What’s Wrong with Theology: A Short Case Study

Earlier today, browsing the Amazon page for Augustine’s Essential Sermons, I came across this passage from the “Product Description”:

The eleven volumes of Augustine’s popular sermons (Sermones ad populum) . . . showcase Augustine the brilliant speaker and engaging preacher of the Word and have proven an indispensable resource for contemporary scholarship. . . . [Edmund] Hill’s translation and extensive notes have received many accolades by scholars, but professors have clamored for a one-volume anthology in paperback form that would be affordable to students and that could be used as required texts in teaching undergraduates, graduate students and seminarians. . . . Students and preachers alike will discover Augustine’s masterful interpretation of the Word of God and creative skills in engaging the people of God.

What’s wrong with this description? More importantly, who is missing? These sermons are “an indispensable resource for contemporary scholarship,” and the translations have received “many accolades by scholars,” and this one-volume anthology will be useful for “undergraduates, graduate students and seminarians.” But where is the layperson? There’s a reason they ain’t titled Sermones ad professorum. They were preached in a church to laypeople, and now they are tragically of interest primarily to scholars and students training to become scholars. The devoted layperson has been left out of the picture altogether. Language like this is a symptom of a disease — the co-opting of theology by the academy from its place in service to the church.

Augustine himself would have been unhappy with our bifurcation of theology and spirituality, or their institutional parallels, academy and church. Consider:

Factum audivimus: mysterium requiramus.
(We have heard the fact, let us seek the mystery.)

One of the maddening things about my “Christian spirituality” classes in grad school was the constant separation students fretted over between “head” and “heart.” This may have been a legitimate problem, but the way they articulated it made it sound like the problem was somehow too much theology. Wrong! A bifurcation of “head” and “heart” is the result of faulty theology, not too much. Something we could learn by reading more Augustine.

(A bracing post-Enlightenment tonic for this ailment is Andrew Louth’s marvelous book Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology, which Eighth Day Books has put back in print.)

(crossposted at Nonnus.)

Dear Scholars

As a proofreader/editor of academic books, I feel compelled to inform you of a few things that you should know, but clearly some of you do not.

First, Your job is to inform, elucidate, clarify. So ending lists with “etc.” and “and so on” generally does not help your readers, whom you are to inform, rather than assume they already know what you would say if you deigned to tell them. While we’re at it, when citing multiple Bible verses, it is not helpful to the reader to write, for example, Rom 8:1ff.  Oh, of course, I know you always use it to mean the following two verses, so that it means the same thing whenever you use it. But your colleague down the hall didn’t get that memo, did he? Because he’s using it to mean Romans 8:1-9:4 or really whatever he wants, but I wouldn’t know the difference, would I? Because instead of doing the work of a real scholar and looking up the reference, you just assumed we would do that work for you, didn’t you? So let’s be done with the obfuscations and actually be a little more careful, shall we? I’m glad we understand one another.

Second, and this is more serious, when you publish a book, you are selling those particular ideas in the form of those words to the publisher. You don’t own them anymore, so you cannot reuse them. Of course, you may need to summarize the same ideas or even say the same things throughout the course of your career, but this is different from cutting and pasting words from one document to another. And let’s face it, despite what I’ve heard a lot of you say, the editors working at the publishing house you sold your manuscript to (remember?) aren’t morons, and even if they were, this is the twenty-first century, old man (or old woman, let’s be fair). There’s a thing called the Internet. And they have this fancy new thing called Google Books. And your book is probably on there. And all somebody has to do is type in a few of the words from your book and the book you plagiarized will be on there too. Do you have students? Don’t you tell them that plagiarizing is wrong? You do, because I was a student too, and your syllabuses all threaten to fail and even possibly expel your lazy excuses for students for doing it. Oh, you’ve got tenure? Well have you ever heard the word lawsuit?

And third, for goodness sakes do not ask your editors whether or not you should include a footnote! Did you come up with the idea? Did it originate in your mind or someone else’s? If you didn’t think of it first then cite it! I don’t care if it’s not a direct quote. And this next thing should be obvious but the fact that I feel the need to write it clearly demonstrates that it is not. Provide page numbers. Do I have your personal library in my office? Can I read your mind? Again, much of this information can be found on the almighty Google Books, but let me remind you one last time. This is your job. Why do I feel like I’m addressing Comp 101 students? You are a scholar. Do the work of a scholar.

Now I feel a little better.

We Interrupt This Blast of Nonposts to Bring You A Testy Conservative Rant

I know better than to base my opinion on editorials with summaries that say things like, “the pope deserves no credence when he distorts scientific findings about the value of condoms in slowing the spread of the AIDS virus” (from where else), so when I saw those very words in my daily headlines email I did what I usually do when major (liberal) media outlets cover the latest supposedly inflammatory words from the current (conservative) pope: Ignore. And then I assume that somebody will provide me with the context or perspective lacking in the sputtering, apoplectic screed with which I was originally confronted.

It turns out this time around that that “somebody” was the Harvard School of Public Health, specifically Edward C. Green, a senior research fellow there.

But let’s go back to the original editorial. The little summary sentence, it turns out, is an elision and conflation of the first two sentences, the first of which reads, “Pope Benedict XVI has every right to express his opposition to the use of condoms on moral grounds, in accordance with the official stance of the Roman Catholic Church.” (How magnanimous. Here’s my headline in response: “New York Times Gives Pope Permission to Exercise Role as Infallible Magisterium of Roman Catholic Church.”) Then the second sentence reads, “But he deserves no credence when he distorts scientific findings about the value of condoms in slowing the spread of the AIDS virus.” Distorts? Really? Duplicity and willful deception are pretty strong accusations to lay at the feet of one of the world’s most influential moral voices, and a careful and pedigreed scholar to boot. But when somebody not only questions but assumes to be false a central piece of ideological dogma, its defendants naturally can get pretty antsy. To be fair, at almost the end of the editorial, the authors concede, “The best way to avoid transmission of the virus is to abstain from sexual intercourse or have a long-term mutually monogamous relationship with an uninfected person.” But this is in the middle of an otherwise unceasing torrent defending condom usage as the best way to prevent AIDS.

And then this.

Edward C. Green—a self-professed liberal mind you—steps up to the podium and defends the pope! Here’s a chunk of what he has to say:

Yet, in truth, current empirical evidence supports him.

We liberals who work in the fields of global HIV/AIDS and family planning take terrible professional risks if we side with the pope on a divisive topic such as this. The condom has become a symbol of freedom and — along with contraception — female emancipation, so those who question condom orthodoxy are accused of being against these causes. My comments are only about the question of condoms working to stem the spread of AIDS in Africa’s generalized epidemics — nowhere else.

In 2003, Norman Hearst and Sanny Chen of the University of California conducted a condom effectiveness study for the United Nations’ AIDS program and found no evidence of condoms working as a primary HIV-prevention measure in Africa. UNAIDS quietly disowned the study. (The authors eventually managed to publish their findings in the quarterly Studies in Family Planning.) Since then, major articles in other peer-reviewed journals such as the Lancet, Science and BMJ have confirmed that condoms have not worked as a primary intervention in the population-wide epidemics of Africa. In a 2008 article in Science called “Reassessing HIV Prevention” 10 AIDS experts concluded that “consistent condom use has not reached a sufficiently high level, even after many years of widespread and often aggressive promotion, to produce a measurable slowing of new infections in the generalized epidemics of Sub-Saharan Africa.”

Amazingly enough pope Benedict doesn’t just make stuff up as he goes along! This is something I thought the New York Times would have figured out by now.

Now I know that this is a contentious and complex issue, and I don’t hinge my arguments solely on the latest scientific study (and what this excerpt points out is that clearly many pundits on the other side of the issue don’t either, though they would like to believe they do), which is why this whole argument seldom goes anywhere, because it tends to be cast as progressive, empirical science vs. outmoded moralism. And so it goes.

A Friendly Reminder in Light of the Upcoming Lenten Season

This coming Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. It’s interesting to me that most low-church Protestants find their way into the liturgical calendar by way of Lent. I tend to think that maybe it says something about how, in our society’s glut of superabundance, we feel a subconscious need for renunciation, and so we turn to the resources of the Church. But I want to write about something else related to Lent, and it is this.

Lent is forty days, right? Right. Well, there are actually forty-six days in between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. The forty fast days of Lent don’t include the six Sundays therein. each of those Sundays is a feast day. If this is your experience with Lent, you’re thinking well, duh. But in my experience, most of us low-church converts don’t realize it to begin with. When Jess and I were first told several years ago that we didn’t have to fast on Sundays, Jess was scandalized. “It’s cheating! They’re changing the rules on us!” For me it was like an epiphany. Everything clicked into place. (I think I was in a Christian spirituality class at the time that leaned heavily on the theology of asceticism.) Here’s why.

Every Sunday for the entire year is a mini Easter, a celebration of Christ’s resurrection. As such, it is also a day on which we Christians look forward to our own resurrection at the Second Coming. Lent, on the other hand, is a period of waiting and penitence: we wait for Christ, who, in between his ascension and his return, is physically absent from the church, and we are penitent for our sins, clinging to Christ’s atoning work in his death on the cross. Fasting physically reinforces these more abstract realities to us. But even in gloomy Lent, Good Friday—death—cannot be complete without Easter Sunday—resurrection.

So here is my reminder. If in Lent, you either decide to “go the extra mile” by fasting on Sundays, or you feel guilty, so you don’t break your fast on Sundays: you are denying the resurrection. Both Christ’s and your own. You have taken the purpose of fasting—union with Christ—and made it about your own supposed holiness. You have missed the point of fasting, you have missed the point of asceticism, and you have missed the point of Easter.

Have a nice day!

Hey, Remember When Printable Pages Were, Um, Well, You Know, Printable?

Alas, the ineluctable, glacial creep of advertising into the remotest corners of our lives continues unabated. I have noticed lately that  “printable” pages of articles online are including more and more ads, images, and html-encoded text (which not all printers can handle equally well). Where is the public outcry? Why this injustice? This visual scattershot utterly contravenes the purpose of the “printer-friendly view.” Furthermore, these pages were my one remaining boon from the overcommercialization of the web. I would even often link to them directly from here or on Facebook because they provided a much cleaner and unobtrusive viewing experience. But now, even while I’m reading these articles in my bed at home, I am confronted with the latest ad for Viagra, or whatever wares these evil companies and their internet minions were flogging the day I printed them off.

I Am Buying Gas for Under Two Dollars. Tell Me Why I Should Not Be Happy About This.

Every I repeat every news outlet tells me every single day why I should not be happy that my gas budget has been cut in half since July. (NPR has even told me twice, since they inexplicably played the same news broadcast this afternoon as they did yesterday.) Here is the explanation from the News Media of why I should be upset about affordable gas: It is the sign of a shrinking economy.

Oh horrors!

Well let me tell you something, News Media. This. abstraction. is. not. helpful. to. me.

I still have a job. I am still among the 92.4 percent of the population that does. And as far as I can tell my job is still secure. I have lost money in my retirement fund, but I will not be retiring for, um, let’s see, thirty-eight more years. I’m pretty sure I’ll get my money back by then. But really what it comes down to is that I have at least fifty more dollars to kick around in my budget every month. Boohoo!

I get it, though. I get it. I’m no Pollyanna. I know generally and vaguely how this stuff works on a macro/global scale. I also know that my socioeconomic stratum is not the one hit hardest by these types of things. So forgive me if my critique seems a little bourgeois. But don’t people below me on the economic ladder stand to gain just as much or more than me? And don’t I remember from Econ 101 something about a shrinking economy being a natural and healthy part of a free market economy? Okay, okay. I know what we’re in the middle of is a little more than your garden variety shrinking economy. I’ve read enough of the doomsayers to realize this. But tell me again how lower prices for gas, food, and homes is really actually bad news. This is what seems bourgeois to me. Fifty dollars means a lot more to me than it does to the pundits in Washington.

So until the failing economy actually affects me in a more concrete way than the unexpected-but-welcome surprise of falling prices on necessary commodities, I will not let you kill my joy, News Media. No way. I am going to buy an SUV from one of the failing automakers, fill it up with premium gasoline, fill myself up with Twinkies and YooHoo, and drive that behemoth all over God’s green creation. And then I’m going to park it in the driveway of the foreclosed house I just bought for a song. Because now I can afford to do things like this, and you can’t take that away from me, News Media, no sir, not ever.

How to Cash In on the Latest Fad and Exploit Religion at the Same Time, Or What It Looks Like to Subsume Religion under the Cause du Jour, Or Is the Tail Not Wagging the Dog Here, My Friends?

Website. Despite the intellectually respectable veneer, this is just another version of BibleZines. Lord help us.

Just Split the Infinitive, Alright?

Several times recently I’ve come across prose that is worded awkwardly in order to avoid splitting an infinitive. And I’ve had it. The phrase that tipped me over the edge and sent me running for my computer just now was,  “. . . appropriately to engage . . .” And what initially spurred this monomania a few weeks ago was a professor’s remark to a student, in one of only four “errors” in his student’s entire fifty-page thesis, was that a split infinitive should be fixed. Several episodes in the intervening time set me to foaming at the mouth and spinning into fits of apoplectic rage with increasing intensity. Back to the example at hand: “appropriately to engage.” Nobody speaks like this. It sounds weird, archaic, and stilted. But thankfully it’s not just my own soapbox. While searching out an answer to another tricky grammar rule, I was leafing through Patricia T. O’Connor’s helpful little book, Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English, when I came across a section of “dead rules,” each of which had a tombstone in place of a bullet point. Lo and behold, one of the first dead rules was that of avoiding split infinitives. She explained, first, that the to in an infinitive (e.g., to go) is not technically a part of the infinitive to begin with but is a preposition to let you know that an infinitive is coming. (N.B. In most languages, the infinitive form is built into the word itself, and you don’t need anything to tell you it’s coming.) Second, she explained that most of the zeal for fusing the to and the infinitive stemmed directly from Victorian grammarians who wanted the English language to closely resemble Latin, in which it is impossible to split an infinitive. In fact the rule doesn’t even show up until 1866 in a book titled A Plea for the Queen’s English.

So let’s be reasonable, people. Is it generally good to  avoid splitting infinitives? Yes, of course. But when splitting an infinitive produces crappy prose, I ask, Is the tail not in fact wagging the dog? The rules of grammar are our guides, which enable clarity and facilitate communication. If they blind us to the good, they have stopped serving their purpose; they have become our masters, we their slaves. Therefore let us split our infinitives with alacrity! And let not any of the poopypants who assume that taking grammar seriously means memorizing a set of rules tell us otherwise!

Some Thoughts On My Soon-to-Arrive Economic Stimulus Check

Caveat: I’m not exactly going to be in the town square burning my economic stimulus check or putting it all away in savings just to spite the government. No, I will be a good citizen and insert the majority of my money back into the economy via the shopping mall or what have you. So take this post with a grain of salt.

But I just want to register how ridiculous I think this all is. We go $100 billion further in debt so that the American people can go out and shop in the name of stabilizing our slightly faltering economy. A month or two later, Bush without blinking pats himself on the back because he gave $77 million to help out with the global food shortage.

In an effort to keep this from degenerating into self-righteous bloviation, I would also like to register that there are of course economic trickle-down justifications for taking such courses of action in the name of our economy (i.e., a good American economy is good for the global economy; people spend, economy grows, less people are poor and hungry). Most interviews with economists that I’ve read or heard are pretty optimistic that the economic stimulus package will work.

But the whole thing just doesn’t sit right with me. There seems to be a gaping divide between our economics and our morality. But this comes as no surprise; we Enlightened modern beings have long ago learned that the two have nothing to do with each other. I’m not trying to get into the argument of how, why, and when a government should intercede on the Market’s behalf, but I’m a little irked that I’ve been conscripted by the government to solve the Market’s problems. By spending the government’s money I become a representative  for the government’s economic policy. Who among us hasn’t joked that we’re just doing our civil duty? I have. But upon reflection it seems a bit sinister. Even more so when I realize that my spending habits probably reflect larger economic trends that I’m only dimly aware of, even when my money doesn’t come from the government. I’m not just criticizing Bush’s neocon economic policy but the more general American perception that the way to a healthy society and personal well-being is governed solely by economic prosperity.

This mindset was reinforced to me when I heard this story on the radio several months ago (the bit I’m relating was more of a side note told in passing in a larger story): American armed forces in Iraq inadvertently killed some Iraqi civilians. One of these was a married woman. In order to compensate for the husband’s loss the military offered him ten thousand dollars. He refused the money. The commentator said that this–both the offering of money and the refusals–happens regularly.

What on earth would possess us to buy off people’s grief at the loss of their closest loved ones with a few thousand bucks? Shouldn’t we realize this is profoundly insulting? “I’m sorry for your loss sir, but take heart! We have calculated the worth of your spouse’s entire life and it comes to $10,000. Please accept this money as a token of our condolences.” This also comes as no surprise. Decades ago, the economist Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize for Economics for writing about how we modern people view our world in primarily economic terms. The example of the Iraqi man and the military seems like the most twisted outworking of how thoroughly this way of thinking has sunk in.

This mindset, I think, is not neutral, one that can be used for good or ill. The way we think about the world, and they way our society is run, shapes us in certain ways and not in others. The Iraqi widower not only doesn’t see his wife’s value in economic terms but thought it was morally wrong that anyone should. I’m not saying that all of us Americans simply put dollar values on our loved ones, but I hope it drives the point home that there is something moral, something that shapes us in our very being, in the way the Market almost tyrannically controls our nation’s sense of ease or dis-ease. The whole economic stimulus scheme reinforces our identity as consumers and defines our well-being by what we can spend.

So while I’ll be buying up this and that with my money from On High, I will do it with the knowledge that what shapes me intuitively and gives me confidence in my well-being as a person is that I belong to the church before I belong to the government and that when I go to church every Sunday morning I am told to “draw near with faith” and approach an altar, kneel down, and stretch out my hands like a beggar, consuming not goods and services, but consuming the crucified and risen Christ.

Pope Benedict XVI and the Media

In light of almost every major American media outlet wringing their hands over precisely when it is that Pope Benedict XVI is going to announce that he’s decided to allow women to be priests, embraced gay marriage, decided that John Paul II was cracked over the whole birth control thing, and taken full personal responsibility for the entire clergy sex abuse scandal—not to mention their constant preoccupation with the “public perception” of the Pope (e.g., “The scourge of liberal theologians,” “He’s a dusty, professorial type,” “Why isn’t he John Paul II?”) instead of, you know, actually reading any of the words he’s ever written—there couldn’t have been a better time for Tracey Rowland’s new book, Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI, to appear. There have been plenty of books and articles published about Ratzinger/B16 since he became Pope which cast him as anything from a dangerous conspiratorial anti-modernist to a neoconservative bastion of freedom and democracy, but Rowland, I think, understands him from the inside. That is, she doesn’t attempt to create a critical evaluation of his thought in order to discern his wider agenda, which of course would be fine and has its place; she uses his ideas to develop her own (and she’s no slouch of a thinker by a long shot, as she proved in After Vatican II: Culture and the Thomist Tradition). There’s an excellent review by Ryan T. Anderson of Rowland’s book on the Books & Culture website which, short of reading Benedict’s work or Rowland’s book on his theology, could do a lot to mitigate some of the ridiculous expectations and misunderstandings of Benedict that I read and hear every day.

I don’t say all this to align myself in direct opposition to the concerns of the media listed above but rather to point out that there is a coherence and a continuity to Pope Benedict’s thought that has been almost completely ignored in most of the coverage I have heard. They seem baffled that Benedict’s first two encyclicals have been about love and hope (from the Vatican’s watchdog!), and they definitely don’t apprehend that the better part of Joseph Ratzinger cum Benedict XVI’s career has been dedicated to a critique of not just the issues the media keep bringing up but the intellectual traditions many of those issues represent. Now I also don’t want to sound like I’m saying that the media must read all the books he’s written in order to report accurately and directly on his visit, but it wouldn’t kill them to at least take a sympathetic look at the broader arc of his work through the last several decades instead of commenting backhandedly about how it butts up against our modern liberal presuppositions. In other words, it seems like they’ve told us more about themselves than they have about Benedict XVI.