‘You've gotta thank the Lord, right? Do you thank the Lord for that split-second decision?’

‘I – I’m actually an atheist,’ Vitsmun replies.

Noticeably tripped-up, Blitzer quickly back-pedalled and offered her congratulations for making the decision herself which saved her and her child’s lives. Rather than soap-box, or get offended, or even slighted – Vitsmun graciously extended the following: ‘We are here, and I don’t blame anyone for thanking the Lord.’

This interaction can stand as representative of many things. That journalists ‘should' keep their own worldview out of reporting. That they ‘should’ check their assumptions at the door. That theonormative assumptions should be allowed – or – that theonormative assumptions need to be challenged at every turn.

Most importantly, in my perspective, is that this piece is a great example of authentic, interfaith dialogue. Both parties accurately, transparently, unapologetically, and non-evangelically represented their position. Neither – overtly – held aims or intents of offending or persuading the other. Blitzer didn’t badger Vitsmun into thanking – his signifier of – the Lord; Vitsmun didn’t harangue Blitzer for proffering a theonormative assumption.

Instead, both parties recognized the others’ position, whilst retaining their own. They dialogued around a centrally-connecting, human-impacting circumstance modelling grace, humility, and acceptance of divergence.

Perhaps this interaction will cause a stir in news broadcasting. Perhaps Blitzer will have a behind-the-doors conversation with his editor. Perhaps Vitsmun will suffer criticism or microaggressions by people in her community who may not have previously known of her atheist perspective.

For the time being, I would like to applaud both of them for their unapologetic – if unplanned – example of genial, interfaith dialogue.

Still, there is something to be said about the physical structure that becomes a home. It is a place where multiple people occupy tangible and emotional space together and are tied to it by common memories.

When you lose this place – the building that you call “home” – you lose the memories, the connections and comforts that are necessarily contained in that physical place. But you do not lose the inner space that is really home. In fact, you expand it to include people that were previously separated from you by walls and miles, and suddenly thousands of people are occupying that space with you.

For most of us, the inner home that is with you no matter where you are is linked to a physical, geographical place. It is where you took your first steps, laughed and celebrated with your family, and to where you always return when the world is too harsh, too demanding and too exhausting.

Oklahoma is my home. I was born and raised here, and my family currently lives in Norman, Oklahoma. Norman is about 5 miles south of Moore, Oklahoma on Interstate 35.

If you have been watching the news in the last 48 hours, you know that hundreds of families in Moore, Oklahoma lost their houses in an absolutely devastating storm on May 20^th, 2013. Many of those have lost those loved ones and their lives will never be the same again.

But, these people are not without a home. Oklahoma, the United States and the global community are coming together to give those in Moore, Shawnee, and all places in Oklahoma who have been affected by this most recent string of violent storms, a home while their houses are rebuilt and while their hearts are healing.

Please be a part of this effort. There are instructions below for ways to donate to the relief effort here in Oklahoma. But, please, remember that these families need more than basic supplies to survive this ordeal. They need a home.

Make room in that emotional space that you call home for these people who so desperately need to be connected, to be listened to and understood, who need someone to hold them while they cry and most of all, who need to know that they have a home.

How to help:

-          Visit www.redcross.org or text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 to the relief effort.

-          Text STORM to 80888 to donate $10 to the Salvation Army relief effort.

-          If you are in Oklahoma, please make donations of diapers, clothes, packaged foods and bottled water to your local Food Bank, Salvation Army or RedCross donation center. Also, the University of Oklahoma is accepting similar donations for those in their housing facilities.

What is "the matrix?"

The matrix is the space that we as humans develop culturally. We are all human social beings, we are born into community, a world that exists beyond us, yet we influence it as we choose. The matrix is inescapable. To exist in isolation biologically the human would die off. To exist in isolation psychologically the human would go insane. Consider for instance that the harshest punishment that the United States judicial system utilizes next to the death penalty is solitary confinement. If you want to get just a glimpse of the effects and trauma that solitary confinement has for the human being, watch the National Geographic documentary "Solitary Confinement." To exist in isolation socially makes the human socially dysfunctional. Thus, we cannot escape community and continue to exist or maintain any level of health, therefore it becomes paramount to consider who we are culturally as we practice "faith." The matrix is our culture, we are bound to it, can be bound by it and from second by second we think from our cultural "lens."

Every morning no matter where we are on the planet we each get up and even when we have 20/20 vision we each put on our cultural eyeglasses. The matrix is our cultural thinking that then directs our actions. The matrix is our mind and the "eyes" that we culturally see the world through.

(Utilized with permission: See www.SeniorLiving.org )

Culture is composed of a variety of things, including the foods we eat, style of dress, language, norms, values and most importantly our way of thinking. Our sociocultural thinking is termed "worldview systems." Worldviews are our cultural "philosophies" or theories of existence. They are the lenses we use to make sense of the everyday world.

So let's pretend. Pretend we go back to antiquity and we are philosophers sitting on a mountain and we are considering our connection to the stars, contemplating what is "truth", how to explain the unseen, and ultimately we consider how we should interact with each other on a day-to-day basis. These thoughts and ideas all overlap and they must reinforce each other or the entire cultural philosophy makes no sense. This pretending is the "thinking" of worldview systems and every minute of every second we take for granted that what we know, believe, and think is cultural; not universal as we all forget until we typically come into contact with someone who culturally thinks differently than us.

We need to dig deeper, continuing to ask more fully "what is culture?" and "what are worldviews?"

What you should understand is that the "African worldview" does not mean every person born on the continent of Africa believes and thinks this way, rather it is the agreed-upon dominant historical interpretations that African Studies and Black Studies have collectively presented as an historical ethos that weaves through modern day African cultures. The most amazing thing about cultural thinking is that it is NOT dictated by race, gender, sexual orientation, political position, social status, or geographic location. So, you could be born in America, Africa, Peru, Europe or Asia and think colonial or African or somewhere in between. Most world cultures follow dimensions of the African worldview, while the Colonial worldview is clearly the dominant way of thinking nationally and internationally. Who is free in their mind? Worldviews weave through and construct our everyday thoughts, interactions, perceptions of truth and reality and how we should treat "others." Therefore, this matters very much when it comes to theological interpretations of ethics.

What is theology?

Theology: theos + logos = God talk

>language or reasoning about God
>thinking, speaking and writing about God
>discourse about God, the Christian life and human life in the Church
>Disciplined reflection and interpretation of all reality in light of the main beliefs, values and symbols of the Christian community

To think theologically is to think critically utilizing a religious paradigm in making a social analysis or critique of human, thought or behavior. Therefore, in order to really do any adequate exegesis one must be awakened to their own cultural worldview as these shape and direct human thought and behavior and are the lens with which we interpret theology. In order to "be" theological one is attempting to understand the "mind of God." In order to understand the mind of God we must first understand the mind we've taken in from the world as this impacts how we interpret and ultimately see God.

How to do theological reflection?

Theological reflection is characterized by being rooted in sacred canon and Spirit centered, as well it takes on a cyclical nature of read/reflect; listen/reflect; dialog/reflect; research/reflect; write/reflect. Worldview systems impact what we see, hear, say, understand and argue. Thus, to do theological reflection one must understand the history of their own cultural thinking. More than that, we can clearly see that the Colonial worldview does not view the universe as composed of Spirit only measurable matter that originates from an explosion that mathematically aligned our solar system. Therefore, if one is operating from a colonial worldview where the structure of the universe is inherently divided and in conflict where only the fittest survive, and truth has to be measured while our day-to-day interactions suggest isolation from "other" is life-- this clearly impacts Biblical interpretion. The Bible which is itself in clear contrast to all of these colonial positions and with the cyclical nature of theological reflection undoubtably then the exegetical summary would look quite different from an African worldview. The African worldview has often been dubbed "backward" "uncivilized" "not modern" when in reality it is the starkest polarity to colonialism where all other cultures fall onto the spectrum between the poles. Thus culture in the form of our thinking expressed through our worldview lenses on a daily basis shape and impact our theological reflections and this is "the matrix."

Ethical implications of cultural thinking?

I recently completed an ethics course and I went into the course asking the question, “What does it mean to be a Christian ethically?” I spent the entire semester pondering, analyzing and creating a response. I conclude that “to be” a Christian ethically is to love and seek justice.

Love and justice are social creations and products of our cultural worldview systems. Again, if we pretend we are on that mountain as philosophers from another time and we are creating what it means "to love" and "do justice" first as a thought, a perception shaped by our position cosmologically, epistemologically, ontologically and axiologically then perhaps we get out of the mindset "that's just the way it is." We humans decide what and how to love and do justice, some seek religious interpretations in order to consider how God views love and justice ethically. I have been lecturing and teaching at the university level on worldviews since 2005, thus as I created this analysis I was operating from an African worldview, yet I never state it; however once you can "see" the matrix it becomes clear.

Here is my analysis and argument in its entirety.

The ethical implications of cultural thinking is that if we have been successfully colonized and this shapes, shades and overshadows interpretations of what it means “to be” a Christian ethically, then are we Christian? This question of identity is tantamount to future social change. We are operating on a mass scale in the roles of oppressor and oppressed; our daily society of gun violence, domestic violence, terrorism and bullying in America exemplify what we think culturally and ethically. My own father is in his late 60's and the Civil Rights Act did not pass until he was 19 years old. My grandmother, who was my babysitter and closest friend until I was 14 years old worked her entire life in rural Mississippi as a sharecropper on Mr. Griffin's farm making $19/bail with NO medical or retirement for a life of hard labor. She passed the test to become a school teacher even with never having completed more than elementary education, yet because she could not buy the books for her classroom and students she could not teach and she worked the farm until 1964 when she snuck away in the night with her children to Chicago. My father went to all segregated schools his entire life, he worked as a sharecropper beginning when he was six years old and then started plowing when he was nine and during crop season none of the children could attend school. All of my grandmothers children have been diagnosed with forms of lung cancer, lung disease and pneumonia that has been traced to the pesticides in the fields that they had to work as children. My father is a part of the largest generation in American history, the Baby Boom generation. By all American standards my brilliant, powerful father has the "American Dream" and as the first generation of my family off the plantation, I see that many structures from this same generation are operating in a mindset that can no longer be hidden. This is "the matrix."

Christians need to minimally be asking if we think like Christ, talk like Christ, behave like Christ and ethically live in community like Christ. Our faith commands us to transcend and take off culture to take on the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:15-16). I argue this is an ethic of love and justice that transcends the matrix of cultural worldviews that substantiates and gives voice to my family and others oppressed by social reality.

Are you colonized? Do you live in a simulated reality? No matter what is hidden; I see your thoughts, I see the history of your thoughts, do you?

This is the Theological Matrix: Worldviews Exposed.

“On the Spiritual Road: Seeking Faith and Religion in the United States” is an exciting new Interfaith project that has started in Rochester, NY and may be coming to a city near you. Andrew Harrison is traveling the United States looking to interview people of different faiths. His goal is to learn about 12 religions and then humanize each of them. He wants to know how people chose their religion, what they love most about it, and how they practice their faith in today’s society.

“On the Spiritual Road” is focusing on the following faiths/religions:

The end result of Andrew’s interviews is going to be a bookumentary (printed book augmented by online videos). Here is an overview video of “On the Spiritual Road,” (3:09).

In an email to us, Andrew said, “I’ve conducted 26 interviews so far. They’ve changed my life.”

Here is a sample of some of the people he’s talked with: A Hindu professor of physics and humanities, an excommunicated (but still practicing) Catholic priest, a Muslim whose father is an Imam and grandmother and uncle are preachers, a Mormon stake president (regional head), a Buddhist CEO, a Chabad Rabbi, a southern Baptist turned Catholic, Born Again’s, a professor of biblical interpretation, a 29-year-old female Baptist pastor, a Bahai leader and two atheists.

Andrew is not a religious scholar or leader, he is a writer, business person and someone looking for the right religious fit. He was born and raised Catholic, migrated to SBNR, but now calls himself a Seeker.

Andrew is also new to the world of Interfaith. He described, “I didn’t know my journey was an Interfaith one until I was introduced to the term a few months ago. It spoke to me then and hasn’t quieted down since. Interfaith is now part of who I am. Society and the world need Interfaith more than ever. I know there are a lot of people with similar questions to mine. I hope my journey can help add a unique flavor and awareness to the Interfaith dialogue.”

Andrew is looking to the Interfaith community for help. He hopes we can connect him to potential interviewees as well as to places he can experience religious traditions. Please help spread the word.

For more information:

www.iamontheroad.com

http://youtu.be/71bTRVuWX54

https://www.facebook.com/OnTheSpiritualRoad

@AndrewOntheRoad

andrew@iamontheroad.com

I come from a line of Christian Scientists, educated people devoted to the art of learning, whose hearts and imaginations are fed by angelic ideas, who are restored to health and wholeness through the spiritual practice of learning. Of course, not only Christian Scientists access the divine via the portal of the intellect. The heritage of growth through learning, and liberation through education, is upheld by Jesuits, Orthodox Jews, swamis and gurus, poets and scholars, and anyone who embarks courageously on immersion into a new discipline. Children, whose biological development keeps rapid pace with their cognitive burgeoning, are greeted by angels on every horizon.

I am a PhD student, a professional learner. Presently I am preparing for comprehensive exams. Naturally, the task of preparing for comps is accompanied by great trepidation. It is the time at which one is asked to master the literature and historical lineage of their field of study in order to be able to teach it to undergraduates and to more incisive graduate students, and to be able to engage with fellow field specialists about new research and emerging methods for conceiving of, connecting, and conveying information within and beyond the field. The heritage of the academic profession is to be encyclopedic about one's field of study, and to be able to constellate ideas and explications into related clusters. These constellations amass into a celestial canopy of ideas, the effulgent latticework that is your field of study. In other words, you have to get the lay of the land and to be able to name the giants whose shoulders you stand upon.

The reason this task is laden with such trepidation has to do with the enormous amount of literature that beleaguers virtually every academic discipline. All of this information has to be taken in and synthesized. The proof of the achievement is passage of a series of exams that ask you to demonstrate your grasp of up to 210 academic treatises relevant to your field. Even if you aren't particularly interested in or compliant with certain arguments that have been made, if they have been made in the neighborhood of your topic, you need to be conversant on them. It is part of the vocation. So people like me are asked to read about a book a day every day for about nine or twelve months, and to reintegrate other pertinent literature read throughout graduate and perhaps undergraduate coursework.

This is of course an arduous undertaking. I have found that it is, to my surprise, possible to read a book a day, although the more appropriate term might be "reading," these big juicy air quotes denoting a selective and efficient mode of input that depends heavily on introductions, conclusions, indexes, chapter headings, and other scholars' reviews and summaries of the text.

The greatest challenge of this task is structuring the input marathon so it is sustainable and retainable. I have long been a binge-worker, working until collapse until catatonia subsides and I do it again. So the attempt to discipline myself for consistent input has released my beastly wild child. My greatest enemy is not the magnitude of literature to intake, nor is it the difficulty level of these dense texts, though these factors are of course daunting. What I fight with every single day is simply the charge to wake up at the same hour, to sit and read for several more, to feed and exercise and bathe myself, to read some more, and then to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Consistency is the hobgoblin of my monstrous little mind, which wants to monkey around, climb the walls, multitask uselessly, check Facebook, write unnecessary emails, wander around my apartment in pointless loops, stare into the bowels of the refrigerator, and gaze at my toes.

The last time I felt like this I was living at a Benedictine monastery for three months. I found that without the demands of meetings and constant social stimulation, I had a window to my anxieties and the whirligig pony ride psychcrunch of my mind that was, frankly, horrifying. I was amazed by the amount of trash floating around in the air of my imagination, much like the view outside Dorothy's Kansas window as her house floats through the tornado.

The thing is, Dorothy was looking out the window from inside the eye of the storm, from a room of relative tranquility. Hers was a steady gaze through the glass at the whirling world outside. That calm eye is also in my mind, and I learned to looked at my mind with that eye when I was at the monastery. As the days and weeks and months passed, I grew able to occupy that eye more readily. One day I realized I was becoming the eye. I was able to gaze out beyond the tornado without worrying I would get hit by a flying scarecrow. I knew I was not in danger.

Now charged with preparing for my comprehensive exams, I am tasked to find the eye and look tranquilly out onto the pages before me. When I manage to resist interacting with flying monkeys and broomsticks and toenail polish and tasty leftovers, I touch a certain tranquility, a receptivity to the many minds of my field of study.

I am an anthropologist of religion. So I am reading what social scientists have written about religious communities, rituals, and experiences for about the last 200 years. As the days, weeks, and months pass, I will myself to arise and go to the page and put my eye on it. Slowly the scarecrows cease their chatter. The more I read, the more I develop a cybernetic latticework of ideas and analyses and interpretations and narratives. I feel hot little buttons going off in my brain as ideas start to connect and citations start to sprout. I see the family tree of social scientists unfurling: the ancestors, the elders, the old brigade, the current in-crowd, the ingenues.

I know that Sigmund Freud saw religion as the universal obsessional neurosis, a projection of the need for a father figure who provides structure and protection, and for a nurturing mother who provides a familiar hearth and a warm breast. I know that Karl Marx saw religion as upholding the ideology of the ruling class, a lie about eternal rewards that kept the little people working even though they were totally alienated from the products of their own hard labor. I know that about a century later a sociologist named Peter Berger wrote that reality is a social construction, and most of the life-ways we take for granted emerge from a fundamentally arbitrary mass of variables that have been sculpted through political, economic, linguistic, ecological and biological processes into the forms we take as facts today. I know that anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has found a way to not only conduct but to clearly explain a complex study on the religious experiences and prayer lives of American evangelical communities, and how a nuanced personal relationship with God over time changes response and bias tendencies in the human brain.

As I read on, arguments about religion seem laden with heritages, classifications, and contradictions. Within a few sentences I can identify whether a person thinks about religion theologically, anthropologically, biologically, philosophically, historically, phenomenologically, sociologically, scientifically, self-consciously, prayerfully, habitually, traditionally, economically, politically, personally, critically, or constructively. Usually these adverbs come in combinations. They are often quite identifiable and traceable.

It is pretty cool to develop such classifying competencies, to start to see the underlying patterns and matrices in arguments and narratives, to be able to trace leaves to branches to roots. I am getting the lay of the land, slowly and surely. I see Van Gennep talk to Durkheim, and I see Turner expand on Van Gennep. I see Ammerman invoke Weber, and I see Bender invoke Ammerman. I see E. Evans-Pritchard savage the just-so theories of Freud while admitting their creativity. I see Margaret Mead illuminating anthropological method in her day and later, decades after her death, lambasted for enhancing her data, generating new standards for methodological stringency even after death. Human thought is no isolated process; it is a conversation. Nobody is in this conversation alone. They all speak to each other across the decades and centuries. Human thought bears a radiant connective tissue, pulsing with tension and unity.

Strangely enough, this was almost exactly my experience when I was at the Benedictine monastery years ago. I encountered the connectivity of all life, intersecting by sentience and sensation, suffering together, harmonious and destructive, contradicting and borrowing from each other, deeply interdependent. The leaves and branches and roots I followed then were my own restless mental meanderings, my psychological quirks and pathologies. I followed them down to the ground of my being (citation: Paul Tillich). What was at the ground? The source of life. An indivisible wholeness. Inimitable, imperturbable unity. The eye of the eye.

I cannot yet name the ground of the social science of religion. Maybe it is curiosity; maybe it is control; maybe it is a kaleidoscopic system of emotion, bodies, logic, and social groups, with a ground as elusive and yet undeniable as the ground of my being. Of course, my reading and learning about religion will continue long after my comps, and this tree of knowledge will continue to flourish and bloom and sprout and sway in the bluster of new information. But the experience of taking in all this literature has felt something like springtime inside. The tree that is growing in my brain has a paint-by-numbers color scheme, and as time passes I can see and name the numbers and I know who inscribed which numbers where and what thinking-family they hail from. My brain plastically absorbs and synthesizes new information and connections, and it feels like sun landing on dewdrops on leaves. I literally feel lit-up inside my head. It is really cool. Yes: preparing for comprehensives exams is really cool.

Lots of people told me that preparing for comps would be torture. Lots of people told me that comps are the ball and chain of graduate school and that they are a soul-sucking stress-fest of doom.

Horror story not true. It's a rigorous undertaking to be sure. Almost every single day I have to torture and punish and discipline myself (citation: Foucault) to sit down and read. After the daily explosive wrestling match with my beastly little wrigglemonkey, I surrender. I sit down, and the lights start to light up. The dewdrops heat up. I start to ride my melt. Bronislaw Malinowski kicks Max Weber's ass for being an armchair anthropologist, and E. Evans-Pritchard does the same to Durkheim (also snarling at Malinowski for pioneering fieldwork methods but not theorizing well). Gananathe Obeyesekere salvages Freud's dream symbols to understand Hindu ecstasy, and Talal Asad corrects Wilfred Cantwell Smith's tendency to ignore ritual practices and secularism when attempting to define Religion. Ghosts yodel at each other across parallel universes through the bullhorn of the page. It is a grand opera.

I resist my seat in the audience out of defiant habit but then succumb to the show. There is really no way around mastering the literature of a field other than to stuff it in your brain as quickly as possible. And lest we forget, this stuff is interesting. I am obsessed with these ideas and I always have been. And now I am collecting and sorting (citation: Mary Douglas) the citations to support my obsession.

If angels are ideas, if they are seeds for expanded consciousness, then teachers and books and comprehensive exams are the sacred ground of revelation. Every now and then I fall out of my eye and back into the storm, where I get whacked by a few scarecrows and chase the monkey around the tree for a few hours. But then I climb back into the blustering branches and keep reading. After all, I have a big exam coming up in late May. Leftovers and toenail polish can't help me now.

OFFENSE

Jesus was most recently portrayed in celluloid form by a Portuguese model with great hair. I’m talking about The Bible, a miniseries broadcast on The History Channel. In it we learn that Jesus was gentle and strong; that Jews really care about rules; that God exists and is good; that religion is beautiful. This is the right way for religious images to appear on screen.

Whichever films veer from such portrayals are proclaimed offensive. Blasphemous. They are threatening somehow. And the people who feel so offended and threatened--what do they do? Well, they revert back to the Hammurabic code, a thoughtless legalism, and they return threat with threat.

That’s what happened to Monty Python’s Life of Brian. You’ll see--this movie is full of outrageous mockeries of religion, both Christian and Jewish--of the nature of human beings to be like lemmings, blindly attaching themselves to petty assessments of the miraculous, so desperate for leadership that they clamor around the nearest fellow, overlooking inconsistencies in their system, rationalizing challenges away. In Monty Python’s Life of Brian this is quite literal--Brian is born next door to Jesus, in the neighboring manger. He is indeed the nearest fellow to Jesus. But he is mislabeled as the Messiah. Hilarity ensues.

Causing religious uproar is a brilliant marketing strategy for a film: there is a strong positive correlation between successful religious offense and the buzz generated about a particular production.  Offense is Life of Brian’s badge of honor: in the 1990 book A Brief History of Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship and the Satanic Verses, mostly focusing on the controversy of Salman Rushdie’s novel, Richard Webster takes time to address Life of Brian. The author writes:

internalised censorship played a significant role in the handling of Monty Python's Life of Brian. … As a satire on religion, this film might well be considered a rather slight production. As blasphemy it was, even in its original version, extremely mild. Yet the film was surrounded from its inception by intense anxiety, in some quarters of the Establishment, about the offense it might cause....the film was shunned by the BBC and ITV, who declined to show it for fear of offending Christians in this country.

Religious people do funny things--elaborate outfits, strange movements, nonsensical dietary restrictions. In general, as a group, they are easy to make fun of. They are also often really easy to offend, and they can also react to being offended in a way that doesn’t turn out well for anyone. I remember when I was studying religion in a Christian context and I used to send up a joke about Mormon underwear, Sikh underwear, terrible Jewish food, or most of all a joke about Jesus, people would say: "Don’t take away my Jesus!” Wow. You think I can take away your Jesus? If this liberal, Reform Californian Jewish Jew-Bu can take away your Jesus, I suggest you reassess whether you had Jesus to begin with! I should not be able to take away your Jesus. Or your Mohammed. Or your Joseph Smith, or your Torah, or your Buddha.

The makers of Life of Brian felt the same way. They were a little bemused, and perhaps confused amongst themselves, about the accusations of heresy.  In Monty Python Live at Aspen (1998) Terry Jones says, “I think the film is heretical, but it’s not blasphemous.” Eric Idle can be heard to concur, adding, “It’s a heresy.” However, John Cleese says, “I don’t think it’s a heresy. It’s making fun of the way that people misunderstand the teaching.” Jones responds, “Of course it’s a heresy, John! It's attacking the Church! And that has to be heretical.” Cleese replies, “No, it's not attacking the Church, necessarily. It's about people who cannot agree with each other.” In a later interview Jones said the film “isn’t blasphemous because it doesn’t touch on belief at all. It is heretical, because it touches on dogma and the interpretation of belief, rather than belief itself.”

The filmmakers are professed non-believers. Who knows what that means--presumably they believe in gravity and the laws of economics, which some people name as God, as in the God of universal constants and the structures of being, with no inherent moral orientation. But in any case the filmmakers of Life of Brian are not professed Christians. Unless you’re inside the Christian conception of God you can’t really discern whether you’re lampooning it or not, which might explain their confusion as to whether and exactly what kind of offense they might have achieved. In any case, the offense is light. This film is a precursor to modern day Southpark, the champion of equal opportunity offense. By today’s standards Life of Brian’s religious offense is quite mild--in 2009 local bans on showing the movie in the British Isles were lifted. Why are our standards for being offended changing? Are we taking ourselves less seriously? Developing some personal resilience? Relaxing the so-called boundary between the sacred and the profane? Getting a little more confident about the Jesus that nobody in the world can take away? It’s an optimistic read. But I like it.

The irony is that this film is made more in the rebellious spirit of Jesus than the holyrollers who supposedly protect gentle Jesus. This film overturns the moneychangers' tables. In mocking shallow, reactionary, religious preciousness it forces people to figure out if their faith is worth more than puffery, sentiment, and self-justifying rationalization. We must forgive the offended, for they know not what they do.  Monty Python cast member Eric Idle later said in the Python’s Autobiography about Jesus, “He’s not particularly funny, what he’s saying isn’t mockable, it’s very decent stuff….” See--the Python crew are the antiestablishment revolutionaries, pushing back against mechanistic, kneejerk religious sentimentalism. We should be applauding their religiousness. They are better Christians than their Christian detractors. They had courage, and they had a grand goal (make the people laugh! and maybe think a bit!), and they execute it with utter commitment because that is the only way it will work, detractors be damned. Sounds like Jesus to me.

You think Jesus was a blond, blue-eyed gentle lamb? Or a Zombie?

Do you think that’s funny? Or are you very offended?

Being offended can be painful--it’s a protective reaction, an instinctive defense of something precious to us. That reactivity exposes a deeper vulnerability. That vulnerability is a great part of you, and I want to encourage it. But I also see offense as an opportunity. An opportunity to question what it is inside you that has been threatened, that is so precious and so in need of your defense. Because if you really think about it, it might not need your defense. Chances are you aren’t holding it up and sustaining it--it might actually be holding you up and sustaining you.

So play a little. Get offended. Follow that impulse to your soft belly and let it be a clue to you about what exactly is so darn precious that you’re willing to get red-faced and publicly principled about. And think about the fact that Jesus endured unthinkable torture, unbearable betrayal, crushing disappointment in his friends and religious peers--all without getting huffy and prissy and schoolmarmish. All because his feet were planted on the ground of his being and he was living and breathing in a truth that his whole being confirmed for him. He was doing the Right Thing, and that solid certainty kept his head held high, never reacting to offense, until finally his quiet confidence shamed his offenders for millennia. Yes, it is absurd. And once you understand it nobody can take it away from you, even by laughing at it. Maybe finding that part of you will help you take yourself less seriously, enough so you can laugh right back.

I’m a Jew--well, JewISH--and you have probably sensed by now that I’m unlikely to be religiously offended (I have other insecurities that cannot withstand a healthy ribbing). I am more interested in the conception of God that leads to the creative engagement of filmmaking, the rebellion inherent in satire, and in risking offense to a dominant paradigm that sometimes doesn’t seem to understand the complexity and self-contradictions of its own text.

I also lift up the Jewish value of makhloket--disagreement. There are two Jews and three opinions. We have two different positions on something between us? Great. Now we get to talk about it, fight about it, drop our weird social boundaries of propriety, and engage about something we feel strongly about. The disagreement, if wielded constructively, can lead to new creation. Can lead to a third way, to a relationship. And that is what is happening when we watch Life of Brian and maybe fight about it or feel uncomfortable or feel proud of the filmmakers and a little nervously envious that we didn’t make this movie.

This movie gets us talking and it provides grounds for a relationship. When you watch it (you really should, it's fantastic), pay attention to your quiet twinges of offense or your petty grievances: these are clues to your values, to your precious soft spots, to what you hold most dear. These are the seeds of your art, and of your own life.

Life--that thing we're looking on the bright side of, and trying to laugh at.

*

Originally delivered to the BU Film Society as the Spring 2013 lecture on Religion and Film, at their screening of MONTY PYTHON’S THE LIFE OF BRIAN.

For many of us the word “sin” carries with it negative associations of a God whom we were taught to fear as children and whom we have spent our adulthoods struggling to redefine. “Sin” may conjure up images of the punishing old man in the sky who sees and judges our every move. Or perhaps it feels foreign, a word associated with religions not our own.

In spite of—or perhaps because of—the aversions or the dissonances this word brings up, it is upon us, today, to redefine what sin is and, therefore, determine how we wish to deal with it, both communally and individually. As Robert Frost wrote, in his A Servant to Servants, “The best way out is always through.” We must reckon with the sin until it is transformed. But when, and how, are we to do this? By examining a ritual from our past we can find direction for the future.

During the time when the Temple stood, on Yom Kippur the High priest used to perform a ceremony on behalf of the community to rid the people of their sin. In Leviticus (16:8-10, 21-22) we read that Aaron, the High Priest, would take two goats: one to be marked for a sin offering, the other, called the “goat for Azazel” designated for the “taking away for sin, that it would be sent away into the desert" (Lev 16:8-10). We read that Aaron would lay both of his hands on the goat and make a public declaration that all of the sins of Israel were placed on the goat’s head. It was thought that the goat then lifted up these sins of Israel and carried them off into the desert.

During Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we cast our sins into the desert, freeing ourselves from their oppressive burden, unshackling our hearts and minds so that we can begin the year anew. Six months later another new year arrives (Exodus 12:12). After a period of enslavement we find ourselves once again loosening our chains and opening our souls. As we move on the path of freedom—beginning with Pesach and culminating with Shavuot— we can still hear the waves crash behind us as we begin to tentatively make our way through the midbar (desert).

That same desert landscape that we once relegated our sins to is now the backdrop of our journey. The desert preserves, it desiccates and hones through its dry winds and parched air. The sins we left behind have been reduced to their essence by being in the desert, and we see them in clear relief, like bones of bodies left out in the sun. They have waited for us, here, to be reckoned with in a more elemental form. These months later we can see with more objective eyes and a more receptive heart. Sifting through our sins laid bare in front of us, our usual mechanisms of avoidance or denial fall flat. We feel the sorrow, sit with the pain, understand these months later the consequences our actions wrought, and, from there begin to rest into a place of compassion that allows the soul to breath and the heart to shift.

We look back on that which we released during the High Holy Days as we pick through the remnants of what we cast away. Now with some distance we can see more clearly, and can begin asking the difficult questions: Why? Why did we do what we did? What in our nature compels us year after year to commit the same sins in new forms? What psychological barriers exist that keep us locked in this seemingly inescapable cycle? How do we shift the most stubborn aspects of our consciousness such that we are freed? What support do we need? What definitions of self are no longer serving us and what support do we need in developing new ways of being in the world?

We cry and complain: we do not want to do this work. Why couldn’t we have stayed oblivious, shallow and unredeemed? It is through these seven contemplative weeks, counting the days of the Omer as we move through the desert, that we begin to heal our past. Encountering all of our own accumulated misdeeds allows us to become truly free, truly prepared to hear the message of Sinai on Shavuot. And what is this message of revelation? It is the wisdom that comes from the hard, trying work of facing the wrongs we have committed head on, and working with them until they—and we—are transformed.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

AUTHORITY

There is another hot issue in a discussion about religion and the Bible: the question of who has authority over the telling of a narrative? How about The Bible miniseries on The History Channel? It’s a very confident little piece, isn’t it? Let me tell you a little bit about the text it purports to be based off of, especially what the Christian production company might consider the most important installment of the miniseries--the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

The New Testament is comprised of a few categories--let’s call them the gospels and the letters. There are four gospels, four separate accounts of the ministry and eventual execution of Jesus, inscribed between 30-60 years after his death. They offer four competing narratives, and if you lay them in parallel formation they contradict each other blatantly. Between the four gospels you have four different scenes at the tomb when Jesus is discovered to have triumphed over death through resurrection. Which do the fillmmakers pick? Do they conflate all four? Are they noble to one? What is their agenda?

A certain kind of Christian production company is likely to ignore the Gospel of Mark, which ends with this line: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16:20, NRSV). Now that’s not very glorious. That’s the version Italian cinema will engage, and Pier Paolo Pasolini does it beautifully in his creepy, sorrowful portrayal of the Passion story. But production companies who want to glorify Jesus also don’t like the Gospel of Luke, where the Marys and Peter see two strange men, presumably angels, and yet again “they went home, amazed at what had happened” (Luke 24:12 NRSV). Even in the Gospel of John, supposedly the evangelical one, Mary runs into Jesus at the tomb, disguised as a gardener, and she flees. Let’s keep looking for glory. Finally! The Gospel of Matthew delivers! A big angel is chilling on the tombstone, proclaims the risen Lord, and the disciples meet Jesus on their way home! The Bible miniseries uses this version of the tomb scene.

So you see--there’s no authoritative tale of the Bible. Anyone who tells you so is selling you something. Anyone who makes a movie about it has to make these choices. But film is very powerful--remember Paul on his imaginary white horse on the road to Damascus?--and it seals in the minds of the viewers certain ideas about the way things went down that day at the tomb. That silver screen stabilizes in our collective imaginations the FACT--like Paul’s factual horse--of a resurrection. That miniseries confirms with utter confidence the particular details around the central message of Christianity--not just that there is a truth that is bigger than all of our miserable lives and insignificant deaths, but that it happened in such and such a specific way. Suddenly, with the authoritative portrayal of the resurrection, we have history’s greatest Zombie story sealed into the minds of many viewers who don’t care to actually read the Bible they hold up as representing historical truth. What’s true? Well, it’s in the Bible. Did you read it? No--this movie tells the story. Oh I see--and I bet you’ll use your own version of the Bible to do lots of other gruesome things, like deny civil rights to gay people.

Next up in this trinitarian series about religion and film: we return to Monty Python’s Life of Brian and try to figure out why it is so deliciously offensive.

See Part 3 here.

*

Originally delivered to the BU Film Society as the Spring 2013 lecture on Religion and Film, at their screening of MONTY PYTHON’S THE LIFE OF BRIAN.

We met in one of the basement classrooms of a campus ministry center, hosted by the local Unitarian Universalist church that rents space there. Fifteen people showed up, most of them Unitarian Universalists, members of the host church. One was Christian (Unity), one was Jewish, one was Baha’i. Two were religiously unaffiliated.

Most of the people in attendance had been involved in serious community and environmental work for a long time. Just south of Austin, San Marcos is home to Texas State University—but it’s also a unique ecological place. Thanks to the presence of water, it is one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in North America. The Edwards Aquifer feeds the clear, cool San Marcos Springs, which in turn form the headwaters of the beautiful San Marcos River. This river is a central feature, key to the life and identity of the city and its people.

The list of organizations in which these folks were involved was long and impressive: the League of Women Voters, the Sacred Springs Alliance, the San Marcos Nature Center, the Texas River Foundation, the Edwards Aquifer Authority, Texas Master Naturalists, Sustainable San Marcos, San Marcos Neighborhood Gardens, and the San Marcos Greenbelt Alliance.

The longer I listened to this group of people introduce themselves, the more sure I became that, rather than showing up out of a desire to help launch a new initiative, they had come as invested local leaders, out of curiosity. Surely they were already too busy and too committed to other things to do more. We would have a friendly conversation, people would agree to stay connected, and that would be about it.

After the presentation, we arranged ourselves into a circle—and I found out just how wrong I had been.

As the group talked, I listened. They immediately started brainstormed about issues they could take on: waste and recycling, rapid development, local planning, weatherization. One person spoke about the importance of connecting kids to nature. One of the religiously unaffiliated spoke passionately about grounding our work in the sacred. Two people, at separate points in the conversation, spoke movingly about gratitude as a practice and an approach. One person started to choke up as she reflected on feelings of overwhelming grief, in facing the reality of global warming.

At one point, I said something that ended with, “it depends on what you all want to do,” to which the woman sitting next to me issued her gut response in a whisper: “I want to save the world.”

By now, I had tears in my eyes.

These people were hungry for connection—to each other and to the Holy. They were full of love for their part of the natural world and their local community. They wanted, with all their hearts, to do something worthwhile. They wanted meaning—and they were willing to work for it.

Over the last nine years in which I have been employed, in one way or another, by a religious organization, I have come to see some of the ways that our consumer culture creeps into religious life. People talk about “church shopping.” We have conversations about how to “attract and retain” members, as though they are customers to be wooed. Recently, I heard about efforts by some congregations to entice people to attend services by offering door prizes. All of this smacks to me of consumerism and makes me cringe.

What people want—I’ve thought to myself—what they hunger for, is meaning. Help people feel like they are an important part of a community; that their presence and participation matters; that the things we do and say in our worship services are connected to ancient traditions, have bearing on our lives today, and are one way of connecting to the Holy; that our actions and our choices and our contributions make a real difference, to other people and to God; that rather than having everything handed to us, we should work and build and make offerings of our lives—and people will come. And they will stay.

Honestly facing this time of uncertainty, strife, fear, change, and global climate crisis gives us an opportunity to offer our lives in connection and service to the Holy, and together, to make meaning. I am grateful to a handful of folks from San Marcos, Texas, for reminding me of that.

________________________

Photo of the San Marcos River taken by the author, Yaira Robinson.

The rash of hate crimes following the Boston Marathon bombings reminds us of the major challenges religious minorities face in this country. Last week a taxi passenger in Northern Virginia verbally and physically attacked his driver for being “a fucking Muslim.” The victim, Mohamed Salim, who served with the U.S. Army in Iraq and currently serves as an Army Reservist, was left with a fractured jaw. This week in California, an 81-year-old Sikh man was brutally assaulted with a steel pipe in a suspected hate crime, from which he suffered a fractured jaw, punctured lung, and head injuries.

While the police investigate whether or not to charge the attackers with hate crimes, politicians and community leaders continue to explore ways to minimize hate-based violence and facilitate the integration of diverse communities in modern America. The U.S. military has an opportunity to contribute in this regard by opening its doors to various religious minorities, many of whom remain marginalized.

In January, the military announced that it would allow women to serve in combat roles. Although long overdue, this announcement comes as no surprise given that the Armed Forces has opened its arms to a variety of communities over the past several years.

Despite this progress, a number of religious minorities are still barred from serving in the military. Sikh, Jewish, and Muslim Americans are among the many communities affected by a policy that does not allow military personnel to adhere to their religion’s articles of faith, usually involving dress or personal appearance, and members from these groups have been working diligently to repeal the policy.

For example, Rabbi Menachem Stern filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against the Army for the right to serve while maintaining his facial hair, which he considered to be an article of faith. In 2011, the Army agreed to a deal that would allow the rabbi to serve as a chaplain and keep his “unshorn beard in a neat and orderly manner while serving in the Army.”

Like Rabbi Stern, three turbaned Sikhs have received exceptions to the Army’s grooming policy and have been allowed to serve in the military. In 2009, Simranpreet Singh Lamba enlisted for and was recruited by the Army, and he applied for a waiver to maintain his Sikh articles of faith. After a 10-month review, the Army approved Lamba’s waiver given that the “religious accommodations would not affect training, unit readiness or cohesion, individual readiness, morale, discipline or safety and health; and as long as proper appearance and guidelines were maintained.”

The fact that the Army has recruited, enlisted, and provided religious accommodations for two more turbaned Sikh Americans indicates that religious minorities can meet the Army’s expectations and go beyond them. In a 2010 interview, Lamba explained that his articles of faith do not affect his duties as a soldier. “I’m wearing the same uniform. There’s nothing about my beard and hair that would stop me from excelling as a soldier. I can do everything other soldiers do. I have the same flag on my right arm. I’m doing the same thing, defending the same country.”

Although these individuals have received exemptions from the grooming standard, the official policy does not currently allow individuals to maintain religiously mandated articles of faith. In the federal discrimination lawsuit filed and settled by Rabbi Stern, the assistant U.S. attorney argued that facial hair obstructs the use of protective masks. But the three Sikhs who currently serve in the U.S. Army have successfully created seals with their protective mask over their facial hair. Concerns with placing protective masks on people with beards first emerged during World War I, but technology has developed enough over the past century to render this a moot issue.

Another common argument is that soldiers with religious head-wear take on additional risk because they cannot wear helmets. But religious minorities have long worn helmets over these articles of faith, including those who have recently received exemptions from the Army. There is no reason to believe that this is a legitimate concern for communities such as Jews, Sikhs, or Muslims.

America has long stood for the rights and protections of its minority communities, and at times, it seems as if we are bending over backward or offering preferential treatment to include others. But as we have seen time and time again, including minority religious communities has strengthened and enriched our societies. We are starting to see key institutions modernize their policies to embrace religious diversity and account for religiously mandated articles of faith. In September 2012, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law the Workplace Religious Freedom Act, the strongest and most comprehensive equal employment legislation in the country. Among other issues, this act forbids segregation of individuals who wear religious articles, such as facial hair or head coverings. Furthermore, a few months ago, the British Army and the Scots Guard modernized its policies by allowing a Sikh soldier to wear his turban rather than the traditional bearskin cap while guarding Buckingham Palace in London, England.

Our country has a long tradition of preserving the freedoms of our religious minorities, and the U.S. military can now initiate a process of orderly inclusion. As major institutions around the world work to establish equal rights and equal opportunities for all citizens, the military ought to be ahead of the curve, not behind it. By modernizing its policies to include religious minorities in the service, the U.S. Armed Forces can help pave the way toward a more pluralistic, progressive, and peaceful society in the land of the free and home of the brave.