in our local interim minister’s report from General Assembly this week that

The most popular event at G.A., other than the major worship services and ceremonies, was a nine-hour lecture on theology.
You might need to read that last sentence again. – The Rev. David Keyes

Indeed! It seems that All Souls (NYC) Senior Minister Galen Guengerich presented a widely well-received “systematic theology” at G.A. I would love to read what he presented! Even before hearing about this I had been thinking out loud with April about what a Unitarian-Universalist theology might look like after reading an essay by Anthony Pinn in which he mentioned Gordon Kaufman and his brand of Christianity. I read Kaufman’s In Face of Mystery and enjoyed it thinking to myself, a lot of Unitarian-Universalists could probably go along with this kind of Christianity.

Unitarian-Universalism is not Christian, of course, but it has room for Christianity in it and Kaufman’s type of Christianity is certainly in Unitarian-Universalism’s religious “neighborhood.” But the radically reasonable way he approached the symbol “God” got me wondering whether there was a way to approach theology in Unitarian-Universalism. I don’t know about a whole theology (although Rev. Guengerich seems to have developed something) but I came up with at least two things about Unitarian-Universalism that I believe to be true that might form a foundation for myself, at least, in thinking about this.

It may seem strange that one would have to work hard to find things one can say about the core beliefs of the religious system you belong to – but Unitarian-Universalism is no ordinary religion. But here is my attempt: first, Unitarian-Universalism self-identifies as a religion. By definition I think we can say as a consequence that

1. Unitarian-Universalism must, in some sense, take religion seriously.

But what does that mean? I think it means that Unitarian-Universalism must take the fundamental essence of religion seriously. It is not just a social club or a school of philosophy or a social action network. It is a religion. And for that to make any sense it must engage in whatever the something a religion must engage in minimally to be a religion. I’m not sure what that is, to be honest, but my guess is that it has something to do with fundamental (Ultimate) human experience.

But I also have thought there is something else that can be said with some firmness about Unitarian-Universalism. We have no creed, but we do have our official “Seven Principles” and our “Sources.” Now individual Unitarian-Universalists don’t have to profess a belief in all these principles or draw from all the sources – there is no such litmus test for an adherent. Instead the Unitarian-Universalist congregations must affirm and promote them, not a particular Unitarian-Universalist individual. Hence the reason they are not considered creeds (though some may argue that this comes from a narrow understanding of the word “creed” and that our Seven Principles really are a creed - not that I have anybody, April, in mind...). In any case, in a practical sense I think it makes little real difference since it would be rather pointless, it seems to me, to be a member of a congregation that must affirm and promote these principles and states that it draws from these sources if one didn’t, at least broadly, agree with the principles and respect the sources.

But if the sources and principle are to have any meaning at all I think they point to at least one thing:

2. Unitarian-Universalism is pluralist and not exclusivist.

If your principles include “acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth” and a “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” and your sources include “[w]isdom from the world’s religions” I don’t know how it could be any other way. For instance I can’t imagine someone being Unitarian-Universalist but believing that Christianity/Buddhism/Islam/Humanism is the exclusive path to truth and meaning. One may prefer one of those paths to other paths – that is absolutely okay as I understand Unitarian-Universalism – but I think if one were to go beyond that and say “my Unitarian-Universalist Christian/Buddhist/Islamic/Humanist beliefs are the only path anyone should be taking and y’all who don’t share them may be well meaning but are just plain wrong” I think one would be leaving the path of the Unitarian-Universalist.

I think combining those two principles might lead minds more subtle and inventive than mine to something like a Unitarian-Universalist theology. One possibility seems to me to be along the lines of the viewpoint of John Hick and his followers. I'm eager to find out if Rev. Guengerich’s theology talk went in any direction like this. In any case, I am a bit less pessimistic that it can be done than I was a few months ago. I used to think that one could only walk on a liberal Christian or Humanist or Pagan path and stop at a Unitarian-Universalist church now and then, sit down and hear a service. I am beginning to think maybe there is a way to walk along a Unitarian-Universalist path after all.

Tillich, the Courage to Be, and Meaninglessness.

Continuing blogging my way through the reading of one of my favorite books, Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be.

I left off a while back with a discussion of the section on “The Anxiety of Fate and Death.” This was the first of Tillich’s “Three Types of Anxiety.” The next is “The Anxiety of Emptiness and Meaninglessness.” (Courage p. 46-51.) I liked this section for the way it addresses the issues it raises in such a careful intellectual way but really ends up stating a very common truth that many people I know have found on their own. A key point is stated very near the beginning of the section:

Spiritual self-affirmation occurs in every moment in which [humankind] lives creatively in the various spheres of meaning.

The basic idea seems to me to be: participate in life! Don’t just sit on the sidelines watching the world go by! This sounds to me like great practical advice. Lay around and mope and it is easy to be depressed. Get yourself to participate in an activity and there is not time to feel sorry for oneself. (Woody Allen, interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air yesterday seems to have a depressing version of this philosophy. He talks about it with Ms. Gross in connection with his new movie.) “Everyone who lives creatively in meanings,” writes Tillich, “affirms himself as a participant in those meanings.” Here he gives examples of the artist and the scientist but he notes that one need not be a creative artist or scientist to be spiritually creative, but one needs to be able to “participate meaningfully” in the artists creations and the scientists discoveries.

Tillich asserts that living “creatively in meanings” through art and scientific discovery presupposes taking the spiritual life seriously. A spiritual life in which these creative experiences are not had, Tillich says, is “threatened by non-being in the two forms in which it attacks spiritual self-affirmation: emptiness and meaninglessness.” (p. 47) The anxiety of meaninglessness is the anxiety over the threat of non-being to spiritual self-affirmation. It is aroused, says Tillich, by the loss of a spiritual center.

Emptiness, Tillich says, is different. It is connected to special threats of non-being to the spiritual life. It happens when you are cut off from creative participation in a particular cultural activity. You go from tradition to tradition and nothing satisfies because the tradition, no matter how well respected, has lost its power to give content today. You turn away from all “concrete contents” and try to produce an ultimate answer that satisfies you intentionally. But that is all but impossible to do, says Tillich, and only produces deeper anxiety. “The anxiety of emptiness drives us to the abyss of meaninglessness.” (p. 48)

Doubt comes into play and the spiritual life attempts to maintain itself by looking to those areas that doubt has not yet undercut. But this cannot be sustained and to save oneself, says Tillich, people look to something beyond themselves to sustain them – something he calls “transindividual.” (p. 49) Answers are given to the person authoritatively (by the Bible or the Koran, perhaps?) and freedom is sacrificed to regain meaning.

The result we see all around us: fanaticism. The person who has sacrificed their freedom to this transindividual something becomes consumed with the anxiety it was designed to conquer because to admit doubt becomes a threat to the sustaining of the regained meaning. Such a person can do violence on those who disagree with the authority he or she has accepted. The person threatening this authority has a power over the person trying to sustain it because that latter has to suppress the former and persecute dissent. Think biblical fundamentalists or Islamic extremists.

The problem becomes most acute when the symbols of the traditional systems lose their power to be understood in the traditional ways. Tillich gives the doctrinal symbols of Christianity as an example of this. “[Humankind’s] being includes [its] relation to meaning,” says Tillich indicating that ontic and spiritual self-affirmation cannot be wholly separated. We are “human only by understanding and shaping reality … according to meanings and values.” (p. 50) This shaping and understanding is present in our most primitive expressions. All meaning and value is potentially present in even our first formations of sentences and therefore meaninglessness and emptiness threaten our very being. It is why, he says, despair over the meaninglessness of life can even lead to one taking one’s own life. “The death instinct is not an ontic but a spiritual phenomenon.” (p. 51) The phenomena feed on themselves and non-being threatens from both sides – the ontic and the spiritual.

The frightening thing is that it is clear that for many of us these old symbols and doctrines have indeed lost their meanings and there is no going back. When I first came to not believe in a traditional way my first instinct was to find a way to remedy that through the traditional belief itself. This manifests in many of us through a sort of hostile atheism of a type in which you spend much of your time debating and fighting with that thing that you have rejected but can’t seem to really let go of. The hostility of many atheists to religion is a symptom of this anxiety over this loss, I think. One may not be able to embrace the original tradition, but if you are constantly fighting with it and debating about it you keep that tradition close to you in a way. How does that old saying go – hate is not the opposite of love, indifference is!

Another way must be found to conquer the anxieties of meaninglessness and emptiness. Albert Einstein recognized this problem in atheism and it was a reason he never wanted to be considered one. I remember seeing a bit of myself from years ago when I read what he said of “fanatical atheists whose intolerance is on the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source”:

They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who - in their grudge against the traditional “opium for the people” – cannot bear to hear the music of the spheres. (Quoted in Max Jammer’s Einstein and Religion, p. 97)

The question for me is: if the old notes of that music fail to continue to move you, where do you look for the new melodies that can?

Initial Thoughts on Dylan's "Together Through Life"

“What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time they were standing outside of them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat. What’s depressing today is that many young singers are trying to get inside the blues, forgetting that those older singers used them to get outside their troubles.” - Bob Dylan, from the liner notes to his second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

As Dylan expressed so simply and well back in the 60s the key to the blues, and maybe most all forms of art, is that they are infused with the Courage to Be. The Courage to Be is always the Courage to Be in spite of something – the anxiety of non-being or meaninglessness or guilt. Dylan has been the popular music master of this artistic courage.

What he does so effectively so often is to look the hardest and most depressing parts of being (or life) squarely in the face, sing about it, and therefore deny the victory of the anxieties with the very act of creating out of it. When you can sing about mortality and death with as much creativity and life as Dylan does in say, “Not Dark Yet” on his album Time Out of Mind, for a few minutes, at least, death loses much of its sting.

Dylan released his latest album of original songs, Together Through Life, on the 28th of April and the reviews have been mixed. Most reviews have been positive, but many have called the album “good, but no masterpiece” and a “letdown” after the last three albums. Dylan has an ongoing problem in reviews with always having to be compared with earlier selves. At one time the comparisons were always with the mid-sixties material. Then along came Blood on the Tracks and for years the greatest praise a Dylan album could get was “well, it is the best one since Blood on the Tracks.” Now, with the renaissance in Dylan’s reputation since the release of 1997’s Time Out of Mind he has yet another past Dylan to compete with. And this album has not only to compete with the memory of that album and 2001’s "Love and Theft" but in particular it is competing in memory with last year’s release of the splendid Tell Tale Signs a collection of outtakes from the last 17 to 18 years or so. That album contained several songs many considered “masterpieces” and its memory is very fresh in our minds as we listen to Together Through Life for the first time.

The general feeling among reviewers I’ve seen is that this is a much “lighter” less substantial album than Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft", and Modern Times. Many reviewers note that Dylan sounds like he is having a lot of fun on this one. And that, apparently for many, is a negative. It kind of reminds me of the girl in the movie “Don’t Look Back” who complains to Dylan that she likes his folk acoustic solo work better than what she is hearing on Bringing It All Back Home because it just sounds like he is having a “good old laugh.” Dylan replies to her “Well, don’t you like me to have a good old laugh once in a while? Isn’t that okay with you?”

It is okay with me. On Together Through Life Dylan literally cackles a few times. Written mostly in conjunction with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, the words are not as hard and bleak about life and love as the ones on those other records of the past decade or so, but they are hardly Pollyannaish. Dylan still puts the Courage to Be in spite of lost love, mortality, and corrupt politics on display, but there is a bit more light in this tunnel. The album is almost danceable and is infused with the accordion playing of David Hilgado from Los Lobos.

The opener is one of the best songs on the album “Beyond Here Lies Nothing.” It is not nearly as depressing as its title suggests – in fact the point seems to be that he is so in love with a woman that there is nothing worth having beyond their love. The catchy melody is highlighted by Hilgado’s accordion playing. “Life is Hard” has Dylan admitting that life is hard without a certain woman’s love. It is very slow, but also has a pretty melody with Bob's croaking voice straining for the notes. I could hear Norah Jones doing this one someday. Dylan borrows a melody from Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You” for his song telling us that Hell is “My Wife’s Home Town.” The first Dylan cackle of the album is at the end of this one. Being a transplanted Houstonian I get a kick out of “If You Ever Go to Houston” – a straightforward number. I haven’t warmed up to “Forgetful Heart” yet, but I love the Kafkaesque lines “The door has closed forevermore, if indeed there ever was a door.”

“Jolene” (no relation to the Dolly Parton song) is another blues rocker about a woman he can't live with or without and is followed by “This Dream of You” a ballad dominated by Hilgado’s accordion and a south of the border feel. It is the only song on the album Hunter had no part in. A hard rocking blues “Shake Shake Mama” follows and the opening lines “I get the blues for you baby when I look up at the sun/ I get the blues for you baby when I look up at the sun/ come back here we can have some real fun” set the tone for track.

Finally, Dylan brings on two of his best for last: “I Feel a Change Comin’ On” and “It’s All Good.” On the former it sounds like Dylan is falling in love, realizing it is late in life for it, but welcoming it nonetheless. “Well, life is for love” Dylan sings and you can actually believe him. Musically, it feels like a song by The Band for some reason. Dylan concludes the album with “It’s All Good” in which he presents a fast paced litany of modern evils and concludes each verse with a variation of “you know what they say…. They say it’s all good.” He is being sarcastic, of course, but the irony is that it is all good. Dylan cackles with delight – not at the misery he chronicles but at this banal modern phrase and the way he has used and subverted it. The way he has utilized it to do what the old blues singers did – to stand outside all the evil and suffering and to get himself (and us) outside his (and our) troubles. And there is nothing wrong with having a "good old laugh" now and then.

A few more thoughts on Gordon Kaufman’s “In Face of Mystery”

I posted a few days ago on my admiration for Gordon Kaufman’s reconstruction of Christianity in his In Face of Mystery. One of the (many) things I left out in that brief and over-simplified description was that his vision of Christianity is very nicely non-exclusivist. I have remarked before that for myself that is an important element of any religion I’m even considering being a part of.

What Kaufman basically says is that constructing a version of Christianity like this is a choice that one can make or not make. He notes that in fashioning this construction we make many choices along the way that one is free to accept or reject. The point is to construct something capable of orienting us within the world and our lives and he admits that there is more than one way to do that. So, he says, if you are interested in constructing a Christianity that is capable of fulfilling the purpose of orienting your life while maintaining continuity with traditional beliefs and capable of being fully integrated with a modern outlook on life and the world it is possible and here is one way of doing it. However, other Christians and other cultures also have ways of accomplishing this and it is inappropriate to say that if we choose this way we are choosing the ONLY way. We can learn from one another instead of trying to silence everyone who doesn’t choose the orientation we do.

For the modern highly culturally integrated world, this seems to be a must. One problem with it in practice, however, seems to me to be that no Christian church would suffer such a thing as official doctrine. Almost all denominations I know about declares the Bible, for instance, as THE word of God, or at least as uniquely inspired in some sense to the exclusion of all other expressions of the Mystery. That is why I have only felt at home with the Unitarian-Universalists. There, non-exclusivism is pretty much what the church (or fellowship) is all about. In the UU tradition the individual is encouraged to do just what Kaufman suggests – construct a theology that works for you and doesn’t exclude others. The disadvantage is that it is not really done as a fellowship so there is little shared experience for whatever theology you develop.

In any case I find very attractive the idea of developing your own theology within Christianity that is continuous with the traditions and with modern scientific thinking. I have admiration for Borg and Tillich and the like too, but Kaufman is the first Christian theologian I’ve read that I think actually achieves the merger with modern scientific thinking. With Tillich and Borg I think to myself “If Christianity had been presented to me like this, I might have never left the fold” but haven’t left there are still too many barriers with what they believe and with what I believe to be able to fully embrace their versions of Christianity now. Kaufman is the first theologian I’ve read and thought: “If there was a Christian denomination that adopted this, I could sign up tomorrow.”

Gordon Kaufman's "In Face of Mystery"

Although I abandoned belief in the “supernatural” aspects of Christianity (and other religions) long ago, I have always understood myself to me “culturally Christian.” What do I mean by that? Many of the things central to my view of life are taken wholesale from my Christian background. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The ideas of loving your neighbor as yourself and your enemy too. Special attention to the poor and the “sinner.” Redemption, forgiveness. The centrality of Love.

But where I grew up in central Illinois – not the “Bible belt,” but a bit too close to it. Christianity was mostly very fundamentalist in its understanding of the Bible there. Isaac Asimov tells a great story in his autobiography In Joy Still Felt about being at a convention with Avram Davidson, a very orthodox Jew. Asimov relates that during a discussion in which Davidson was “stressing his orthodoxy just a bit too hard” for Asimov’s comfort, Davidson asked Asimov’s stand on religion. Asimov answered

“I’m an atheist.”

“Yes,” said Avram, without batting an eye, “but what kind of atheist? A Baptist atheist, a Hindu atheist? A Seventh-day Adventist atheist?”

I got the idea. “A Jewish atheist,” I said “which means I have to fight the irrational elements in Judaism particularly.” (In Joy Still Felt, pp. 174-175.)

When I became an atheist during junior high I think it was largely to “fight the irrational elements” in the fundamentalist Christianity that surrounded me. Creationism. Biblical inerrancy. Things of that nature.

I recently read Gordon Kaufman’s In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology and I think it is a heroic attempt at constructing a form of Christianity that might work for someone like me. It doesn’t require any major compromise with a modern viewpoint in life and seems to retain the ultimate concerns of Christianity that I was (and still am) attracted by. He starts out by noting that “God” is a symbol that has been so powerful and important in human affairs that it seems a shame to give it up. It has connotations that are so significant that no other symbol can quite live up to in western culture. What if it is not the symbol that is the problem for “non-believers” in the modern world but only the reification of that symbol? What can you do with “God” and Christianity if you do away with the reification of God and Christ?

Central to Kaufman’s construction is the description of the human as a “biohistorical” being. I found the idea very attractive and useful. Basically he wants to eliminate the problem of deconstructing human beings down to just matter and the information found in DNA. He notes that it is clear that humans are much more than that. We are living beings who have found ways to create cultures based on historical understandings. It is the combination of the physical with this culture that creates the type of “being” that we are. The point is that history and culture don’t just influence us – it has a part in the creation of what we are. Without culture and the historical framework we live in, even something as central as the concept of the self or “I” would not exist, he says. The history we live as a part of defines who and what we are at a very fundamental level: hence we are “biohistorical” beings.

With that in mind he goes on to construct concept of God, Christ and Holy Spirit that are compatible with that modern understanding of the human and the world around us. It would be way too much to go into detail on his construction (read the book for that) but here is a summary of the result.

“God” in this construction is the serendipitous creativity of the universe which brings everything into being in a evolution which (with respect to we biohistorical human beings) seems directional. He doesn’t envision God as a out of time and space superbeing who directs the universe to create us, but simply notes that in some sense the universe has created something here. At one time there were no humans, and so no one to create art, music, etc. At some point humans emerged from the universe and developed in time and history towards a point where we could create the Mona Lisa, Highway 61 Revisited, and the theory of Relativity, for instance. There was nothing but energy and matter in the universe at one time and somehow over billions of years of evolution of the matter and energy there is art, music, science, and history. In some sense this is obviously a creative act by the universe, if a serendipitous one. It may seem to be unduly specific to reference earth bound creativity of the last few hundred years in a discussion of a universe 15 billion years old and huge beyond imagining, but the whole idea of constructing a religion is to help orient the lives of we humans – so emphasis on our little corner of the world seems justifiable.

The Holy Spirit is constructed as that which sustains our being – whatever it is that grounds existence and manages to keep everything going. This spirit requires a certain faith to believe it is going to keep on keeping on and that everything isn’t going to go Poof! and be gone when we turn around. It can be thought of as the ground of our being, our foundation.

As Kaufman notes these concepts of God and Holy Spirit are very abstract and are perhaps too esoteric to inspire followers in a concrete way. This is why the concept of Christ is so necessary. The symbol “Christ” to Kaufman goes beyond the person of Jesus to include the community that surrounds Jesus and strives towards a more humane future – symbolized by the idea of the coming “Kingdom of God.” It is an evolving process, though, the Christ exemplifying that evolution towards the Kingdom not a completed act. The Christ, in this conception, can inspire us towards the more humane by the emphasis on love, faith, and hope. The Christ represents the directional creativity of God (the universe’s serendipitous creativity) exemplified in the human (biohistorical) being and in that way is worthy of veneration, even worship. We must take a leap of faith, Kaufman notes, to hope that this directionality will indeed lead to a more humane loving society rather than a monstrous one taking advantage of the power of modern technology to simply cause more suffering. But that leap of faith is one well worth taking if it serves to orient us in the right direction and surely looking at history there is some justifiable cause to believe that it can.

So he constructs a version of Trinitarian Christianity without anything in it that I particularly object to. I have simplified what he has done considerably, obviously. I highly recommend the book to anyone who, like me, simply cannot bring him or herself to believe in physical resurrections, six-day creations, virgin births and such, but is still drawn to the ancient message of that mystery beyond all of us and is searching for an expression of it that can inspire and still be believed.

Happy Easter!

Life has been very busy in the last several weeks leaving little time to blog. In the few spare moments I've had we've been doing family activities and I have been reading Gordon Kaufman's In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology. It is not easy going but looks to be worth it so far. I am getting to his construction of God and so far it is actually one I could sign on for. Unfortunately I haven't yet reached how he deals with the resurrection or I would post on that today! Anyway when I am done with the book I will be sure to write something about it here, and in the meantime HAPPY EASTER to all!