Category: Uncategorized

Making a theological statement

I have never really liked theology. It would be easy and boring to associate this sentiment with some self-aggrandizing notion of how my beliefs are so original and idiosyncratic that they cannot be contained in existing theological discourses. But this was the case even when I was primed for theology, when I was seeking theology, when I just loved Jesus and wanted to be smart too.

Perhaps it was simply the case that I was exposed to bad theology early and never recovered. Going to a small evangelical bible college I still have images of the brick that is Millard Erickson’s systematic theology. From what little I remember it was basically an exhaustive attempt at creating a logical system of proof texting the Bible in relation to God. It seemed that unconsciously I sensed that theology tried to make of the Bible something other than what it already was. I always enjoyed the Bible, or at least from my early formative periods of faith. The Bible was just something that my faith led me to be immersed in. In the Bible there was more than I could possibly understand.

Evangelical apologetics were equally inscrutable. Why would ‘God’ be subsumed to reason or logic, wouldn’t that make logic or reason God? I mean, I understood what people were trying to do in apologetics but it never made sense, that is, I couldn’t actually do it. I remember taking an apologetics class and for my class presentation the only thing I could come up with as ‘proof’ was how interesting it was that over millennia a community gave what seemed like unbroken testimony to something.

My aversion to theology only continued and it was not really for lack of exposure. I toured through various ancient and modern theologians with some holding more and some less interest. My only really sustained engagement was with Rowan Williams. Williams was the first theologian for whom theology seemed non-reductive, that is, he seemed to let his theology roam as wide as his faith. This may not be advisable as an academic discipline but it was invigorating at the time. This period also aligned with my time worshipping in an Anglican church. It felt as though perhaps I found an intellectual and spiritual home. But at that time I also began reading works by Philip Goodchild and Daniel C Barber. Significant to their work was a critique of the function of transcendence within Christianity (and so also modernity) and its attendant schools of thought. The critique that I drew from them was how evoking transcendence (that is the existence of another plane of reality inaccessible by direct contact from this plane) was almost always a power play, always a matter of who was mediator, priest, of the pathway between realms. To be on the side of transcendence was to be an unassailable authority (perhaps benevolent perhaps not). Goodchild unpacked this in terms of the difference between imagination and attention. Put most simply imagination projects beliefs onto the world while attention allows for the possibility of mutual transformation engaging the world. Confessional statements of faith could not be protected when one is committed to paying attention. This was the undoing of my Anglican tour of faith. Anglican theology (and its attendant liturgy) was on trend at that time for intellectuals and artists of faith, Anglican theology (and its attendant liturgy) offering a drama of life in which creation is taken up into its vision of life. Everywhere I turned from then on all I could see were acts of imaginative projection (which ultimately is just another term for supremacy). I am not saying I have rid myself of Christian supremacism but Anglican theology was ruined for me.

In the last ten years I have come across theology that has moved and shaped me; James Cone, Delores Williams, and Marcella Althaus-Reid are a few that come to mind. What these theologians modelled for me was the type of attention that facilitated a sense of relay with life, or living. This attention privileges suffering as a reality which is excluded or rejected from dominant discourses and imaginations. Suffering is the site which can have no meaning. This resistance to discourse, which is perhaps also resistance to the world comes close to my definition of holiness drawn from the Israelite tradition of anti-idolatry, leaving nothing at the center worship. Here attention is drawn to that which is not figured, not of this world but also not transcendent; not a meaning maker from another realm.

God and God’s holiness is that which moves otherwise than the figuring of the world. This is of course not a consistent theme in the Bible. To impose consistency would already be to adopt an intelligible discourse of the world and ascribe holiness to it. The Bible does, however, offer a surprising multitude of clashing discourses, meditations on sheol and darkness, rigorous demands of holiness, and calls to value what is not. This swarm hardly makes for theology in any standard use of the term.

In the place of theology I consider my intellectual practice one of study. Study is necessary unfinished, necessarily attentive and formative. There are of course many forms and types of study but the holding of faith and intellect draws me time and again to absurdities, dreams, traumas, and the unbearable for these places necessarily clear so much of the world from it that the possibility of holiness seems somehow inevitable if one is able to learn how to sustain attention, for these things so easily cast us off or cast us down or elicit rationalizations and denials. It is from here that my understanding or worship and even church appear. It is in the gathering of those at such sites of attention that the practices of faith sustain our attention and await something that we might call resurrection.

Closed communion: On maybe not being God’s gift to the world

As the trend in Mennonite Church Canada continues to drift towards ‘open communion’ (which typically refers to an invitation to receive communion regardless of one’s ‘merits’ [baptism, membership, etc.] or even designation as a Christian) I found myself becoming more resistant than I anticipated. There are several reasons for this.

First, by way of orientation. In my experience ‘closed’ communion is typically supported by the notion that communion already reflects a faith commitment. This could be appealed to by way of the biblical precedent of only disciples being present at the founding event and then also of the very early church tradition in which communion was given special weight in relation to a believers commitment. There are progressions of commitment and development with communion figuring at a particular point.

As many traditions in the last 50 years or so began to question and address the manner in which the church has functioned to exclude people and hold an unhelpful and hypocritical measuring tape up against others there have been attempts to ‘open’ communion, focusing rather on the radical hospitality of Jesus and the rejection of meritocracy, on who is ‘worthy’ to judge and to receive communion. Communion becomes a symbol that anyone should be able to recognize and receive as a sign of grace.

What I find myself wondering about is the arrogance of the church in both of these models. Closed communion can certainly be reflective of a larger ‘closed’ culture in a congregation which is unable to recognize faithfulness and goodness in people who do not fit the moral codes or liturgical practices of a congregational theology. This is still most easily identifiable in matters of exclusion in relation to marriage equality or sexual orientation but this extends in basic congregational expectations that often reflect middle-class values on what being ‘blessed’ looks like and in turn what we expect others to look like. And so ‘closed’ communion can easily function to reinforce who is really a part of God’s chosen people. Closed communion can enforce an image of holiness with a particular church’s values with the church functioning as gatekeepers. This aligns with the deeper theology of Christian supremacy which believes the church to sufficient and superior prior to contact with what is unrecognized.

In this way it makes sense for those addressing these harmful practices to ‘open’ communion and indeed focus on radical hospitality, extending the table as it were. However, I find this posture to be more about liberals wanting to distance themselves from the narrowness of its more conservative brothers and sisters. What I mean is that I am concerned this approach is more about soothing our own guilt and distancing ourselves from what we find distasteful in other church forms than actually thinking about how communion can and should function in the church. So, a few thoughts.

If communion is meant to be an intimate space in the relation to God and fellow believers church leadership should never consider it a completely open space. One can only wonder how many times victims have been forced to take communion alongside abusers. The time has fully arrived for the church to re-visit the question of church discipline particularly in relation to issues of abuse and harassment. It seems reasonable if not necessary to reflect on how to make communion a safe space (which includes an interrogation of the theology behind communion practices).

And so while communion should hopefully support and protect those within a congregation I also feel like we need to be more attentive to how communion protects those outside the congregation. Unless we wish to make communion a literal meal (or feast!) basically like every other meal (which would probably be great!) then we need to acknowledge that communion reflects a practice not of material nourishment but one whose symbolism reflects a bond to God and to one another. There is great pious theology that can articulate the abounding love of God which is for everyone. And most of us in the church do hope that if there is something good we can offer, we want to offer it. But deploying this theology at the site of communion may not be the most helpful.

This call to open communion can again communicate that we are literally God’s gift to everyone, that we have what is good for what ails you. And so what I am wondering if we are willing to acknowledge that we may NOT actually be good for some people to be bonded to. I hear this from some black people who are uncomfortable (to put it mildly) with our white churches trying to be more ‘diverse’ (making them a project of our aspirations). I hear this from queer individuals hesitant to receive welcome when it is only practiced in a let’s-all-agree-to-disagree-and-focus-on-unity context (ultimately subsuming them under a repressive theology). And it is quite simply arrogant to assume we have what you need (I can’t help but think there is a sneaking supremacy in all this). Why would we invite someone new to Christian faith into the imagery of consuming our God’s flesh? Yes, let the flood gates of hospitality abound. Let a thousand potlucks spring up for the all the neighbourhood to join. And let this all be offered without consideration of mutual commitment or obligation.

Rather, take your time. Get to know the church. Learn about its history, theology and practices. You know, catechism. If the church can only offer communion as a means of support to those outside its congregation it is probably doing something wrong. There are all kinds of tables, all kinds of relationships and opportunities. We don’t have our house in order and should not be quick to begin bonding someone to our family dynamics until that person has a better sense of what they are getting themselves into. Particularly as Mennonites we cannot allow our theology to become increasingly divorced from our ecclesial realities.

Review of Marcus Rempel’s *Life at the end of us vs them*

Marcus Peter Rempel, Life at the end of us vs them: Cross culture stories. Privately published with Friesen Press, 2017, 318 pages.

I confess that I picked up the book because I hated the title and because the author was local and writing from the same Mennonite tradition I am connected with. I hated the title because I hated the notion of speaking beyond or at the end of us and them. This gesture typically requires the enactment of some synthesis or overcoming of what is, some teleological or transcendent authority to accomplish such a feat. Historically or world historically this has been performed through the variations of Christian supremacy, even in its most benevolent forms (which is of course its preferred self-understanding). As I heard one professor put it the creation of a ‘we’ is always the creation of an other, an excluded. I am of the same conviction. I am sure that an individual’s personal ethics or morals can be generally kind and just while holding to some transcendent ideal of ‘we’ but if we want to work in the realm of thought we must also give account for the genealogy and political or ontological relations of these thoughts. And so suffice it to say I began with some apprehension or almost disdain at the brazen notion of entitling a work Life at the end of us vs them.

I will also confess that the book was much better than I expected. Rempel’s writing reflects sustained and humble attentiveness to his experiences as well as intellectual engagement with significant cultural and theological writers. I was impressed with Rempel’s awareness of his own limitations and the potential for abuse and misunderstanding that can come in addressing the issues he raises. The chapters in this book run the length and breadth of hot topics covered in churches, social media and politics.

It is his personal confessions that stand out as he wrestled with understanding indigenous/settler relations, liberal and religious uses of violence, sexual orientation and gender abuses, economics, terrorists, etc. Rempel hits all the talking points often with surprising freshness. If this were all, if Rempel offered these accounts as the fruit of extended introspection it would have much to commend it. However, and to return to my initial (then uninformed) criticism, Rempel does not frame these accounts in genre of introspection and personal confession but rather turns them outwards where they become projection with the influence of Rene Girard, Ivan Illich (and John Milbank to a lesser extent) and a guiding quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn which reads famously that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” These are Rempel’s tools for constructing a life beyond us and them.

While always hedging and qualifying the contingency of his position he also asserts that these teachers offer genuine answers into not only present but world historical (even pre-historic) questions of humanity, religion and meaning. The Solzhenitsyn quote as well as Girard and Milbank in particular impose a levelling effect on humanity and bring each life into a sort of equal analogy, that is, that there is a way of thinking uniformly across human experience. For Solzhenitsyn it is the entangled (and universal) soul which cannot completely eradicate evil from the human heart, for Girard it is the universal scapegoating mechanism by which human civilization and ‘peace’ is founded on the murder or sacrifice of particular individuals, and for Milbank it is the church’s ontology of peace which funds the resources for humanity’s wellbeing. I am not familiar with Illich and so will not speak of his influence.

The trouble with these authors is how smoothly the get recuperated into the imperial project of Christianity. This is explicit in John Milbank who seems to have no qualms in reclaiming Christianity as the best possible hegemony (often in trying to illuminate the deficiencies of both Islam and secular liberalism). Girard is even grander claiming a universal and scientific claim about humanity and how Christianity is the one event which holds open the possibility of reversing humanity’s use of violence to establish peace. To be sure these scholars offer tremendous critical tools and I think Rempel puts them to good use but these tools often betray him in the process.

This betrayal is particularly evident in chapter 4 ‘Sex Fiends: Jian Ghomeshi, My Rooster and Me’. In the wake of all the high profile revelations of sexual abuse and the #metoo movement Rempel opts for sympathy for the devil considering these powerful men as ‘scapegoats’ allowing us regular dudes the ability to disavow our own potentially harmful sexualities. It is not so much that Rempel is wrong about us all being complex and caught up in larger social forces it is rather precisely his inability to read those larger forces. He frames his engagement with Ghomeshi as a bold vulnerability inserting all men (and women) into the equation of sexual abuse (or at least abusive impulses). For those working at the front lines of sexual abuse (that I have encountered) it is precisely Rempel’s approach that is entirely predictable. Despite all the attention now given to sexual abuse the predictable response is still  to assert this appeal to ‘nuance’ to quickly include all of our seemingly tortured souls. This continues in Rempel’s larger critique of contemporary gender issues noting the confusion and conflicts that surface among both men and women not ever accounting for the remaining internalized patriarchy that so many feminists are clear about. And so in the end many of his chapters are inevitably about his sexuality (which fair enough is his right as an author!) and not about centering other marginal approaches to gender and sexuality. Again, if he had made other claims about the book this would have been perfectly understandable (even if problematic). But this is the temptation of the models like Girard and Milbank. They return time and again to a white male accounting for everything. And so rather than attending to entirely different models of life like the black scholarship that is emerging from a profound meditation on anti-blackness as the founding of the world (see Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson) slavery (with Girard) can be quickly is positioned as just another analogy in the logic of scapegoating. These theoretical models are dangerous because they continue to posit a sort of pure origin that can necessarily only ever be accessed by these privileged approaches and so necessarily turn to projection, determining and positioning those who encounter it.

Rempel offers an important distinction towards the end of the book,

“Illich and Girard have helped me to understand the strange world I live in by transforming my condemnation into contrite grief and my confusion into an exploratory hypothesis. But living in community – rather than intellectual conversation – are what give shape to my hopes and energy to my resistance.” (191)

I take this statement in good faith but would hope that someone like Girard would precisely become less important in his thinking and articulation over time. His model is too easily coopted into dominate discourses of theology and I don’t see Rempel’s expression as actually following from it. Not every situation is ripe for pruning along the line that divides our heart. Not every form of oppression and resistance can be collapsed neatly into a scapegoat theory packaged nicely for the Christian story of peace. I confess that Rempel’s approach remains likely more appealing that what I could offer as it is constructive. With notions of transcendent hope and pure origins there are resources for a constructive projection. My approach remains critical, the naming of idols. The confession with prophets of 1 and 2 Kings that have only the refrain the king has caused the people to sin. There is of course the daily work of care and right worship but these do not need to make the claims that Girard and Milbank ask for but can continue in the way of bearing with one another.

In the end I did not hate this book. It should be read. It is much better than many of the popular resources I see passed around in my circles. But to use Rempel’s own method I would suggest that no author can draw clearly the line in their own entangled heart and so I would suggest that Rempel and his readers attend to the remnants of an imperial imagination that persists there and have proven so hard to uproot and perhaps cannot be but does not absolve us from such field work an analogy I hope Rempel can appreciate.

A brief dismissal of Jordan Peterson

I felt a little embarrassed that we, in Canada, offered the world Malcolm Gladwell with what always struck me as a sort of naive embrace of clever optimistic liberalism. But I never gave him too much thought and in his influence seemed largely benign. Now we have offered up Jordan Peterson. What to say? I was initially surprised when I found out that the Jordan Peterson of international fame and controversy was *that* Jordan Peterson of boring reactionary soundbites on CBC.

In any event his influence appears to be growing for now and seeping into my church and denominational circles so I figured I should at least have some sense of informed response.

I don’t think it is too difficult to cut to the core of how to position yourself in relation to Peterson. He makes his orientation pretty clear when he talks about some of his primary academic research.

“I was comparing and contrasting two narratives—let’s say the narrative that drove the Communists and the narrative that drove the West. I was curious in a postmodern way, I suppose, about whether or not these were just two arbitrary narratives. Because that’s a possibility, right? We’re all socially constructed. We can organize ourselves according to whatever narrative we want. What I figured out was that the narrative of the West is not arbitrary; it’s just right. We got it right—that the individual is sovereign. That’s the right answer to the problem of tribalism. I don’t care if it’s tribalism on the left or the right.”

Despite packaging Peterson’s position is boring and predictable. Why would there be any surprise that a white western male ‘discovers’ that the myth of individualism premised the exploitation of so many groups for the founding of the modern world, a myth which has served him so well is indeed correct. Of course there is all the ‘research’ to which Peterson will point showing that his position somehow has nothing to do with realities of race, gender, etc. But to put in terms my denominational colleagues might understand, to claim that the individual is sovereign is actual equivalent to the prosperity of gospel of claiming that if you have enough faith you will be healed. It is the history of might makes right, winners write history, blah, blah, blah.

And as though his basic premise of individualism is not sufficient reason to discredit him he makes clear how he positions this individualism in relation to left/right social expressions.

“I’ve been thinking about the difference between the right and the left, because obviously the right can go too far. If you’re on the right, as soon as you start making claims of ethnic or racial superiority, you can put those people in a box and you can say no. On the left, we know the left can go too far, but we don’t know when. I think it’s because it’s a multivariate problem. You can’t point to one thing, one policy, one ideological axiom on the left that has the same degree of self-evident toxicity that racial superiority does, though I think equity comes close, the demand for equality of outcome”—i.e., the anti-capitalist idea that we should all more or less end up with the same number of marbles, no matter how we play the game.” [emphasis mine]

So working at some level material/economic distributive equality is close to the toxicity of racial superiority. This quickly circles back to his premise. To claim that the West was right in claiming the sovereignty of the individual is in fact akin to claims of racial (and gender) superiority as we know which individuals in history were sovereign. All of this spins out in his claims that he is trying to get young men to take responsibility . . . take the responsibility of their sovereignty I suppose (which includes a seemingly oh-so benevolent patriarchy).

In any event whatever ‘good’ can be found in his work can be found in better forms elsewhere. Don’t give Peterson the time and let him fizzle out or self-conbust.

No gods – A retelling of 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

I was asked to offer an ‘experimental re-telling’ of 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 for Unsettling the Word: Biblical Experiments in Decolonization.  Nothing particularly insightful came to me, though it did help to clarify and confirm the truth of the phrase the foolishness of the world. I mean, the world is a place where growth is outstripping resources; wealth is produced to be concentrated; violence is enacted in the name of peace and order; mental and spiritual well-being is being eroded even among the most secure. We might as individuals and as small groups deviate or resist this wisdom from time to time but really it does not change the prevailing (dominating) wisdom and how it effects the earth and life on earth. It seems clear that the wisdom of the world is foolishness and I tried to make that clear in my retelling.

Is there good news in such a situation? What would that sound like? Or, who could hear it? I could not simply speak of the wisdom of God. We are 2000 years on from Jesus. The world has been shaped by what the church and her theology became. We can’t simply reassert or reassemble a true or original Gospel message from the words we have inherited. If there is hope for wisdom then the gods of this world must be named and denied. And that was my point in the piece. I did not feel that I had available to me constructive language of good news in the face of the world’s deadly foolishness.

I did not want to assume what is being referred to when people (or I) say ‘God’. A god is a concentration of the world. I think gods are inevitable for humans, that does not mean I think humans create them; that gives us too much credit. But the culmination of our value, attention, and energy forms part of a spirit that honours something. This is clear in overt nationalism. This clear, though seemingly less so for us, in our economic system. What else do you call a symbolic belief structure that demands our attention, determines our value, promises a future, and avenges disobedience? Neither modernity nor secularism nor even atheism has rid the world of gods.

Further I would argue that the church has been midwife if not mother to the gods of Capitalism and Western/White supremacy. Sure, a complicated history but one that the church cannot be extracted from without the history of the West becoming unintelligible.

So I did not think I could simply evoke ‘God’ in this re-telling; this would be to risk letting the gods of the world control the message of ‘good news’. After all Paul is clear that the preaching must be of Christ crucified. It should also be noted that there is a reason why early Christians were sometimes called atheists. The form of their belief in God was literally unintelligible to the wisdom of the world. Now this is not a case for contemporary atheism, in my understanding most atheism still honour gods; that is, they embrace the wisdom of the world (often in keeping with the supremacist legacy of the church but with new terms).

So something has to give for there to be an intervention of wisdom (a wisdom not of the world). And because my understanding of wisdom is the unintelligible (the things that are not according to Paul) then I could only offer a critical re-telling, though a liturgy of sorts. No gods. A refrain. This is not a refrain that is helpful or appropriate in all contexts but perhaps necessary in the face of everything in this world including the church’s role in the formation of present world. No gods. We can’t be too careful right now.

The Israelites were commanded to leave the space between cherubim in the holy of holies empty. They could rarely if ever manage this. Jesus was accused of blasphemy because of how he held out the possibility of embodied divinity, rejecting any complicity with images of the empire. We can’t be too careful. Begin, like Paul, with things that are not (to be sure there are other perhaps better interventions but this is still relevant). In this way let the prohibition of false gods be rigorous and thoroughgoing. And then wait. Listen. See if any others have taken up this refrain. Gather. Perhaps something will yet rise up from what seems like death. Perhaps something will pour down like fire and wind. But I could not move as quickly as Paul does to a positive message in this passage because we are not the community that Paul was addressing and if you are serious about seeing if there is something other than the wisdom of the world you can’t skip the initial and needed refrain. No gods. Christ crucified.

That was all I was trying to say in my retelling.

Being Unreasonable: Culture, Abuse and Support

Others have said it before and better and for some time I have indeed believed or understood those who have it said before. However, it seems that I am only coming to feel or, not really to feel, but to have those beliefs rub against, agitate, a deeper formation in me that, it seems, has remain largely undisturbed.

Almost by definition a culture (perhaps this is not the right word, we may be talking about a world here) can only convict and condemn that which is not culture, uncultured. While we might talk about a culture of violence or abuse this designation proves the point of what tends to be signified when we talk about culture in itself. To be cultured is to be good. This remains the track record of black, indigenous, poor, mentally ill and other populations. These groups and individuals (not to fully equate them) are often defined apart from, are deviant from culture. What I am coming to more deeply understand is how this relates to questions of abuse.

When abuse is perpetrated by people who already occupy an uncultured position then the conviction of abuse tends to be easier. However when an individual occupies enough of a cultured position then allegations of abuse tend not to stick. This is logical. Explicitly, our culture denounces and condemns abuse (the term itself of course remains contested). Culture condemns abuse. Therefore if a cultured environment cannot readily identify an experience or event as abusive and yet an individual emerges with an accusation of abuse then that individual is not only accusing an individual but is also accusing a culture.

That is, if a person is cultured and has not themselves admitted or confessed to abuse then the culture itself has little resources to convict one of its own. Culture has no inherent capacity for siding with those making accusations of abuse against a cultured person. An accusation against such a person is an accusation against the culture. I have not fully appreciated this reality because I also have been intimately and fundamental formed in contexts that have explicitly normalized, enculturated actions and individuals that are abusive. I was brought up in a logic that dismissed and rejected the disruption of accusation. This is not as easy to dismantle and discard as I once thought.

If the connection between culture and cultured (or the in the church you can substitute the words ‘faithful’ or ‘righteous’ here) individuals is true then accusations of abuse may be by definition unreasonable. As I have begun wading into my own experience of those speaking out about their abuse I can testify as to how quickly and easily rationalizations emerge. I remain a deeply cultured person. Within this logic there is always a reasonable explanation for what happened that softens (at the least) or can fully discredit the accuser’s claims.

I suspect that the working assumption in dominant culture is that real abuse will be self-evident, that a clear outlining of the ‘facts’ will render a verdict irrefutable. Perhaps we can accept that ‘good’ and cultured people do from time to time abuse and then deny it to protect themselves but surely we as a civilized culture will be able to discern these matters clearly. But if we listen to advocates of abused individuals we will hear the refrain that our culture and courts create an environment that benefits and protects abusers. We may agree that such injustices occur but have we interrogated our own enmeshment with a culture that by definition exists to protect its own? What follows are observations that I have read before but now they come more as confessions of my own enmeshment and as validation for those who needed to break this ground pioneering outposts rejected by culture.

  1. There will always be a reasonable explanation to deny or minimize abuse allegations. The accused would never do such a thing. The account is exaggerated. The accuser has ulterior motives. The accuser is not well. There was a misunderstanding. I knew these things but when in closer proximity to such accounts I was astonished at how quickly and how naturally these responses came. Do not underestimate this.
  2. You will probably never get the ‘victim’ you want. We likely have an image of a victim we want to help save (and it should be noted that image was likely produced by our culture). It may feel easier to support a victim who seems victimized and needs our protection from an easily identifiable predator. Perhaps it is someone unsure needing our confirmation. This image may well fit some situations but there is also a good chance that you will encounter a victim who is also, by personality or circumstance, a bit of a jerk; or, if not a jerk tends towards hyperbole in expression or uses ‘inappropriate’ language or characterizations. The accuser may be exceedingly angry or disarmingly confident. And unless you have a lot of experience in this area most accusers, in whatever form they express themselves, may well seem unreasonable. Be prepared for this.
  3. To side with an accuser is to take a risk. To side with someone who has experienced abuse is to leave your investment in power and your cultural protection. You won’t know the facts first hand and you may never feel like you know ‘the truth’ or that some lingering doubts remain. This is the risk. Reason, reasonableness is culture’s terrain of safety. To side with someone making accusations of abuse is almost by definition to be unreasonable. Culture tells us that abuse is in fact unacceptable and so the fact that someone needs to make accusations is to already make an accusation against the culture. To accuse the culture of at the very least being inadequate. This is a risk, understand that.
  4. If you are like me you will make mistakes. Your formation, despite your best intentions, will work against you. Expect this. Apologize when you have actually seen the error but don’t make the apology about you. My sense is that there will be times when you just need to get out of the way if you are no longer the person to be trusted.

These are expressions, articulations that I have read often enough but slowly I am trying to articulate them from my own experience, particularly as my own formation is working against my attempts to be consistently supportive. This is not as easy and not as clear as I thought. For those of us who have fit well enough in our culture there tends to be little reason to articulate the negative conditions and forces of that environment because to do so means questioning an authority that has protected us and perhaps being criticized for biting the hand that feeds us. Rearrange your humility and your defensiveness so that it might better serve those vulnerable to our culture. It is unreasonable to consistently walk with those making accusations of abuse. Learn to be unreasonable and keep walking.

2017 Sexual Abuse Revelations – 2018 Sexual Ethics Engagements

Below is an active archive of particular responses to the charges and movements related to issues of sexual violence emerging in 2017. I hope to manage this post as a collection of primary sources for the further development of sexual ethics.

Women’s March 2017
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3060-march-as-feminists-not-as-women
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/06/women-strike-trump-resistance-power?CMP=share_btn_tw
https://www.bustle.com/articles/201378-what-every-white-woman-attending-the-womens-march-needs-to-know
http://www.brittanytoliver.com/blog/2016/11/16/why-i-do-not-support-the-one-million-women-march-on-washington

#metoo
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2018/01/05/the_new_york_times_joins_the_chorus_of_voices_arguing_that_metoo_will_end.html
https://verdict.justia.com/2018/01/03/sexual-revolution-cause-sexual-misconduct-revealed-metoo

Donald Trump
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/listening-to-what-trumps-accusers-have-told-us
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-and-the-truth-the-sexual-assault-allegations
https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/08/politics/trump-on-howard-stern/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html

Harvey Weinstein
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.html

Louis CK
Accusations – https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/arts/television/louis-ck-sexual-misconduct.html
Louis CK’s response – https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/arts/television/louis-ck-statement.html
Responses
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/14/opinion/louis-ck-not-funny-harassment.html

Aziz Ansair
Original piece – https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355
Responses
http://www.katykatikate.com/2018/01/not-that-bad_15.html
https://jezebel.com/babe-what-are-you-doing-1822114753
http://www.survjustice.org/blog/the-azizansari-accusation-and-the-metoo-movement

Cat Person – New Yorker
Original piece – https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person

Sexual Abuse and Disabilities
https://www.npr.org/series/575502633/abused-and-betrayed

Incels and the Toronto Van Attack
http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2018/04/24/incels-hail-toronto-van-driver-who-killed-10-as-a-new-elliot-rodger-talk-of-future-acid-attacks-and-mass-rapes/

Stanley Hauerwas on John Howard Yoder
Hauerwas’ piece – http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2017/10/18/4751367.htm
Responses
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2017/11/30/4774014.htm
https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/historical-justice-era-metoo-legacies-john-howard-yoder

General Engagements
https://jezebel.com/theres-nothing-more-ordinary-than-abuse-1821615223
http://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasure

Engagements coming from a broadly Mennonite context (or background)
https://intoaccount.org/2017/11/21/a-manifesto-on-ass-grabbing/
http://www.queerpgh.com/throw-rock-hit-rapist-me-too/
http://www.ourstoriesuntold.com/we-are-the-answer-weve-been-waiting-for/
https://uwaterloo.ca/grebel/publications/conrad-grebel-review/issues/winter-2017/afterword
https://intoaccount.org/2018/01/26/responding-to-reports-of-abuse-whos-getting-it-right-and-where-does-theology-come-in/

The Body in Pain: Unmaking the World

The Body in Pain

I’m not sure what to make of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. It is has been a while since I have read something that attempted the scope of what Scarry is approaching. It has been a while since I felt convinced of a brilliantly simple thesis and yet unconvinced of so many details. Scarry offers a mediation on the relation between the imagination and the body; pain, sentience and objects, making and unmaking.

Part One: Unmaking the World

Scarry addresses torture and war. She begins with the observation that pain is notoriously difficult to express. Pain, it seems, is unique in its inexpressibility. There are political stakes to this inexpressibility. With torture, pain is not meant to illicit information but to deconstruct the prisoner’s voice; to separate body from meaning. What emerges from this obscene surgery is the emergence of the torturer, or more accurately the torturer’s regime, as exhaustively real.  Any possible existence and meaning is controlled by the one who controls the fullness of pain.

Scarry defines war as a contest of injuring. But the act of war does not in itself bring its consequence. The actual acts of war do not make clear who has ‘out-injured’ who at a given time. As a contest, how does war end? Typically in war both sides have bodies in pain, bodies are altered in some way. This pain only indicates that there was a war, not who was a winner or loser. The end of war is ultimately a contest of belief, of meaning. The losing party must somehow be persuaded of their defeat or they must be exterminated. In either case fundamental meaning must again be severed; their sense of cultural reality must be exposed and rejected as a cultural fiction. A contest of injuring bodies provides this means. A war is won when one side no longer has the ability to self-describe.

The timing and context of such feelings [aggression, pride, etc.] here and in other international disputes suggest that when the system of national self-belief is without any compelling source of substantiation other the material fact of, and intensity of feeling in, the bodies of the believers (patriots) themselves then war feelings are occasioned. That is, it is when a country has become to its population a fiction that wars begin, however intensely beloved by its people that fiction is. (131)

War is in the massive fact of itself a huge structure for the derealisation of cultural constructs and, simultaneously, for their eventual reconstitution. The purpose of the war is to designate as an outcome which of the two competing cultural constructs will by both sides be allowed to become real, which of the two will (after the war) hold sway in the shared space where the two (prior to war) collided. Thus, the declaration of war is the declaration that ‘reality’ is now officially ‘up for grabs’. (137)

War and torture share this process of using pain to divorce voice (meaning) from body. Scarry takes time considering the difference between these two forms. War is a contest in a way that torture is not. Technically speaking if war is meant to disrupt a nation’s substantiation of itself then inflicting pain is not necessary. This is why we might talk about politics as war by other means (we might also speak of economics as war in this way). But Scarry does not focus on this, rather she observes that the question of consent is the key difference between war and torture; that those involved in war have consented to put into play the question of truth and reality. This seems entirely unconvincing as she goes on to site examples of how “after the American Civil War, the population of the South comes not only to accept but to take pride in its presence within the larger Union” (144). And never mind the conditions a country would create in order to enlist the faithful, as it were.

As she concludes the first section of her book on ‘Unmaking’ she introduces the notion of objects and artifacts, how they are extensions of the body, how in their creation they often arise in compassion (a chair to accommodate and relieve the weight of a body) and in decreation (war and torture) all those objects and artifacts that have accommodated bodies are now severed and destroyed.

Torture ends at what is the other’s starting point: it ‘produces’ the pain that has not only been eliminated by the act of creation, but whose very existence had been the condition that originally occasioned the act of creation. . . . the very existence of each requires the other’s elimination (145).

Scarry draws this section to a close by bringing the notion of pain, unmaking and making even closer in the observation that there is a human tendency to locate pain as an affirmation of belief. Where seeing is often a confirmation of an object, hurting can also be a way of confirmation. Scarry locates this in the religious register. Pain allows confirmation of what has no object or artifact. And so the tendency to idols (a benign source of substantiation as Scarry puts it). Scarry has drawn close, it seems, to what it is to be human, that is, discursive, making and unmaking. To understand this one must attend to the body in pain.

Writing 1985, with no reference to Derrida and a brief footnote to Foucault Scarry writes of how we are discovering the extent of human constructs/creations (God, law, childhood, sexuality, nature, etc.) and says,

very little inquiry into the nature of fictions has actually occurred, and thus creation – which will eventually come to be understood as having moral and ethical import at least as great as what in earlier centuries was ever perceived to be entailed in questions of ‘truth’ – is at present barely understood in even its most elementary forms. When one day the nature of human creation is fully unfolded, a new language will accommodate a long array of distinctions that are now nearly invisible, and that only being with the profound difference between a creation and a lie, between a fiction and a fraud. . . . it will be clear that the moral and aesthetic value of a given creation does not just depend on the content of the fiction but on the nature of the substantiation used in its confirmation in the transitional period when it is between the states of having been already made-up and not yet made-real (150).

Pain, trauma, and the Real these are all themes that get taken up in the wake of our encountering the discursive nature of reality and how our bodies move in this environment. Part II shifts focus onto the making of such objects, artifacts, and fictions.

The Gospel of Gentrification

If I am an evangelist for anything it is my neighbouhood. I have lived in the West End of Winnipeg for about 13 years (first moving onto Spence St in 1999). It won’t be long and it will be the place I have lived longest in my life. I can’t think of a better place to live in Winnipeg. The suburbs don’t register. Wolseley is too white. The Exchange seems okay but maybe just not residential enough. Maybe parts of St. Boniface. Anyway.

I am coming to realize that the fact that I am evangelist for my neighbourhood should give me pause. How did I come into this neighbourhood? How has it shaped me, how do I effect it? I first moved into the neighbourhood in my third year of Bible college when I formed an evangelical notion of the social gospel. A Christian should be among the least of these. The West End is probably considered by most the second worst neighbourhood in the city (would I have ever considered the North End, probably not). The Gospel was meant to address material needs and not spiritual insurances. So this is where I needed, wanted, to be. I don’t really know what I did here. I worked at the community centre for a while, talked to folks on the street, and cultivated a notion of how depraved suburbanites are. Over time I found that I just liked the neighbourhood. I liked finding my identity in it. But in truth I came to the neighbourhood believing I had something superior to offer while being able to profit from what was there (sound familiar?).

My first years in the neighbourhood I learned the term ‘gentrification’. All I really knew about it was that it was bad. That it forced the most vulnerable to leave or make them even more vulnerable. I learned that gentrification in many cities was initiated by large influxes of investment capital making quickly and dramatically reshaping the landscape of a neighbourhood. This mostly hasn’t happened in Winnipeg except maybe along Main St. But if Wolseley is any example, what does happen is the slow ‘improvement’ of a neighbourhood through white investment and ownership. I like to think the West End is a little more textured than Wolseley was before its white washing. Currently it is still difficult to visibly identify an ‘ethnic’ group. Businesses and religious/community centres are diverse. Very mixed income housing. But of course the trend has started. The good part of the West End is now affectionately called North Wolseley. We are in the fortunate position to home own and are doing some renovations. Hipsters and hipster businesses are creeping up out of West Broadway. The University of Winnipeg continues to extend its influence.

So what to do? Probably nothing. Or is there? I don’t know. I still really love this neighbourhood. Maybe I’m looking for absolution, wanting to be considered native enough to be above (or below) these trends. But hipsters aren’t the only thing on the rise. The influence of the mosque is increasing. Orthodox Eritreans are moving in and opening businesses. Second generation Filippino’s are making their mark. The indigenous community is becoming more prominent. Will this all be for not. Will whiteness just win again? What are your experiences in other cities?

Perhaps in college I should have the foresight, the vision, to just move immediately to suburbs. If a white person can formulate theology with integrity perhaps it must be able to survive and respond to the suburbs and not rest on the credibility of other people’s vulnerability.

Prophet to king: You have caused the people to sin

A while back I noticed a curious phrase in the Book of Kings. I remember it saying something to the effect of accusing the king of ‘causing Israel to sin’. Such a phrase feels pivotal at this point in our political/historical moment. We are increasingly comfortable naming things like ‘structural violence’ but still tend to collapse into very individualistic based responses. More and more attempts are being made highlight how these appeals to individual actions actually fall well within how the powers of our age organize and communicate. Such a system of placing the burden on the individual offloads any guilt or charge of responsibility from those places and people where power is concentrated. One of the places endorsing the responsibility of individual is the church. The church, broadly understood, heralds the virtue of the individual. This emphasis cuts across liberal/conservative divides as both look to the individual whether for personal, spiritual salvation or in discipleship responding to social injustices. [See Adam Kotsko’s The Prince of this World for how the church’s theological traditions have informed our current understanding of the individual].

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