Monday, August 29, 2011
Missionaries or Soldiers?
Woke up this morning in Minnesota and just walked in the door tonight after a 15- hour drive to discover an article I wrote for another blog called ThinkChristian was put up today. Interesting to see this at the end of the day and read some initial comments. One I like quite a bit and one made me bristle. If you had read the blog I used to do in Europe you probably recognize the story I used, but I re-purposed it for this blog. I’d love it if you took a look and posted a comment.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Soft Male Beds
A funny thing happened to me this week when I was trying to write a devotional on I Corinthians 6. I read verses 9 and 10. Talk about accidentally falling into something big. I am reminded about how important it is to do the meticulous work of careful translation before opening your mouth on an issue.
Here’s what those verses say in the TNIV, the translation I was reading at the time: “Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor practicing homosexuals nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”
The phrase “practicing homosexuals” caught my attention. Actually, it was the word “practicing.” In recent years a distinction has been made in some religious circles between those with homosexual orientation and those who engage in homosexual acts. The belief is it is not a sin to be gay as long as you remain celibate. (This line of reasoning acknowledges that homosexuality may be genetic and not a choice after all.) I’m not really interested in commenting here on that school of thought – I’m interested in how the TNIV came up with the phrase “practicing homosexuals.” Surely, I thought, that is a modern notion and not what the ancient text actually says.
So I grabbed half a dozen other Bible translations as well as a Greek Bible and Dictionary to satisfy my curiosity. After reading, all I could say was, “Holy Homophobia!” I wasn’t prepared for the difference between what the Greek text says and how the words are translated.
There are two Greek words at play in verse nine. One is malakoi, translated in the TNIV as “male prostitutes” and the other is arsenekoitai, translated in the TNIV as “practicing homosexuals.”
Here is a list of what I found. First you’ll see the abbreviation of the translation I looked at, then how that translation renders malakoi and next how it renders arsenekoitai.
TNIV / male prostitutes / practicing homosexuals
NRSV / male prostitutes / sodomites
NIV / male prostitutes / homosexual offenders
NASB / effeminate / homosexuals
ESV / men who practice homosexuality*
KJV / effeminate / abusers of themselves with mankind
Actual Greek / soft / male bed
* The ESV has a footnote saying the two Greek terms refer to the passive and active partners in consensual male homosexual acts.
If you wonder how you get from “soft” to “male prostitutes” or “male bed” to “sodomites,” you are not alone. Did I ever stumble onto a hornet’s nest! In the past couple of days I’ve been reading all I can find about these two Greek words and how they have been understood over the years. I’ve read both conservative and liberal arguments and if you want to read those things google “I Corinthians 6:9 translation arguments” and have at it. You can read paragraph after paragraph of speculation about what Paul really meant. My guess is whatever point of view you bring with you into the argument will be the one you leave with. And I feel like the point of view the translators brought with them to the argument was the one they went ahead and translated the verse with. (I find the English Standard Version footnote the most curious example of this.) The translation issues around these two words don’t solve anything – rather, they create all sorts of questions.
There are at least six things to note.
1. Malakoi is used at other times in the New Testament to refer to soft clothing. But Paul certainly couldn’t have had that usage in mind here. He meant soft people. John Wesley thought it meant people who lived in an easy, indolent way. Others sexualize the word. I can see how the King James guys got from soft to “effeminate,” although I wonder what effeminate meant in 1611. (And isn’t that translation offensive to women?) But how do you get from soft (or even effeminate) to “male prostitutes”?
2. Arsenekoitai is a compound word, made up of the Greek words for “male” and “bed.” There is no known usage of it in ancient Greek writings. It appears to be a word coined by Paul and is only used in the Bible here and in a similar list in I Timothy. It is impossible to be certain how to translate the word. Does it mean males who use their beds for illicit purposes? Perhaps it (rather than malakoi) is a reference to the male prostitutes working in the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth. If that’s the case, it could have homosexual overtones, but male prostitutes didn’t exclusively serve male customers. And if it is a reference to male prostitutes, isn’t it then a reference to people who are sexually indiscriminate instead of being sexually responsible? I don’t think all homosexuals are prostitutes any more than I think all heterosexuals are prostitutes.
3. Since we do know arsenekoitai does have the word male in it, if Paul is saying something about homosexuality, lesbians get a free pass.
4. If you are wondering if Paul meant homosexual why he didn’t just use that word, it is because homosexual is a recent term, unknown both in the time the Bible was written and unknown even when the King James Bible was translated. There were other common words for homosexuality at the time of Paul but he doesn’t use them. Why not? There is plenty of speculation on both sides of the issue about Paul’s choice of words but no definitive answer.
5. There are an awful lot of people (again on both sides of the issue) very certain about the meaning of a passage that is fraught with translation difficulty.
6. I can’t imagine what it might feel like for a homosexual person to know these words are unclear and then have them so definitively and negatively translated. Or what it might feel like for a homosexual person who doesn’t know they are unclear to simply read the way most versions of the Bible translate them.
As is often the case, I find the recent translation in The Message by Eugene Peterson helpful. His rendering of I Corinthians 6:9,10 says “Don’t you realize this is not the way to live? Unjust people who don’t care about God will not be joining in his kingdom. Those who use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex, use and abuse the earth and everything in it, don’t qualify as citizens in God’s kingdom.” I think that captures what Paul had in mind without making translation leaps or stigmatizing people with labels and expresses Paul’s meaning in a way that will get us nodding our heads in agreement instead of getting out our megaphones and yelling at each other. What do you think?
Here’s what those verses say in the TNIV, the translation I was reading at the time: “Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor practicing homosexuals nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”
The phrase “practicing homosexuals” caught my attention. Actually, it was the word “practicing.” In recent years a distinction has been made in some religious circles between those with homosexual orientation and those who engage in homosexual acts. The belief is it is not a sin to be gay as long as you remain celibate. (This line of reasoning acknowledges that homosexuality may be genetic and not a choice after all.) I’m not really interested in commenting here on that school of thought – I’m interested in how the TNIV came up with the phrase “practicing homosexuals.” Surely, I thought, that is a modern notion and not what the ancient text actually says.
So I grabbed half a dozen other Bible translations as well as a Greek Bible and Dictionary to satisfy my curiosity. After reading, all I could say was, “Holy Homophobia!” I wasn’t prepared for the difference between what the Greek text says and how the words are translated.
There are two Greek words at play in verse nine. One is malakoi, translated in the TNIV as “male prostitutes” and the other is arsenekoitai, translated in the TNIV as “practicing homosexuals.”
Here is a list of what I found. First you’ll see the abbreviation of the translation I looked at, then how that translation renders malakoi and next how it renders arsenekoitai.
TNIV / male prostitutes / practicing homosexuals
NRSV / male prostitutes / sodomites
NIV / male prostitutes / homosexual offenders
NASB / effeminate / homosexuals
ESV / men who practice homosexuality*
KJV / effeminate / abusers of themselves with mankind
Actual Greek / soft / male bed
* The ESV has a footnote saying the two Greek terms refer to the passive and active partners in consensual male homosexual acts.
If you wonder how you get from “soft” to “male prostitutes” or “male bed” to “sodomites,” you are not alone. Did I ever stumble onto a hornet’s nest! In the past couple of days I’ve been reading all I can find about these two Greek words and how they have been understood over the years. I’ve read both conservative and liberal arguments and if you want to read those things google “I Corinthians 6:9 translation arguments” and have at it. You can read paragraph after paragraph of speculation about what Paul really meant. My guess is whatever point of view you bring with you into the argument will be the one you leave with. And I feel like the point of view the translators brought with them to the argument was the one they went ahead and translated the verse with. (I find the English Standard Version footnote the most curious example of this.) The translation issues around these two words don’t solve anything – rather, they create all sorts of questions.
There are at least six things to note.
1. Malakoi is used at other times in the New Testament to refer to soft clothing. But Paul certainly couldn’t have had that usage in mind here. He meant soft people. John Wesley thought it meant people who lived in an easy, indolent way. Others sexualize the word. I can see how the King James guys got from soft to “effeminate,” although I wonder what effeminate meant in 1611. (And isn’t that translation offensive to women?) But how do you get from soft (or even effeminate) to “male prostitutes”?
2. Arsenekoitai is a compound word, made up of the Greek words for “male” and “bed.” There is no known usage of it in ancient Greek writings. It appears to be a word coined by Paul and is only used in the Bible here and in a similar list in I Timothy. It is impossible to be certain how to translate the word. Does it mean males who use their beds for illicit purposes? Perhaps it (rather than malakoi) is a reference to the male prostitutes working in the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth. If that’s the case, it could have homosexual overtones, but male prostitutes didn’t exclusively serve male customers. And if it is a reference to male prostitutes, isn’t it then a reference to people who are sexually indiscriminate instead of being sexually responsible? I don’t think all homosexuals are prostitutes any more than I think all heterosexuals are prostitutes.
3. Since we do know arsenekoitai does have the word male in it, if Paul is saying something about homosexuality, lesbians get a free pass.
4. If you are wondering if Paul meant homosexual why he didn’t just use that word, it is because homosexual is a recent term, unknown both in the time the Bible was written and unknown even when the King James Bible was translated. There were other common words for homosexuality at the time of Paul but he doesn’t use them. Why not? There is plenty of speculation on both sides of the issue about Paul’s choice of words but no definitive answer.
5. There are an awful lot of people (again on both sides of the issue) very certain about the meaning of a passage that is fraught with translation difficulty.
6. I can’t imagine what it might feel like for a homosexual person to know these words are unclear and then have them so definitively and negatively translated. Or what it might feel like for a homosexual person who doesn’t know they are unclear to simply read the way most versions of the Bible translate them.
As is often the case, I find the recent translation in The Message by Eugene Peterson helpful. His rendering of I Corinthians 6:9,10 says “Don’t you realize this is not the way to live? Unjust people who don’t care about God will not be joining in his kingdom. Those who use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex, use and abuse the earth and everything in it, don’t qualify as citizens in God’s kingdom.” I think that captures what Paul had in mind without making translation leaps or stigmatizing people with labels and expresses Paul’s meaning in a way that will get us nodding our heads in agreement instead of getting out our megaphones and yelling at each other. What do you think?
Monday, August 22, 2011
Jim Leyland, Biblical Inerrancy and the Presidential Campaign
I voted for Jim Leyland once. I won’t tell you what the election was, but I was so disgusted with the candidates that I felt on the whole the manager of the Detroit Tigers would do a better job of leadership so I wrote his name in. If you’ve ever listened to Leyland semi-coherently grumble his way through a post-game interview, you understand “politician” is not a word that will ever be used to describe him.
Having said that, I should also admit I have a certain amount of sympathy for those who do choose to seek office because they are put under such an amazing microscope. I wouldn’t want that done to me -- I say stupid stuff all the time I wouldn’t want posted on YouTube.
For example, did you see the video last week of Rick Perry answering a little boy’s question about how old the earth was and then talking about evolution as a theory that has some gaps in it? Part of me said, “Hey, he’s referring to my last blog entry” and part of me wondered what difference his views on evolution could possibly make on his qualifications to be President.
But perhaps you wonder why Perry thinks the way he does. At least part of the answer comes in how he reads and interprets the Bible. This election is unique because there are two bona fide Biblical inerrantists running for President – Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman. Inerrancy is the view that the Bible has no errors. I don’t believe this. I believe the Bible is inspired by God and has no errors in the things it was designed to teach – matters of salvation, namely – but that in things it was not designed to teach (like biology or astronomy) the Bible is consistent with the ancient worldviews and understandings of its authors.
It would seem on the surface that someone who holds to inerrancy rejects reason in the name of faith. But there is an irony here, and in reality it is faith that gets rejected for reason in the inerrant world view.
The appeal of inerrancy is that it is black and white. Rationalism and logic triumph over faith, because faith is not black and white at all. Faith is about belief in the mysterious and unseen, and faith has the ability to hold contradictory notions in your head at the same time and know that both are true. Reason says if A is true than B is false, faith says A and B and even C can all be true at the same time.
200 years ago it was easier for people to say “Slavery is endorsed by the Bible” than for people to say, “Even though the Bible has verses that say things about slaves obeying their masters, the writers of the Bible never imagined slavery the way we have it today, and what Jesus said about loving your neighbor as yourself is far more significant.”
30 years ago it was easier for people to say, “Women should be silent in church” than for people to say, “Wait a minute, the same passage also says women should keep their heads covered in church and the guy who wrote all of that actually acknowledged women in leadership in the early church.”
Biblical interpretation is hard work and there often are not clear answers. Why is the church so torn on homosexuality? One reason is that there are legitimate Biblical viewpoints on each side of the argument. But if you are an inerrantist, there is no argument.
Inerrancy offers clear and quick answers. It works for sound bites. But ultimately it reflects an unwillingness to live with contradictions and gray areas. That, it seems to me, does have a lot to do with someone’s approach to being President.
We have an election coming and I find myself less than inspired by the candidates. At the same time we’re late in the baseball season and the Detroit Tigers are in first place. Jim Leyland seems to be pushing all the right buttons and seems smarter than ever. Not only that, but I’m pretty sure that if you asked Leyland about Biblical inerrancy, he’d take a drag on one of his ever-present cigarettes and look at you like you were crazy. He could talk about the errors Wilson Betemit makes at third base and why that led him to call Brandon Inge back up from Toledo at what was just the right time, but Biblical inerrancy?
I’m feeling that urge for a write-in vote again.
Having said that, I should also admit I have a certain amount of sympathy for those who do choose to seek office because they are put under such an amazing microscope. I wouldn’t want that done to me -- I say stupid stuff all the time I wouldn’t want posted on YouTube.
For example, did you see the video last week of Rick Perry answering a little boy’s question about how old the earth was and then talking about evolution as a theory that has some gaps in it? Part of me said, “Hey, he’s referring to my last blog entry” and part of me wondered what difference his views on evolution could possibly make on his qualifications to be President.
But perhaps you wonder why Perry thinks the way he does. At least part of the answer comes in how he reads and interprets the Bible. This election is unique because there are two bona fide Biblical inerrantists running for President – Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman. Inerrancy is the view that the Bible has no errors. I don’t believe this. I believe the Bible is inspired by God and has no errors in the things it was designed to teach – matters of salvation, namely – but that in things it was not designed to teach (like biology or astronomy) the Bible is consistent with the ancient worldviews and understandings of its authors.
It would seem on the surface that someone who holds to inerrancy rejects reason in the name of faith. But there is an irony here, and in reality it is faith that gets rejected for reason in the inerrant world view.
The appeal of inerrancy is that it is black and white. Rationalism and logic triumph over faith, because faith is not black and white at all. Faith is about belief in the mysterious and unseen, and faith has the ability to hold contradictory notions in your head at the same time and know that both are true. Reason says if A is true than B is false, faith says A and B and even C can all be true at the same time.
200 years ago it was easier for people to say “Slavery is endorsed by the Bible” than for people to say, “Even though the Bible has verses that say things about slaves obeying their masters, the writers of the Bible never imagined slavery the way we have it today, and what Jesus said about loving your neighbor as yourself is far more significant.”
30 years ago it was easier for people to say, “Women should be silent in church” than for people to say, “Wait a minute, the same passage also says women should keep their heads covered in church and the guy who wrote all of that actually acknowledged women in leadership in the early church.”
Biblical interpretation is hard work and there often are not clear answers. Why is the church so torn on homosexuality? One reason is that there are legitimate Biblical viewpoints on each side of the argument. But if you are an inerrantist, there is no argument.
Inerrancy offers clear and quick answers. It works for sound bites. But ultimately it reflects an unwillingness to live with contradictions and gray areas. That, it seems to me, does have a lot to do with someone’s approach to being President.
We have an election coming and I find myself less than inspired by the candidates. At the same time we’re late in the baseball season and the Detroit Tigers are in first place. Jim Leyland seems to be pushing all the right buttons and seems smarter than ever. Not only that, but I’m pretty sure that if you asked Leyland about Biblical inerrancy, he’d take a drag on one of his ever-present cigarettes and look at you like you were crazy. He could talk about the errors Wilson Betemit makes at third base and why that led him to call Brandon Inge back up from Toledo at what was just the right time, but Biblical inerrancy?
I’m feeling that urge for a write-in vote again.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Adam and Eve and the Nature of Truth
You might find it helpful to look at this link to a recent NPR story about Evangelical scholars questioning the historicity of Adam and Eve before reading my comments below.
I vividly remember being frustrated when I went to seminary 30 years ago when none of my professors would give me a straight answer on the existence of Adam and Eve. After reading the NPR story, I figure if I’d gone to Calvin Seminary, instead of Western Seminary, I might have gotten a straighter answer, but I’m not sure I would have gotten an answer that satisfied me. Besides wondering who was there to write everything down before Adam was created, I just couldn’t get my mind around a few of the facts presented in the first pages of the Bible – like how the world could have days before the creation of the sun, how people could live to be 600 or 700 years old, or how after Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel, and Cain killed Abel, Cain fled to the land of Nod where he and his wife had a son named Enoch. Where the heck did Cain’s wife come from? (“No doubt Can’s wife was a daughter of Adam,” a fundamentalist commentary I own says, and besides creeping me out, that explanation also makes me wonder what sort of God creates a world where incest is necessary and how many generations it would take to get the mutations that sort of coupling must have caused out of the human bloodstream. But I digress….)
I doubt any of my professors believed in a literal, historical Adam and Eve. You can draw your own conclusions about why they might be reticent to acknowledge that publicly, but I tend to think they were watching how this issue kept coming up a few miles down the road at Calvin and decided discretion served them better than disclosure. Who wants to upset their conservative wealthy donor base?
Having no donor base to alienate, I can freely say I don’t think we are supposed to understand the first chapters of Genesis literally. I quoted Father Richard Rohr in this blog a while ago saying, “Literalism is usually the lowest and least level of meaning.” In the NPR story, Fuzale Rana, the vice president of an organization called Reasons to Believe, is quoted as saying, "I think this is going to be a pivotal point in Church history because what rests at the very heart of this debate is whether or not key ideas within Christianity are ultimately true or not."
I disagree with this statement. The presupposition behind it is that literalism is the sole gage of “ultimate truth.” I remember learning the story of the tortoise and the hare in elementary school and knowing the story was true even though there wasn’t a “real” race between a tortoise and a hare that ever happened. As a child I didn’t struggle with needing to know if something was literally true to believe it.
What my professors did teach me in seminary was what to have faith in. I was taught to reject the idea of putting my faith in the Bible and instead to believe in the God the Bible witnessed to, a God too big to ever be completely captured in the words on a page. That’s nuanced thinking, because I was also taught to have a very high view of scripture. I believe everything we need to know about creation, human nature and sin is found in the first chapters of Genesis. And I believe ultimately it doesn’t matter whether or not someone believes if Adam and Eve were historical characters. Except if you believe they were, you wind up saying creepy things like Cain married his sister. Yuck!
I vividly remember being frustrated when I went to seminary 30 years ago when none of my professors would give me a straight answer on the existence of Adam and Eve. After reading the NPR story, I figure if I’d gone to Calvin Seminary, instead of Western Seminary, I might have gotten a straighter answer, but I’m not sure I would have gotten an answer that satisfied me. Besides wondering who was there to write everything down before Adam was created, I just couldn’t get my mind around a few of the facts presented in the first pages of the Bible – like how the world could have days before the creation of the sun, how people could live to be 600 or 700 years old, or how after Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel, and Cain killed Abel, Cain fled to the land of Nod where he and his wife had a son named Enoch. Where the heck did Cain’s wife come from? (“No doubt Can’s wife was a daughter of Adam,” a fundamentalist commentary I own says, and besides creeping me out, that explanation also makes me wonder what sort of God creates a world where incest is necessary and how many generations it would take to get the mutations that sort of coupling must have caused out of the human bloodstream. But I digress….)
I doubt any of my professors believed in a literal, historical Adam and Eve. You can draw your own conclusions about why they might be reticent to acknowledge that publicly, but I tend to think they were watching how this issue kept coming up a few miles down the road at Calvin and decided discretion served them better than disclosure. Who wants to upset their conservative wealthy donor base?
Having no donor base to alienate, I can freely say I don’t think we are supposed to understand the first chapters of Genesis literally. I quoted Father Richard Rohr in this blog a while ago saying, “Literalism is usually the lowest and least level of meaning.” In the NPR story, Fuzale Rana, the vice president of an organization called Reasons to Believe, is quoted as saying, "I think this is going to be a pivotal point in Church history because what rests at the very heart of this debate is whether or not key ideas within Christianity are ultimately true or not."
I disagree with this statement. The presupposition behind it is that literalism is the sole gage of “ultimate truth.” I remember learning the story of the tortoise and the hare in elementary school and knowing the story was true even though there wasn’t a “real” race between a tortoise and a hare that ever happened. As a child I didn’t struggle with needing to know if something was literally true to believe it.
What my professors did teach me in seminary was what to have faith in. I was taught to reject the idea of putting my faith in the Bible and instead to believe in the God the Bible witnessed to, a God too big to ever be completely captured in the words on a page. That’s nuanced thinking, because I was also taught to have a very high view of scripture. I believe everything we need to know about creation, human nature and sin is found in the first chapters of Genesis. And I believe ultimately it doesn’t matter whether or not someone believes if Adam and Eve were historical characters. Except if you believe they were, you wind up saying creepy things like Cain married his sister. Yuck!
Monday, August 8, 2011
Wise-cracking women: From Lucy to Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin
What did you do to mark Lucille Ball’s 100th birthday on Saturday?
Hundreds of people dressed as Lucy gathered in her hometown of Jamestown, New York, in an attempt to set a world record for the most Lucille Ball imitators in one spot. I saw footage of overweight men dressed in polka dot dresses wearing red wigs and lipstick. It wasn’t pretty.
We marked Lucy’s birthday in a more sensible way by watching one of her old movies, made long before Lucy was “ditzy Lucy.” It was the 1937 comedy Stage Door, which was shown as part of Turner Classic Movies fine “Essentials” series every Saturday at 8pm. Lucy was 26-years-old when this movie was made, and she played a wise-cracking woman in a house full of wise-cracking women. Those were the days when Lucy was making movies with both the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers. Along with a bevy of great women actors like Eve Arden and Ann Miller, she supported Ginger Rogers and Katherine Hepburn in this one. Stage Door is the sort of movie sympathetic to women that just doesn’t get made anymore. It was a comedy with melodramatic overtones about how hard it was for young women to break into the theatre. All the women lived in a boarding house for aspiring actresses called “The Footlights Club.” It was written by two giants – Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman. See it if you ever get a chance.
Just to keep our theme of sassy women going, we watched the 1972 screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc?, last night with our trusty On Demand movie feature. This movie had another unbelievable cast – Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, Madeline Kahn (in her first movie role), and some character actor favorites of mine like Kenneth Mars, Randy Quaid and Emmet Walsh. Barbra Streisand makes one smart quip after another throughout the whole movie. I’m scratching my head to come up with examples of current movies like the ones we saw this weekend with women in strong comic leads.
So I laughed a lot. That beats crying thinking about the possible world-wide economic meltdown we seem to be on the brink of, or lamenting the deaths of all those Navy Seals killed on that helicopter in Afghanistan.
I will restrain myself and only make two political comments. First, the people who are blaming the economic problems on Obama are simply idiots. This is a worldwide crisis. Obama didn’t cause the problems in Greece or Ireland or Spain or Portugal. I saw an editorial from the state-run Chinese newspaper this morning which talked about the solutions to the US economic problems in words that sounded exactly like a Tea Party speech. Think about that for a moment.
Second, I heard the commander of our forces in Afghanistan talking about the Navy Seals that died and calling them true heroes that died in the defense of liberty. There is no question about the courage of these men. But I’m sorry; I fail to see what relationship there is between the hunt for Muslims in Afghanistan and liberty. I really don‘t.
Okay, I can’t help myself – I’m going to say one more thing. Few people are connecting the two stories. They are integrally related. Over the past decade the United States has spent over a trillion dollars on two wars we have had no intention to finance. We haven’t sold war bonds or initiated a special tax to fund the war on terror. We simply borrowed money (from the Chinese) to do it. Again, Obama didn’t start this. He’s slowly stopping it, and while the pace of our exit from the Middle East frustrates me, it is a sign that Obama is more of a pragmatic moderate than the wild liberal his political opponents make him out to be. The whole mess is extremely depressing.
I was about to say I’m so sick of it I’m ready for the world to be run by wise-cracking women, but then you might think I support Michelle Bachman or Sarah Palin. No, no, no. Unlike them, Lucy’s ego had limits. She understood she was acting and was content ruling network television for a couple of decades. God help us if either Bachman or Palin become President. There won’t be anything funny about it.
Hundreds of people dressed as Lucy gathered in her hometown of Jamestown, New York, in an attempt to set a world record for the most Lucille Ball imitators in one spot. I saw footage of overweight men dressed in polka dot dresses wearing red wigs and lipstick. It wasn’t pretty.
We marked Lucy’s birthday in a more sensible way by watching one of her old movies, made long before Lucy was “ditzy Lucy.” It was the 1937 comedy Stage Door, which was shown as part of Turner Classic Movies fine “Essentials” series every Saturday at 8pm. Lucy was 26-years-old when this movie was made, and she played a wise-cracking woman in a house full of wise-cracking women. Those were the days when Lucy was making movies with both the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers. Along with a bevy of great women actors like Eve Arden and Ann Miller, she supported Ginger Rogers and Katherine Hepburn in this one. Stage Door is the sort of movie sympathetic to women that just doesn’t get made anymore. It was a comedy with melodramatic overtones about how hard it was for young women to break into the theatre. All the women lived in a boarding house for aspiring actresses called “The Footlights Club.” It was written by two giants – Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman. See it if you ever get a chance.
Just to keep our theme of sassy women going, we watched the 1972 screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc?, last night with our trusty On Demand movie feature. This movie had another unbelievable cast – Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, Madeline Kahn (in her first movie role), and some character actor favorites of mine like Kenneth Mars, Randy Quaid and Emmet Walsh. Barbra Streisand makes one smart quip after another throughout the whole movie. I’m scratching my head to come up with examples of current movies like the ones we saw this weekend with women in strong comic leads.
So I laughed a lot. That beats crying thinking about the possible world-wide economic meltdown we seem to be on the brink of, or lamenting the deaths of all those Navy Seals killed on that helicopter in Afghanistan.
I will restrain myself and only make two political comments. First, the people who are blaming the economic problems on Obama are simply idiots. This is a worldwide crisis. Obama didn’t cause the problems in Greece or Ireland or Spain or Portugal. I saw an editorial from the state-run Chinese newspaper this morning which talked about the solutions to the US economic problems in words that sounded exactly like a Tea Party speech. Think about that for a moment.
Second, I heard the commander of our forces in Afghanistan talking about the Navy Seals that died and calling them true heroes that died in the defense of liberty. There is no question about the courage of these men. But I’m sorry; I fail to see what relationship there is between the hunt for Muslims in Afghanistan and liberty. I really don‘t.
Okay, I can’t help myself – I’m going to say one more thing. Few people are connecting the two stories. They are integrally related. Over the past decade the United States has spent over a trillion dollars on two wars we have had no intention to finance. We haven’t sold war bonds or initiated a special tax to fund the war on terror. We simply borrowed money (from the Chinese) to do it. Again, Obama didn’t start this. He’s slowly stopping it, and while the pace of our exit from the Middle East frustrates me, it is a sign that Obama is more of a pragmatic moderate than the wild liberal his political opponents make him out to be. The whole mess is extremely depressing.
I was about to say I’m so sick of it I’m ready for the world to be run by wise-cracking women, but then you might think I support Michelle Bachman or Sarah Palin. No, no, no. Unlike them, Lucy’s ego had limits. She understood she was acting and was content ruling network television for a couple of decades. God help us if either Bachman or Palin become President. There won’t be anything funny about it.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Stanley, Did You Really Say That?
How much should a memoirist tell?
I remember Jennifer Holberg asking that question to Rhoda Janzen and Thomas Lynch at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing last year. Janzen, author of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, spoke sadly about how her portrayals of some family members had caused lots of pain. Lynch, the funeral director-poet-essayist best known for The Undertaking, said he waits for people to die before writing about them (which only seems fitting for a man in his line of work) and has managed to avoid stepping on toes.
I just finished reading Hannah’s Child: A Theologian's Memoir by Stanley Hauerwas. Stanley, who was named “America’s Best Theologian by Time magazine in 2001, has long had a reputation for being provocative. As a result of his philosophical and theological convictions about honesty, he’s written a bracing memoir unlike any I’ve ever read. Consider these lines:
“Mother was a pain in the ass.”
“Dick’s way of going about things made it appear that his true interest was in being the first president of Roman Catholicism in America.”
“Dennis had nothing he wanted to do other than be the dean.”
It is compelling reading as he details his first wife’s mental illness or tells the inside story of faculty battles at Notre Dame and Duke, but at times I felt like I was slowing down to gawk at a traffic accident. What is the difference between transparency and too much information? Or, as Hauerwas himself puts it on the last page of the book, “between a loving but honest description and cruelty?”
One of the things I learned about Hauerwas is that he came from a long line of bricklayers and joined his father “on the job” when he was seven or eight years old. It’s a long way from being a poor bricklayer in Texas to places like Yale and Duke, and the pages of Time magazine. In previous encounters with Hauerwas, I've felt like he had a chip on his shoulder, and now that I know his story I have a better sense of the complex forces that drive him.
He owes a great deal to Ernest Hemingway, both stylistically, for his staccato sentences (“Paula is a great reader. Much of the time we share is spent reading. We both love murder mysteries.”) and his macho manner. Stanley is without a doubt combative, which seems like an odd thing to say about a pacifist. He is also funny, brilliant, complex, engaging, overbearing (after all, the preface is called “On Being Stanley Hauerwas”) and someone who has been right on just about every major issue of our time. For example, in Time in 2003 he wrote this about the Iraq War, “Bush’s religious rhetoric … tempts us to confuse Christianity with America.”
I recommend the book, if you are interested in theology and what makes an uncompromising theologian tick. But every time you cringe, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I remember Jennifer Holberg asking that question to Rhoda Janzen and Thomas Lynch at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing last year. Janzen, author of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, spoke sadly about how her portrayals of some family members had caused lots of pain. Lynch, the funeral director-poet-essayist best known for The Undertaking, said he waits for people to die before writing about them (which only seems fitting for a man in his line of work) and has managed to avoid stepping on toes.
I just finished reading Hannah’s Child: A Theologian's Memoir by Stanley Hauerwas. Stanley, who was named “America’s Best Theologian by Time magazine in 2001, has long had a reputation for being provocative. As a result of his philosophical and theological convictions about honesty, he’s written a bracing memoir unlike any I’ve ever read. Consider these lines:
“Mother was a pain in the ass.”
“Dick’s way of going about things made it appear that his true interest was in being the first president of Roman Catholicism in America.”
“Dennis had nothing he wanted to do other than be the dean.”
It is compelling reading as he details his first wife’s mental illness or tells the inside story of faculty battles at Notre Dame and Duke, but at times I felt like I was slowing down to gawk at a traffic accident. What is the difference between transparency and too much information? Or, as Hauerwas himself puts it on the last page of the book, “between a loving but honest description and cruelty?”
One of the things I learned about Hauerwas is that he came from a long line of bricklayers and joined his father “on the job” when he was seven or eight years old. It’s a long way from being a poor bricklayer in Texas to places like Yale and Duke, and the pages of Time magazine. In previous encounters with Hauerwas, I've felt like he had a chip on his shoulder, and now that I know his story I have a better sense of the complex forces that drive him.
He owes a great deal to Ernest Hemingway, both stylistically, for his staccato sentences (“Paula is a great reader. Much of the time we share is spent reading. We both love murder mysteries.”) and his macho manner. Stanley is without a doubt combative, which seems like an odd thing to say about a pacifist. He is also funny, brilliant, complex, engaging, overbearing (after all, the preface is called “On Being Stanley Hauerwas”) and someone who has been right on just about every major issue of our time. For example, in Time in 2003 he wrote this about the Iraq War, “Bush’s religious rhetoric … tempts us to confuse Christianity with America.”
I recommend the book, if you are interested in theology and what makes an uncompromising theologian tick. But every time you cringe, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Missing Mary
When you are an unknown blogger like me, the loss of a faithful follower is devastating. I’m mourning the passing of Mary DeYoung, a friend for at least 25 years, who died last Monday following a brief battle with cancer. Mary followed the blog I did when we lived overseas and was overjoyed when I started this new blog. She was a frequent commenter who would also unabashedly correct my grammar via personal notes. I’m not sure if she ever fully believed my explanations that they were “just typos.” She sent me about three paragraphs in May on the difference between “its” and “it’s,” which I kept pleading I already knew. Our last correspondence was on June 21st. Unbeknownst to me, she also had a biopsy that day.
Her funeral last Saturday was the epitome of the oxymoron “good funeral.” It was attended by hundreds of people, which gave an indication of how beloved Mary was. The messages and remembrances were touching, the music was great, and I felt honored to be there.
Here’s one of my favorite stories about Mary. I’d known her for years and Gretchen and I had even spent a week in Minnesota together with Mary and her husband Steve when this happened. I used to teach a class in the religion department at Hope College. It was usually in the same room in the same building – which I always thought of as the “humanities” building since it housed the religion, English and history departments. Then one year I was given a new classroom in a building that housed the math department. On the first day of class I was wandering through the building trying to find the right room when I saw Mary sitting in an office.
“What are you doing here, Mary?” I asked.
“This is my office,” she said. And indeed, it did look like her office. Not only was she in it, but there were pictures of her husband and kids on the wall.
But I was puzzled. “Why is this your office?” I asked stupidly. Now I knew in the back of my head that Mary did something with math but I wasn’t sure what it was.
“This is where the math department has their offices,” she said.
Oh. At that point I’d known her for six or seven years. She’d been a professor of math at Hope College all that time. (All told she spent 29 years on the Hope math faculty.) Apparently, that had never come up between us.
Now if I were a math professor everyone I met would be informed of that fact within the first three minutes of knowing me. I like to establish my intellectual superiority. Not so Mary. Teaching was one of the things she did, but not the only one. It was possible to know her and experience the richness of her life without having that fact straight. We went to church together, had a lot of the same friends, went to parties together, served on boards together, and many, many other things. She had a great spirit and zest for life. And she knew more math than I ever, ever imagined.
Mary DeYoung was 58 years old when she died. I, and countless others, miss her.
Her funeral last Saturday was the epitome of the oxymoron “good funeral.” It was attended by hundreds of people, which gave an indication of how beloved Mary was. The messages and remembrances were touching, the music was great, and I felt honored to be there.
Here’s one of my favorite stories about Mary. I’d known her for years and Gretchen and I had even spent a week in Minnesota together with Mary and her husband Steve when this happened. I used to teach a class in the religion department at Hope College. It was usually in the same room in the same building – which I always thought of as the “humanities” building since it housed the religion, English and history departments. Then one year I was given a new classroom in a building that housed the math department. On the first day of class I was wandering through the building trying to find the right room when I saw Mary sitting in an office.
“What are you doing here, Mary?” I asked.
“This is my office,” she said. And indeed, it did look like her office. Not only was she in it, but there were pictures of her husband and kids on the wall.
But I was puzzled. “Why is this your office?” I asked stupidly. Now I knew in the back of my head that Mary did something with math but I wasn’t sure what it was.
“This is where the math department has their offices,” she said.
Oh. At that point I’d known her for six or seven years. She’d been a professor of math at Hope College all that time. (All told she spent 29 years on the Hope math faculty.) Apparently, that had never come up between us.
Now if I were a math professor everyone I met would be informed of that fact within the first three minutes of knowing me. I like to establish my intellectual superiority. Not so Mary. Teaching was one of the things she did, but not the only one. It was possible to know her and experience the richness of her life without having that fact straight. We went to church together, had a lot of the same friends, went to parties together, served on boards together, and many, many other things. She had a great spirit and zest for life. And she knew more math than I ever, ever imagined.
Mary DeYoung was 58 years old when she died. I, and countless others, miss her.
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