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The Devil, Hell, Demons, and Excorcism (enough to interest you yet?)

This is a rough draft of my sermon on Sunday (Mark 1:9-15; 1 Peter 3:18-22).  I will likely make some more edits and developments but I am curious if there is any feedback that I should take into consideration here.

At times the church gets criticized for holding on to outdated and backwards views of the world.  And we do need to be open to these criticisms and concerns.  But it is interesting to note that while many churches on the one hand are working hard to remove unhelpful ideas about mental illness being some sort of evil spirit or of heaven and hell as literal places in the clouds and in the center of the earth on the other hand we find so-called enlightened western culture fascinated with movies about books about zombies, vampires, demons, ghosts and all sorts of hellish creatures.  Out of curiosity I went online to search for videos on YouTube about demon possession and exorcisms and I found plenty, some with millions of views.  What is going on here?  How do we discern these matters as a church?  Is there a relationship between our current curiosities and interests in evil spirits and other hellish matters and what is happening with Jesus and the Devil in the wilderness and Jesus message to the spirits of the dead in prison?  I think there may be a connection but I think the connection is in their opposition to each other.  Let’s start by looking at our current and ongoing fascination with the realms of the dead.

Continue reading “The Devil, Hell, Demons, and Excorcism (enough to interest you yet?)” →

A matter of X and Y

There is a sense in which Heidegger’s work in Being and Time is at best some sort of ivory tower abstracting.  And of course it is abstracting.  Heidegger is looking to dismantle the traditional concepts of philosophy at the time to see if there is way of building up an ontology from the resources of observation and reason.  So language sounds even more foreign because he does not want to appeal to ready-made categories of philosophy.  What I want to definitely demonstrate however is that this is not an ivory tower exercise.  Case in point;

Overheard at Robin’s Donuts in the morning last week,

I think the sexiest woman in Hollywood is X
but the person I would most want to bang is Y

Think of the nuanced distinction of categories here.  To be quite honest this line stuck with me for a couple of days.  Here is a man who has clearly given some thought to the manner in which women-are-being-in-the-world-for-him (to use a heideggarian term . . . sort of).

So remember this the next time you disparage the project of someone like Heidegger.  Turn that disparaging finger inward and examine your own fundamental categories of being in the world!

Oh and I did catch X but missed Y.  Though it is easy to follow his line of thinking and it would make the name of Y almost superfluous anyway. X was Jennifer Aniston . . . (!?!)

And as though that conversation was not bizarre enough to overhear.  This is what I caught later at a University Starbucks,

So we were hooking up and then he said, ‘You should consider yourself lucky to be with someone so good at Tetras’  And he kept playing while he took his pants off.

I am not sure Heidegger is sophisticated enough to respond to that one.

To love is to bear with the chaos

In an earlier post I raised some provisional concerns over the direction Danial Barber’s work On Diaspora was heading (book event details now up).  Namely, I was concerned that what would be produced would have value for ‘strong subjectivities’ that would be able to do the work of decomposing sedimented discursive traditions, at mercy of the vulnerable who suffer under such forces.  I was concerned in terms of what could possibly be the therapeutic extensions of such a project (if any would indeed be relevant).  I am still not quite finished the work and so this is still provisional but I was struck by Barber’s use of Catherine Keller’s work in chaos in relationship to his development of diaspora.  I was struck if for nothing else than to read the line that titles this post.  Here is the excerpt.

The discursive tradition of Christianity is inconsistent from the beginning, and this is because the beginning it signifies is discontinuous: in the beginning was the discontinuity of chaos and God, of material divergence and creative consistency. Just as there is no need to choose between pure disruption and identitarian traditions, neither is there a need to choose between chaotic excessiveness and formal consistency. Keller considers an interpretation of creation that evades such mutual exclusivity, an interpretation “in which the chaos is neither nothing nor evil; in which to create is not to master the formless but to solicit its virtual forms.” It is precisely this approach that is implied in diaspora, which sees difference neither as something to be sublated in identity nor as something that remains the brute inverse of identity. Diasporic thought sees the chaos of the deep as that which decomposes identitarian forms and enables the re-composition—here the creative solicitation—of differential forms. Indeed, a diasporic account of Christian declaration, which emphasizes that enemy-love means beginning with the signification that exceeds recognition, discovers an ally in Keller’s “proposition for any tehomic ethic: to love is to bear with the chaos. Not to like it or to foster it but to recognize there the unformed future.”

Preparing for the apocalyptic book event

Having finally got my hands on a copy of Daniel Barber’s recent book On Diaspora I am trying to carve out enough blocks of time to get it down before the book event.  I am only two chapters in and a question is forming in my mind.  It may well be that Dan answers the question in the course of the book but the question relates to other accounts that attempt to furnish a theoretical engagement with ‘the powers’ and how they might be named, undermined, overthrown, etc.  My experience with these accounts is that they seem to function with the implicit need of a ‘strong subjectivity’.  What I mean by this is that there is much language about and call to de-centering, deconstructing, dispossessing, or decomposing (I am of course not assuming these are all the same) while many people simply live in the midst of such processes at the mercy of those who hold power over them.  This question reminded me of a post by Tim at Veeritions.  What I will be curious about understanding as I continue to read Barber’s work is the extent to which this is a work for the oppressors or at least the strong.  Is that inevitable in this medium?  I struggle to think of valorizing those who already experience this undoing and can’t understand why I would want to perpetuate it.  Barber speaks of endless deterritorialialization and undoing identities, will this mean then I must ‘submit’ in the face of those for whom such a process is enforced so that some other movement might be possible?  Can we only ever speak either to the mountain that must be brought low or the valley that must be raised but never both?

In any event these are pre-mature questions, at least with respect to Barber’s work.  If you have not already decided to come on board for the event I strongly advise it.

A note on fact and meaning

My interest in working through Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences has waxed and waned.  This is probably due to the sharp transition I feel in moving from Kierkegaard’s style to the more straightforward work of ‘real’ philosophy.  What has kept my attention though is Husserl’s genuine impression of having discovered something and of its significance and secondly of the fact that in historical context the work he did has had tremendous historical significance.  So what is he doing?  I understand a primary motivation of his work to be a method of thinking subjectivity scientifically.  How can I be included in scientific investigation?  For this reason the natural sciences and mathematics always play a secondary (but certainly not disparaged) role.  These secondary sciences work from the assumptions of a pre-given world that accord with our experience of that world.  These sciences always rest on something prior.  So Husserl is trying to carry out to completion Descartes’s emphasis on the primacy of the ego.  But the ego is not a ‘premise’ from which the rest of knowledge is deduced.

The point is not to secure objectivity but to understand it.  One must finally achieve the insight that no objective science, no matter how exact, explains or ever can explain anything in a serious sense. To deduce is not to explain.  To predict, or to recognize the objective forms of composition of physical or chemical bodies and predict accordingly – all this explains nothing but is in need of explanation.  The only true way to explain is to make transcendentally understandable. (Crisis, 189)

This is not particularly shocking to anyone with exposure to philosophical hermeneutics but it is a helpful reminder for what continues presently to be a common and serious misconception, namely, that scientific findings are self-evidently meaningful.  These findings are framed as such because they give the air of authority and therefore power to various expressions.  While I am not sure I will follow Husserl in his own project I think this point remains sound.

2011 on into 2012

In 2011 I . . .

1. Got ordained.

2. Finished Kierkegaard’s published works.

3. Got an e-reader and returned to the world of fiction (Infinite Jest was much easier to tote around in this form).

4. Did a good number of reviews.

5. Found continual frustration in trying to develop a more sustained piece of theology for publication.

6. Perhaps most confusingly seem to have become a sports fan.

2011 was also my first full year blogging at the de-scribe.  I literally felt like I reached a certain ‘crisis point’ at my old site in that my basic theological orientation had made enough of shift that I could no longer look out the same way through the framework that had been developed there.  The move to this new site reflects my desire to engage the world both more plainly and more rigorously; to begin with a certain subjective honesty (yes, I’ll let that phrase stand) and then work through some of the implications or holes.

While I would enjoy more traffic and engagement here I have no real plan to publicize the site.  It seems the only way for this to remain valuable for myself is to continue to post as though no one was reading . . . but many thanks to the small tribe who does!

As for 2012

Incidentally 2012 will mark my tenth year engaging on the internet.  I created an online forum after graduating from college in 2002 and have truly valued the opportunity this medium afforded since that time.  It has been or at least become the most formative educational space in my life (ummmm, yah).  This of course has been frustrating on one level because many others have had the opportunity to continue their formation in the furnace of a direct academic community; and so I am left taking some comfort that there remains enough folks within those communities willing to share of their time and thoughts.  The most formative spaces online for myself in the past year have been An und für sich and The Last Psychiatrist (with appreciative nods going to On Journeying with those in Exile, Veeritions, and Bifurcated Life).

With the goal setting of my Kierkegaard reading last year I was able to carve out a new discipline of reading outside of my regular responsibilities in work and life.  So I have decided to outline a new reading list.  The drawback of this one is that it became large and sprawling and so I could not reasonably set a clear end date for accomplishing it.  That being said I hope it will continue to focus and energize my reading.  In any event here is my own version of a Great Books course (see tab at top of page).  The hope in this is to give attention to all those used books I picked up over the years thinking them necessary for my personal library.  Many of these readings will not in any way be close readings but chances to familiarize myself with influential styles and content.  I will not follow the list chronologically and so the first concentration will be on phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Marion) with second concentration likely being some Freudian trajectory.

All the best to your own new year’s endeavors.

A skeptical rant

A while back I started to occasionally cruise the local atheist/skeptic sites from around Winnipeg.  It was an interesting cultural experience.  It made me think of what some non-religious folks might (possibly) experience when they encounter  particular church cultures.  What I am thinking of primarily is the seemingly unconscious maintenance of a certain in-house mindset that helps support and perpetuate a larger view of the world that is not held by popular culture.  This was strikingly impressed on me in a recent post at Winnipeg Skeptics entitled, Top Ten Reasons Why Being a Skeptic is Fulfilling.  Now there really is nothing to criticize here as the post is about a subjective experience, that is, being fulfilled.  However, the experienced fulfillment strike me as either unhealthy or simply generic and so confusing in terms of its being unique to skepticism (though I did admit the author did not claim uniqueness for many of the reasons).

First is the prescriptive nature of the post.  Here are a few excerpts,
As a skeptic you love science
Through your skeptical endeavors you have found your social conscience, a sense of camaraderie and have made friends for a lifetime.
I feel bad for the poor skeptic who remains unconvinced of the current employment of science as an effective means to address human well-being and in so doing finds him or herself ostracized from this fraternity for such contrarian views.

More than this defining of what a skeptic loves and will experience is the nature of the claims.  So take the full sentence of the first reason skepticism is fulfilling,
As a skeptic you love science and know that the scientific method is the best method mankind has ever invented to understand who we are, how we got here, and how we can improve our lot in this universe.
Okay I will grant the how we got here but who we are and how to improve our lot, really?  I’ll leave a comment over at that post and wait for some elaboration because I don’t even know where to start on that claim.  But more to the point.  This post is about fulfillment.  Skepticism is fulfilling because it is the best.  How is it the best?  It is the best not because of demonstrable realities but because it is fulfilling for this individual.  It provides a subjective condition which the author enjoys.  Shouldn’t there be reasons to be skeptical about that?

Here is number two,
You know that reality is a puzzle and that it will take a lot of effort to understand it. At times truth goes against what seems to be common sense. You have discovered that the struggle to understand reality reveals truths that are, at times, deeply profound. That knowledge will keep you searching the for the truth for the rest of your life.
That may well be true of skepticism but I am going to go ahead and say that is true of anyone who is semi-conscious or attentive to life.

The author goes on in number three,
You possess a willingness to learn accompanied by a willingness to change, that’s why your skepticism makes you a better person.
How does a willingness to change make anyone better?  There is simply no relationship here.

Number four,
I have only ever met one group of people who cheer when they have been proven wrong. Skeptics. Especially those who employ scientific skepticism. You may be bold when you ask those annoyingly tough questions, but underneath it all you are humble enough to know when you have discovered the truth. After all, evidence is evidence and that’s good enough for you.
This is about as laughable as the Christian radio station that claims to only use ‘safe’ language. Hmmm, agreed upon in-house rules are cheered upon when followed by one another?  Strange.  I am still waiting for evidence of things like, say, the above claim about how science is the best mode of ‘improving out lot in life’.

Bizarrely perhaps this post reminds me of certain strands of pentecostalism.  The nature of these claims reminds me of the pentecostals who tried to show me the fulfilling nature of speaking in tongues.  They just wanted me to try it and if I opened myself to it I would see its value.  I tried.  I did not see.  I have the same feeling about these models of skepticism/atheism.  They continue to strike me as so profoundly lacking as an overall approach to life.  It is almost as though the author knows this and instead simply tries to amp up the volume to create a kind of Prosperity Gospel for skepticism.
Do this and you will end up fulfilled, isn’t it wonderful.
Sure, the author of this post is someone who apparently was an Anglican Minister and now an enlightened skeptic so I guess I should forgive him the zeal of conversion but these expressions strike as so terminally unfulfilling that I can’t even begin to wrap my head around them.  I want to be clear that author does admit that “You understand that being skeptical on it’s own just doesn’t cut it.”  But this is followed quickly about an apparent openness to letting others ‘prove themselves’.  I think most people with any familiarity to this discussion knows how this goes.  Two sides with differing foundational logics attempt to ‘prove’ something and surprisingly no one is convinced.

As I reflect on this post, which I was originally going to scrap, what remains most impressing is this notion of hope.  Why should there be hope in this?  I am guessing there is hope because of this author’s experience.  This all strikes me as somehow strange.

A learned twaddler

I am into the thick of the final volume of my Kierkegaard reading project.  It looks like I may even finish ahead of schedule by a few days.  I already have an outline for my next reading plan as this one really seemed to focus my time and attention to accomplish an amount of reading I can’t imagine I would have been able to under ‘normal’ circumstances.  In any event part of the next reading project will include a stint in phenomenology.  I have for some time sensed a ‘call’ towards phenomenology.  If there is one thing I have learned about my style of critical engagement is that I can easily move into ‘poetic’ gestures or expressions.  I certainly don’t mean this comment to belittle the role of the poetic in communication only that for me it was a space I attempted to inhabit when I really did not know what I was talking about.  In communicating this way I hoped that the frills were distracting or persuasive enough to keep from further scrutiny.

My rudimentary view of phenomenology is of a process by which someone learns the simple task of description.  I don’t assume that description will be neutral of course only that a certain form of content can be developed and articulated that will provide a more decisive engagement and understanding of a given context or idea.  I am simply working at trying to be more specific and honest.  I think honesty does have potential currency to it, not in some heartfelt intention but in clarity.  When Kierkegaard responded to the real or imagined question ‘What do you want?’ in a local periodical he replied, ‘honesty’.  Much of his writings in his so-called ‘Attack on Christendom’ have to do with being honest about why Christianity exists as it does and how that relates to the text of the New Testament.

In The Book Adler Kierkegaard gives an aside with regards to how it often seems to easier for people to talk about immeasurably more complex topics than specific ones.  His sentiments reflect some of the motivation behind my own development.

A learned twaddler who at bottom knows nothing can seldom be got to deal with anything concrete; he does not talk of a particular dialogue of Plato, that is too little for him – also it might become apparent that he had not read it.  No, he talks about Plato as a whole, or even perhaps of Greek philosophy as a whole, but especially about the wisdom of the Indian and the Chinese.  This Greek philosophy as a whole, the profundity of Oriental philosophy as a whole, is the prodigiously great, the boundless, which advantageously hides his ignorance.  So also it is easier to talk about an alteration in the form of government that to discuss a very little concrete problem like sewing a pair of shoes; and the injustice towards the few capable men lies in the fact that by reason of the prodigious greatness of the problem they are apparently on a par with every Peer, who ‘also speaks out.’  So it is much easier for a dunce to criticize our Lord than to judge the handiwork of an apprentice in a shop. . . . But our Lord and his governance of the world is something so prodigiously great that in a certain giddy abstract sense the most foolish man takes part in gossiping about it as well as the wisest man, because no one understands it.

I am trying in my own way to be honest about what I know and what I do not know.  This is not about knowing completely but simply in how I can talk about specifics.  In this way much of the theology I currently touch on (and it is less and less these days) seems to fall under the final line in the quote above and I am left wondering if it is a wise or foolish person who is speaking.