Category: Culture
The Latest from “Sightings”
I received this “Sightings” from the Marty Institute this morning. I’m a subscriber and recommend it if you wish to be nudged or sometimes challenged by a weekly email.
Martydom
by Martin E. Marty | Sightings | 17 May 2010Almost always Sightings takes off from a current text or image lifted from news and opinion sources. This week our “current” text is 1900 years old. It happened that Sunday I was to engage in a moonlighting vocation, namely preaching a sermon, something I’ve enjoyed doing for sixty-two years. To some, this activity in a sanctuary may seem to occur in a polar-opposite locale from the “Public Religion” sites that we ordinarily visit. However, sanctuary acts are to relate to the public, and public acts have or can have anchors in community and personal life. Those of us who are called to preach on Lectionary – ecumenically-chosen biblical – texts often have to take their chances. This week the seasonal text was from John 15:20-27, read as farewell words of Jesus to disciples. Preachers everywhere are in trouble almost right off. Jesus: “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also.” While I have preached among the poor and suffering, few were persecuted. More often the words fall on the ears of comfortable, middle-class persons, or in the academies, people with pensions, good names, often tenure, honorary degrees, “Good Citizen” awards. Now what? “They” did persecute Jesus back then, and he promised like treatment for his followers. Here the contortions begin.
Contemporaries in comfortable worlds go hunting for persecutees, and often even place themselves in the mirrors, as being the hunted. These days the whole concept of being persecuted gets trivialized. Forbid “National Day of Prayer” people from receiving demanded public space and time, and you will hear moans and whines: “They are persecuting us!” Tell that to the people who are tortured and condemned for their religious, in this case Christian, commitments and witness. Maybe some who cry “Persecution!” do so not for political reasons, as they seek to be empowered in their weakness and humility. Better to punt and scoot past the verse I quoted to other really rich and promising words in the “Farewell Discourse.” But, then, is there something to the point for moderns as they hear these words from a gospel?
Here is where contemporary relevance does come in. Monitoring newspapers, newsletters, magazines, print-outs, and media stories and images, as we are called to do, has us finding horror stories each week from around the world. How many? It is hard to know, given the dispersal of two billion Christians in two hundred lands, many of them suffering in silence, unnoticed, as embarrassments to their enemies, or too insignificant to be counted up. Yet we get clues, however they are gained and however widely they vary. My favorite guess, or reckoning, appears in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Volume 34, No. 1 of which appeared in January.
The count? “Average Christian Martyrs Per Year,” 178,000 right now, 210,000 projected for 2025. Of course, as I read such figures annually and occasionally ponder explanations about how computers help bring up such figures – how can anyone know? – I indulge in the hermeneutics of suspicion. What are the motives of the calculators, friends of martyrs, and statisticians? Just as quickly as such questions come to mind, one does well to postpone dealing with them and instead to think about what even one such death means, what one harassed and stalked community suffers, what motivation it should develop for people of good will in statecraft, non-governmental organizations, and religious communities of all sorts, to change circumstances, to bring the number down. 210,000 in 2025? That text from John 17 still haunts.
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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
In Defense of the Ivy League
Yes, I read “The Daily Beast” site. The name is refreshing and the reporting (yes, reporting is still a profession) is above average. Reporting, professional investigative reporting, is needed now more than ever in our world. This article by Peter Beinart caught my eye for a couple of reasons. First, it highlights the ongoing “anti-intellectual” crusade that continues to wash over our country. I understand the anger that supports the perception that smart people in the government and in the financial sector are the cause behind our problems. I would agree that some, most likely, gamed the system to benefit themselves, or a small group, in our capitalists caste system, and that they have successfully gotten so many of us in debt or distracted that few can afford to take to the streets in protest. Well played. But that should not keep us from seeking out the smartest among us for service in offices where either by natural character or because of the office itself people act as honorable agents for the good of us all.
Second, it offers another thinking perspective for mainline Christianity while it is shifting its consumer attitudes toward those educated for ministry and ordained leadership in the Church as well as how persons are educated for ministry. I continue to think that an educated laity is the best “reformation” movement in the life of Christendom. Here is a paragraph from Bienart’s article. Click the title to read more.
In Defense of the Ivy League
by Peter Bienart | The Daily Beast | May 14, 2010“There’s about to be a backlash against the Ivy League lock on the court,” explained David Brooks, this week. In fact, it has already begun. From left to right, just about the only thing that liberals and conservatives have agreed upon since Elena Kagan’s nomination is that there are too many pointy-heads on the Supreme Court. “I think it would be good to have a nominee that stood up against powerful interests like the elite law schools, which are a powerful interest in the U.S. and have done a lot of damage,” explained William Kristol recently.
I’d like to propose a backlash against the backlash. (And yes, shoot me, I attended an Ivy League college myself.) When critics bemoan the fact that if Kagan gets confirmed, every Supreme Court justice will be tainted by the Ivy League, what they generally mean is that the Supremes won’t have anything in common with average Americans. But in one sense, they’re not supposed to.