Temples of the Holy Spirit: Questioning Body-Soul Dualism

By Julia Meszaros

Is Christianity tied to a dualism of body and soul? A recent Anthropos seminar with ethnologist Maria Schnitter indicated that this question gets to the heart of a whole range of theological anthropological themes, including the status of the created world, the nature of sin, and the relation between self and other.

Bathing practices and salvation of the soul

According to Schnitter, who spoke on the differences between Christian, Muslim and pagan attitudes towards ritual bathing, the spread of Christianity among the Southern Slavs led to the gradual disappearance of their traditional bathing practices. As Schnitter argued, Christianity’s emphasis on the care of the soul and its call for the sacrifice of the body meant that Christians viewed the weekly bodily hygiene rituals of both pagans (or ancient Romans) and Muslims either as an idolatrous pleasure detracting from salvation or as indicative of a person’s spiritual impurity. Regular bathing, so the Christian authorities maintained in response to the prevailing Slavic customs, was acceptable only so long as it was required by the body itself; it was immaterial (if not damaging) to the salvation of the soul.

Whether rightly or wrongly, the separation, or even opposition, of body and soul that is at play in such arguments is often traced back to St Paul’s negative view of the flesh, or to the inheritance of a Greek dualism between body and soul (although it must be noted that Christianity has regularly condemned a strict anti-body stance, such as found in Gnosticism and Manicheanism). Such an opposition is often seen to be indicative of a wider-reaching binary logic that has fundamentally shaped the Western imagination and that is increasingly found to be incapable of adequately capturing reality. Traditional Christian practices geared towards the ‘salvation of souls’ or the ‘mortification of the flesh’ are thus being replaced by Eastern practices of yogic mindfulness and contemplation. The pursuit of ‘inner balance and centredness’, ‘self-acceptance’, and ‘groundedness’ is typically seen to represent a more holistic spirituality, which in turn helps underpin many of postmodernity’s most pressing concerns, such as the environmentalist movement, new perspectives on diet and health, or the development of pedagogical approaches more suited to integrating body, mind and soul. In short, Christianity’s association with a dualism between body and soul appears to be one of the reasons for the contemporary backlash against Christianity.

Yet despite these trends, it remains far from certain that the dechristianisation of society really provides new resources for the integration of body and soul. The contemporary concern to give greater importance to the body often takes on the form both of a fetish with the body, and of a heightened puritanism about the body: we are obsessed with the sexual body but afraid of the ageing, ugly, dying body. Thus, far from seeing a new willingness to engage in anything akin to the traditional communal bathing practices as were discussed in the seminar, we live in a society which accepts only the display of the ‘fit’ (and typically photo-shopped) body, and which is increasingly skeptical towards communal locker rooms (to name but one everyday example).

Christianity as resource for body-soul integration

These tensions and contradictions should give us pause. Did/does the Christian paradigm really entail a binary between body and soul and, in effect, devalue the body? The doctrine of the Incarnation and the sacraments would seem to suggest otherwise. As Schnitter moreover noted, Christian baptism is in many ways analogous to Muslim bathing practices. Here, too, an act of bodily washing has a spiritual effect and helps the soul onto the path of salvation.

How, then, can we articulate the difference between Christian and other perspectives on the relation between body and soul? It is true that Christianity does not consider the regular cleansing of the body relevant to the cleansing of the soul. In Christianity, the conditions for salvation have largely been internalised, such that baptism—though an efficacious and externally visible sign of an invisible grace—requires only a symbolic cleansing of the body, and that the internal purity effected by this ‘washing’ can only be tarnished by sin (as opposed to, say, natural bodily processes). It is the internal act of faith which is distinctive for salvation, such that bodily purity may coincide with spiritual impurity, and vice versa (cf. Jn 9).

At the same time, the suggestion that Christianity simply dismisses the body’s role in the salvific life seems inadequate. This is indicated, not only by Christian practices such as fasting, liturgical postures, etc. but also by the extent to which the Gospels view bodily healing as a sign of faith. The point here, however, is that the leper does not obtain salvation through bodily purification but obtains bodily health through his faith (Mt 8:1-4).

This suggests that, more than undoing it, Christianity reverses the relationship between body and soul. Salvation begins with the soul, even though its effects may become manifest also in the body. Implied in this, I would contend, is both a more humble and a more elevated vision of the human body. For, while the body’s salvific powers are limited, even the physically tainted body can serve as a ‘temple’ of the Holy Spirit.

SST Conference Nottingham 2015: Church, Otherness and Interruption

By Lieve Orye

“Thinking the Church Today” was the central theme of the Society for the Study of Theology conference at the University of Nottingham last week. During three buzzing days theologians from all over the UK, but also from Australia, the Netherlands and Belgium discussed what Church is or should be today, how it should be reflected upon, and how it could be understood as both continuity and discontinuity.

Church, dialogue and interruption

Lieven Boeve, founding member of the Anthropos research group, and first speaker at the conference, set the tone with his paper ‘Interrupting Scripture, Interrupting Church’. His was a rich paper in which the historical-dynamic, dialogical concept of Revelation as developed at Vatican II was taken forward encouraging theologians to continue the Vatican II practice of rereading doctrinal texts in view of perspectives developed in the context of the day. A key point was that in continuing this dialogue on how to understand Revelation today even its dialogical nature had to be thought differently. The suggestion was to reconceive it from the perspective of otherness and difference which brings more into focus the asymmetries in dialogue. The human person cannot be understood as first a being in itself that in a second step decides to relate and engage with the other. Rather, Boeve noted, we find ourselves always already in relationship, addressed by the other and being asked to answer. He noted that the previous strategy of dialogue as ‘mutual and critical correlation’ between faith and modernity that was based on the presupposition of continuity no longer functioned when such overlap eroded. In response, strategies of discontinuity had been advocated by theologians, some of who questioned even the very desirability of dialogue. As a third alternative Boeve proposed to reemphasize the necessity of dialogue but to reconsider its nature through the notion of ‘interruption’, a notion that involves both continuity and discontinuity. What is interrupted continues but continues differently. It involves the intrusion of an otherness that halts the narrative, draws attention to its narrative character and forces it to open up towards the other. Both Revelation and Church can interrupt. But also, both self-securing concepts of Revelation and Church can be interrupted.

Church and persons with disabilities: Receiving (from) the other

Both 'interruption' as well as 'otherness' were words that found a frequent echo during both formal and informal conversations at the conference. Let me mention one that provoked ample discussion within my reach of hearing. The third plenary paper by Mary McClintock-Fulkerson in many ways took up this question of Church and otherness, interrupting the rather abstract reflections in terms of exclusion, inclusion and pluralism using her ‘thick’ ethnographic description of welcoming people from group homes in UMC Good Samaritan. Visiting this church, meeting these people ‘with disabilities’ for the first time, she found herself, one could say, 'interrupted', questioned in her own openness toward the other. This interruption, and her fieldwork, helped her to see ‘inclusion’ and ‘pluralism’ as concretely given shape: inclusion took the shape of people from group homes being welcome in the Sunday service but on the condition of being as much as possible ‘like us’ – wandering around and making noises were seen to be disruptive and were discouraged. Pluralism took the shape of a special service, each Thursday evening, where people of the group homes could ‘be themselves’. McClintock Fulkerson argued to continue theological reflection on welcoming the stranger differently: Inclusion nor pluralism are in themselves good concepts to think with if we wish to honor all creatures, people from group homes included. That is, inclusion, welcoming the stranger, is important but how to go beyond a welcome that is conditioned by the standards of ‘the normate population’? Pluralism on the other hand does not set such standards and takes the needs of different groups seriously. But, by providing different services according to the needs of particular groups these are not really challenged to change. It remains easy to consider the ‘special needs service’ as ‘not really worship’. The interruption is neutralized. Allowing herself and theology to be interrupted, McClintock Fulkerson suggested adding a new category: “'receiving from the other’ may well be a crucial element of real (ecclesial) welcome”. She told us that she finds her theological categories questioned and challenged: how do you theologically take seriously people who will never be able to understand Christology or the Trinity, who will never have ‘the correct beliefs’, who even seem to communicate very differently and for whom “church” seems to “work” very differently? How do you honor the Imago Dei of people with disabilities? A first new way toward creativity in our practice of welcome, she noted, is humility. This means acknowledging that there is grace that the church does not control or even know. Second, we need new categories informed by disability studies that help us recognize that ‘disruptive’ behaviors are in fact a different form of communication, and from sociology, to help us understand ourselves as habituated into specific bodily proprieties and sensitivities. Thirdly, we need to look for a theological genre that is not simply doctrine but that nevertheless can result in a different critical theological lens to “discern how or if a faith practice has a discernible normative effect”, even when that faith practice is very different from what we are used to.

Structural problems, no structural solution?

The SST conference itself was in fact an effort in ‘receiving the other’, in being more welcoming to women. A women’s reception to start up the whole event, an extra tag to sessions that addressed issues of gender and diversity and a panel discussion “Gender, sex and systematic theology: present realities, future aspirations” were the major means to do so. In the panel session gender equality or the lack of it, the structural reasons for inequalities as well as personal experiences were discussed by a diverse group of scholars such as Margaret Adam (St Stephen’s House, Oxford), Jenny Daggers (Liverpool Hope University), Mary McClintock Fulkerson (Duke Divinity School), Karen Kilby (Durham University) who had been voted vice-president of the Society in the annual general meeting the day before, Katja Stuerzenhofecker (Universities of Manchester and Chester) and the President of the Society, David Brown. As in several other sessions I went to a major problem in all these matters seems to be that the effort to bring the issues, the differences, the problems to the surface, the development of categories, data and comparisons, also immediately seems to set the scene for making these issues unsolvable. I think Claire Hein Blanton, a young PhD student from Aberdeen, said it well in a conversation over dinner later on: “it is a structural problem that might not have a structural solution”. For me, this becomes very clear when the situation of people ‘with disabilities’ is addressed. It is not enough to devise new categories that would allow in theory to recognize their ways of experiencing the divine. As McClintock Fulkerson would quickly note, our bodily proprieties of fear and uneasiness are not that easily overcome. This can only be done by what is hardly ever addressed in these discussions, the need to take time and to be with each other, doing ‘work’ and acknowledging the ‘work’ done by the other to engage, to attune, to give and to receive. Rather than new theological categories that make 'theoretical' room for the other, we need theological language that redirects our attention to such concretely 'receiving the other'.

Living together with difference through keeping the future open

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By Lieve Orye

As the previous post indicated, the Anthropos research group had the pleasure of having Prof. Schnitter from the University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria and Prof. Adam Seligman from Boston University with us for a few days. Both are involved in CEDAR, Communities Engaging With Difference And Religion. Within CEDAR people from very different backgrounds and communities are brought together during two intensive weeks to learn to ‘live together with difference’. Two elements are crucial in its philosophy and pedagogy: first, differences are important and not to be denied, privatized or aestheticized. Second, to open up a future wherein living with difference becomes not only possible but mutually enriching, the importance of ritual and of creating concrete shared experiences is emphasized. Ritual is seen as a place where people commit to each other, to the world, and to the future in ways that circumvent the need for consensus. The demand for sincerity and sharing a set of meanings and beliefs is seen to be counter-productive. In other words, to live together with difference does not consist in finding ‘common ground’ on an abstract level, in some shared fundamental theory or worldview, but ‘on the ground’, in our daily bodily going on with each other.

Here, paying attention again to Rachel Muers’ Living for the Future (2008), I first want to suggest that more is needed than de-emphasizing beliefs and emphasizing ritual. The question rather is whether beliefs and practices hinder or nurture ‘living together with difference’. Muers shows how this depends on how we bring ‘the future’, and especially the question of how we ‘live for the future’ into the picture of daily bodily going on. Second, I nevertheless support wholeheartedly the shift in attention from shared worldview to our daily bodily going on with each other that Seligman advocates. But here as well, ‘living for the future’ demands a particular way of tending to our social fabric, to the radically ordinary.

Community, difference and future

How are communities, difference and the future interrelated?

“Responsibility to future generations involves forms of self-definition that do not rely on setting one’s own group over against those ‘outside’… If the future of the community itself is treated as a gift, rather than as a product or as threatening ‘fate’, we would expect this to be reflected in the capacity to deal with difference in the present, neither by bringing it under control nor by externalizing it as a threat” (Muers 2008:79-80, 88).

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I think a crucial point is made here: our thinking about and living with difference is strongly related to how we think about and live for the future and how the past is allowed to give life to our present and future – or to suffocate the life of that present and future. Both Seligman and Muers, each in their distinctive way, make clear that both to live ‘for the future’ and ‘with difference’ have to do with our daily tending to the social fabric in which we live. Furthermore, it involves a tending to the radically ordinary precisely not in the shape of securing in advance one’s relations to the other while simultaneously trying to control the future. For Christians this means, as Muers points out, that as a community we are to live a kind of life whose future does not depend on its capacity to secure its own duration. To ‘treat our own continued existence, at the expense of others or of the wider environment, as a paramount good’ is misdirected Molech worship that nourishes unsustainable forms of sociality and deathly patterns of existence. Any attempt to frantically construct a road map for the future to be followed by all in order to gain control over it, involves precisely a way of tending to the present that gives rise to suffocating ways of being and suffocating environments. 

Tending the radically ordinary

“Choose life… so that you and your descendants may live” (Deut. 30.19). The quality of the present is important for the future, but in a non-instrumental way. One way to concretize this is by emphasizing intransitive verbs: In commenting on Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians Muers writes

[W]hat brings people together appears to be their participation in a non-instrumental work – a work that takes time, an ongoing labour and toil. …[T]his work has no obviously specifiable purpose external to itself; although it points towards a future (hope in our Lord Jesus Christ) it does not bring that future about. It is simply love’s labour, both labour on the basis of love and labour that makes love real… the relationship to future generations is worked out through time, rather than being given in advance... it is to exist ethically in a way that allows the future to happen” (Muers 2008:40-41).

To greet the other, to share meals, to labour and toil together is “to live out of a future that is given rather than seized” (Muers 2008:76). Anthropologist Tim Ingold seems to confirm this when he emphasizes the importance of intransitive verbs in ‘life embracing’ relational anthropology. Intransitive verbs, such as ‘to hope,’ ‘to grow,’ ‘to dwell,’ are all verbs that express a carrying on, that express the immersion and participation of beings in the currents of the lifeworld. Key here is that such carrying on immersed in the currents of the lifeworld no longer allows for an easy opposition of world and other. Really knowing the other cannot take the shape of othering, a holding at arm’s length to get a good look to see in which category someone fits, but takes the shape of togethering, of an aligning and an attuning to them. For Christians, this involves an opening up of one’s own future to the gift of the other and allowing oneself to be God’s gift in their life.

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That such opening up is not simply a mental or spiritual exercise but also wholly a bodily one becomes clear when Ingold with his colleague Jo Vergunst point out a major difference between being face-to-face with someone, which can take the shape of an interview, a doctor’s appointment or a poker game, and going on a walk together. In the first situation, you can see the other in the eye, but you can also see what happens behind the other’s back and use that to your own advantage. It is more confrontational, less companionable. A shared point of view is not so easy to come by. In the second situation, you share a common movement and horizon, you go on together. As they note,

Crucially, walking side by side means that participants share virtually the same visual field. We could say that I see what you see as we go along together. In that sense I am with you in my movements, and probably in my thoughts as well. We can talk within and around our shared vista and the other things we are doing along the line of the walk. Participants take it in turns to carry the conversation on, and when not actually speaking one is nevertheless listening, participating silently in the ongoing flow (Ingold & Lee 2006:80).

‘To walk’ is mostly used as an intransitive verb. ‘To walk together’, it seems to me, might be a good movement and a good metaphor with which to think and live ‘together with difference’. This is clearly demonstrated by Sebastien de Fooz who was present at the workshop on CEDAR and who started the Jorsala project that organizes walks-in-diversity.

Muers, Rachel (2008) Living for the Future. Theological Ethics for Coming Generations, London: T&T Clark.

Ingold, Tim; Lee, J. (2006) 'Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing.' in Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology. Coleman, Simon & Collins, Peter (eds.), Oxford: Berg.

To those interested in this line of thought, I recommend listening to Tim Ingold's 2014 Huxley Memorial Lecture 'On Human Corresponding'.

Pictures are taken from a soda can thrown into Den burn.

Differences in Daily Life

Religious and Cultural Aspects of Bathing

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The Anthropos Research Group invited Bulgarian professor Maria Schnitter to present a paper at the Anthropos Forum of March, 16. The paper was entitled: “Body Hygiene of the Southern Slaws: Religious and Cultural Aspects”. Schnitter offered an historical overview of bathing practices in the region we now know as Bulgaria. She showed how during the Roman Empire, but also in the first centuries after the invasion of the region by Bulgarian tribes, public - and in many ways ritual - bathing was an important and extensive part of every-day life. This changed when the region was christianized. In light of the Christian emphasis on the need for spiritual purity and for sacrificing the body, regular bathing came to be viewed as an indulgent pagan enterprise (though occasional bathing remained acceptable where the needs of the body demanded it). Schnitter discussed some examples of this cultural shift. Perhaps most relevant for theologians is the example of baptism as a purifying ritual that brought about a (more or less) lasting spiritual purity and thus replaced the need for regular purificatory baths (which thus came to be seen as a sign of spiritual impurity). The rejection of ritual bathing was reinforced during the Osman Empire, which brought to Bulgaria the Islamic concern with purificatory washing in both ritual contexts and in daily life. The rejection of bathing now became an identity marker by which Bulgarian Christians distinguished themselves from their invadors. Schnitter discussed how the practice of bathing thus became a means of confronting difficult questions regarding identity of cultural communities, and the boundaries between them. She showed, for instance, how practices of bathing changed according to the way people in different contexts (for example: rural versus urban context) dealt with these new questions. What we now consider to be a daily habit with little more than practical meaning - to wash yourself, to bath - has been, from an historical point of view, a litmus test for one’s position towards the body and towards concepts such as ‘purity’, as well as a marker of one’s identity. Schnitter’s presentation, although at first sight not evidently of theological relevance, clearly showed the value of daily habits for theological anthropology.

How to Deal With Ambiguity

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In the afternoon, Prof. Adam Seligman, who also participated at the Anthropos Forum with prof. Schnitter, gave a lecture on ‘Ritual, Experience and the Limits of Notation’. The lecture served as the discussion starter for a doctoral seminar, organized by Anthropos, in collaboration with the Centre for Metaphysics and Philosophy of Culture (Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven). In his paper, Prof. Seligman addressed three different ways of dealing with the ambiguities of life and living together: notation, ritual and shared experience. Notation refers to the attempt to disambiguate by way of defining categories and rules. It has been a vitally important project in the period beginning with the Enlightenment and is continuing in many ways today. There are, however, important limits to notation, which solidifies and refines boundaries and tends towards abstraction, away from experience. Ritual and shared experience are presented as important alternatives that allow us to live with ambiguity and that sidestep the problem of shared meaning either through the creation of a subjunctive space, a shared ‘could be’, or by bracketing the need for shared meaning. Seligman emphasized the latter two ways of dealing with differences to answer the question ‘how to live with people who differ from us in fundamental ways?’ After a response by Prof. Paul Courtois, a lively discussion ensued, in which both philosophers and theologians engaged the thought-provoking paper offered by Seligman.

Pope Francis' Apocalyptic Vision & the Anti-Christ in Benson's Lord of the World

By Patrick Ryan Cooper

As a young Catholic theologian with relatively few laurels to rest upon, I nevertheless consider myself wise enough to have critically eschewed the media's partisan Doppelgänger portrait of Pope Francis, preferring instead to pay close attention to what the Holy Father himself has said and done over these utterly remarkable and unprecedented first few years of his papacy. Given the tired and woeful inadequacy of labels such as "right/left", or "traditionalist/progressive", how should we understand Pope Francis? Perhaps we should look at his library and the book recommendations that he has made as Pontiff.  After all, it was at his very first Angelus (March 17, 2013) that Francis would recommend Cardinal Kasper's work on "mercy" – and we all know the centrality this theme has taken, and how it continues to play itself out, in both the Extraordinary and upcoming Ordinary Synod on the Family later this year.

However, there is another trajectory to Francis, one that is clearly less-publicized, though arguably just as relevant and defining. Veteran Vatican correspondent John Allen  captured it in his interview (November 17, 2014) with the ailing Archbishop emeritus of Chicago, Francis Cardinal George, wherein George notes that

It’s interesting to me that this pope talks about that novel, “Lord of the World.” That’s one thing I want to ask him. How do you put together what you’re doing with what you say is the hermeneutical interpretation of your ministry, which is this eschatological vision that the anti-Christ is with us? Do you believe that? I would love to ask the Holy Father. What does that mean? In a sense, maybe it explains why he seems to be in a hurry. Nobody seems interested in that but I find it fascinating, because I found the book fascinating. I read it quite by chance when I was in high school. It was written in 1907, and he has air travel, he has everything modern. It’s really eerie because it seems as if he was looking at our time, meaning right now. Does the pope believe that?....I hope before I die I’ll have the chance to ask him: How do you want us to understand your ministry, when you put that before us as a key?[1]

On more than one occasion[2], Francis has indeed referenced Benson's dystopian novel, which today is largely forgotten (illustrated by the fact that the only extant copy available for my recent purchase was a cheap, photographic imprint edition). Most notably, this past January, Francis cited Benson as providing the key to explaining what he means by the "ideological colonisation of the family". "There is a book that was written in London in 1903, called “Lord of the World”, by Benson: I recommend it to you" Francis said to reporters upon his return trip from the Philippines. "If you read it you’ll really understand what I’m talking about.”[3] However, Francis' comments about "ideological colonisation" specifically in terms of the family are largely enigmatic. For Benson pays little attention to the state of the family (or gender theories) in his apocalyptic drama. Rather, the forced association that Francis is communicating by such references appears to have another intention: namely, as code for speaking about the "Anti-Christ" within  public media, cleverly without mentioning the word itself, as well as communicating something fundamental about himself and his papacy. So what then is Lord of the World all about?

Benson's apocalyptic novel itself takes place at the dawn of the 21st Century and it begins amid fierce tension and the threat of cataclysmic war. Then all of a sudden, a relatively unknown junior senator from Vermont, Julian Felsenburgh quickly and extraordinarily emerges upon the world political stage, brokers a peace within Asia's rival factions and thereafter Europe. Benson's prose relishes in describing the messianic enthusiasm that engulfs the various world capitals, in particular London, describing at one point how the "officials were like men possessed….disappear[ing] in the rush to the City, for it had leaked out, in spite of the Government's precautions, that Paul's House, known once as St. Paul's Cathedral, was to be the scene of Felsenburgh's reception." Amid its apocalyptic frenzy and frequent hyperbole, the humor of Benson's satirical edge should not be forgotten, for it was 'Paul's House' that welcomed with open arms none other than the Anti-Christ Felsenburgh himself. We should recall that Benson himself was the son of the former Archbishop of Canterbury and was initially ordained as an Anglican, before leaving and eventually becoming ordained in the Roman Catholic Church in 1904.

One of the central themes to Lord of the World is the manner in which evil insidiously apes the good, while aiming to show the very messianism at work with the Anti-Christ and the perverse simulacra atheistic humanism supplies as a (to use Benson's very post-modern sounding phrase) "Catholicism without Christianity". Benson endlessly exploits this familiar genre thematic, where emergency "ministers of Euthanasia" are now regarded as the "real Priests" of mercy and compassion, while he particularly excels in describing the newly institutionalized mandatory worship that Felsenburgh inaugurates, along with the former Modernist-leaning Fr. Francis, who apostatizes and becomes Minister of Public Worship. Here, the natura pura of neo-Scholasticism reveals its own horrific monstrosity, as the new elite enthusiastically revels in such worship, displaying the "deepest instinct in man", while sacralizing the feasts of Maternity (not surprisingly, on January 1st) and Life (March 25th), in addition to those of Sustenance and Paternity, for "God was man, and Felsenburgh his Incarnation!"

But the most consequential demonic doubling the novel displays is to be found in the profound physical likeness shared between Felsenburgh and the novel's main protagonist, the English Fr. Percy Franklin—who later becomes a Cardinal and eventually Pope Silvester III after the full-scale destruction of Rome and the Church hierarchy. Like the relative obscurity of Felsenburgh, Benson's outsider protagonist Fr. Percy is indeed a very striking character, who equally becomes thrust in the middle of the action, only to ascend to the throne of St. Peter after the tremendous turmoil and persecution of Rome. Immediately contrasted by his more grandiose and monarchial predecessor, Benson continuously emphasizes how the newly ordained Silvester III is in every way imaginable a "model of simplicity". Does any of this sound familiar? It certainly should, for perhaps we can better understand not only why Pope Francis has such a fondness for this book, but furthermore, we can well speculate how he himself envisions the core of the Petrine office today as Servant of Servants, in addition to his own extraordinary ascendency as interpreted by this apocalyptic hermeneutic.

And now it was come to this. Christianity had smoldered away from Europe like a sunset on darkening peaks; Eternal Rome was a heap of ruins; in East and West alike a man had been set upon the throne of God, had been acclaimed as divine. The world had leaped forward; men had learned consistency…the social lessons of Christianity apart from a Divine Teacher, or, rather, they said, in spite of Him. There were left, perhaps, three millions, perhaps five, at the utmost ten millions—it was impossible to know—throughout the entire inhabited globe who still worshipped Jesus Christ as God. And the Vicar of Christ sat in a whitewashed room…dressed as simply as His master, waiting for the end.

And yet, while pushing aside all popular and heterodox accounts of apocalyptic foretelling, what in fact could be the theological significance in describing Francis' ecclesial vision as apocalyptic, as a "field hospital after battle"? To probe such depths, we would be wise to turn to the Notre Dame theologian, Cyril O'Regan, who over the last decade has steadily challenged (contemporary) theology's predilection in maintaining its "cordon sanitaire around itself to repel apocalyptic infection".[4] Instead, O'Regan insists upon the genuine urgency to rearticulate a distinct Christian apocalyptic vision, which alone can sufficiently corral both the retrieval of Christian identity otherwise fragmented by the "corrosive effect of the Enlightenment on Christian discourse"[5] as well as the insistence upon the praxis of justice as "specifically Christian paths of actions and forms of life that may very well exceed what is demanded by secular culture."[6] Such a "necessity", O'Regan reminds us, need not be merely "defensive" and suspicious of contemporary life nor triumphalist, but it certainly does demand an evangelical robustness, for "to speak the truth boldly (parrhesia) is a Christian imperative" and such a theological discourse is by his estimate, "becoming more rather than less imperative as a form of theology".[7] In closing, I would argue that Francis is indeed shaped by this imperative in countless ways amid a fragmented and perilous contemporary moment in which religious persecution and horrific images of martyrdom appear almost daily (i.e. "ecumenism of blood"). And so, we may well call his "vision of God" and that of the Church genuinely apocalyptic as he "suggests that there is much more to do than do enough, that witness even to the point of martyrdom is called for".

[1]See John Allen, http://www.cruxnow.com/church/2014/11/17/chicagos-exiting-cardinal-the-church-is-about-truefalse-not-leftright/

[2] See Pope Francis Homily 18.11.2013 and his reference to the "adolescent progressivism" of apostasy and spiritual worldliness, wherein he specifically mentions Benson. http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-lord-save-us-from-the-subtle-conspiracies-of

[3] See http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/the-vatican/detail/articolo/francesco-filippine-38640/

[4] See Cyril O'Regan,  Theology & the Spaces of Apocalyptic, from The Pére Marquette Lecture in Theology (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2009) 15.

[5] ibid., 26.

[6] ibid., 126.

[7] ibid., 127.

Divinization and the "Death" of "God"

By Jared Schumacher

The final keynote of the recent Theosis Conference held at KULeuven was delivered by two of the United Kingdom’s leading theological voices: George Pattison, Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow, and former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.  In a certain sense, the two lectures were powerful compliments to each other, as each expressed the past and future relevance of ‘divinization’ in Christian thought.  While Williams focused more on the systematic and biblical aspects of the concept and how to renew it for application today (namely as an alternative way of affirming human personhood distinct from that of modernity’s overfixation on autonomy), Pattison manfully employed his efforts along a different, more historical-hermeneutical, track: attempting to understand our post-modern, post-secular context as one in which traditional Christian concepts, like incarnation and divinization, have undergone a radical – though recognizable – permutation and secular appropriation.  In this sense, Pattison delivered a petit-récit of the intellectual history of modernity as told through the myth of ‘man-God’. I would like to summarize briefly his conception and indicate what I take to be its import for theology done in a postmodern context. 

Genealogy of the ‘Myth’: Deicide as Secular Divinization

Pattison’s geneology of the myth of the man-God began in German idealism (and more broadly modern humanism), was inflected through Romanticism in the leading intellectual and literary figures of 19th century, and culminated in transhumanism at the end of the 20th and dawn of the 21st centuries.  It started with Kant and included “Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel, and Hegel and further radicalized in the Left Hegelians and post-Hegelians Strauss, Feuerbach, Stirner, Marx, and Engels….”, leading ultimately to Nietzsche, whose vision of the “death of God”  was its absolutization.  Despite the varying inflections, the central logic shared by this diverse array of thinkers is this: humankind must overcome itself to reach its final conclusion, and it can only do so by becoming God. This is the resolution of ‘history,’ the fulfilment of human desire.  The ‘man-God’ is thus the embedded teleology of the thinkers and prophecizers of modern history, and man-Godhood becomes the secular eschatological vision towards which the critical consciousness of modernity is compelled.  In this sense, ‘the man-God’ functions as a profane divinization, an inverted atonement in which, rather than God becoming man to save Man, Man becomes god – by killing the transcendent “god” – to save himself. 

Pattison labored to show that, despite a consistent thread of denial and rejection of the existence of God in the orthodox theological sense, whether in favor of no ‘god’ at all or a retro-pagan pantheism, this ideology nevertheless is driven by a kind of theo-logic, even if a heterodox one.  It has, as it were, aspects of truth, something profoundly true which even “orthodox” theology, sometimes wallowing in scholastic formulae, can forget: that man is destined to become something more than human; he is called to divine self-transcendence.  In the orthodox theological tradition, this was definitively formulated in Athanasius’ famous bon mot: “God became man that man might become God.”  And so while the man-God is a self-conscious denial of the Christian God, it nevertheless is an offshoot of the Christian theological tree. In a quote which gets to the heart of the matter, Pattison avers

“...it might plausibly be argued that the ideology of the Man-God set in motion by Idealism offered a rapidly secularizing society a means of carrying forward impulses from the theological tradition that had themselves been covered over, distorted or, quite simply, abandoned in the course of theological history. In a theological culture shaped by Reformation debates about justification and an emphatic doctrine of original sin, subsequently ‘liberalized’ by a massive refocusing on rational morality, the rise of Man-Godhood might be read, generously, as intimating a theological need for a larger vision of redemption.”

Relevance #1: Hermeneutic of Charity and Suspicion

This “generous” reading or “hermeneutic of charity” was the central theological imperative of the lecture.  Pattison is keenly aware that there is a temptation to summarily dismiss the “death of God” theologies inspired by the man-God ideologies on account of their overt hostitility to the very subject of theology (God himself). He hopes to remind more traditional theologians that if the truth claims of Christianity cannot themselves be killed by any man, then even heterodox philosophy and theology can be engaged in productive ways. In the idiom of the Second Vatican Council, we might say that even the "death of God" can be read, in light of the Gospel, as a sign of the times.  In essence, Pattison sees man-Godhood as a deformed, but nevertheless sincere, hope for a better future, a sign of at least the need for human redemption, even if a confused one.  And while it would be dangerous to adopt a thoroughgoing hermeneutic of charity without balancing it with an equal hermeneutic of suspicion (which Pattison, in his lecture, clearly advocates in the voices of Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky),  he is right to insist that Christianity calls for a hermeneutic of charity, even when it confronts an ideology whose only good news is the “death” of “God”.   

Relevance #2:  preparatio evangelii post evangelium

Pattison called his lecture an exercise in preparatio evangelii post evangelium, and rightly so, because if Pattison is correct, then not only is the myth of the man-God a substructure at the core of modern thought, but modernity itself should be seen as having an embedded anthropo-theology. By this I mean a post-evangel programmatic account of ultimate human fulfillment that gives human society a meaning and purpose once belief in a transcendent God has been rendered culturally implausible.  And insofar as this account takes the functional place of the older theological ordering of society (i.e. by establishing and coordinating a system of social meanings, a hierarchy of values, to human life and conduct), it adopts the forms and manners of theology not merely accidentally (because these are the cultural signs available to it) but also necessarily (because what it communicates is in part theologically true).  God has willed that man should become God.  Even when man stops believing in God, his unbelief is not strong enough to overcome his vocation to self-overcoming.  And even when this self-overcoming becomes thoroughly immanentized – or in classical language, becomes diabolical – at no point is the living God’s grace completely without resources for redemption. Or as Pattison puts the matter, there will always be apologetic “points of contact” between Christian truth and even the all-too-human conception of being human.   For Christians remember the death of God as but one moment in the Everlasting Life of Jesus Christ. 

Love-making in public: Another look at Paris

by Adanna James

“… Oh listen Lord if you want to know…what the world needs now is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of …” Jackie DeShannon, US, 1965
“ Please give a helping hand oh Jah, …what we need is love, vice versa love …” Barrington Levy, Jamaica, 1993. 
  “…People killing, people dying, children hurt and you hear them crying …Father, Father Father help us, send some guidance from above, cause people got me questioning where is the love,” The Black Eyed Peas, US, 2003

Popular culture has a way of reminding us theologians and other academics that we’re always a step behind when it comes to discerning what society needs. Long before the anthropological shift in justice discourse advocating love as central to justice, artists were making connections between injustices in the world, the need for love as a way of countering them, and an appeal to a Divine Reality to make it all possible. 

ANTHROPOLOGICAL SHIFT: PAYING ATTENTION TO OUR DARKER SIDE
While the connections made in academic theology prove more complex, there is a similar concern about the prevalence of injustices in societies today. This prompted philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in her 2013 Political Emotions, to question the taken-for-granted assumptions about the human condition undergirding dominant justice discourse. No longer should we assume that we, rational human beings, would simply act in accordance with the demands of justice once it could be seen that an ideal situation of fairness was being maintained for the benefit of everyone’s individual pursuits, as was broadly assumed in the dominant justice discourse.  Nussbaum sees another side to us human beings, a side we rather refuse to see: those aspects of our animal nature which remind us of our helplessness, vulnerability and mortality. It is precisely this refusal – or ‘anthropodenial’ as Nussbaum calls it – that is often responsible for tendencies such as narcissism, anxiety and disgust for and stigmatisation of others. This same emphasis on the denial of our vulnerability and fear of difference is shared by theologian Thomas Reynolds in his 2008 Vulnerable Communion as he writes on the topic of disability. But whereas Nussbaum focuses more on individual human beings and our emotions, Reynolds highlights networks of relationships. He speaks of the ‘cult of normalcy’ that works to establish standards of what is normal, at the same time denying vulnerability. 

LOVE AS ANTIDOTE
Both authors however, make the case for love. “Love is what gives respect for humanity its life,” writes Nussbaum (2013:15). Reynolds, in a similar vein, comments: "Love is the relational power that animates belonging together, It gives and receives life, and the process radiates joy" (Reynolds 2008:119). He further states that to counter the effects of marginalisation and exclusion of difference, love must be measured by an empowering justice that makes way for more love. Reynolds, however, pays more attention to our relationships and the necessity of being in vulnerable connection to each other. “Love involves welcoming another into a space of mutual vulnerability” (Reynolds 2008:119). Such an encounter is one of immediacy, a concept he takes from existentialist philosophers like Gabriel Marcel and Martin Buber and uses to emphasise the mutual exclusiveness of ‘becoming involved’ as opposed to  ‘objectifying another’.   

I think both Nussbaum and Reynolds bring interesting thoughts to the table on making love public. Perhaps if we were to reflect on a specific example, for instance, the recent tragic happenings in Paris, we could better see what both authors contribute to the debate on love's public significance.

NUSSBAUM’S PUBLIC EMOTIONS
Looking at the recent terror attacks in Paris, we could say that it was possible that Parisians as well as non-Parisians worldwide, seeing these media images, could identify with the vulnerability of the victims. These images captured the shooting and killing of a police officer and terrorist, frightened hostages running and screaming, flowing tears of loved ones. The responses to these images and reality were profound. Among them, mass demonstrations congregating persons of different cultural, religious and ethnic backgrounds under the banner (even if just for a day) of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Nussbaum’s theory of love being a powerful motivator in upholding the tenets of justice could find resonances here. 

REYNOLDS’ CULT OF NORMALCY
At the same time, the response borne out of fear of vulnerability, visible in Reynolds’ ‘cult of normalcy,’ could be seen in numerous events and discussions surfacing after the event, including PEGIDA marches against the Islamisation of Germany. It seems in that instance that an objectification of the other stood in the way of immediacy of encounter. There was no recognition of mutual vulnerability that could result in openness to others, compassion and fidelity.

REYNOLDS’ LOVE AS WELCOMING THE OTHER INTO A SPACE OF MUTUAL VULNERABILITY
But I’d like to highlight one example that shows the power of immediate encounter in mutual vulnerability.  A BBC report looked into how the terrorist attacks were being interpreted within the French school context, particularly in predominantly Arab immigrant communities. Some teachers spoke of the difficulties in generating empathy among the students for the victims of the attacks. "Twelve people were killed…it didn't mean much to them," one teacher remarked. But an interesting dynamic was noted when the minute of silence was observed. Unlike the previous time when the minute of silence was not respected by students in various schools, (after the 2012 killings in Toulouse and Montauban by a radical Islamist) the called-for silence was instructed to be observed in schools only after prior discussion was held (on the instruction of the Education Ministry). One teacher confessed that she was unable to hold back her tears during these discussions. The result: silence. It appears that the teacher’s display of vulnerability brought students into a space of mutual vulnerability, opening them up to her as well as the people she spoke about and cried for. It is precisely through such encounters that a compassionate feel for the injustices that lie beneath the objectifying gaze that separates us from each other can be nourished. 

My suggestion finally is this. Before moving too quickly to discussions of press freedom, migration, religion and the Enlightenment, perhaps a deeper, public engagement of our vulnerability as it presented itself to us during the days of the attacks will help steer discussions, decisions and actions in more just ways. Our artists, after all, do seem to know what they’re singing about… “what the world needs now, is love, sweet love….. “

Henri Astier, “Charlie Hebdo Attack: French Values Challenged in Schools.” BBC News Paris, January 30, 2015 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31027152 [accessed February 3 2015].
Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2013
Thomas Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press , 2008.

Christian ethics/design of everyday life?

By Lieve Orye

Theology and anthropology ‘by means of design’

What happens when in between theological books, one of which is Rachel Muers’ Living for the Future (2008), a chapter on design anthropology is read, especially a chapter in which anthropology of design is exchanged for an anthropology ‘by means of design’?

Anthropologists Tim Ingold and Caroline Gatt rethink the relation between design and anthropology and in the process rethink both. Interestingly, they attempt to clarify the move they make from ‘of’ to ‘by means of’, by drawing a parallel with anthropology's relation to theology. They see the closest equivalent of what they are trying to do in a 2006 article by Joel Robbins in which he sees three kinds of anthropological engagement with theology: (1) anthropology exposing and critiquing theological roots of anthropological concepts; (2) anthropology using theologies and theologians as data and informants for ethnographic analysis and (3), the promising one, the closest equivalent for Ingold and Gatt, an approach in which anthropology opens itself up to theology as a potent source of inspiration for its own projects, “acknowledging that we have much to learn from the faith, commitment, and wisdom that give hope and commitment to others’ lives” (Robbins 2006:285 in Ingold & Gatt 2013:141). Ingold and Gatt’s ‘anthropology by means of design’ is then not aiming for (1) a critical design anthropology that looks for cultural imaginaries and micropolitics behind the science and practice of design, nor (2) for an anthropology that places activities of designers in their social and cultural context but is (3) an anthropology opening up to design as a potent source of inspiration for its own projects. Cross-pollination, though, would mean that those interested in doing theology in conversation with anthropology, as Michael Banner is recently suggesting for moral theology in his book The Ethics of Everyday Life (2014), could engage in drawing parallels the other way around: is there relevance in Ingold’s and Gatt’s reflections on ‘anthropology by means of design’ for how or what we do in theology, especially when it is a theology that wants to reconnect to everyday life? A full discussion would take at least an article, could easily fill a book, but let me give just a few hints of what might be possible.

Design conundrums: keeping life going

Design, Ingold and Gatt write, "is about shaping the future of the world we live in" (Ingold & Gatt 2013:144). But they point out that curiously design seems predicated upon the failure of our predecessors and upon an understanding of our successors as mere users who simply implement the designs already made. Our predecessors did not succeed in shaping a future for us whereas if we succeed to do so, the next generations can only implement. "Designs, it seems, must fail, if every generation is to be afforded the opportunity to look forward to a future that it can call its own" (Idem). Ingold and Gatt suggest, rather than to think design in terms of ends and final answers, to think it in terms of what keeps life going. That is, to stop thinking in terms of forms as specific results while paying attention to 'form-giving'. In other words, they plead for a shift from predictability and foreclosure to a life process that is open-ended and improvisatory.

We want to argue that design, far from being the exclusive preserve of a class of professional experts tasked with the production of futures for the rest of us to consume, is an aspect of everything we do, insofar as our actions are guided by hopes, dreams, and promises. That is to say, rather than setting the parameters for our habitation of the earth, design is part and parcel of the very process of dwelling (Ingold 2000). And it is, by the same token, about the ongoing creation of the kinds of environments in which dwelling can occur (Ingold and Gatt 2013: 144-145).

Key is that whereas an anthropology 'of' design, or 'of' any other human activity, turns the activity into an object of analysis and looks back over times past, Ingold and Gatt instead set out "to restore design to the heart of anthropology's disciplinary practice" and to move forward with people in tandem with their dreams and desires (Ingold & Gatt 2013:140). Such a shift also results in a very different understanding of what it means to be human. But even more, could a shift towards an open-ended forward-looking concept of design that refocuses attention on ongoing everyday life not be of interest in the search for an open-ended concept of ethics?

Christian dreams and hopes as open-ended Design?

Rachel Muers’ Living for the Future (2008) is currently lying on my desk. Hers, I reckon, is a search for a theological ethics that saves itself (and us) from the design/future conundrum to allow again room to think ‘care for future generations’ without tying the future completely to the present and past nor, cutting it lose completely. Furthermore, she writes, “[i]t is not a question of applying existing ethical principles to future generations, but of existing ethically in a way that allows the future to happen” (Muers 2014:41). With Ingold and Gatt, I dare to suggest that to live Christianly is to design Christianly, is “to design things in a world that is perpetually under construction by way of the activities of its inhabitants, who are tasked above all with keeping life going rather than with bringing to completion projects already specified at the outset”(Ingold and Gatt 2013:145). Such Christian design might then be understood as improvisation in which Christian dreams and hopes and Christian imagination of the human give specific direction, specific sign-posts involving a seeing into the future, seeing a new world in becoming. We have a song in Flanders in which Christians ask God to teach them his future. This is not a request for a plan or a project to be implemented. Rather it seems to me to be a plea to redirect our attention from plans and designs that promise security, predictability and control to the signs in our ongoing participation in the world and the lives of others that point to the coming into being of the New Kingdom.

Let’s wrap this up in a more general way: I would say, fruitful conversation between theology and anthropology requires for both a focus on concrete ongoing life and attention to ‘keeping life open’ both in thought and practice.

Banner, Michael (2014) The Ethics of Everyday Life. Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ingold, Tim and Caroline Gatt (2013) ‘From description to correspondence: Anthropology in Real Time’ in Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice, Wendy Dunn, Ton Otto, Rachel Smith.(eds.), London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp 139-158.

Muers, Rachel (2008) Living for the Future. Theological Ethics for Coming Generations, London: T&T Clark.

The Birth of Christmas

In the film Des hommes et des dieux (2010) we were struck by what is problably the most profound Christmas scene in recent cinema. Based on the true story of the Trappist monks of Tibhirine (Algeria), the movie shows how armed rebels enter their monastery on Christmas Eve of 1993. That same night, the monks continued their liturgical life:

Two years later, the prior of the community reflected upon the meaning of that Christmas event, and their life of brotherhood in the midst of terror:

[for French and Dutch version, see below (*)]

"What we had left to do after their departure was to live. And the first thing to live was…to celebrate the vigil and the Mass of Christmas. This is what we had to do. And that's what we did. And we sang Christmas and we welcomed this child who presented himself to us without defense and already so threatened... And then our salvation was to have all these daily realities to assume: the kitchen, the garden, the office, the bell ... day after day. And we had to become disarmed.

And day after day, I – and I think we – discovered that to which Jesus Christ calls us: to be born. Our human identity goes from birth to birth, and from birth to birth we will end up by giving birth, ourselves, to the child of God that we are.

For the Incarnation, for us, is to let Jesus' filial reality incarnate in our humanity. The mystery of the Incarnation remains to be lived. Thus what we have lived, is rooted, and what we are yet to live." (*) 

(brother Christian de Chergé, Algiers, March 8, 1996 – words used for the scene of the ‘last supper’ in Des hommes et des dieux)

We wish you a blessed Christmas time!

(*) French original:

"Après leur départ, ce qui nous restait à faire, c’était à vivre. Et la première chose à vivre c’était, deux heures après, de célébrer la vigile et la messe de Noël. C’est ce que nous avions à faire. Et c’est ce que nous avons fait. Et nous avons chanté Noël et nous avons accueilli cet enfant qui se présentait à nous absolument sans défense et déjà si menacé… Et après, notre salut a été d’avoir toutes ces réalités quotidiennes à assumer: la cuisine, le jardin, l’officee, la cloche… Jour après jour. Et il a fallu nous laisser désarmer.

Et jour après jour, j’ai, et, je le pense, nous avons découvert ce vers quoi Jésus-Christ nous invite: c’est à naître. Notre identité d’homme va de naissance en naissance, et de naissance en naissance nous allons bien finir, nous-mêmes, par mettre au monde cet enfant de Dieu que nous sommes.

Car l’Incarnation, pour nous, c’est de laisser la réalité filiale de Jésus s’incarner dans notre humanité. Le mystère de l’Incarnation demeure ce que nous allons vivre. C’est ainsi que s’enracine ce que nous avons déjà vécu ici, et ce nous allons vivre encore."

(frère Christian de Chergé, Alger, 8 mars 1996)

 (**) Nederlandse vertaling:

"Na hun vertrek restte ons niets anders dan te leven. En het eerste dat ons wachtte , was twee uur later de metten vieren en de mis van Kerstmis. Dat was we te doen hadden, en wat we hebben gedaan. We hebben kerstliederen gezongen en we hebben dat kind verwelkomd dat zo weerloos was en reeds zoveel gevaar te duchten had. En daarna waren er zoveel dagelijkse bezigheden. De keuken, de tuin, het koorgebed, het klokkenluiden, dag na dag. We moesten ons ontwapenen…

Dag na dag hebben we ontdekt waartoe Jezus Christus ons uitnodigt: om geboren te worden. Als mens gaan we van geboorte tot geboorte. En van geboorte tot geboorte zullen we het kind van God dat wij zijn ter wereld te brengen. Want de menswording betekent voor ons dat wij de realiteit van Jezus’ kind-zijn doorleven. Het mysterie van de incarnatie komt terug in wat wij beleven. In wat wij hier beleefd hebben en wat we nog zullen beleven."

(Broeder Christian, monnik van Tibhirine, tijdens 'laatste avondmaal' in film Des hommes et des dieux)

The option for the poor

By Joe Drexler-Dreis

The Centre for Liberation Theologies offered a course this year on the option for the poor. We questioned how the concept of the option for the poor can formulate a theological response to a contemporary context shaped by hierarchies based on economic, social, and political power. At the conclusion of the course, I can see three inter-related points that we developed.

First, there is a need to develop a method that can elucidate the historicity of the Christian understanding of salvation. This implies a need for both structural analyses and ways to understand everyday realities. These ways of analyzing historical reality impact the understanding of God. This question of social analysis or mediations for theology has received renewed interest over the last decade by theologians such as Ivan Petrella and Ada-María Isasi-Díaz.

This already leads me to the second point: social analyses, and the social practices these imply, have theological implications. There is a functional relationship between inductive and deductive ways of thinking when engaging the option for the poor as a discourse about God. The option for the poor is a fundamentally theo-centric option. God’s self-revelation in Jesus of Nazareth, as among and for the oppressed, is fundamental to who God is. This represents a deductive principle, yet this deductive principle demands a parallel inductive principle. In turning to “the poor” in our immediate situations, we can better understand who God is.

This brings me to the third point, on which I’d like to dwell a bit. If “the poor” is a fundamental theological category, as the previous two points indicate, how we understand the poor is crucial to a theological understanding of reality. Many descriptions of “the poor” describe poverty in terms of a lack or deprivation. In many important ways, poverty is a lack, and it’s important to acknowledge this: poverty cannot be defined without reference to the concrete lack of material resources. But in my contributions to the course, I put forward the thesis that the option for the poor disallows this notion of a lack to extend to the epistemological level: the oppressed do not lack the capacity to make sense of reality in an adequate way. If the actions by and relationships among the materially poor are seen as outside rationality, or as not making a legitimate claim towards universality, then the option for the poor, as the ground of a Christian theological discourse on the divine, is sacrificed. In other words: the option for the poor demands that the epistemologies and cosmologies that emerge from the materially poor have the capacity to make sense of the divine reality.

This is where decolonial theory can be helpful to theology. Walter Mignolo, one of the preeminent decolonial theorists, is critical of liberation theologies:

“While there is a history of theology obviously linked to imperial designs and interests, the papacy being an obvious example, there are theologies of liberation in South America, North America, and Africa, as well as a Jewish theology of liberation. My claim is that, as in the disputes between (neo)liberalism and (neo)Marxism, both sides of the coin belong to the same bank: the disputes are entrenched within the same rules of the game, where the contenders defend different positions but do not question the terms of the conversation.”[1]

Even though (neo)Marxism represents a leftist critique of (neo)liberalism, both are Euro-centered discourses: both develop in reference to European realities and in dialogue with an (almost) exclusively European intellectual tradition. Analogously, for Mignolo, liberation theologies, like traditional theologies, develop in reference to European intellectual traditions despite their leftist (although not exclusively Marxist) tendencies. (Although, and this is what he misses, not in reference to European realities.)

To do liberation theology from the decolonial perspective that Mignolo is pushing for would require seeing the role of Christianity within Western expansion from the perspective of the experience of colonization. It requires thinking out of the memory of the exploitation that allowed for Western modernity (i.e., colonization and the slave trade), and the hope for the obliteration of these exploitative processes. This means engaging thought systems that emerge from the sites of exploitation by Western modernity, not merely as claims for justice that need to be recuperated within the Western tradition, but as intellectual claims.

Such a perspective is in contrast to a perspective of (Western) modernity, which assumes the normativity of the hegemonic epistemological position articulated within Western Europe. For Mignolo, what characterizes modernity is its Euro-centrism. Theologies that critique Western modernity by finding a better European tradition thus remain, for Mignolo, in a perspective of modernity. Within theology, we see this in a return to pre-modern sources (i.e., radical orthodoxy) or a postmodern turn in order to offer an internal critique of modernity. These two turns are both attempts to maintain the centrality of European discourse. Even as turns away from Europe—to the way the victims of Western modernity have responded to its oppressive features—would make more sense, both these trajectories cling to a need to maintain the epistemic normativity of the Western tradition.

The decolonial perspective that Mignolo finds lacking in liberation theology isn’t only an issue of diversifying knowledge, or adding race or gender analysis (although it is also this). Fundamentally, a decolonial perspective is significant because it suspends the de facto authority of Western thought systems over all other ways of making sense of the world and human relationships. Within this suspension, decolonial theorists turn towards the ways those outside the benefits of Western modernity have made sense of the world. This is crucial for the option for the poor. The option for the poor implies doing theology—that is, thinking the divine reality—from a decolonial perspective. Because of who Christians hold God to reveal Godself to be (deductive principle), Christian theology requires thinking within trans-modern epistemologies (inductive principle).

[1] Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 92.

The Immaculate Conception as a School of Devotion

By Patrick Ryan Cooper

During the Church's penitential season of Advent, an appropriate image that emphasizes this time of preparation and waiting is that of an expectant mother. In the Gospel of St. Matthew, the increased signs of apocalyptic tumultuousness are likened to the birth pangs of a women beginning in labor—where the difference between birth and death become terrifyingly intimate.(Mt 24, 8) And appropriately so, as the sign of birth pangs, in both pre-labor and the beginnings of active labor indeed confirms the coming of that which is both imminently anticipated, while nevertheless preserving a sense of irruption and adventious uncertainty in the coming of new life. For my wife and I, the connection between birth pangs, upheaval and the eschatological promise of new life attested to in this text is a powerful reminder of the night when my wife's hour had come as she entered into active labor to receive the birth of our first child. This hour similarly coincided with this very same Gospel text from St. Matthew as the daily reading. Fortunately, however, its dim warnings of anguish and woe for pregnant women and nursing mothers (Mt 24, 19) would eventually give way to a more ecstatic release, for while the anguish, tumult and confusion was great, these things were so quickly forgotten (Jn 16, 21) as the mother's sufferings were unburdened by her gratitude in peacefully turning towards the son; and the son, still weary and limpid, turned towards and beheld his mother in loving astonishment for having remained with him until the end.

His astonishment recalls that we are peculiarly gifted with a unique, receptive capacity for life, one which is widened and made spacious, giving a sense of depth and joyous wonder that comes upon the heels of suffering—a receptivity, which singularly recalls this initial exchange of gazes—when beholding our mother.

To gaze so, with astonished perplexity, I would argue, is singularly adequate when contemplating the person of Mary, who the Church recognizes in this season of Advent to be found immaculate, "without spot or blemish before him, at peace". (2Pt 3, 13-14) For the paradox of her sufferings is nearly as ungraspable as the mystery that she herself is. And in view of the Cross, in which her faithfulness continuously endures and our redemption radiates, this salvific fulfillment stretches us back to the very beginnings of what the Church celebrates on this Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. Namely, that Mary was conceived without the stain of original sin—having been the public faith of the Church since the promulgation of the papal Bull Ineffabilis Deus by Pius IX in 1854.

Fundamentally, the Immaculate Conception can be said to signal the excessive wonder of creation itself and the integral integrity by which it radiates. In Mary, the Church professes the restoration and sanctification of our human nature, undimmed by sin and towards an original creaturely goodness and suffused with grace by way of her receptive fiat—"Be it done to me according to your Word." With and in Mary, Mother of "The One whom the heavens cannot contain, yet you held in your womb"[1]—we learn of the original width and depth of our human dignity, untainted by sin and division, and our relational autonomy seen specifically in terms of an active receptivity: that becoming more uniquely particular rightly hinges upon our creaturely receptivity in terms of capax dei, which simultaneously unfolds how we are to ask the question of being as a welcoming of life. In the two Annunciation narratives in the Lucan Gospel for example, it was Zachariah, who elevated himself as the primary reference by asking the Angel the epistemological question, "How can I know this for sure?" (Lk 1, 18-20) and was thus silenced. While in Mary, as a school of devotion, in whom we cross the porous borders of philosophy and theology, we increasingly learn how to ask and dialogue over the question of being and its relationality—"How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?" (Lk 1, 34)—in a wholly authentic, creaturely manner, and thereby actively to respond to the fecundity of grace and its abundant givenness. Just as "spirituality is rooted in ontology" the late Stratford Caldecott writes, so too the "secret design of all creaturely being, revealed in Jesus through Mary, is love."[2] While analogically and in view of the Immaculate Conception, the creaturliness of being is most clearly seen in Mary's receptive fecundity, whereby:

Mary appeared pure in her origin not only by the influence of the divine principle, but also by that of the human. She appeared pure, down to the foundations of her being, and even down to the matter from which she was formed; in other words, down to the root, yes to the very seed, from which she sprang.[3]

However, I suspect that the reticence that various people continue to hold towards Mary—especially her being "immaculate"—is largely grounded upon a rather specious Mariology that would regard the 'purity' of her mediating relationship as somehow lifting her up as distant and impossibly unapproachable—as an artificial, reified "between" Christ and humanity so as to keep them at a distance. Herein, the "supreme principle of Mariology" and in a similar fashion, that of "Christianity and Christology" is that the "mother of God defines the Incarnation, for the part of men."[4] Without the Theotokos, the Incarnate Word would have been merely "similar to us but would not have been perfectly consubstantial" and thus the "God-man would not be my brother".[5] A doceticism, which distinctly opens onto a fundamental loss of solidarity within the economic order, leaving unanswered the call, ""Who are My mother and My brothers?" (Mk. 3, 33) Rather, since the God-man is fully human through His mother, Mary is likewise a mother with regard to all humanity in their deified lives. For Mary teaches us how to receive and respond to being's excessive giftedness, precisely by way of not further magnifying herself, yet is magnified by the one in whose hospitality she gives Him himself as man. "[W]ithout the Blessed Virgin, the God-man would not encircle men in themselves; they would not be made, in Him, full sharers in the divine nature, in grace, in divinization."[6]

[1] Antiphon from the Christmas Octave, Solemnity of the Mother of God

[2] Cf. 'Stratford Caldecott, Mariology" in (eds.) Nicholas J. Healy Jr. and D.C. Schindler Being Holy in the World: Theology and Culture in the Thought of David L. Schindler (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011) 292.

[3] Cf. Matthias Scheeben, Mariology, vol. II, (trans) T.L.M.J. Geukers (London: Herder Book Co., 1947) 81.

[4]  Cf. Emile Mersch, Theology of the Mystical Body (trans.) Cyril Vollert (London: Herder Book Co. 1951) 172.

[5] ibid.

[6] ibid.

The Way We Were: Why Remembering Matters

Culture Runs Thicker Than Blood

Dan Brown’s bestseller ‘The Da Vinci Code’ suggests that the Holy Grail of Christianity is in fact not an object, but a person. Or, rather, the Holy Grail is a family tree, consisting of all direct descendants of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Of course this is fiction, and numerous criticisms have been raised about the factual accuracy of Dan Brown’s work in general. But this idea in particular is an interesting one, precisely because of the nature of its flaw. 

The idea that a direct line of descendance of Jesus would be devastating for the Roman Catholic Church (which therefore would try to exterminate Jesus’s children, his grandchildren, etc.) presupposes that genetic inheritance is primordial for the human species. Of course it isn’t. What matters, is cultural inheritance (without implying a complete separation between the biological and the cultural). Christians have known this - or at least acted on this - since the early days of Christianity. To be a descendant of Christ means foremost to be a member of the cultural, religious tradition that sees itself rooted in His life, death, and resurrection. What matters is not your DNA, but what you believe. 

Active Remembering

But this criticism on Dan Brown's gene-centered (or at least 'blood-centered') perspective does not imply that the human foundations of the Church are unshakable. The very phenomenon of a cultural tradition is quite fragile, having evolved - as far as we currently know - only in our species. It is a particularity about human cultural traditions that we not only remember what we - as a species - have come to know before, and that we transmit that to our kin, but that we also enhance what we have come to know. We change what we learn from our parents, our peers, or other influential figures in our environment, we build on it, we improve it, up to the point "that cultural traits become too complex for a single individual to invent in their lifetime.” This clearly suggests that cultural inheritance is not merely a matter of copy-pasting from one generation to the next, but rather an active, creative process. One could argue that Homo sapiens is the “wise man"(sic) precisely because of our species’ ability to critically and creatively remember.  

Remembering To Be Human

It is notable that theologians, in emphasizing the importance of creative appropriation in the development of tradition, parallel the evolutionary perspective just scetched. Lieven Boeve’s concept of recontextualisation (which in turn builds on e.g. Schillebeeckx’s work, thus in itself being an example of how a cultural tradition ‘works’), is an example in point:

"For sure, faith cannot be reduced to context, nor can tradition development to mere adaptation to the context. Nevertheless, there is an intrinsic bond between faith and tradition, on the one hand, and context, on the other. Hence, contextual novelty puts pressure on historically conditioned expressions of faith and their theological understanding, and drives towards recontextualization. In both taking part in, and confronting itself with this changed context, Christian communities may find new ways to express their faith, in fidelity to the tradition as well as to the context in which they are situated – balancing between continuity and discontinuity.”  

During the month of November, marked by All Souls Day, All Saints, and Armistice Day (Veteran’s Day in the US), it seems appropriate to reflect on our species’s ability to remember, and on what it means to remember in the light of our evolutionary history. The importance of remembering, as part of recontextualisation, is often underestimated. A Belgian newspaper - publishing mainly economic news - featured a cartoon about All Shouls Day, which suggests that only the here and now matters.

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The cartoon shows a (grand)son offering flowers to his aged (grand)mother, saying: “At least now you can still enjoy them”. This suggests that putting flowers on our deceased’s graves is futile. This is an example of the vulnerability of cultural traditions in two ways: first, it shows we risk losing part of our cultural inheritance, since the cartoonist clearly has forgotten why we visit the graves of our lost ones, and second, the cartoon itself promotes ‘forgetting’, focussing on the ‘here and now’ as the only context that matters, as a context that reduces meaning and makes remembering impossible. Of course, from a materialist perspective, visiting graves, asking for the intercession of Saints (the very concept of sainthood even!) or rituals such as the Last Post, are useless. At the same time, if we really are to be ‘Homo sapiens’, if we really are to become Imago Dei, one could wonder whether these are not precisely the things that matter most. In this November month, dedicated to remembering as it is, one might experience that it is only by remembering the way we were, that human becoming can continue. 

Body Matters – A Workshop on Christianity and the Body

By Julia Meszaros

A few weeks ago, I—like other members of the Anthropos research group—had the privilege of participating in a workshop led by the dance artist and scholar of religion Carol Webster. Focusing on the theme of Body Matters: Somatic Conversations on Christianity, Love, and Justice, Webster took us on a theoretical and practical exploration of the human body’s role in Christian life and thought. Webster began with a short lecture on how St Paul, in her eyes, negotiated the emergent Christian identity in recourse to bodily images, such as that of Christ’s body being eaten (at the Eucharist) and that of the prostitute (as the antithesis of a member of Christ). With this, so Webster argued, Paul gave the body the ambiguous role of both unifying Christians and forever ‘othering’ those who do not fit the Christian understanding of social and moral norms.

Instead of choosing the conventional route of embarking on an intellectual discussion of these bold claims, Webster then let us probe Christianity’s relationship with the body more practically, performatively and experientially. She asked each participant to physically enact (with movement and sound) how he or she presently felt. Our bodily self-expressions were then ‘shared’ in various ways: we were for instance asked to re-enact as well as physically connect each other’s movements and sounds (by having everyone enact their movements together and while touching one another), and to reflect on how we experienced these—at times uneasy and physically challenging—encounters.

Webster continually related these exercises to the relationship between our own identity and our relations with others. How and to what extent, so Webster asked, can we truly remain ourselves while being just and loving towards others—and vice versa. Her thought-provoking underlying hypothesis was that, unless we become conscious of their bodily dimension, both our self-identity and our relations with others are compromised.

While our various experiments did confront us with the fact that our human lives have a profoundly bodily dimension, Webster’s final—and impressive—exercise nonetheless made me doubt quite how central our body is both to our self-identity and our capacity to love. In this exercise, our group was asked to crowd together, such that we occupied the smallest possible amount of space in the room. Finding ourselves in one sweaty and uncomfortable pile, we were asked to reflect on whether we still felt capable of upholding our identity and of loving one another. To contrast this experience, we were then invited to spread out over the room with as great a distance from one another as possible.

As I experienced it, the first case of a crowded space certainly posed a challenge to my self-identity and capacity for love but did not seem to undo this. Love quickly became imperative for survival and took on the concrete meaning of solidarity, interdependence and mutual acceptance. My ability to find a positive bodily identity was nullified to the point that my bodily senses shut down, yet I managed to inhabit an internal place that still felt like ‘me’. My identity, it seemed, had become more spiritual than bodily but nonetheless felt authentic.

In the second case of physical alienation from others, by contrast, bodily self-expression and –identification may have been possible in theory, yet my spirit felt suffocated to the point of incapacitating me as a whole (i.e., also bodily). My physical alienation from others seemed to imply that I could neither be myself nor love others (or myself)—indeed that I was stifled and petrified at the very core of my being.

Ironically perhaps, the attempt to explore myself as body thus seemed to reveal the primacy of myself as embodied (!) spirit. This is not to say that the bodily dimension does not matter to our ability to be ourselves and love others. Far from it—my physical or bodily situation obviously had a deep impact on my sense of self and love insofar as I experienced physical isolation, in particular, as profoundly hazardous. Yet it was striking to me that I experienced my ability to be and to love as relatively divorced from my capacity for bodily self-expression. Indeed, even where any such freedom was taken away, that is, where our bodies were so close that we could not even more them, self-identity and love still seemed possible—possible on a spiritual plane.

Reading Together: Retrieving a Theological Sense of Being Human

As the last key note speaker of the conference Re-Imagining Human, David Jasper (Theology and Religious Studies, University of Glasgow), founding editor of the journal Literature and Theology, concluded:

‘For me the study of literature and theology is the most serious thing I have ever been engaged in. It has been a task of retrieving a theological sense of being human, but before one can even begin to do that one must begin by retrieving a sense of being human at all, without which we are nothing. Before we can recover any sense of God (whatever that might mean or in whatever language), we must elect to engage in a constant mutual release in forgiveness of one another in order to remain free. My old friend Bob Detweiler, may he rest in peace, … a man who knew suffering, once described this release as best found in what he called religious reading, which

“might be one that finds a group of persons engaged in gestures of friendship with each other across the erotic space of the text that draws them out of their privacy and its stress on meaning and power.”

And it is in this space that we might begin to find the consolations of religion speaking again. Detweiler suggested we recover two German terms once used by Meister Eckhart but taken up also by Heidegger: Gelassenheit and Geselligkeit. Gelassenheit: “a condition of acceptance that is neither nihilistic nor fatalistic but the ability – and it may be a gift – to move gracefully through life’s fortunes and accidents, or to wait out its calamities.” Geselligkeit: sociability, or togetherness.

            Reading together texts which resist all attempts to simplify and manipulate we may learn again to live through a religious tradition into a form of theological humanism which has recently been outlined by David Klemm and William Schweiker in which it is neither God’s will nor human flourishing that alone offer any sufficient measure for human life. Yet brought together they offer guidance in the human responsibility for integrity of life.  I am not sure that we have succeeded very far in persuading anyone in either church or academy of the profound importance of what we have tried to do. But, in our various ways, we must keep trying. I return sometimes to the end of the book of Job and try to place myself in Job’s position:

“I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42: 5b – 6)

The point of God’s great outburst is not that there is no meaning, or even that meaning is a human category, but that it is beyond our reach, only to be accepted. The end of Job, as Muriel Spark well understood in her novel The Only Problem, is neither a frame nor a finished form but a story that holds its secrets and hides its causal links, a story not to be accepted simply nor refused, but which prompts endless questions to God and to ourselves. If it pains it also restores, and it enables us to move on, to craft our own story from memory, in Kierkegaard’s phrase in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, it keeps “the wound of the negative open.”'

[Extensive quote with the permission of the author.]

Jasper’s lecture Retrieving a Theological Sense of Being Human was delivered at Re-Imagining Human, the 17th Conference for the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture, hosted by  Anthropos Research Group, Faculties of Theology and Arts, KU Leuven, 18-20 September 2014.

The Ultimate Symbol of a Productivistic Anthropology? On Bio-cremation

Ellen Van Stichel

Last week a plea for bio-cremation was launched in the Belgian press: this implies that, after death, the human corpse is dissolved in ‘alkaline liquid’ so that the ecological ‘costs’ of dying are reduced to zero. It took a while before the idea sunk in, but now critical voices are being raised on blogs and newspapers. “Do I now also have to die in an ecological manner?”, one journalist poignantly asked. 

I won’t try to dismiss the environmental crisis we face and the ecological challenges it brings. As a ‘conscious consumer’ I buy organic food mostly from the local farmer, stop every now and then at the Oxfam store and look for ways to reconstruct our house in an ecological way. So you won’t hear me saying that nothing is wrong with our environment. But extending that eco-logic to the ultimate act one can do for one’s predecessors intuitively seems problematic.

As a theologian, I believe that the proposal for bio-cremation could be countered by focusing on the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body. Whether understood in a rather literal or in a symbolic way, this article of faith points to the importance of the material body in a Christian understanding. However, as an ethicist these systematic theological discussions are not my field of expertise.

Rather I would like to focus on the productivistic anthropology which underlies and gives rise to the proposal for bio-cremation. Bio-cremation would in essence allow us to “recycle” coffins, an efficiency argument which adds to the productivistic rationality of our consumerist, even if consumer conscious culture, as opposed to the ‘wasteful’ symbolic tradition in Belgium of annually decking the graves with flowers on All Saint’s day, in the dark and cold of autumn. Bio-cremation is the ultimate symbol of an anthropology focusing on utility, prolonging the economic paradigm and cultural mentality in which only those are valorized who are productive for society, who contribute to it by working hard and––it seems–– who leave no trace of having lived; It confirms the message we already give to our elderly and ill fellow citizens that they are a burden, an obstacle because of their non-contribution; it seems to portray them as ‘waste’ for society. And reducing the corpses of the dead to nothing by dissolving them in liquid, and thus treating them as ‘waste’ because of the ecological cost – thus weighing costs and benefits – seems to materially extend this symbolic message we already give to them in life. As the cultural historian Nadia Sels puts it: “Is death not the final annulment of the accountancy and balance between costs and benefits which we keep so carefully during our life?” (Flemish News paper De Standaard, 14 October 2014). However ambiguous the words “to dust you will return”, they do at least offer a small ‘consolation’. But, bio-cremation’s message that ‘your dust will pollute even the dust is cruel’, as she rightly points out. Moreover, what happens with the remaining residue is also morally problematic.  When dissolved, only 3 % of the corpse will remain as a white powder, the rest having been dissolved into a water solution. This water solution, which now contains the remains of the body, is treated as ‘waste’ and is sent ‘down the drain’ quite literally.  This is a problem for Christians, who view the body, even when dead, as something to be cherished.

The practice of bio-cremation may also make the practice of mourning more difficult. Though proposed in the Belgian context, but already used in Canada and potentially Florida in the near future,  bio-cremation is likely to become a global phenomenon, especially considering the global scope of the ecological crisis.  But I remain concerned about its vision of the body as disposable waste, and its implicit practice of hiding the body so that those of us who are left are able to adequately mourn.    

On a different but related note, at Fara, a pregnancy counseling centre where I work, we meet women and men who struggle with their longing for legal but especially emotional recognition of their stillborn children.  Is biocremation not in stark contrast with the call for an earlier legal recognition of stillborn fetuses, from 24 to 20 weeks, that would allow parents to give their baby an appropriate name and funeral instead of treating them as ‘medical waste’? This call for a new law so as to allow for the registration of these children was even taken up by the new Belgian government in its state of the union address released earlier this week! Couples whose baby was less than 24 weeks tell us how important it is for them have an opportunity to mourn, to go to a plain field close to the hospital, the so-called ‘star field’ as it is called at the local university hospital, where they can leave a symbol of their loss (a bear, a cross, etc.) - even if they do not have any material remains. Some of them tell us they would prefer to have the remains buried somewhere. There is even a trend of people who make a piece of jewelry out of these remains, if the baby was ‘old’ enough to be legally recognized. Maybe gruesome for some, but nevertheless clearly a sign of the need to mourn, and mourn materially.

Often such parents are left to mourn in solitude, either because no one knows about their loss or minimalize it ‘because they have not yet really seen, felt it, known it alive’? At Fara we hold a desire to abolish this taboo and to give these women and couples the space they need to mourn. Would bio-cremation, when applied as a general practice, not also result in a lot of ‘hidden mourning’?  Does it not confirm the thought that long term mourning is inappropriate, and might even be labeled as a mental disorder (as the discussion continues in the aftermath of the publication of the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders… (DSM-5, 2013))? Is it thus not a new step in denying death a place in life, of pushing it to the margins of our life and thoughts, because we don’t know how to handle it? Biocreation – in extremis – might send the message to the dying that the only thing their life leaves us with is ‘waste’.

At stake is the symbolic meaning we give to the physical corpse after death, which is reflected in how we deal with it. And if we just unconsciously accept this practice of bio-cremation, this practice will force a symbolic meaning upon us, one with which we might not condone. 

Re-Imagining Human: Quis est homo qui non fleret?

At this year’s conference of the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture, Re-Imagining Human, Sigrid Weigel (Center for Literary and Cultural Research, TU Berlin) presented a pre-view of her forthcoming book, in which she will develop an iconographic genealogy of the notion of ‘compassion’. In an intriguing journey through her collection of images of mourning people in ancient Greece, in the Christian tradition and in contemporary mass media she showed remarkable similarities, in particular at the level of gestures, on the one hand and differences on the other (e.g., tears only appear in Renaissance paintings).

In Weigel’s perspective, the question what it means to be human ultimately comes down to a verse from the traditional hymn Stabat mater. When beholding the miseries of Christ’s mother, the medieval author asks us: Quis est homo qui non fleret? (‘Who is the human being who would not weep?’). The human being is that being who can and should ‘weep-with’, be com-passionate, co-suffer.

Weigel’s lecture COMpassio. Pathos Formula of Mourning and the Shaping of a Cultural Habitus was delivered at Re-Imagining Human, the 17th Conference for the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture, hosted by  Anthropos Research Group, Faculties of Theology and Arts, KU Leuven, 18-20 September 2014.

Teaching theology and disciplinary decadence

 By Joe Drexler-Dreis

Michael Wolgemut. The Scourging of Christ, 1491. 

While teaching christology this summer at Xavier University of Louisiana, I asked students to “name” Jesus Christ, to respond to the question Jesus asks in Mark 8:29. To establish the context in which this naming takes place, we watched the 2013 documentary Let the Fire Burn. The film shows the process that led up to the city of Philadelphia dropping a bomb on a home that served as the headquarters of the religious-political group MOVE on May 13, 1985. The director of the film, Jason Osder, tells the story relying solely on video archives, particularly footage of a commission held shortly after the bombing. At one point during the commission, a reverend questions two police officers why, when they went into a back alley where some MOVE members were trying to escape the burning house, the people chose to go back into the burning house, to then be burned to death. The reverend asks the officers what could possibly have led these people, choosing between a burning house and police officers allegedly asking them to come out, to opt for the burning house. The police officers were only able to refer to the irrationality of MOVE members.

One of the ways we interpreted the logic evident in the bombing of MOVE, which indicates a set of hierarchies that continue to determine the experience of life in the United States, was through the framework of what decolonial theorists call “coloniality.” Coloniality refers to the logic embedded within the political process of colonialism, which has yet to disappear despite political decolonization. In the context of what happened to MOVE members in May 1985, the concept of coloniality indicates a concealed set of hierarchies, on which western modernity depends, that make living life unbearable for those outside the benefits of modernity. Thus the choice to return to the burning house.

Students’ contributions in their struggle to name Christ are particularly relevant in light of continued police violence in the US, where a black person is killed by police, security guards, or vigilantes every 28 hours. As the course progressed, some students became increasingly suspicious of the capability of a theological reflection on Jesus Christ to respond to coloniality. To paraphrase one student’s articulation of his suspicion: “The more we (black US Americans) talk about Christ, the farther we move from understanding the historical situation that we’re in.”

The ways black liberation and womanist theologians give meaning to the identity of Jesus Christ convinced many students that christology could help navigate the relationship between the historical reality and the divine reality. But a few students in each of my courses remained unconvinced. Their persistent critique was that a doctrine of Jesus Christ worked out within the parameters of a Greek philosophical thought system simply didn’t provide a sufficient response to the everyday experience of life of black people in the United States.

Immediately after teaching, I participated in the annual conference of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Listening to the keynote lecture by Lewis R. Gordon helped me appreciate the depth of the students’ critique. Gordon talked about “disciplinary decadence,” which he defines as:

“the phenomenon of turning away from living thought, which engages reality and recognizes its own limitations, to a deontologized or absolute conception of disciplinary life. The discipline becomes, in solipsistic fashion, the world. And in that world, the main concern is the proper administering of its rules, regulations, or, as Frantz Fanon argued, (self-devouring) methods.”

When Gordon talks about “turning away from living thought,” this includes turning away from those deemed incapable of thinking. The police officers’ justification of the MOVE members returning to the burning house is an example of this: they attempt to bring others’ thought into their own way of thinking so that they can package it in a way that fits their naming of the world. Turning away from thought includes a concealed anthropological distinction between people groups. The discipline, governed by particular people groups, becomes the world, while the ways those relegated outside of the discipline have made sense of the world are left out. The narration of the world, even the world itself, becomes the exclusive domain of those whom the discipline allows in.

Gordon’s lecture made me think of the ways disciplinary decadence manifests itself within theology, and how this concept might have helped my students to elaborate on their suspicion that christology can provide a framework for a response to the lived experience of black US Americans. The concept of disciplinary decadence prompts the question: Does the coloniality embedded within the discipline of theology (i.e., on an epistemic level) allow for a response to police bombing a house full of people, or killing another unarmed black teenager? My intuition, during and after the course, is that we have to continue to work through the nature of the students’ suspicion that the implicit anthropological distinctions strongly embedded within the academic discipline of theology disqualify it as an adequate framework from which to respond to our immediate situation. The refusal to engage those who don’t neatly fit into the disciplinary boundaries of theology creates a distorted and solipsistic analytical circuit that often reduces theology to faith in a system, rather than, as Gustavo Gutiérrez defined theology, critical reflection on historical praxis in light of Christian faith.

Is it moral to "like" Facebook?

Jared Schumacher

The virtues of Facebook are manifest to those who frequent the social media behemoth: it allows the almost instantaneous "sharing" of information with those to whom we wish to be connected, de-limiting the ways in which information is communicated and the social pot is stirred.  This is to say that Facebook’s virtue is that it closes the distance gap by enabling immediate connection.

 But its limits as a medium are increasing becoming obvious the more it has been appropriated.  For the past decade or so, detractors have been lining up to criticize the vacuity of a virtual social bond and the way it detrimentally affects an individual user's real-life sense of self and his or her perceived community. Witness the Catfish phenomenon as a critical case in point.  But these criticisms often focus somewhat narrowly on the virtuality of relationship, its abstraction from concrete human embodiment.  Because humans are embodied beings – so the argument goes – they require concrete interaction.  And Facebook cannot de-limit this human need virtually.  

A recent article adds another, more unique, critical voice to the chorus.  In a piece for Wired magazine, Mat Honan summarizes the results of his comical-because-tragic experiment to "like" everything on his Facebook feed.  

The premise was simple:  Honan clicked the “like” button for everything that was posted on his Facebook wall.  Some of this content was posted by friends, and – because Facebook's business model is dependent upon ‘suggested content', which really means advertisements placed within one's wall as if from friends – some of it by Facebook itself.   As Honan explains:  

See, Facebook uses algorithms to decide what shows up in your feed. It isn’t just a parade of sequential updates from your friends and the things you’ve expressed an interest in. In 2014 the News Feed is a highly-curated presentation, delivered to you by a complicated formula based on the actions you take on the site, and across the web. I wanted to see how my Facebook experience would change if I constantly rewarded the robots making these decisions for me, if I continually said, “good job, robot, I like this.”

The results of the experiment were fascinating.  As he details, "[a]fter checking in and liking a bunch of stuff over the course of an hour, there were no human beings in my feed anymore. It became about brands and messaging, rather than humans with messages." The robots used his encouragement in the form of "liking" to create a marketing echo chamber, and a radicalizing one at that.  As his friends on the political right and left posted things that he then "liked", his feed was funneled to aggregation sites like Huffington Post and Buzzfeed, which continued to feed him ad nauseam with similar polarizing stories, products, and pages, all for him "to like", but little of which he actually did.

The cascade effect this experiment had on others is also worthy of note.  Facebook frequently posts liking activity on friends' feeds.  So, when Honan went on his liking rampage, his friends were involuntarily drawn in to his experiment.  Their feeds became colonized by his activity, limiting their exposure to articles and content they might actually otherwise have "liked." 

After two days of liking activity, and some time for reflection, Honan concludes his experiment with this piece of epigrammatic analysis:  "By liking everything, I turned Facebook into a place where there was nothing I liked. To be honest, I really didn’t like it. I didn’t like what I had done."  Indiscriminate liking had the ironic effect of radicalizing while banalizing everything.

Despite this unhappy ending, the experiment did help to expose one of the most obvious and yet under-recognized facts of human interaction on the web.  There seems a broad but naive assumption that, because "the internet" is a medium, it itself is unmediated.  But this is categorically untrue.  In ways we are only beginning to understand, the media we use to interrelate, however virtually, are themselves mediated by those who provide the services in the first place.  Facebook's algorithm and its extreme use in the experiment expose the prejudices of those who designed it.  Facebook exists to make money for its (now) public investors, and those investors profit from the radicalization of news and products and the filtering of information to sites which are themselves heavily monetized.  It seems that for us humans, there is no unmediated reality, virtual or otherwise.  Even if ‘the virtual’ de-limits our capacity to interact at a distance, it does so precisely by delimiting in other ways.  Which means that, while it may indeed close the distance gap, Facebook also functions as a social filter, creating different gaps in its place.  We tell Facebook who our friends are and what we “like” or don’t like , giving us the appearance of control over the information that we allow to inform us;  in actuality, Facebook controls our social network through a process of selection, limiting our exposure to information in ways that are not altogether clear. 

To some extent, there is nothing perfidious in all of this.  There is simply too much information in the world, even when filtered through our “friends”, for us to digest in any meaningful way at a given moment.  We need filters.  However, the concealment of this selective process, the veiling of the algorithm and its predilections for proprietary reasons, molds our perception of reality far more than we are aware. When this concealment is allied with the economic self-interest Facebook possesses as a publically traded company, its tendency to represent reality in its own best financial interests is compounded. 

Only by becoming aware of what exactly is happening when we like Facebook, can the morality of its use be adequately judged.  Only when we are first clear about what we like about and on Facebook, can we use it responsibly.  Otherwise, Facebook will take our liking behavior as a tacit affirmation that its robots are constructing a (view of) reality that we actually like.  And because (virtual) reality is deeply interconnected, what we "like" affects, and sometimes afflicts, those we truly care about.  

Book Announcement: Questioning the Human

The Research Group Anthropos is proud to announce the publication of Questioning the Human, edited by Anthropos members prof. Lieven Boeve, prof. Yves De Maeseneer and Dr. Ellen Van Stichel.

“The Christian notion of the Human involves both the biblical notion of the Imago Dei and philosophical understandings of natural law. How those concepts are to be understood, defended, and nuanced in the face of modernity and postmodernity is the subject of these rich and varied essays. This exploration of Christian anthropology, fifty years after the capacious vision of Gaudium et Spes, should be gratefully received and meticulously studied.”

— Lawrence Cunningham, John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology (Emeritus), The University of Note Dame

“Theological anthropology, the project of articulating what it is and what it means to be human in relation to the transcendent God, stands at a crossroads in the second decade of the 21st century. Powerful forces shaping contemporary life—science and technology, the workings of the global economy, re-configurations of social and political power, regionally, locally, and globally—seem to render that project deeply problematic in terms of both its substance and its methods. The discourse of theological inquiry, moreover, has itself been pluralized, nor only in consequence of these encompassing cultural challenges, but also as a result of a renewed self-critical awareness of theology’s own deep embedding in socio-cultural and historical particularity. The essays in this volume offer incisive diagnoses of these challenges and promising strategies to address them. They provide a solid basis for confidence in the continuing importance of a renewed theological anthropology for the living faith of the Catholic Church in its concrete engagements with the full range of the workings of the world.””

— Rev. Philip J. Rossi S.J., Marquette University

“In Questioning the Human, international known scholars explore crucial issues on the relation of human nature to sciences, ethics, and morality in a way that clearly shows how contemporary thought reflects on the human self and the human body in a world that is both diverse and commodified. These essays explore central questions that a Twenty-First Century theological anthropology needs to take into account. An exciting, probing, and informative volume.””

— Francis Schuessler-Fiorenza, Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Theological Studies

“In a time when the natural sciences are raising new questions about the very notion of a fixed human nature, theology is required to think more deeply about the meaning and implications of the classical claims of Christian faith, particularly the Incarnation. These welcome exploratory essays in theological anthropology by significant contemporary scholars will help theologians and students sort out the issues and join a very important conversation.””

— Paul Crowley, Santa Clara University

Sports, Why So Serious?

Tom Uytterhoeven

Imagine alien observers filing the following report with the Department of Xenoc Affairs:

“Observers have noticed a peculiar pattern in human behaviour. Every four years, people from all continents (except Antarctica, for obvious reasons) flock to one country, the choice of which seems to be made randomly. They meet in large venues, each of which has a rectangular patch of grass at the centre, decorated with white lines. There, the gathered crowd watches how two groups, dressed in different coloured shirts and shorts, try to kick a ball through a metal framework. Each time one of the players succeeds in doing so, part of the crowd cheers aloud, while the other part expresses dismay and grief. At a given time all activity stops, and everyone leaves the venue. During a whole month, this behaviour is repeated, but not among all groups. It seems that only some are selected for the next rounds. At the last of these peculiar meetings, one group is rewarded with a golden cup.”

Earthlings might recognize the FIFA World Cup, one of the world’s largest sport events, in this report. But how would our imaginary alien observers explain this behaviour? One possibility could be for them to look at economical or political gain. Research would show them that, although there might be economic benefits, the hosting country does not seem to receive taxes or other forms of payment from visiting countries, nor does it gain lasting political power from organising the event, ruling out materialistic gain as a goal for the event. Human evolutionary psychologists have proposed that the groups kicking the ball are actually displaying themselves for potential mates. But even if members of the group that wins the golden cup might have more reproductive success, there is no research available that confirms this for all males in their home country, compared to males from other countries. This might lead some alien researchers, desperate for a rational explanation, to turn to the golden cup itself, proposing the hypothesis that it is a religious object, possibly referring to some kind of supernatural agent. Would such an explanation do justice to the experience of soccer fans? Would it be applicable to other sport events, like the Grand Slam tennis tournaments, the Tour de France, or the Super Bowl?

The suggestion that religion and sports are overlapping cultural fields has indeed been made on different occasions, for instance at the start of the last World Cup in South Africa. Moreover, in his elaborate study of religion, American sociologist Robert Bellah refers to “play” as a fundamental element in the evolution of culture, arguing that play has enabled our species to become a learning species, a species that does not depend on selected instincts, but on “plasticity and openness to learning” (Bellah 2011, 81). For Bellah, play is thus more than just a game or sports, even though he discusses Greek Olympiads. Play is part of what he calls a “relaxed field”, a space that is not subject to the pressures of the struggle for life. In the conclusion to his book, Bellah returns to this early reference to play, showing how play has always been influential throughout the cultural history of humanity, although somewhat hidden in the background of each historical scene.

 He sees a close connection between play and renouncers of the existing social order, arguing that the “universal egalitarian ethic” of the axial age, critical as it was towards the powers that be, depended on these renouncers, pursuing “play” over “work” (Bellah 2011, 574-575). Play, in this regard, is part and parcel of most axial-age utopias, Bellah explains. One example he offers is that of Plato’s parable of the Cave:

“The Parable of the Cave has an element of play in that it involves a release from its starting point, life in the cave, which is a realm of coercion: its inhabitants are chained. When the protagonist is released from his chains and turns around, leaves the cave, and finds himself in the open air with the sun above, he is at first anxious. He is free and he doesn’t know what to do with his freedom – it has been a long time since he experienced the world of play, if he ever had – so he is even half inclined to return to the cave. But what he actually does is ascend to the vision of the form of the good, a joyous, overwhelming experience of being and meaning. Is that so far from play at its best?”

 Bellah’s discussion of play offers some food for thought for those who want to compare religion with sports, moreover for those who want to imply that sports is a new religion. It raises the question of whether sports do not miss an essential element to become a secular religion, namely the element of play. Do sports offer a playful critique on existing social structures? If one looks at what the World Cup has done for the people in the Brazilian favelas, one might wonder whether sports have not become too serious to do so. Their seriousness can only offer some leisure for some people, not a new vision on a new earth for all. Reading Bellah, we could wonder, when watching athletes at work, whether we should not put play back into the game.